Trends in Cognitive Sciences

Feature Review

Towards a Cognitive Science of the Human:

Cross-Cultural Approaches and Their Urgency
1,
H. Clark Barrett *

While a major aim of cognitive science is to understand human cognition, our con- Highlights
clusions are based on unrepresentative samples of the world’s population. A new Cognitive science faces a representa-
wave of cross-cultural cognitive science has sought to remedy this with studies tiveness problem, with most research
occurring in educated, industrialized
that are increasing in scope, scale, and visibility. Here, I review the state of this populations.
new wave of research. The portrait of human cognition that emerges is one of varia-
tions on a theme, with species-typical capacities shaped by culture and individual A review of 10 years of cross-cultural re-
search shows progress in remedying
experience. The new wave has expanded our understanding of processes underly-
this, but research is still bimodally
ing human variation and cumulative cultural change, including mechanisms of social distributed between educated city
learning and cultural transmission. Less consensus has been reached, however, on dwellers and small rural populations.
the cognitive foundations of human nature. The promise of cross-cultural cognitive
The decade has seen progress in
science will not be fully realized unless we continue to be more inclusive of the
understanding individual cognition
world’s populations and strive for a more complete cognitive portrait of our species. (e.g., perception, reasoning), inter-
personal cognition (theory of mind,
personality), and societal cognition
The Promise of Cognitive Science (social learning, norms, cooperation,
The aim of cognitive science is broad: to understand cognition, in all its forms. It was born as a union morality).

of fields, including psychology, philosophy, linguistics, neuroscience, computer science, and anthro- Formal models of social learning and
pology. While some areas of cognitive science do not concern human cognition, it seems safe to say cultural evolution are improving our
that what interests the majority of cognitive scientists is us. We seek to understand the nature of our understanding of the mechanisms un-
derlying human variation and similarity,
thinking, what is universal and variable about it, and how human cognitive mechanisms respond to
but we remain far from a satisfying
and are shaped by the diversity of circumstances that we experience. account of human nature and human
cognitive universals.
How are we doing? A recent survey of the field suggests that of the six fields comprising cognitive
Without a more inclusive cognitive
science, it is heavily dominated by psychology [1]. In principle that is not bad, because psychology, science, our portrait of human cognition
like cognitive science more generally, seeks to understand the nature of human thought. However, will remain incomplete.
as frequently pointed out by anthropologists and sometimes psychologists themselves, the field of
psychology is heavily skewed towards research with particular kinds of subjects (mostly, college stu-
dents) and methods, including laboratory-based experiments, that orient us towards certain kinds of
phenomena and ways of measuring them [2,3]. To the extent that the aim of cognitive science is a
portrait of human cognition writ large, then drawing conclusions about a small and unusual slice of
humanity by bringing them into the laboratory to look at computer screens will not do [4]. At the very
least it will result in a portrait of human cognition that is incomplete and quite possibly biased as well.

This argument was made forcefully by Henrich, Heine, and Norenzayan in a 2010 paper entitled
‘The Weirdest People in the World?’ [5]. This paper introduced the now-popular acronym
‘WEIRD’ (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic) to describe the typical research 1
UCLA Department of Anthropology,
subjects of behavioral science, with the added nuance that these research participants might 341 Haines Hall, Box 951553, Los
Angeles, CA 90095-1553, USA
indeed be ‘weird’ compared with most humans around the world and over human history.
Each of the factors captured by the acronym WEIRD also has the potential to shape cognition
in ways that might radically bias conclusions we draw about human cognition. For example, *Correspondence:
education, literacy, and exposure to electronic media may deeply influence the development of [email protected] (H.C. Barrett).

620 Trends in Cognitive Sciences, August 2020, Vol. 24, No. 8 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2020.05.007
© 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences

cognitive abilities and even brain structure [6], yet the vast majority of cognitive science research is
done on just this literate population.

Most cognitive scientists agree with this point. The ‘WEIRD problem’ has become widely known
and has spurred researchers to action, spawning what might be called a ‘new wave’ of cross-
cultural cognitive science (CCCS) research. Here I will review this new wave of post-WEIRD
research, with three goals in mind. First, I will summarize and describe the state of the field since
2010, using a systematic literature search to identify and highlight significant trends in the field.
Second, I will attempt to summarize what this new wave of research has told us about human
nature: human cognitive universals, human cognitive diversity, and what sets us apart from other
species. Third, I will examine where the new wave continues to fall short of our aspiration to create
an accurate and representative cognitive science of the human.

A Brief Sketch of the Problem

There can no longer be any doubt that cognitive science and its most prominent subdiscipline,
psychology, face a representativeness problem in the use of research participants. Since the
WEIRD paper, a variety of papers have appeared examining this problem and its consequences
in greater detail [1,4,7–11]. To take one example, a survey of top developmental psychology
journals from 2006 to 2010 found that over 90% of research participants were WEIRD, with
around 60% from the USA, another 15% non-US English speakers, and 15% from Europe [10].

Another problem, less often addressed, is the nonrepresentativeness of the researchers themselves.
Most researchers in cognitive science are from a skewed subset of the world’s countries, reflecting a
bias in science in general, in which the majority of publications come from the USA and Europe [12].
An important question concerns the degree to which our theories, methods, and research questions
are biased by our own cultural backgrounds, a phenomenon with which anthropologists have been
particularly concerned [13]. Beyond regional bias, the strong disciplinary bias towards psychology
within cognitive science documented by Núñez et al. [1] potentially means that certain topics and
perspectives may be heavily over-represented or under-represented in the field. Anthropological
perspectives on human nature and human diversity, for example, are nearly absent.

