The causal chains of culture Members of a human group are bound with one another by multiple flows of information. (Here we use “information ” in a broad sense that includes not only the content of people’s knowledge, but also that of their beliefs, assumptions, fictions, rules, norms, skills, maps, images, and so on.) This information is materially realized in the mental representations of the people, and in their public productions, that is, their cognitively guided behaviors and the enduring material traces of these behaviors. Mentally represented information is transmitted from individuals to individuals through public productions. Public representations such as speech, gestures, writing, or pictures are a special type of public productions, the function of which is to communicate a content. Public representations play a major role in information transmission. Much information, however, is communicated implicitly, that is, without being publicly represented. Information can also be transmitted without being properly speaking communicated, not even implicitly, as when one individual acquires a skill by observing and imitating the behavior of others. Most information transmitted among humans is about local and transient circumstances, and is not transmitted beyond these. Some information of more general relevance, however, is repeatedly transmitted, and propagates throughout the group. Talk of “culture ” (whatever the preferred definition or theory of culture) is about this widely distributed information and about its material realizations inside people’s mind and in their common environment (see Sperber 1996). One can study cultural phenomena in two main ways. One can interpret them, that is, try and make their contents intelligible to people of

We investigated social inference practices of Koreans and Americans in two novel domains: behavioral predictions and folk theories of behavior. When dispositional and situational inferences were disentangled, Koreans showed dispositional thinking to the same extent as Americans. This was the case for behavioral predictions based on individual difference information (Study 1) and for endorsements of a dispositionist theory of behavior (Studies 1 and 3). Consistent with previous research in the causal attribution and attitude attribution paradigms, Koreans made greater situational inferences in behavioral prediction as long as situational information was salient (Study 2), and endorsed a situationist theory of behavior more (Studies 1 and 3). Koreans also differed from Americans in believing personality to be more malleable (Study 3). Cultural Similarities and Differences in Social Inference: Evidence from Behavioral Predictions and Lay Theories of Behavior "Lay dispositionism" (Ross & N...

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Two studies (N =456) compared the development of concepts of animal species and human gender, using a switched-at-birth reasoning task. Younger children (5- and 6-year-olds) treated animal species and human gender as equivalent; they made similar levels of category-based inferences and endorsed similar explanations for development in these 2 domains. In contrast, 10-year-olds and adults treated gender and species concepts as distinct from one another. They viewed gender-linked behavioral properties as open to environmental influence and endorsed environment-based mechanisms to explain gender development. At all ages, children demonstrated differentiated reasoning about physical and behavioral properties, although this differentiation became more stable with age. The role of psychological essentialism in guiding conceptual development is discussed. A number of theorists have compared children’s and adults ’ reasoning about gender and other human social categories to their reasoning about animal species, proposing that people appeal to a notion of a category ‘‘essence’ ’ in their reasoning about both kinds of categories (Allport, 1954; Atran,

This essay examines the proposal that psychological essentialism results from a history of natural selection acting on human representation and inference systems. It has been argued that the features that distinguish essentialist representational systems are especially well suited for representing natural kinds. If the evolved function of essentialism is to exploit the rich inductive potential of such kinds, then it must be subserved by cognitive mechanisms that carry out at least three distinct functions: identifying these kinds in the envi - ronment, constructing essentialized representations of them, and constraining inductive infer - ences about kinds. Moreover, there are different kinds of kinds, ranging from nonliving sub - stances to biological taxa to within-species kinds such as sex, and the causal processes that render these categories coherent for the purposes of inductive generalization vary. If the evolved function of essentialism is to support inductive generalization under ignorance of true causes, and if kinds of kinds vary in the implicit assumptions that support valid inductive inferences about them, then we expect different, functionally incompatible modes of essen - tialist thinking for different kinds. In particular, there should be differences in how biological and nonbiological substances, biological taxa, and biological and social role kinds are essen - tialized. The functional differences between these kinds of essentialism are discussed.

An ongoing goal in the field of categorization has been to determine how objects ’ features provide evidence of membership in one category versus another. Well-known findings include that feature diagnosticity is a function of how often the feature appears in category members versus nonmembers, their perceptual salience, how features are used in support of inferences, and how observable features are related to other observable features. We tested how diagnosticity is affected by causal relations between observable and unobserved features. Consistent with our view of classification as diagnostic reasoning, we found that observable features are more diagnostic to the extent that they are caused by underlying features that define category membership, because the presence of the latter can be (causally) inferred from the former. Implications of these results for current views of conceptual structure and models of categorization are discussed. It is generally accepted that people’s concepts include not only the features and attributes of the entity being represented, but also the ways in which those features are related to one another. For example, we know that hormones can alter a person’s behavior, that chemical structure can affect a substance’s hardness, and that processor

Nearly all research on concepts in cognitive psychology is research on categories of objects — categories of teapots or turnips, for example. But when it comes to things that are important to us — people, pets, works of art, special places — we also represent the individuals themselves, not just the categories they belong to. Proper nouns, such as Herman Melville, Toto, Broadway Boogie-Woogie, or Hudson Bay, can denote these individuals, but you can also represent individuals for whom you have no conventional names, like the bed you usually sleep in or your neighbor’s mulberry tree. It is Doug Medin who is mainly responsible for calling category researchers ’ attention to the importance of individual concepts. Medin and Schaffer’s (1978) Context Model proposed that much of what we know about categories we determine from our memories of their exemplars. It’s hard to overestimate the importance of this model: Not only has it produced generations of similar theories of categorization (e.g., Kruschke, 1992; Nosofsky, 1986), but it has also influenced fields as diverse as the psychology of attention (Logan, 2002), social psychology (Smith & Zarate, 1992), and phonology information that concepts afford (e.g., Medin, 1989; Medin & Ortony, 1989), but he still retains a fondness for exemplars. In fact, this tension in Doug’s thinking about concepts is characteristic of a special turn of mind, a form of reasoning that we’re tempted to call “modus medins ” and that the following schema approximates:

The proposal that the concept of innateness expresses a ‘folk biological ’ theory of the ‘inner natures ’ of organisms was tested by examining the response of biologically naive participants to a series of realistic scenarios concerning the development of birdsong. Our results explain the intuitive appeal of many of the existing philosophical analyses of the innateness concept. They simultaneously explain why all such analyses are subject to compelling counterexamples. We argue that this explanation undermines the appeal of these analyses, whether understood as analyses of the vernacular concept or as explications of that concept for the purposes of science. 1.

this paper to answer." (p. 163)

learns that a cat has a particular biological property, one could expand this knowledge to other cats. We argue that young children perform induction on the basis of similarity of compared entities, whereas adults may induce on the basis of category information. If different processes underlie induction at different points in development, young children and adults would form different memory traces during induction, and would subsequently have different memory accuracy. Experiment 1 demonstrates that after performing an induction task, 5-year-olds exhibit more accurate memory than adults. Experiment 2 indicates that after 5-year-olds are trained to perform induction in an adultlike manner, their memory accuracy drops to the level of adults. These results, indicating that sometimes 5-year-olds exhibit better memory than adults, support the claim that, unlike adults, young children perform similarity-based rather than category-based induction. The ability to make inductive generalizations is crucial for learning: If one learns that a cat has a particular unobserved biological property, one could extend this knowledge to other cats, and possibly to other mammals. Furthermore, by some accounts, ‘‘inductive inference is the only process... by which new knowledge comes into the world’’ (Fisher, 1935/1951, p. 7). There is much evidence that even infants and young children can perform simple inductions (Baldwin, Markman, & Melartin, 1993;