Social cognition across cultures: Case studies in evolved reaction norms
H. Clark Barrett
CEU Department of Cognitive Science and UCLA Department of Anthropology
Human nature isn’t just what’s identical across all individuals and cultures. Humans vary in personality, language, culture, and many other traits that are the result of the evolutionary process. At least some of this variation may be the result of evolved developmental systems, or reaction norms, that project developmental experience into phenotypes, creating universality along some dimensions and variation along others. If so, how do we develop theories and methods that allow us to understand these evolved mapping functions, and to test between different hypotheses about their design? In this talk I present a series of experimental studies of social cognition across cultures, and ask how we can begin to understand the variability and universality that these studies reveal within a common evolutionary, developmental, and cultural framework.