How children learn culture — and create it, with Dorsa Amir, PhD
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What fundamental question about culture and the mind drives this episode?
It's a question many of us have pondered. If I had been born somewhere else, in another country, another community, another culture, would I be the same person? Would I think the same way? Would I see the world differently? Psychologists have long searched for universal truths about the human mind. But another growing area of research asks a different question. How much of what we think and perceived is shaped by the Culture we grow up in. Today we're going to talk to a psychologist who studies just that. What aspects of human development are consistent across cultures and what things vary? Can culture influence basic cognitive processes like visual perception and numerical reasoning, not just beliefs and values?
How does culture shape children's cognitive development as they grow? And how do children themselves help shape culture over time? Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I'm Kim Mills. My guest today is Dr. Dorsa Amir, an assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University, where she leads the Mind and Culture Lab. Her research explores how cultural environments shape the mind and how the mind in turn shapes culture. She's worked with children and adults across the world, including the Shuar people and indigenous community in the Amazon. She's published dozens of articles in scientific journals.
And her research and writing have been featured in media outlets including the Washington Post, Slate, Eon, and Scientific American. Dr. Amir, thank you for joining me today. Thank you so much for having me. Let's start with a couple of definitions. As I said, your work looks at how culture and cognition interact. How do you define those two terms culture and cognition in your research?
Wow, okay, big question, right? Those are very, very tough terms to define. I will say, you know, I have my working definition of those concepts.
How does Dorsa Amir define “culture” and “cognition” for her research?
Um, but one of the things I often encourage people to do is to define their own versions of those concepts when they do their work. And some of my work has really been about having more precision in those definitions. So, loosely speaking, I would say I define culture as essential. Things that are the product of other people. So one canonical definition of it is about socially transmitted information. So stuff you have to learn from other people. I don't know if that's necessarily broad enough because there's lots of stuff that we're learning second or third hand from others. And of course, we're interacting with technologies and tools that other people have produced. So that's kind of my fuzzy definition of it, but I think it can be.
Very quite a lot. And cognition, similarly, that is quite a loaded question. What exactly is cognition and what are its constituent parts? There are people, for instance, that would argue that the way that we visually perceive the world and our knowledge and beliefs about the world are actually different parts of our mind, uh, and maybe dissociate between those two things. Um, I don't necessarily have a dog in that fight, but I guess you could think about it as the way the mind functions. Functions, how it interacts with the world, and what those input output relationships look like. So very broad terms, I would say.
Now, has psychology as a field spent a lot of time thinking about these questions or has it focused more on looking for universal aspects of cognition rather than how it varies across cultures?
Well, I will say this is a very old question, this idea of how cultural influence and how the environment shape our minds. I think it's one of the oldest questions. You can trace the history of this all the way back through diverse cultures and lineages throughout thousands of years. So it's certainly one we've been grappling with for a very long time. Um, I think, in fact, the the kind of modern renaissance that produced cognitive science and its more modern form, uh, really actually had cross-cultural studies and anthropology as one of the central foundational disciplines in this view of what cognitive science was.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What fundamental question about culture and the mind drives this episode?
0:00–2:06
2
How does Dorsa Amir define “culture” and “cognition” for her research?
2:06–5:49
3
Why is the historical relationship between anthropology and cognitive science important for studying cultural cognition?
5:49–10:35
4
What insights did fieldwork with the Shuar community reveal about children’s learning and development?
10:35–15:24
5
How do children’s risk‑taking, sharing, and time‑preference differ across foraging and industrialized societies?
15:24–19:28
6
What did cross‑cultural versions of the marshmallow and risk‑preference tasks uncover about self‑control?
19:28–24:49
7
Can visual‑perception illusions be shaped by culture, or are they universal?
24:49–29:32
8
What practical lessons can parents take from cultural diversity in child‑rearing and the role of peer cultures?
29:32–39:47
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from Speaking of Psychology
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