Chapter 16: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Human Cognition

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Welcome to the Deep Dive.

Today we are undertaking a really fundamental investigation into the mind.

We really are.

We're going to tackle this implicit decades -long assumption that's been baked into nearly all of cognitive psychology.

The idea that the way we humans perceive, remember,

and reason is fundamentally universal.

It's the cornerstone of this entire field, isn't it?

For decades, our models of perception, memory, all of it, were built almost exclusively on data from a very specific group.

The so -called weird population?

Exactly.

Western -educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic populations, mostly U .S.

and European university students.

Right.

And the implicit assumption was always, well, if it works for them, it must apply everywhere.

But that's a huge leap of faith.

It's a massive leap.

I mean, as Triantis argued way back in 1996, something like 70 % of the world's population lives in non -Western cultures.

Just 70%.

So if psychology wants to claim it's a universal science, we desperately need to look at how cognition functions in that overwhelming majority.

So, okay, our mission today is to dive deep into cognition and cross -cultural perspective.

And we're not just looking to find differences, are we?

No, that's not the real goal.

We want to unpack that huge, kind of vague term, culture itself.

That's the key.

We need to identify exactly which specific variables,

things like,

say, schooling, or the structure of your language, or even just your daily habits, are actively sculpting how we think.

And that first step, just defining culture, is messy.

Oh, it's an endless debate.

Yeah.

You have some scholars, like Cole and Scribner, who tried to identify these core ingredients.

What, like a recipe?

Sort of.

They'd say a culture has a distinct language, specific customs, shared habits, a particular system of beliefs.

Okay.

But then you have others, like Seagal, who took a much simpler view, at least for research.

He said, look, for our purposes, culture is really just a collection of independent variables we can isolate and measure.

So things like exposure to certain landscapes, or how often you practice memorization.

Exactly.

Things you can actually test.

I find the framework from Triandus,

his idea of cultural syndromes, really helpful here.

It makes this huge concept manageable.

It really does.

It moves us beyond just vague geography or nationality.

So a cultural syndrome is more of a pattern, right?

A pattern of shared attitudes, beliefs, norms, and values that are all organized around a distinct theme in a specific place or time.

It gives us dimensions to study, which is tremendously helpful for creating testable hypotheses.

We can look at a few crucial examples from the research.

First, there's the idea of tightness versus looseness.

Tightness versus looseness.

What does that mean?

Well, in a tight culture, there are a lot of established norms for how you should behave in most situations.

And any little deviation, it's often criticized, maybe even punished.

There's a lot of social pressure.

And a loose culture is the opposite.

Exactly.

Fewer norms, and you really have to deviate in a major way before anyone calls you out on it.

And you can imagine how that difference in psychological pressure changes how people process social information.

Absolutely.

And then there's cultural complexity.

Right.

Just think about the sheer complexity of the landscape you live in.

In, say, a simple hunter -gatherer society, you might have 20, maybe 30 distinct job definitions or roles.

And in an advanced information -heavy society like ours.

We have hundreds of thousands of distinct jobs.

Each one requires this highly specialized abstract knowledge.

That sheer complexity demands a vastly different kind of cognitive system just for organizing and accessing all that information.

And that brings us to maybe the most famous one, though, one that seems to pop up everywhere in this research.

Individualism versus collectivism.

Right.

So if you grow up in an individualistic culture, your sense of self is defined as, well, independent.

Your personal goals take precedence.

Right.

Your social behavior is often shaped by your own attitudes and a kind of cost -benefit analysis.

Whereas in a collectivist culture, the self is defined as being inherently part of a collective.

The family, the village, the company, the tribe.

Your personal goals are often subordinated to the group's needs, and your behavior is regulated by your duties and obligations to that group.

And how you define your very self is going to fundamentally change how you approach pretty much every problem.

It has to.

But the real power of this research, as we said, comes from the unpacking.

We don't want to just say, oh, culture A performs differently from culture B.

That's not very helpful.

No.

We want to know why.

Is the difference we're seeing in, say, memory linked to the local landscape?

Or is it about the availability of schooling, the structure of the language,

the economic practices?

