Cognition: our common biology and cultural impact

The psychological constructs that permit thinking and reflection are referred to by the term cognition. Thinking is a product of all the psychological processes that result from sensory inputs and eventually produces cultural knowledge. Our common human biology has provided universal sensory receptors referring to sensations of sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch. Perception is the process that occur after the initial experiences of sensation in particular how sensory reactions are organized and create cultural relevant meaning. In all cultures human beings engage in higher order mental operations represented in language, thinking and reasoning. Problem solving and decision-making abilities emerge out of the cultural meanings produced by the social context.

6.1 Culture and cognition.

The essence of research on cognition in cross-cultural psychology is to examine cultural differences and variations. Cognition is culture that can be manifested in material artifacts. All cultures produce in-group feelings of familiarity and people from other cultures are intuited as being fundamentally different (Kitayama & Cohen, 2007). In the past a common view was to see these cognitive differences as rooted in biology and the concept of race. Today such views are not sustainable as the phenotypical differences that we call race mean little compared to the cultural knowledge accumulated from earlier generations. We conceptually stand on the shoulders of our fathers and mothers and pass the torch of culture to our children. Culture is learned patterns of behavior reflected in daily life and practice as influenced by cultural norms and values.

Hofstede (1980) built on these ideas by describing culture as mental programming. Even though all humans largely have the same hardware in our computer (brain) culture creates different software programs that direct members to behave in distinct ways. The very definition of culture is rooted in the communality of shared norms, beliefs and values transmitted to each generation (Berry, Poortinga, Segall, & Dasen, 1992). The function of these common meaning systems is to enable society and the individual to adapt, to survive, and to provide an answer the existential issues of life. Cognition was developed within cultures because it enabled people to meet the demands of the environment and solve the complex problems of large groups living and surviving in a common territory.

As we learned in the preceding chapter humans evolved language and the ability to attribute intentions to self and others that in turn promoted selective adaptation. Intentionality develops at a very early age in humans (Warneken & Tomasello, 2006). For example the grandson of this author learned very early to intuit the reactions of adults, and before he was corrected for misbehavior he would exhibit a broad smile and say hi! His favored past-time at 18 months was to throw rocks into the family pool, and he would energetically say “no no”, while he proceeded to smile and toss the rocks. It is the special human mental processes that created culture including the norms that direct the practice of daily life. In turn accumulated social knowledge represented by norms and cultural values are manifested in behavior and in systems of thought like ideology and religion.

The relationship between culture and cognition is based on several levels of social organization. As noted humans as a species have inherited a similar biological computer (the brain) that creates the structure and basis for all our understanding. Cognition is also influenced by evolved cultural behaviors and practices typically related to specific societies occupying defined territories. Levels of cognitive organization can only be separated at the abstract level as they are casually interdependent. Cultural cognition is what we have inherited by being born into these societies with unique social contexts. Culturally unique cognition did not appear suddenly like a revelation, but evolved over eons of time, and researchers must therefore take a developmental perspective based on biological evolution and adaptation, as well as cultural history. Further, we must also take into account the influences from individual development and the requirement to respond to the daily organization of human life in understanding cognitive processes (Vygotsky, 1997).

Culture is a resource supporting individual survival and is the social glue that holds society together as a functioning unit. Cultural cognition is the understanding of accumulated behaviors transmitted over generations manifested both in individual psychology, but also in the artifacts created by culture that constitute resources for survival and existential meaning. The accumulated behaviors and thought patterns influence the external environment, and at the same time the material culture delimits thought processes. Human cognition produce artifacts of material culture that assist the individual and society in goal directed behaviors (Cole, 1996). Artifacts and material culture is created by human thought as we adapt and interact with the environment. Norms, beliefs and values are the mental representations typically referred to by the term schemas that define the roles people play and the appropriateness of behavior for various segments of society divided by gender and age.

The duality separating the material environment and cognition is not useful. For example, whatever happens in the material world has a correlate at the neurophysical level. Luria (1974) called this a kinetic melody, a sequence of patterned movement related to the ongoing action that integrates goal directed behavior. Cognition is produced by the variety of goal related activities and the acquisition and utilization of knowledge through processes of sensation, perception, logic and dialectics, memory, language and other higher order processes. What is universal is the hardware that humans inherit that is largely independent of culture. The impact of culture is on the development of cultural products summarized by the language, tradition and ideology of a society. Whether culture can produce deficits in intellectual functioning is an issue discussed when we examined the research on intelligence. We found little credible evidence of a biological basis for deficits as defined by intelligence testing.