Why should these factors matter for cognitive science? The general answer should be obvious:
unrepresentative sampling leads to faulty conclusions. What might be less obvious, however,
is exactly how these aspects of nonrepresentativeness might influence our conclusions. As of
yet, we do not fully understand how the factors associated with WEIRD societies shape human
cognition, but there seems no doubt that some cultural ideas, practices, values, and traditions
have, for a variety of historical and economic reasons, spread globally at the expense of others.
The ideologies of colonialism, capitalism, neoliberalism, and world religions have had a profound
impact on social and economic life, and likely on cognition as well, as they edge out less expansion-
ist cultural traditions [14]. Technological change, too, has multiple influences on how we think,
through changing our daily activities and the structure of social interaction. Of course, the
WEIRD acronym is too simplistic to capture all of these factors and processes, but there is a grow-
ing concern among cognitive scientists that by relying on the convenience samples that we typically
study (e.g., college students, mTurkers) we are systematically biasing our conclusions, mistaking
WEIRD cognition for human cognition writ large.

How big of a problem is this for cognitive science? Sometimes psychologists and neuroscientists
argue that cultural variation is not likely to impact fundamental aspects of brain structure, or ‘core’
cognitive processes (e.g., perception, memory, attention). This could be true, especially if one de-
fines a ‘fundamental’ or ‘core’ process as ‘one that is not influenced by cultural variation’. Some

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would prefer to dodge this question by abandoning the very idea of fundamental or universal cog-
nitive processes. But surely there are species-typical human cognitive processes, even if they
vary, as all biological traits do, and surely it is one goal of cognitive science to understand
them. Here we are faced with a chicken-and-egg problem: in order to understand which cognitive
processes vary and which do not, we need research across cultures, and in order to discover
such variation or similarity we must decide which people and processes to examine. As I will
argue in the following review, while CCCS has made admirable progress in understanding cogni-
tive variation and the factors that shape it, we are still falling short of the field’s promise as a
science of human nature.

The New Wave of CCCS

Here I will use the term ‘new wave’ to refer to CCCS since the 2010 WEIRD paper, with the
following caveat. There is no evidence that this new wave represents a discontinuity or paradigm
shift from prior work. Cross-cultural work in psychology and cognitive science has a long and
robust history, stretching back to the beginning of the last century and beyond [15,16]. The
‘new wave’ simply refers to the last decade in this tradition. To the extent that the WEIRD
paper was a call to arms, perhaps the new wave can be seen as taking inspiration from it, but
this review later does not suggest anything like a sea change in how we do cross-cultural
research. Still, the field has shown steady progress in its scope, methods, and questions, and
a review of the last 10 years gives us a portrait of latest trends in the field.

I conducted a survey of the cross-cultural literature since 2010 using the Web of Science platform.
Because of the diverse nature of this work, it is impossible to capture it with a single, algorithmic
search, so I used a multistep process to try to extract a representative, though by no means
exhaustive, portrait of research in the field. This search resulted in a sample of 249 papers reporting
empirical cross-cultural studies since 2010 (details of the survey procedure, and a full list of papers,
are available in the supplemental information online). Based on this search, I arranged the diversity
of recent work into 15 categories in three major areas: individual cognition, interpersonal cognition,
and societal cognition. These are shown in Figure 1. I also created a word cloud of the 200 most
common words in the titles of these papers (editing out common redundant words like ‘culture’
and ‘cross-cultural’), which gives another portrait of the common themes and variations in the
new wave of CCCS, including the popularity of developmental work (Figure 2). Finally, I used the
results of the survey to create a map of where around the globe CCCS research is occurring,
with countries color-coded by number of studies in which they are sampled (Figure 3).

While this analysis shows that there is a reasonable degree of global representation in the new
wave of CCCS, research is still unevenly distributed across the world’s populations, focusing
heavily on comparisons between the USA and China. Work in other places, particularly in the
global south, is less common, though increasing. Promisingly, of the 217 studies used to create
the map in Figure 3, over half (53%) included data from ‘small-scale’ societies (see the
supplemental information online for details). There are hot spots of research in certain places,
such as Vanuatu and Fiji, because of the high productivity of some research teams. However,
the distribution of research participants is still skewed, with most participants coming from
college student and online populations, and a smaller mode in small-scale societies, with a gap
in research on populations between these two extremes.

Based on the results of the search, I sorted papers into 15 areas of research in the domains of
individual cognition, interpersonal cognition, and societal cognition. These are gestalt catego-
ries that are not necessarily meant to reflect existing technical distinctions in the literature, but
rather aim to capture the ‘level’ of the processes involved. Individual cognition refers to

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Societal cognition
• Social learning
• Cultural values and norms: Individualism / collectivism,
East / West differences, societal tightness
• Morality
• Prosociality
• Religion

Interpersonal cognition
• Emotions, gesture, and communication
• Gender and sex differences
• Self, personality, and individual differences
• Theory of mind and social cognition
• Well-being and wisdom

Individual cognition
• Attention, perception, executive functions,
cognitive flexibility
• Language and thought; Space, time, number,
sensory categorization
• Reasoning and cognitive biases
• Cognition about artifacts and the natural world
• Music cognition

Trends in Cognitive Sciences

Figure 1. Areas of Research in the New Wave of Cross-Cultural Cognitive Science.

processes that mostly have to do with subjective cognition about the world and self: for
example, perception, attention, reasoning, and executive functions. This does not imply that
these processes are not socially or culturally shaped (indeed, that is what most of the CCCS
work on these topics investigates) but rather that the target of the processes involved is per-
sonal knowledge or experience. Interpersonal cognition refers to processes that are principally
about social interaction and that have as their target, typically, person-to-person dyadic inter-
actions: for example, presentation of the self, emotions and communication, and theory of
mind (ToM). Finally, societal cognition refers to processes that have as their target larger-
scale social processes, such as morality, religion, and cultural values and worldviews. A strong
caveat here is that none of these categories are mutually exclusive. Instead, they might be
regarded as standing in a hierarchical relationship, where individual cognitive processes are
embedded within and shaped by interpersonal ones, which in turn are embedded within
societal processes (Figure 1).