That's the real scientific challenge.

Let's ground this right away with a really powerful early example.

It's from a 1974 study by Bovet.

Ah, yes.

The Algerian children.

Exactly.

They were struggling with these classic piagetian conservation tasks, specifically the conservation of quantity.

This is the famous test where you pour water from a short, wide glass into a tall, thin one.

Right.

That's the one.

And Western middle -class kids pretty quickly grasp that the amount of water stays the same, even though it looks different.

But the Algerian children in this study often failed this.

They seemed to lack the concept.

But Bovet refused to accept the easy answer, which would have been to just say they lacked the cognitive competence.

Right.

He dug deeper.

His speculation focused entirely on the cultural environment and their everyday customs.

You have to picture the setting.

OK.

In the Algerian environment Bovet was studying, things like eating and cooking utensils were often of varied, non -standardized shapes and sizes.

Not like our matching sets of plates and glasses.

Not at all.

And food was often served communally.

People would help themselves from a shared bowl or a dish.

There just wasn't an inherent cultural need for precise measurement or for comparing individual serving sizes.

And you contrast that with a typical Western middle -class environment.

It's a world of difference.

Everything is standardized.

Spoons, plates, glasses.

Parents serve the food, trying for equal portions.

And kids get into these very explicit arguments over who got more ice cream or milk.

I've had that argument.

I refereed that argument.

Exactly.

And that difference in daily practice is a profound cognitive trainer.

The Western environment naturally forces a child's attention onto precise quantities and how they relate to the look of the container.

While the Algerian child may be watching their mother use intuitive approximations instead of measuring cups, develops a whole different set of assumptions about what quantity and equivalence even mean.

It's a perfect demonstration of how something as simple as a dinner table custom can guide fundamental cognitive assumptions about the physical world.

This immediately brings up the central tension in all cross -cultural research, doesn't it?

It does.

On one side, you have what's called cultural relativity.

The idea that certain cognitive processes or skills are specific to a particular culture.

Right.

For instance, the ability to form these highly structured abstract categories,

like classifying a poodle as a specific type of dog, which is a type of mammal, which is a type of animal, that might be a skill that's highly practiced in one culture, but almost totally irrelevant in another.

And on the other side of that tension.

You have cultural universality,

the belief that certain phenomena are common to all humankind.

Like the basic capacity for language or memory storage.

Exactly.

And your starting assumption really matters.

If you assume universality, your research is going to focus on how culture just shapes or influences that process.

But if you hold a strong relativist position, you might argue that the underlying process itself might not even be present in all groups.

Before we jump into the data, we really have to acknowledge how difficult this research is to actually do.

The methodological challenges are just enormous.

They're huge.

I mean, in a standard lab experiment, what's the gold standard?

Random assignment.

Random assignment.

But you can't randomly assign someone to be raised as a Capelle farmer in Liberia versus a Wall Street trader in New York.

It's impossible.

So you're always dealing with these participant variables, which makes interpreting any differences really tricky.

And how do you even choose a task?

How can a researcher pick a memory test or a problem solving puzzle that's equally difficult, equally familiar, and an equally good measure of the underlying ability for people from radically different cultures?

You might just be measuring how much practice they've had with that specific type of task.

You might.

And to make it even harder, culture itself is often.

It's tacit.

It's implicit.

I love that quote from the scholar Kitiyama.

What culture is to humans, water is to fish.

Exactly.

It's so pervasive, so routine that the people living inside it often don't even notice their own practices, let alone question them.

So researchers have to work incredibly hard just to spot the cultural variables that might be influencing cognition in the first place.

Okay.

That sets the perfect context for our first big area.

Cross -cultural studies of perception.

Right.

Perception, the interpretation of sensory input is often assumed to be the most hardwired of all our cognitive functions.

But the cross -cultural evidence shows it is highly, highly susceptible to top -down processing interpretation that's guided by our experience.

And the foundational work here is Hudson's studies in the 1960s on picture perception.

He was working in South Africa, right?

Yes.

And he noticed that Bantu workers in the mines and factories seemed to have trouble interpreting depth and distance in the 2D posters and films they were using for instruction.

