The Native Mind : Biological Categorization , Reasoning , and Decision Making in Development and Across Cultures

This paper describes a cross-cultural and developmental research project on naïve or folk biology – that is, the study of how people conceptualize nature. Our methods and results integrate three distinct perspectives into a complex and coherent account of biological cognition. From the standpoint of mainstream cognitive psychology, we find that results gathered from “standard populations” in industrialized societies often fail to generalize to humanity at large. For example, similarity-driven typicality and diversity effects and basic level phenomena either are not found or pattern differently when we move beyond undergraduate participants. A second perspective involves the notion that domain-specific modules facilitate and structure cognition. Here again, standard populations may yield misleading results because such populations represent examples of especially impoverished experience with respect to nature. Conceptions of humans as biological kinds vary with cultural milieu and input conditions. We also show certain phenomena that are robust across populations, consistent with notions of domain-specificity. Third, we argue that cultural transmission and formation does not consist primarily in shared rules or norms, but in complex distributions of causally-connected representations across minds. This has novel implications for environmental decision making and management, including dealings with commons problems. Our framework addresses a series of methodological issues, such as the fallacy of conceiving culture to be a bounded entity, well-defined system, or independent variable, and the tendency to “essentialize” culture and treat it as an explanation rather than phenomena to be explained.