Individual Cognition
Work on individual cognition has formed the bread and butter of much of cognitive science,
including work on perception, attention, reasoning, and language. Perhaps because these

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Innovation
Americans Adolescents
Rossel Examining Self-esteem

Traditional
Meta-analysis Psychology Perspective

Reference
Meaning
Bayaka

Diversity
Olfactory Flexible Examination
Similarity
Interpersonal
Hunter-gatherers
Meta-analytic

Similarities Factors Linguistic Semantic

Versus

Expressions Investigation Cooperation

Evolution
Learning Perspectives Languages
Without Understanding
Well-: Psychological

Systems
Number Exploring
Musical Hadza Vs.
Learn Groups Relations

Societies Beliefs

English,
Perception
Effects

Evidence Affect
Life Prosocial Sensitivity
Languages:

Differences
Children
Immigrant

Role Three
Verbal Chinese Emotional Teaching
Development

Testing
Western
Island Structure United Empirical

Emotion
Attention Culture

Analysis
Agency:
Need Experimental

Reading Others:
Human Mind

Personal
Cognition

Religiosity
Iranian Mobility
Coexistence
New

Language, Models
Early
Dimensions

Vanuatu VariationIndividual Middle

Theory
Sacred
People

Guinea
Belief Study Influences
Body

Fiji China Personality

hunter-gatherer
Shape
Spatial
Values Indigenous

GlobalCan

Development:

Exposure
Wichi

Effect World

Overimitation
Behavior

Variations
Revisiting

Review
Two
Moral
Young
Imitation
Morality

Influence Diverse
Different

Tool
Social
Threat

Affects
Executive

Universal Among
Knowledge
Childhood Model Language Cognitive
Basin
Movement
Preschool congo Countries
Comparison Reasoning
Matters
Function
Always

Culture, Performance Reactions

Four
Similar
Basic religious

Populations Biases

Eastern Supernatural Relational

False-belief

Case
Papua Cultures: Religion Cross-linguistic Group
Nonverbal

Associations Individualism FramesMusic

Good Verbs American
Material Culturally Culture:
Seven
Mental Australian Bias
Judgment
Association Foundations Fijian
Culture-specific Increases Fairness
Interaction Tanzania

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Figure 2. Title Words in Cross-Cultural Cognitive Science Papers, 2010–2020.

have long been considered to be among the most fundamental of cognitive processes, the
search for possible cross-cultural variation in them traces back to the origins of psychology
and anthropology [17]. The range of CCCS work on individual cognition is broad and includes
work on musical cognition [18,19], biases in judgment and decision making [20,21], learning
and reasoning about the natural world [22–24], and executive functioning and self-regulation
[25–27]. Because individual cognitive processes such as perception, attention, and executive
control are often taken to include universal, species-typical mechanisms, this is a particularly
fruitful area for our efforts to understand what it means for a mechanism or process to be
universal, or part of ‘human nature’.

A major thread of CCCS research has sought to examine how aspects of personal experience, in-
cluding our physical, social, and linguistic environments, shape individual cognition. A good
example is work on number cognition [28–32]. Here there has been a long-standing debate about
which aspects of our abilities to represent and make inferences about magnitudes and numerosity,
in particular, counting, arithmetic, and other mathematical skills, arise from universal, evolved capac-
ities and which come from culturally evolved technologies, including numerical representations in lan-
guage. CCCS research has provided mounting evidence for the claim that counting, and in particular,
the ability to represent exact integer quantities larger than two or three, is dependent on the presence

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Number of papers (of 217) in which country is sampled

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Figure 3. Distribution of Countries Represented in Cross-Cultural Cognitive Science Research.

of integer number terms in one’s language [31,33]. What is universal, on this account, is an evolved
ability to represent and compare magnitudes or amounts (a continuous dimension, as in the amount
of water or sand) but not to represent or compute exact numbers [34].

In a tradition extending back to Sapir and Whorf, cognitive scientists have been interested in the
causal interplay between language, cognition, and experience: for example, how linguistic repre-
sentations of abstract concepts such as space and time influence spatial and temporal cognition
[35–40]. A fascinating line of work examines how sensory qualities, especially in sensory domains
other than vision, are represented in languages and how this influences experience and perception.
References to vision and visual qualities predominate in the world’s languages and fine-grained dis-
tinctions about visual properties such as color are typically easier to make than for other senses
such as touch or smell [41,42]. Some languages, however, such as Semai, Jahai, Maniq, and
Cha’palaa, have rich olfactory lexicons and their speakers are able to perceptually categorize smells
in a much more fine-grained way than, for example, English speakers [43–46]. Ecology appears to
play a role here too: Semaq Beri foragers were better at odor naming than Semelai horticulturalists
who speak a closely related language, reflecting the importance of smell for foraging [47].

This work illustrates two concepts that are critical for a biologically sound understanding of
human nature: plasticity and reaction norms. All traits vary, even species-typical traits such as
our sense of smell. Some of this variation (but not all) is due to plasticity, or the ability of develop-
mental systems to alter phenotypes in response to the environment [48]. A reaction norm
describes how a trait in a given organism develops differently depending on environmental
circumstances [49–51]. For example, people who forage daily develop fine-grained odor catego-
rization skills that city-dwellers do not, a good example of biological potential that does not
develop fully when not used. Different species have different reaction norms: dogs growing up
across a range of olfactory and social environments exhibit one reaction norm for smell and
humans another. Human universals might best be thought of as variations on a theme:

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species-typical traits that exhibit reaction norms leading to variation in the trait. Olfaction,
language, ToM, and moral judgment are all examples, explored in more detail later [51].

Armed with more sophisticated tools for theorizing mechanisms of similarity and variation,
research from the new wave is providing increasing support for this view of human nature as
variations on a species-typical theme. It is also improving our understanding of how the causes
of cognitive variation in humans, including language and culturally transmitted information, differ
from those seen in other species (Box 1).

Interpersonal Cognition
Interpersonal cognition refers to processes that have as their target direct social interactions with
others. Again, nearly all the processes studied by CCCS have an interpersonal quality to the
degree that they are shaped by cultural processes, but for some the function of the process itself
is interpersonal.

A good example of interpersonal processes are those involved in the construction and presenta-
tion of the ‘self’. Here, what cognitive scientists mean is not the actual object or body that is the
person, but rather, our representations of who we are and the thoughts and behaviors we
manifest in the course of interacting with others and negotiating those interactions. This includes
aspects of personality such as introversion and extroversion, which are defined interpersonally,
as well as our judgments about other selves, such as attributions of agency or choice to others.