So he designed a test.

He did.

He used these simple pictures of a man with a spear, an elephant, and an And the key thing is that the pictures contained various depth cues.

Like what?

Well, object size.

The elephant was drawn smaller to suggest it was farther away,

superposition one object slightly overlapping another,

and linear perspective.

He then asked different groups, black and white South Africans, schooled and unschooled.

A simple question.

What is the man aiming the spear at?

Okay.

So what would a typical three -dimensional interpretation be?

A schooled participant, seeing those size cues, would interpret the elephant as being far away and the antelope as being near.

So logically, they'd say the man is aiming at the closer target, the antelope.

And the non -literate workers.

They often saw the image two -dimensionally.

They might say the man is aiming at the elephant just because the tip of the spear is physically closer to the drawing of the elephant on the page.

They ignored the depth plane entirely.

So did Hudson conclude that schooling was the cause?

Not directly.

He argued that the ability to perceive pictures three -dimensionally came from what he called informal practice or pictorial literacy.

So just being around pictures.

Exactly.

The kind of literacy you gain from habitual exposure to books, photos, and illustrations in a Western style home environment.

It's the constant unthinking practice of decoding 2D lines and shapes as representing 3D space.

That's a powerful idea, but imagine it was challenged.

Oh,

immediately.

Deregowsky, working in Zambia in 1968, set up a really critical comparison.

He tested Zambian children and adults using Hudson's standard picture task, but he added a new task.

What was it?

A model building task.

Participants were given sticks and clay and had to construct a three -dimensional model based on a picture depiction.

And the results were fascinating.

Over 80 % of his participants failed the standard Hudson task, which suggested they had 2D perception.

But over half of those same individuals succeeded in the model building task,

which proves they could perceive 3D depth, but only when the response was physical construction, instead of just answering a question about a picture.

And this is a major insight, far too simplistic to just say these people can't see in 3D.

No, the skill is there.

The cognitive skill exists, but whether or not you can express it depends on the context and the mode of response, the difficulty of the task, the content of the picture, how you ask the question, it all determines whether that learned skill gets activated.

We see this get refined even further in Liddell's 1997 work in South Africa.

She showed African -themed color pictures to kids in grades one through three and just asked them to describe what they saw.

And she found that these South African children overwhelmingly focused on factual, what she called, disembodied labels.

So just listing things.

Exactly.

There's a tree, there's a person, there's a goat, there's a house.

They averaged 65 distinct labels, but offered only three narratives or interpretations across six different pictures.

They were describing the parts, not the whole story of the scene.

That's a good way to put it.

And here's the really counterintuitive twist.

Okay.

The tendency to create narratives actually decreased with more years of schooling for these children.

Wait, that's the complete opposite of the pattern you find in British children.

The exact opposite.

Liddell speculated it might be linked to the South African elementary education style at the time, which maybe emphasized factual descriptive lessons over more creative, open -ended interpretation.

Or maybe just less exposure to picture books early on, so they hadn't fully acquired that skill of linking objects in a 2D scene into a coherent story.

It's a possibility.

But this idea that culture dictates what we pay attention to, the main object or the background, is really beautifully shown in the work of Nisbet and his colleagues,

comparing East Asian and Western participants.

This is the work on holistic versus analytical processing.

It is.

Miyamoto, Nisbet, and Masuda did this study in 2006, where they just studied photos taken in U .S.

cities versus Japanese cities.

And what did they find?

They found that the Japanese scenes were rated as more ambiguous and contained significantly more elements, more objects, more clutter than the American scenes.

Which naturally leads to the idea that the Japanese environment encourages a more holistic or contextual way of seeing things.

And there are real cognitive consequences.

When they tested people and changed blindness tasks, where you have to spot differences between two flashing images,

the American participants were better at noticing changes in the focal objects.

The main things.

But the Japanese participants.

They were far more sensitive to changes in the background or in the contextual objects.

Your everyday environment is literally training your top -down attention system to prioritize either the foreground or the relationship surrounding it.

Let's turn now to visual illusions, because this is where the cross -cultural evidence gets really dramatic.

