Experimental results in reference to Brazilian children and adults are presented in the context of current discussions about essentialism and folkbiology. Using an adoption paradigm, we replicate the basic findings of a previous article in this journal concerning the early emergence in children of a birth-parent bias. This cognitive bias supports the claim that causal essentialism cross-culturally constrains the reasoning about the origin, development and maintenance of the characteristics and identity of living kinds. We also report some intriguing differences with (...) earlier findings that speak to theoretical and methodological issues of cultural relativity. (shrink)

Numerous scholars from different fields ranging from history, political science, ethnic and cultural studies, sociology, and anthropology have discussed ethnic and racial identity issues in the People’s Republic of China. Most have noted that there are competing narratives regarding the conceptions of race and ethnicity. Much of the scholarship has been based on social constructivist orientations. This essay is directed towards a merger between social constructivist and cognitive science approaches on essentialism that may open the doors for further research and (...) investigation of this important topic. (shrink)

This essay explores the universal cognitive bases of biological taxonomy and taxonomic inference using cross-cultural experimental work with urbanized Americans and forest-dwelling Maya Indians. A universal, essentialist appreciation of generic species appears as the causal foundation for the taxonomic arrangement of biodiversity, and for inference about the distribution of causally-related properties that underlie biodiversity. Universal folkbiological taxonomy is domain-specific: its structure does not spontaneously or invariably arise in other cognitive domains, like substances, artifacts or persons. It is plausibly an innately-determined (...) evolutionary adaptation to relevant and recurrent aspects of ancestral hominid environments, such as the need to recognize, locate, react to, and profit from many ambient species. Folkbiological concepts are special players in cultural evolution, whose native stability attaches to more variable and difficult-to-learn representational forms, thus enhancing the latter's prospects for regularity and recurrence in transmission within and across cultures. This includes knowledge that cumulatively enriches (folk expertise), overrides (religious belief) or otherwise transcends (science) the commonsense ontology prescribed by folkbiology. Finally, the studies summarized here indicate that results gathered from “standard populations” in regard to biological categorization and reasoning more often than not fail to generalize in straightforward ways to humanity at large. This suggests the need for much more serious attention to cross-cultural research on basic cognitive processes. (shrink)

Using samples from three diverse populations, we test evolutionary hypotheses regarding how people reason about the inheritance of various traits. First, we provide a framework for differentiat-ing the outputs of mechanisms that evolved for reasoning about variation within and between biological taxa and culturally evolved ethnic categories from a broader set of beliefs and categories that are the outputs of structured learning mechanisms. Second, we describe the results of a modified “switched-at-birth” vignette study that we administered among children and adults (...) in Puno, Yasawa, and adults in the United States. This protocol permits us to study perceptions of prenatal and social transmission pathways for various traits and to differentiate the latter into vertical versus horizontal cultural influence. These lines of evidence suggest that people use all three mechanisms to reason about the distribution of traits in the population. Participants at all three sites develop expectations that morphological traits are under prenatal influence, and that belief traits are more culturally influenced. On the other hand, each population holds culturally specific beliefs about the degree of social influence on non-morphological traits and about the degree of vertical transmission—with only participants in the United States expecting parents to have much social influence over their children. We reinterpret people's differentiation of trait transmission pathways in light of humans' evolutionary history as a cultural species. (shrink)

. This paper describes a cross-cultural and developmental research project on naïve or folk biology, that is, the study of how people conceptualize nature. The combination of domain specificity and cross-cultural comparison brings a new perspective to theories of categorization and reasoning and undermines the tendency to focus on “standard populations.” From the standpoint of mainstream cognitive psychology, we find that results gathered from standard populations in industrialized societies often fail to generalize to humanity at large. For example, similarity-driven typicality (...) and diversity effects and basic level phenomena either are not found or pattern differently when we move beyond undergraduates. From the perspective of domain-specificity, standard populations may yield misleading results, because such populations represent examples of especially impoverished experience with respect to nature. Conceptions of humans as biological kinds vary with cultural milieu and input conditions. We also show certain phenomena that are robust across populations, consistent with notions of domain-specificity. (shrink)

The idea that genuinely racial thinking is a modern invention is widespread in the humanities and social sciences. However, it is not always clear exactly what the content of such a conceptual break is supposed to be. One suggestion is that with the scientific revolution emerged a conception of human groups that possessed essences that were thought to explain group-typical features of individuals as well the accumulated products of cultures or civilizations. However, recent work by cognitive and evolutionary psychologists suggests (...) that such essentialism is a product of culturally canalized, domain-specific, and species-typical features of human psychology. This suggests that one common explanation of the content of a break in racial thinking is wrong, and casts some doubt on the thesis that genuinely racial thinking is a culturally and historically local invention. (shrink)

An intuition that has been identified as a core concept in folkbiological thought is the tendency to view humans as one biological species among many. Previous research has shown that in a category-based induction task, children tend to privilege humans as a basis for inferring that multiple species possess similar biological properties, but that culture and experience can affect the development of these anthropocentric tendencies. It has been assumed that anthropocentrism disappears before adulthood, though very little research has been conducted (...) to test this assumption. In the present research, adults studying oriental medicine, western biology, or western psychology completed a category-based induction task as well as a ‘human patient’ task designed to measure cultural differences in concepts of biological processes. The results showed that anthropocentric reasoning still occurs in adulthood and that there are cultural differences in the likelihood to exhibit these tendencies. (shrink)

Although many studies suggest that children and adults focus more on internal causes rather than situational causes to explain observed patterns, such findings may be more limited to WEIRD populations samples. Evidence from cross-cultural studies may point to several distinct attribution mechanisms with their culturally specific deployment reflecting both a developmental achievement as well as a possible signal of group boundaries.

The ability to make inductive inferences is important because without it, generalization of knowledge to new circumstances would be impossible. One context in which such inductive skills are likely to have been important over evolutionary time is encounters with animals. Previous research suggests that children take into account at least two kinds of relationships between animals when making inductive inferences about them: descent relationships, and design relationships. Because descent and design relationships are sometimes orthogonal, making correct inferences about particular traits (...) sometimes requires overlooking one kind of relationship in favor of the other. In this study, I used a base-to-target induction task to examine the use of two inference rules in 5 to 12 year old Shuar children from the Amazon region of Ecuador. The descent rule uses taxonomic relationships when the function of the trait being judged is ambiguous or unknown, and the design rule privileges ecological relationships over taxonomic relationships when the function of the trait is relevant to the ecological category in question. The results show that Shuar children do employ both of these rules, and are able to switch between them for different kinds of traits, as the descent/design mode hypothesis predicts. Children in both the younger age group and the older age group were able to use these rules, but the older children showed a slightly different pattern due to the use of specific acquired knowledge about some of the taxa. (shrink)

In this article I argue that among the southern Betsileo slave descendants are essentialised by free descendants. After explaining how this striking case of psychological essentialism manifests in the local context, I provide experimental evidence for it and discuss the results of three cognitive tasks that I ran in the field. I then suggest that slaves were not essentialised in the pre-colonial era and contend that the essentialist construal only became entrenched in the aftermath of the 1896 abolition of slavery, (...) which paradoxically triggered the historical process of essentialisation. (shrink)