There is a long history of work on the self in CCCS, which includes work in cultural psychology on
cultural differences in how the self is conceptualized, including variation in how unitary the self is
seen to be across time and context, as well as work on ‘East/West’ differences in cognition that

Box 1. Mechanisms of Cultural Variation and Culture Change

A rich theoretical literature explores the mechanisms that lead to variation across individuals, cultures, and generations.
Central is the concept of plasticity: the ability to adjust phenotypic traits to fit local conditions [48]. Individual and social
learning are mechanisms of plasticity and can lead to variation across individuals and cultures. Because social learning
is how information is transmitted from individual to individual, it is the cultural analog of biological inheritance and key to
models of cultural evolution.

Contemporary models of cultural evolution treat individuals’ cultural traits (ideas, beliefs, habits, cognition) as parts of their
phenotypes, nested within populations of cultural learners and actors. Cultural evolution refers to change over time in these
populations, which occurs in tandem with genetic, epigenetic, and environmental change [83,86,88].

Processes of cultural evolution exhibit some analogs to genetic evolution and some differences [162]. Much if not most
cultural variation is probably random rather than systematic, the result of cultural drift. The cultural analog of natural selec-
tion occurs when some ideas, beliefs, or practices spread systematically at the expense of others. This depends both on
how well the ideas themselves spread (cultural epidemiology) and the effects those ideas have on the survival and repro-
duction of the people that hold them (culture–gene coevolution) [163,164]. Traits influencing cultural transmission, such as
learning biases, evolve because of their fitness effects on populations of learners. These include biases to acquire informa-
tion because of its frequency (e.g., conformity bias), source (e.g., prestige bias), or content (e.g., negativity bias)
[85,159,163]. Models investigate conditions under which particular biases are favored. Conformity bias, for example,
is favored when the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ holds true [163].

Unlike the transmission of genetic variants, which tends to be unbiased, cultural transmission is often biased, resulting in
distinct dynamics in the cultural domain. In addition to broad learning biases such as conformity, cultural epidemiologists
refer to cultural attraction processes whereby some information is ‘stickier’, or better transmitted from mind to mind, than
others. Complex psychological factors beyond simple biases may come into play, such as the fit of information with prior
beliefs [89,139].

Finally, the environment can play a role in cultural evolution via our role in shaping it, known as niche construction [87].
Global warming, for example, is both caused by human cultural practices and likely to shape them in the future.

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suggest that Westerners focus more on individual choice and agency and Easterners more on struc-
tural determinants of behavior [52,53]. Recent work has sought to delve more deeply into the causal,
mechanistic explanations for cultural differences in this domain. One line of work has investigated
how social life is shaped by ecological demands, such as agricultural practices, and how these
percolate into different styles of self-presentation and judgment [54–57]. Others investigate more
socio-historical explanations, such as the dissolution of kin marriage by the Catholic church [58].

Another thread of CCCS work on interpersonal cognition concerns how we make inferences about
others’ inner lives, including their thoughts, emotions, and motivations. This includes work on facial,
vocal, and other expressions of emotion [59–64] and work on ‘mindreading’, or ‘ToM’, the ability to
infer and react to others’ mental states via their observable behavior [26,65–73]. Here again,
cognition is organized as variations on a theme: emotion reading and mindreading develop in most
neurotypical individuals, but there are cross-cultural differences in how the domain of emotions is
parsed, linguistically, and how ToM is used in everyday cognition, including moral judgment (Box 2).

Other research on interpersonal cognition includes work on cross-cultural variation in the struc-
ture of gender [74,75] and personality [76–79]. While there is much work showing a ‘big five’
personality structure in WEIRD societies, a structure thought to be highly robust, this structure
is not found universally [77,79]. Modeling work suggests that personality structure may faculta-
tively respond to the availability of different personality ‘niches’ in a society [80,81]. If so, there
is much more plasticity in this aspect of human psychology than WEIRD research had suggested.

Societal Cognition
Societal cognition refers to aspects of cognition with targets or functions that concern social
phenomena beyond the level of the interpersonal dyad. Moral cognition, for example, concerns
not just how we comport ourselves or behave with our neighbors, but how we think about
what is right and wrong in general. These are matters of cultural worldview, mores, and norms.
Societal cognition is deployed in our dyadic interactions, of course, and has the potential to

Box 2. Theory of Mind: Universal, Variable, Human-Specific?

The ability sometimes known as ‘Theory of Mind’ (ToM) or ‘mindreading’, which refers to our sensitivity to others’ mental states,
has become one of the most widely studied processes of interpersonal cognition [150,165,166]. Work in this area is a paradigm
case of the interdisciplinarity of cognitive science, drawing on philosophy, neuroscience, linguistics, anthropology, biology, and
psychology, including developmental comparisons, cross-cultural comparisons, and cross-species comparisons. Still, there
remains substantial debate about the nature of ToM, with some scholars arguing that it is a universal, evolved faculty of human
cognition, and others that it is a culturally evolved ability installed in our minds via cultural transmission [149–151,167].

Much debate in this literature has focused on a highly specialized form of mindreading known as false belief tracking,
originally proposed as a criterion for ToM because it requires representing another’s internal belief state and not just
observable cues [168]. Here, for a long time, the conclusion from comparative work was that this was an ability unique
to humans, with development work showing it emerging around the age of 4 years, except in children with autism [166].
More recent research, however, has complicated this picture. Cross-cultural work with the standard false belief task
has shown variability in the age window for ‘passing’ the task, suggesting a key role of culture and environment
[67,69,70,73,169–171]. Recently, new techniques have provided evidence that chimpanzees can track false beliefs, break-
ing down a long-held division between humans and other species [172,173]. And finally, methodological innovations in infant
work showed evidence for belief tracking as early as 1 year of age, using nonverbal tasks [174–176]. Recently, these tasks
have been transported across cultures, showing a surprising degree of similarity in early, nonverbal false belief tracking [66].