It's some of the most compelling stuff.

It started way back in 1905 with Rivers, who noted that Papuans were more susceptible to the horizontal vertical illusion, but less susceptible to the famous Müller -Lyer illusion than Westerners.

Which led to the landmark study by Segal, Campbell, and Herskovitz, in 1966.

And Segal's core idea was that our past environmental experience systematically affects how susceptible we are to these illusions.

Right, he was building on Brunswick's principle, which basically says that we interpret sensory cues based on how often those cues have been correct in our past.

So even if the cue is misleading in an illusion,

our brain defaults to the interpretation that has historically served us best.

This is perfectly illustrated by the Müller -Lyer illusion, right?

The two horizontal lines are the same length, but one ends in outward pointing fins and looks longer.

And the other ends in inward pointing fins and looks shorter.

The question is, why are people from Western cultures so prone to this trick?

Segal predicted it was because we live in carpentered environments.

A carpentered world, filled with straight lines, right angles, rectangular shapes, buildings, furniture, you name it.

So the theory is that we don't see the 2D figure as just flat lines on paper.

No, our brain automatically interprets them as representations of 3D objects.

Specifically,

the interior and exterior corners of a room or a box.

So the line with the inward pointing fins looks like the inner corner of a room, which in 3D space we know is farther away from us.

Exactly.

And for that farther line to project the same size image on our retina as the other line, our brain makes a logical inference.

It must be physically longer.

So our entire lifetime of interpreting corners and edges in a square world has trained our visual system to add depth automatically, even when it leads us to the wrong conclusion.

It's an interpretation error, not a sensory error.

It's a beautiful, if a little unsettling example of how the very structures we build, our rectangular houses, our tables, our books,

are literally training our brains to process depth cues in a specific way that makes us vulnerable to this one particular illusion.

It sounds almost like environmental determinism.

Are we saying that if someone grows up in a circular hut in a dense jungle, they're just incapable of seeing the illusion?

That's the critical distinction Seagull stressed.

It's about perception, which is interpretation, not sensation, which is the raw acquisition of light.

The underlying hardware, the visual system, is universal.

But the software is different.

The software, the set of rules and habits the brain uses to turn that raw input into a meaningful reality, is culturally sculpted.

The person in the jungle just hasn't developed the automatic 3D interpretation habit for those specific cues because their environment hasn't provided the necessary training data.

And what about the other one, the horizontal vertical illusion, where the vertical line looks longer?

Seagull found that susceptibility to that one was highest in cultures, whose everyday landscape features a vast, uninterrupted horizon.

Desert dwellers, plains dwellers.

Right.

Those individuals have so much more experience interpreting cues related to great distances stretching away from them.

The vertical line might be automatically interpreted as representing distance receding into that landscape, which makes it appear longer than the horizontal line of the same length.

So Seagull's big conclusion is profound.

We learn to perceive in the ways that we need to perceive.

Our perceptual habits are shaped by our environment and culture.

It's an efficient adaptation.

It is.

Okay, so if culture dictates how we interpret what we see, does it also dictate what we choose to store and retrieve from memory?

Let's move on to cross -cultural studies of memory.

Memory is, of course, universally necessary.

But the strategies we use to make encoding and retrieval efficient show massive cultural divergence.

The initial findings here were pretty startling, weren't they?

They were.

Particularly the work done by Michael Cole and his colleagues in 1971 with the Kapel people in Liberia.

They gave them free recall tasks using two types of noun lists.

Okay.

One set was clusterable items that naturally fit into categories like tools, clothing, or food.

And the other was non -clusterable.

Now, in American and European examples, people recall clusterable lists much better, especially older children and adults.

Right.

And that improvement is tied directly to the spontaneous use of a clustering strategy.

If I hear a list of 20 random words, I'll mentally group the four foods together, then the four tools, and I'll recall them by category.

This imposition of abstract structure is central to how we think about memory in the West.

But the Kapel participants didn't do that.

No.

They showed very few differences based on age or schooling.

And crucially, they were very unlikely to spontaneously use that clustering strategy.

They recalled the items, but they didn't group them thematically during retrieval.

So at first, it looked like they had a qualitatively different memory system, maybe one that favored just rote memorization.

That was the initial thought.

But that's where Cole and Scribner's critical follow -up comes in.

They needed to know if the difference was in the underlying capacity or just the strategy being applied.

And what did they find?

They found that when the Kapel participants were explicitly queued to recall items by category, when the experimenter prompted them and said, now tell me all the clothing you remember, then now tell me all the tools,

their performance improved dramatically.

So it shot up to American levels.

It did.

Which proved that their memory systems were perfectly functional, and the knowledge was organized.

The difference was that they weren't spontaneously employing that organizational strategy unless the task itself made the structure explicit.

That shifts the focus entirely from capacity to strategy.

It does.

It's like giving someone a box of Legos.

An educated Western kid has been implicitly trained that the goal is often to build a predefined structure so they look for patterns immediately.

The Kapel participant hasn't been taught that specific game of abstract organization, so they just focus on picking up the pieces one by one.

That's a great analogy.

We see another dimension of this in visual spatial memory, highlighted by Karen's 1981 study of Australian Aboriginal children and adolescents.

And the context here is vital.

It is.

Traditional desert life for Australian Aboriginals demands exceptional spatial knowledge.

They're moving across vast, visually unremarkable landscapes.

They need a deep ability to remember the spatial relationships between landmarks, not just follow a simple route.

So Karen's designed a task for this.

She did.

Participants had 30 seconds to look at an array of 20 familiar objects on a board.

Then the objects are scrambled and the participants had to reconstruct the original array.

And the results were definitive.

The Aboriginal adolescents significantly outperformed their white Australian age mates in every single condition.

At one point, up to 54 % of the Aboriginal group made zero errors compared to just 4 .5 % of the white children.

Wow.

And what was even more revealing was how they did it.

The strategies were completely different.

Completely.

The Aboriginal children sat very still, using a purely visual strategy.

They scanned the array, seemed to remember the look of the whole configuration, and then reconstructed it steadily and deliberately.

And the white Australian children?

They used a verbal strategy.

They moved around, picked up the objects, muttered to themselves, trying to verbally encode the sequence or position.

They worked hastily and made a lot of changes.

It's a perfect example of environmental pressure selecting for specific cognitive skills.

The desert environment enhanced visual rehearsal strategies, while a Western school -based culture often prioritizes verbal encoding, which is just less effective for that kind of pure spatial mapping task.

It really is.

So if culture dictates what we see and what we store, does it also dictate how we draw conclusions from that information?

Let's move to cross -cultural studies of categorization and reasoning.

Categorization is a fundamental human skill,

but developmental studies show kids typically progress from using concrete perceptual bases for sorting like color or size, to using more abstract bases like function or taxonomic class.

And Greenfield and her colleagues looked at this with unschooled Wolof children in Senegal in 1966.

They asked them to sort familiar objects.

And for the young unschooled kids, color was the main basis for sorting.

But the systematic use of color, the ability to select all and only the objects that share a property, that increased dramatically with age and schooling.

And what about the more abstract categories?

Sorting by form or by function, like grouping all the clothing together regardless of color,

was virtually non -existent for the unschooled participants.

So the conclusion was that schooling seems to be the single most powerful factor in stimulating that kind of abstract thinking.

That was the conclusion.

But we have to be careful not to attribute everything to schooling.

We have to remember the role of familiarity.

This is where the study with the mono rice farmers comes in.

Exactly.

Erwin and McLaughlin in 1970 worked with mono rice farmers in Liberia.

They compared their ability to sort abstract geometric cards versus their ability to sort eight bowls of rice, something highly familiar and economically important.

And the mono farmers struggled with the geometric cards.

They did, but they sorted the familiar rice easily and quickly, and they noticed many different possible ways to sort it.

By bowl type, by rice type, by quality.

And when they compared them to American undergraduates.

The American students sorted the shapes easily, but were much less adept at noticing all the possible ways to sort the rice.

So the lesson here is that using unfamiliar abstract materials like geometric cards might only be testing a culture's capacity for abstraction in a decontextualized setting.

Right.