A tentative conclusion to be drawn from this work is that humans possess a nonverbal ability to track others’ beliefs that
has a characteristic reaction norm, developing in early childhood but with variation across individuals. The basic mecha-
nisms underlying this ability are likely to be homologous with those in closely related species such as chimpanzees, but
it certainly takes human-specific forms. ToM likely plays a role in communicative pragmatics (i.e., understanding what
someone intends to communicate) as well as in cooperation, moral judgment, and social learning [93,123,177,178]. Like
other species-typical skills, it also shows variation across individuals and cultures.

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shape all levels of cognition, as we have seen. But it is also, perhaps, a level of cognition that
makes us unique as a species. While other animals certainly have both personal and interpersonal
cognition, it is not clear that any have anything like group-level culture that varies from place to
place and persists through history in quite the same way that humans do [51,82–84].

It is in the study of societal cognition where, arguably, the most progress is occurring in the new
wave of CCCS research. This is in part because of a vibrant and growing area of theoretical work
on mechanisms underlying cultural variation and cultural change, which have increasingly allowed
the field to move beyond the mere cataloguing of cultural variation to explaining it. This theoretical
toolkit includes work from evolutionary developmental biology and psychology on plasticity and
reaction norms; culture-gene coevolution theory and its concepts of transmission biases and
cultural group selection; niche construction theory and the notion of reciprocal cognition-
environment feedback; and cultural epidemiology theory with its notion of cultural attractors
[51,83,85–89] (Box 1).

A key component of models of cultural variation is social learning and for this reason I have included
social learning under societal cognition. It is the vehicle through which we become acculturated.
Social learning is itself a human universal, though it takes many forms, ranging from mere social
influence to explicit teaching [90–94]. A general lesson of cross-cultural work is that we are
outstanding social learners, much better than many other species, so much so that this has
been dubbed ‘the secret of our success’ [82]. The form of cultural learning in which humans are
specialized is a two-sided process: we are well adapted both to acquire and to transmit
culture [92,95–98]. This is something that as humans we take for granted, but compared with
even our closest primate relatives, human social learning is remarkable. Human children can and
do easily learn in an untutored way [91]. Outside of formal schooling, children learn much from
their peers, including older or more knowledgeable children [99–103]. And, unlike some other
species, humans are not merely blind or equal-opportunity imitators, but rather, are good at homing
in on the purposeful, intentional aspects of the behavior they are observing [102–104] (Box 3).

What social learning installs in us, of course, is culture; it is the vehicle of societal cognition. There
has long been debate about how we should conceptualize this structuring of cognition by culture.
Does it infuse its way into everything implicitly, so that we end up like fish in water, unaware of it?
Or does it enter us as explicit rules and representations, like the Ten Commandments? CCCS
research has investigated both.

On the implicit end, as mentioned earlier, there is a robust thread of research in the new wave that
examines how societal structure and cultural values (including explicit ones) can shape aspects of
implicit cognition, including perception and personality. For example, a study of 33 countries
found that the degree of societal ‘tightness’, defined as having strong norms and low tolerance
of ‘deviant’ behavior, correlated with a variety of subjective and intersubjective cognitive traits,
including a higher degree of self-monitoring, risk avoidance, and a sense of reduced personal
agency and increased situational constraint [105]. This work dovetails with other work in cultural
psychology and CCCS that ties personal characteristics, such as individualist versus collectivist
orientations, to longer-term ecological factors such as subsistence style [53,57,106].

The study of prosociality, including phenomena such as generosity, trust, and fairness, is another
burgeoning area of research in the new wave of CCCS. Some aspects of prosociality are embodied
unconsciously, in our personalities and self-expression, and others take the form of explicit beliefs
about how we should treat others. An influential line of work has used varieties of economic games
in which participants are placed in real-world decision-making situations in which they must divide

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Box 3. The Varieties of Social Learning

There are many kinds of social learning and nearly as many taxonomies of it (for reviews see [94,96,97,179,180]). Perhaps
the simplest form of social learning is social influence or contagion, as seen in crowd behavior. In enhancement, a learner’s
attention is drawn socially to a place or object, leading to altered individual learning about it [94]. Both of these are seen in
non-human animals.

Some social learning can be described as copying. The preferences of others can be copied, as in mate choice copying
[181]. Imitation refers to copying the specific form of another’s actions. Emulation occurs when the learner attempts to
reproduce the goals or end-state of the source’s actions. Emulation is thought to be more cognitively demanding than
imitation, involving inference of goals and means-ends relationships. A debate has surrounded the degree to which these
forms of social learning occur in other species, though it is clear that social learning is phylogenetically widespread [93].

Social learning occurs through various modes, including exploration, observation, participation, imitation, and instruction
[96]. Exploration, observation, and participation are common modes of social learning around the world, with multichild
playgroups a common form of transmission of social norms and subsistence practices [101,182]. The cross-cultural
prevalence of instruction has been more controversial [91,92]. Recent ethnographic reviews suggest that it too is likely
universal, especially apprenticeship-like teaching of skills [101,183].

Debate surrounds which kinds of social learning might be human-specific. Csibra and Gergely have proposed a human-
specific form of teaching known as natural pedagogy that involves special demonstrations of instrumental actions to
infants (‘look!’), who learn via a form of emulation or goal-based learning [98]. A possibly distinctive mark of human social
learning is overimitation, in which learners copy seemingly purposeful aspects of a procedure even if they are known to be
functionally unnecessary. Even here, however, there is cultural variation [102,103,184].

While tool use is sometimes thought to be the evolutionary source domain of social learning, much or perhaps most human
social learning is not specifically about how to use things. Learning of language, social norms, and rituals are all examples
[97]. Moreover, much social learning might be better seen as ‘reconstruction’ rather than ‘copying’ [89]. A question for
future work is how the broadening of our social learning abilities to new domains and information types has contributed
to our success as a species [82].

money between themselves and other players. This work has demonstrated two primary features
of human prosociality: first, humans everywhere tend to be more generous than would be pre-
dicted from simple self-interest alone, defined in terms of money maximization; and second,
there is substantial cultural variation in typical behavior in these games, governed by cultural
norms about generosity and trust towards particular categories of individual [107–109]. As
measured by these methods, humans everywhere are far more prosocial than other species, but
this prosociality is flexible and socially shaped.