When you use materials that are highly relevant to their daily lives, their true cognitive competence, their ability to find structure and organization is revealed.

The content of those categories is also influenced, isn't it?

It is.

Hatano and colleagues in 1993 look at the categorization of animacy, judging what is alive in children from Japan, Israel, and the U .S.

And the cultural context here is paramount.

Japanese culture, with its Buddhist influences, often holds that plants have a spiritual quality, maybe even minds.

While Israeli traditions, conversely, often maintain a very sharp distinction between humans and animals on one hand and plants on the other.

And the results reflected this.

They did.

U .S.

children were most likely to use the people, animals, and plants rule for what's alive, which reflects a kind of generalized, taught biological knowledge.

But the Israeli children were much more likely to deny that plants were alive, adhering to the people and animals rule.

It suggests that our conceptual knowledge isn't just acquired from personal observation, but from cultural practices.

Nature shows,

magazines, picture books that define the content of these big biological categories for us.

Precisely.

This leads us into the most abstract area, formal reasoning.

The ability to draw conclusions based only on the premises you're given and ignoring your own personal knowledge.

The classic test is the syllogism.

All men are mortal.

Socrates is a man.

Therefore,

Socrates is mortal.

Luria's seminal 1976 work with non -literate farmers in Central Asia starkly demonstrated how difficult this mode of abstract reasoning was for them.

When they were presented with syllogisms, especially ones that contradicted their daily experience like, in the far north all bears are white, they just refused to accept the premises as universally true.

One non -literate villager famously summed up the core difficulty.

He said, We always speak only of what we see.

We don't talk about what we haven't seen.

So they refused to treat the premises as part of a self -contained bounded problem.

Their own reality was the ultimate judge, not the abstract logic of the puzzle.

And we saw the same profound resistance in the Cole and Scribner study with the Capel elder.

The spider and black deer syllogism.

Yes.

He repeatedly refused to answer based on the premises,

insisting, but I was not there.

How can I answer such a question?

And when they pressed him, he answered based on his own knowledge that black deer eat green leaves, completely outside the logical structure they gave him.

The technical term for this is a failure to accept the logical task.

They omit, add, or alter the premises in their memory so they can rely on their personal knowledge.

And it's important to note this isn't unique to non -literate populations, right?

Young children and even U .S.

adults make these same mistakes when problems get complex or contradict what we already believe.

That's right.

But the propensity to use formal logic as the default strategy is dramatically higher among people who have been through formal schooling.

Which is the key takeaway.

Schooling and literacy significantly improve formal reasoning by promoting this ability to draw conclusions based only on the abstract boundaries of the problem, forcing a separation between logical necessity and empirical reality.

Right.

But what's so fascinating is that these reasoning differences persist even among highly educated people.

They do.

Nisbet and his colleagues have shown that Chinese and Korean university students consistently use more intuitive and holistic strategies when reasoning.

They tend to seek compromise and integration of conflicting ideas.

Which contrasts sharply with European Americans, who rely more on formal reasoning and tend to seek out a single categorical right answer.

And Nisbet and Norenzayan offered this great historical interpretation for that.

They argue the Western intellectual traditions stemming from Greek philosophy and Roman law,

really valued adversarial debate, contractual relationships, and the formalization of knowledge into distinct categories.

So that context naturally promoted formal analytical logic as a powerful rhetorical and cognitive system.

While East Asian traditions, often emphasizing harmony and context, promoted a more holistic approach that finds truth in the middle ground.

The culture selected for different reasoning tools.

Let's shift gears completely now and look at cross -cultural studies of counting and numeracy systems.

Because this is where we see how the very tools a culture provides, specifically the language used for counting, directly affects cognitive development.

It's a fantastic area.

First, we should acknowledge the universal principles of counting, which were identified by Goldman and Galistel in US preschoolers.

Right.

There are five core principles.

One principle, stable order, cardinal abstraction, and order irrelevance.

So even if a child counts a set of three items by saying one, two, six,

they are, in a sense, counting.

They're respecting the structure one tag per item, and their sequence is internally stable.

They get the concept, even if the words are wrong.

Okay.