The new wave has seen a growing number of studies of prosociality in children and how it
develops across cultures. One branch of this work examines children’s sense of fairness, defined
as aversion to unequal distributions of resources [110–113]. Cross-cultural comparisons using
standardized games suggest that disadvantageous inequity aversion (aversion to others getting
more than you) develops reliably by middle childhood, whereas the more prosocial variety of
inequity aversion develops later and is more culturally variable [112]. Consistent with this is
work using simplified dictator games that shows that children tend to make self-oriented
decisions until middle childhood (i.e., around 8–10 years), when their decisions become more
prosocial, beginning to resemble those of adults in their cultures playing the same games [114].
Experimental evidence suggest that middle childhood is a period when children begin to follow
the locally specific cooperative norms of their culture [115,116]. This suggests a possibly univer-
sal developmental mechanism of norm acquisition with a sensitive window in late childhood,
which leads to diversity in prosocial behavior in adulthood.

At the most explicit level of societal cognition is our thinking about morality, ethics, spirituality, and
other cultural values. While these topics have long been studied in anthropology and philosophy,
the new wave has increasingly used cross-culturally transportable methods of cognitive science

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to address them. One line of work has looked at the role that religions with ‘big gods’ play in struc-
turing interpersonal behavior by providing a sense of being watched and a threat of supernatural
punishment [117]. This hypothesis is supported by cross-cultural work showing correlations be-
tween belief in big gods and generosity in economic games, as well as other aspects of moral
judgment [118–121].

The new wave has also seen a growing body of work in experimental philosophy, examining, for
example, cultural variation in the degree to which peoples’ moral judgments focus on intentions
versus outcomes, the deontological/consequentialist distinction, attitudes about punishment,
and attitudes towards various moral values (e.g., obeying authority, avoiding harm, maintaining
purity) [122–132]. Morality is a difficult domain to study because of its complexity, but the new
wave is beginning to reveal both universals and variation in moral judgment. For example, while
some WEIRD psychologists have claimed that moral judgments are ultimately judgments about
others’ inner traits (e.g., their intentions, motivations, or character) CCCS work suggests this
might not be a feature of all moral judgment [123,129] (Box 4).

Work in this area has the potential to address matters of pressing global importance. Sheikh,
Atran and colleagues have used a mix of ethnographic and experimental methods with believers
of various faiths to examine why people are willing to kill and die for a cause [133,134]. Other work
examines the question of what moral rules or principles should be engineered into machines, how
people might agree or disagree on what those rules should be, and if it is even possible for ma-
chines to be ethical [135,136]. Moral judgment itself appears to be a species-typical trait that is
not present, at least in the same way, in other species, and yet what is considered right and
wrong seems to vary dramatically across people and cultures. Understanding the reaction
norms that build human moral judgment is a major challenge for cognitive science going forward,
but one that holds promise for understanding, and perhaps alleviating, human conflict.

Box 4. How Mind-Minded Is Morality?

A tradition in Western philosophy holds that one’s mental and personal states (intentions, desires, motivations, and
character) are central to our moral virtue. Many studies in contemporary psychology, neuroscience, and experimental
philosophy conducted in WEIRD societies support this view [185–188]. Accidental harm, for example, is generally viewed
as less morally wrong than intentional harm [189,190]. This is supported by fMRI studies showing that brain regions
associated with mental state inference are active in processing moral judgment scenarios [191,192]. While the role of
intentions varies across moral domains, such as purity (e.g., eating a proscribed food), an actor’s state of mind appears
fundamental to many kinds of moral judgment about them in WEIRD societies. This is reflected, for example, in the first-
degree/second-degree murder distinction and in the saying ‘it’s the thought that counts’.

Such claims appear to stand in contrast to anthropological reports of societies where moral judgment and punishment
explicitly disregard an individual’s mental states [193]. In witchcraft, for example, it is frequently held that witches do not
know they are witches, but cause harm nevertheless and are deserving of punishment. And some societies appear to
link moral judgment and punishment solely to outcomes, judging intentional and accidental harms equally harshly,
a phenomenon known in law as strict liability [194].

Against this backdrop, a growing body of work in the new wave of CCCS seeks to examine how moral judgments vary
across societies and contexts. A study of moral judgment in ten societies found substantial variation in when and how
people judged intentional wrongdoing to be worse than accidents, with some societies oriented much more towards
the outcome of the act [123]. Follow-up studies have begun to examine possible reasons for this pattern. Is it rooted,
for example, in beliefs about whether or not one can know another’s intentions, or in cultural rules that assign blame based
on the actor’s social position [129,193]?

Even in WEIRD societies there are active debates about the degree to which someone’s intentions should matter for
blame: for example, in the case of discriminatory speech [195]. Here, CCCS work may prove vital for adjudicating these
issues in legal and public spheres and help us to understand why people who agree on the facts of a case may still
disagree about what is right.

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Lessons from the New Wave

What have we learned from the past decade of cross-cultural work? It has reinforced and
expanded some things we already knew, added some new discoveries and, perhaps most
importantly, underlined even more strongly how much there is still to know.

The main picture of ourselves that emerges from this work is not new. We are a deeply social and
cultural species, more so than any other yet known. Some frame this as ‘culture-dependence’
(glass half empty) and others as ‘culture wielding’ (glass half full): these are both right. We need
culture and cultural learning to survive, but it has also enabled us to expand, as a species, unlike
any other on earth, so much so, in fact, that it could become our undoing [82,137].

What is new, in the past decade, is an increasingly sophisticated understanding of the mecha-
nisms that lead to cultural variation and cultural change (Box 1). An emerging evolutionary synthe-
sis views cognition as the product of interacting processes at many scales of space and time, with
individual development, social interaction, cultural history, and genetic evolution all occurring
simultaneously within a complex dynamical system [88]. Dynamics unique to the domain of cul-
ture, such as conformity, produce phenomena not seen in genetic evolution. In the phenomenon
known as cultural group selection, cultural systems can spread as a unit: the stability and spread
of world religions is an example [138]. We have also begun to understand how the dynamics of
information flow depend on properties of individual psychology, including the psychological
‘stickiness’ of some ideas, a phenomenon known as cultural attraction [89,139]. This can explain
phenomena such as informational ‘virality’, and the resistance of some ideas, such as supernatural
beliefs, to change [140,141]. Together, these concepts are giving us new mechanistic
understandings of age-old questions like ‘why do people believe strange things?’ The answer is
not purely individual psychology, or ‘irrationality,’ nor is it purely social contagion. Rather, people
can and do believe strange things for (evolutionarily) functional reasons, such as reliance on the
wisdom of the crowd [142].

Similarly, our picture of the mechanisms of cultural transmission has evolved from an older view
based on mechanisms like reinforcement learning and imitation to more sophisticated models
of cultural learning mechanisms as evaluative. These include Bayesian models of cultural learning
[143] and the notion of epistemic vigilance, in which learners weigh factors like source and
plausibility [144]. We are getting a better picture of the mechanisms underlying ‘cumulative’
or ‘ratcheting’ cultural change, in which cultural systems can increase in complexity indefinitely,
a phenomenon not seen in any other species [84,96,145]. The sophistication of human represen-
tational and symbolic systems certainly plays a role in this, but so too does distributed cognition
and the unique forms of cultural niche construction in which we engage, such as the creation of
writing systems, computers, and other forms of externalizing cultural information [146,147].

Still, there is much left to learn. Perhaps most striking is the continued lack of consensus among cog-
nitive scientists on questions of human cognitive universals and ‘human nature’. Semantic games
and misunderstandings have certainly played a large role here, but few people would argue that
the question of what humans share, cognitively, is meaningless. Physicians, neuroscientists, and
psychologists would hang up their laboratory coats if it were impossible to generalize at least
some findings from one person to another. Still, unlike the emerging consensus regarding
mechanisms of cultural evolution and variation, proposals regarding human universals are invariably
controversial.

At issue here, to some degree, are questions of mechanism. There is at least some agreement
that certain phenomena are universal and/or uniquely human: examples reviewed earlier include

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language, ToM, social learning, and morality. But look beneath the hood of any of these phenomena
and you will see massive disagreement about what cognitive universals, if any, underlie any of them.
Language is the classic battleground for this and continues to be so [148]. Even for a narrower and
empirically well-studied ability, such as ToM, opinions run the gamut from species-typical, early
developing, evolved adaptation to culturally installed ‘gadget’ [66,149–151] (Box 2).

The persistent negativity surrounding claims of human universals, and the failure to treat them in a
biologically plausible way as species-typical traits with developmental reaction norms, has left us
decades behind where we could have been had we fully embraced the idea of a cognitive science
of the human [51,152,153].

Challenges for the Next Wave

Our challenges going forward are both theoretical and methodological and these are intertwined.
Some methodological challenges are old and much grappled-with, such as the challenge of
cross-cultural validity of instruments and measurement (Box 5). So too are some theoretical chal-
lenges, such as the challenge of defining and identifying universals [152,154]. Other challenges,
such as the WEIRD challenge, are newer, in cognitive science at least.

Against this backdrop and in light of progress made by the new wave, here are four goals
I suggest we strive for in coming generations of CCCS research.

Better Explanations of Variation

Models of cultural variation and culture change have been a major area of innovation in the new
wave. Despite this progress, however, or perhaps because of it, there remains a large gap
between the theoretical sophistication of models and the sometimes far simpler explanations

Box 5. Methodological Challenges for Cross-Cultural Research

Some of the biggest challenges for cross-cultural work are methodological. At heart is the problem of validity, or drawing
valid conclusions from our data. As psychologists have long known, just because you ask a question and someone
answers it does not mean they are telling you what you want to know.

Validity problems arise from two related sources: problems of measurement and the theory-measurement link. To draw
valid conclusions you need to measure the right thing and it needs to be related in the right way to your theory. Cross-
cultural comparisons present a special challenge because of the problem of comparability, or equivalence, of measure-
ments across groups.

Cross-cultural researchers have compiled thorough taxonomies of biases and pitfalls that threaten comparability
[15,155,196,197]. Construct biases occur when the construct measured is not the same across groups (‘intelligence’ is
a notorious example). Method biases occur when methods lead to a construct being measured differently across sampled
groups, due to confounding differences across the groups (e.g., literacy), differences in study administration, or differences
in familiarity or comprehension of materials, such as Likert scales [155]. Sometimes items mean different things to people in
different places (item biases), even if translated properly [197]. For example, the question ‘how conservative are you?’ does
not mean the same thing everywhere.

These problems can be ameliorated with various strategies, like translation and back-translation, removing culturally laden
items and concepts, and collaborating with researchers who have deep experience with, or are from, the cultural group
being studied [198]. Additionally, greater attention to proper sample selection, recruiting participants along dimensions
most relevant to the comparison being made, can greatly improve the validity of conclusions we draw.

Perhaps most challenging is the theory-measurement link. What does it mean to measure the ‘same thing’ in different
places? In the moral domain, for example, the question of what it means for a moral situation to be ‘equivalent’ to different
people is a deep one. If participants in two societies differ in how much they use an actor’s intentions to assign moral blame
in a vignette study, is that because of different norms for weighing intentions, or because the situation has different mean-
ings in the two places? [123]. Here the cogency of our theories is crucial and is one reason why cognitive science cannot
do without mechanistic accounts of cognitive universals and variation.

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for cultural variation in the literature. Work reviewed earlier on kinship structure, market integra-
tion, societal tightness, and collectivism versus individualism is admirable for its rigor and search
for major drivers of societal variation [57,58,105,108]. At the same time, however, a selling pitch
for the newest evolutionary models is precisely that they allow us to go beyond single factors as
the cause of variation and to consider complex interactions between individual psychology,
population dynamics, and trans-generational processes. Future work should go beyond looking
for ‘main effects’, or even simple regression-style interactions, to fit models of cultural dynamics
to cultural data. While this is challenging, this review earlier suggests that we are poised to do it.