So with that as a baseline, now imagine a system that completely lacks the base structure we rely on.

Sacks studied this in 1981 with the oxatmen of Papua New Guinea.

They developed a body part counting system.

A body part system.

Yes.

It used 27 distinct body parts, starting with the fingers on one hand, moving up the arm, shoulder, neck, head, and then down the other side.

And the key thing here is that this system has no base structure.

It's not organized in tens or twenties.

It's just purely sequential, tied to the body.

Right.

And Sacks found that oxatmen children acquired counting and conservation concepts at later ages than US children.

But the developmental pattern was still similar.

But here's the interesting consequence.

What's that?

As the oxatmen began participating in the new money economy, they started actively changing and reorganizing their traditional body part system to make arithmetic easier.

So the cognitive demands imposed by cultural change drove the restructuring of the cultural tool itself.

Exactly.

But the most profound finding regarding language structure comes from Miller and colleagues' 1995 comparison of US and Chinese preschoolers.

Both languages have distinct names for digits 1 through 10.

Right.

But they diverged dramatically in the teens.

Chinese uses a transparent, consistent base 10 system.

The number 11 is literally 10 -1.

12 is 10 -2.

Whereas English has the unpredictable non -base -related names 11 and 12.

And the findings were just profound.

While three -year -olds in both countries counted similarly, the Chinese four - and five -year -olds counted significantly higher than their American counterparts.

And the breakdown for the US children happened exactly where the languages diverge.

In the teens.

Precisely.

It suggests that the transparent,

consistent base 10 structure in the Chinese language helps children understand the nature of the number system much earlier.

So the cultural tool, the language itself, is literally accelerating a cognitive process.

It's giving them a cognitive advantage in early numeracy.

Okay.

So we have repeatedly seen schooling appear as this incredibly powerful factor in developing abstraction, organization, and formal reasoning.

In our final critical section, we have to ask, what exactly is it about school that changes cognition, the effects of schooling and situated cognition?

Scholars from Plato to Vygotsky have argued that written language literacy significantly transforms intellectual processes.

Vygotsky believed written language is a powerful cultural tool.

Because its permanency lets us do things like examine syntax, compare sentences, and engage in higher -order abstract thought that's impossible in a purely oral language.

Exactly.

Vygotsky's view was that culture provides the tools that shape the mind.

But the challenge for researchers was disentangling literacy from schooling.

Most studies, like Luria's, confounded the two.

People who could read had also been to formal schools.

Until Scribner and Cole's perfect natural experiment in 1981 with the Vai people of Liberia?

Right.

The Vai had three distinct types of literacy present in their community.

There was the unschooled Vai script, which was an indigenous writing system taught informally at home.

There was Arabic, learned for religious study of the Quran.

And there was English, taught in Western -style schools.

This setup allowed them to finally isolate the effects of reading itself versus the institutional practice of schooling.

And the results were genuinely surprising.

They really challenged Vygotsky's broad claims.

They did.

Literacy in the Vai script alone.

Just the ability to read and write their native language produced only scattered small effects on general cognitive tasks like sorting or memory.

Its effects were highly specific to language knowledge.

So the ability to write and read your own language, which is a monumental intellectual achievement, that didn't automatically make them better at abstract categorization or recall strategies?

That's right.

It didn't.

However, schooling specifically, instruction in English in the formal school setting produced profound effects.

On what?

On the ability to provide verbal explanations and justifications for their answers.

The school participants were far better at articulating why they performed a task in a certain way and providing coherent logical explanations, even when their actual performance score wasn't any different.

So schooling doesn't just teach you content.

It teaches you how to talk about your thinking.

That's Brüder's key argument.

School places demands on you that are unique and honestly kind of bizarre compared to daily life.

Like answering questions when you know the teacher already has the answer.

Exactly.

Or solving a math problem that has no immediate connection to a meaningful social goal.

School explicitly removes learning from the immediate, socially relevant context.

By divorcing the task from practical action, it promotes systematic practice in abstract, decontextualized thinking.

And to really appreciate this context dependency, we need to transition to situated cognition.

The idea that cognition is intimately bound to the context in which it occurs.

And Scribner's 1984 work showed this isn't just about different continents.

It happens right here in the U .S.

workplace.

She studied workers at an industrial milk processing plant.

Distinguishing between what she called theoretical thought school like abstract thought and practical thought.

Which is cognition embedded in daily life, focused on achieving immediate practical goals like finding the best bargain at the supermarket.

She focused on the product assemblers, the preloaders.

Their job was complex.

They were assembling orders in mixed units like one case minus six units when cases held different numbers of units.

So it required rapid mental calculation of mixed numbers sometimes across different bases.

And Scribner found the preloaders were cognitive virtuosos.

They were brilliant at it.

They were.

They solved the same arithmetic problems in multiple different ways.

They didn't stick to one rigid algorithm.

They constantly follow this unstated principle.

Satisfy the order with the least number of moves.

Meaning the least physical effort.

Exactly.

Their accuracy was near perfect.

Developed entirely through on the job training.

A novice or a comparison group of ninth graders was much less efficient.

They were algorithmic, solving every problem the exact same way.

Even if a simple mental shortcut would have saved them physical steps and cognitive time.

That gap between theoretical and practical thinking is maybe most shockingly demonstrated by Lave and colleagues' study of grocery shoppers in 1984.

It's a stunning finding.

When they give the same shoppers a formal school -like arithmetic test, their accuracy averaged only 59 percent.

Wait, so the same adult shopper gets an F on a math test?

Yes.

But when those same individuals performed in -store arithmetic related to their actual shopping calculating discounts comparing prices, their accuracy was virtually flawless.

98 percent.

That is a stunning discrepancy.

It proves cognition is highly situated.

It does.

And the reason is that they weren't using the formal high -demand calculations taught in school.

They were inventing clever shortcuts.

They might weigh two packages to check a price, rather than doing a price per ounce calculation in their head.

They were reducing mental effort while maximizing accuracy in the context of their goal.

Kara Herr found the exact same thing with Brazilian street vendors.

98 percent accuracy on real -life transaction math versus only 37 percent on a formal test.

The evidence is just overwhelming.

It is.

Okay.

Let's try to consolidate the three most important ideas that have emerged from this deep dive into how culture sculpts cognition.

First, I think we have to aggressively challenge that implicit assumption of universal importance in our cognitive models.

As Wilbur advised decades ago, we shouldn't just be measuring how well can they do our tricks.

Right.

Poor performance often just reflects unfamiliarity with a specific task format, not a lack of underlying competence.

Second, the evidence is overwhelming that cognition is profoundly flexible and highly situated.

Our environments, whether it's the aboriginal desert or a milk processing plant, impose environmental pressure.

And that pressure selectively strengthens specific, task -related skills and strategies, often at the expense of others.

Visual memory over verbal encoding or minimal move calculations over formal algorithms.

And third, formal schooling is a powerful and unique cultural practice that promotes something very distinct,

the ability to deal with abstraction.

While simple literacy has specific effects, schooling teaches people how to step back for immediate context, how to structure normal tasks, and most uniquely, how to provide verbal explanations and justifications for their thinking.

So what does this all mean for us as we try to understand human thought?

It means the mind is not a monolithic structure.

Our cognitive abilities are not fixed constants.

They are actively sculpted, strengthened, and guided by the daily practices and environments that make up our cultural lives.

The specific culture you live in determines the cognitive tools you are trained to use and when those tools are used most effectively.

And Nisbet and Norensian give us a final provocative thought on this.

They do.

They remind us that cultural practices and cognitive processes constitute one another.

It's a two -way street.

It's a two -way street.

We've spent this time asking how culture changes cognition, but we should also ask the reverse.

How do the individual cognitive strategies that lead to success, like the preloader finding the most efficient way to stack milk crates, or the street vendor finding the fastest calculation shortcut, how do those things slowly but surely influence and perpetuate the larger economic and social practices of that culture?

So the mind shapes the culture just as the culture shapes the mind.

In an endless loop of adaptation.

That's a fascinating thought to take with you.

Thank you for joining us for this deep dive into the cross -cultural mind.

We'll see you next time.