More Principled Sampling of People and Phenomena

Part of achieving better explanations of human variation involves harnessing the power of cross-
cultural comparisons to explore cognitive variation and similarity. An impression that emerges
from the literature review earlier is that while cognitive scientists are actively striving to expand
the diversity of their research samples, the choice of samples is often less systematic than it
could be. For example, while some studies in ‘small-scale’ societies provide principled reasons
for studying just those societies, others seem to treat them as a different kind of convenience
sample: an antidote to WEIRDness, without further consideration of the historical and cultural
particulars of those societies. There is a large middle ground between cosmopolitan urbanites
and subsistence level villagers that remains largely neglected.

There are at least two strategies that could be followed more rigorously here: hypothesis-driven
sampling and representative sampling. When a priori hypotheses for explaining variation or
similarity exist, then populations should be selected purposefully to examine that variation, simi-
larly to designing conditions in an experiment [152]. Studies that aim to discover sources and
causes of variation post hoc may do better to sample representatively rather than sampling out-
liers or extremes, such as comparisons of college students with hunter gatherers. Finally, there
needs to be a better fit between populations, questions, and methods: too often off-the-shelf
measures are imported into cross-cultural studies as a matter of convenience [155].

Renewed Attention to the Question of Species-Typical Cognitive Mechanisms

This is a promise of CCCS that has largely become lost in the quest to discover cognitive varia-
tion. Neuroscientists have not lost it and there has been impressive progress in using brain
data systematically to discover fundamental structures and processes of cognition [156,157].
However, cross-pollination between this work and CCCS has been thin. To some degree this re-
flects a dismissive attitude by neuroscientists towards work outside the laboratory. But many
cross-cultural researchers are equally dismissive of questions about universals. We are now
poised to begin to remedy this gap, both theoretically and empirically.

Theoretically, notions of universals based on questionable concepts like ‘innateness’ are ready to
be replaced by biological models centered on plasticity and reaction norms. Such models view
traits as distributions rather than absolutes, but still enable us to study species-typical traits,
including psychological and behavioral ones [49,51]. Empirically, CCCS can take a page from
the ‘phenomics’ approach of neuroscience, in which cognitive processes are treated precisely
as aspects of the phenotype and modeled using large datasets with sophisticated statistical
model comparison [156,158]. CCCS is well-situated to provide crucial data for formal models
of the structure of human cognition, if we choose to do so.

Expanding Cognitive Science out of the Ivory Tower

Finally, while CCCS research has been broad in scope, it has tended to focus on questions that
are more of academic than real-world interest. As academics this is understandable. However,
CCCS limits its relevance and under-harnesses its extraordinary empirical power by not tackling

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the cognitive side of phenomena such as inequality, poverty, political and religious extrem- Outstanding Questions
ism, the misinformation explosion, and global warming. As reviewed earlier, there is some Which dimensions of cultural variation
work in these areas, as in the cognitive science of radical religious commitment, and the matter for human cognition, beyond the
study of how false ideas spread [133,141,142,159]. But there is much room for improvement five implied by the WEIRD acronym?

here. Global phenomena such as the persistent increase in global inequality and the rise of right- Can binary distinctions such as
wing nationalist movements clearly reflect the interplay of cultural factors with ordinary human cog- Western versus non-Western, small
nition, in ways that cry out for better mechanistic understanding. To the extent that runaway cultural versus large-scale, and collectivist
versus individualist be replaced with
and technological evolution, spurred by human drives and motivations, have contributed to world-
concepts that better capture the mul-
wide environmental and economic precarity, CCCS potentially has something to say [137,147]. tifaceted nature of human variation?
Here lies a major promise of understanding the complex feedback loops in which human nature
plays a role [160]. How can we move past correlations
between cognitive traits and socio-
environmental variables, like language
Concluding Remarks and ecology, to demonstrate causal
Some cross-cultural cognitive scientists argue that there is urgency in this work, because of the mechanisms of variation?
loss of cultural and cognitive diversity in the face of globalization. While this is a powerful argu-
What kinds of data formats and
ment, it is not the only one. Culture loss is not a foregone conclusion and it is important not to sharing protocols can be used to
treat human beings like endangered butterflies, to be photographed before going extinct. The build a cumulative, shared knowledge
persistent illusion that some societies are outside the influence of history is one that anthropol- base of cross-cultural data?
ogists have vigorously debunked, along with carving cultures into neatly delineated boxes
How can we improve consilience
[161]. No person or cultural tradition is more special, authentic, or characteristic of humankind between neuroscience and cross-
than any other. cultural work, creating methods and
data that can be transported between
them?
That said, it is undeniable that every one of us is an individual, idiosyncratic manifestation of
human nature. And there is also no denying that history is a process of change and the historical How can we better document
clock can never be turned back. This moment on earth may be no more or less remarkable than individual and cultural differences in
any other, but there is no doubt that the specific manifestations of cognitive diversity that exist brain structure and function, given the
uneven geographical distribution of
now will not last forever.
brain mapping technologies?

The urgency of CCCS flows from all the reasons that it is urgent to understand ourselves, as a What aspects of cognition are produced
species. Scientifically, this understanding cannot be complete without including the rest by species-typical, evolved adaptations?

of humanity that is left out of this work; the map in Figure 3 provides a stark reminder of this What aspects of cognition that we take
(see Outstanding Questions). And from a practical point of view, many matters of pressing global to be part of human nature are in fact
concern hinge on human cognition, from our political and moral disagreements to the collective cultural particulars?
choices that determine the trajectories we are now following, politically, economically, and
Via what mechanisms do individual
environmentally. For all of these reasons, a cognitive science of the human is more urgent now differences in experience, such as
than ever. growing up as a forager or speaking
a particular language, give rise to
Acknowledgments cognitive differences?
Thanks to Lindsey Drayton and three anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on earlier versions of the manuscript and
How deeply do explicitly held cultural
to members of the UCLA Experimental Biological Anthropology seminar for discussion of ideas. This research was
values, such as religious beliefs, shape
supported by the Geography of Philosophy Project, funded by the John Templeton Foundation (60813). implicit cognition?

Supplemental Information How does individual level cognition

scale up to macro-level processes
Supplemental information associated with this article can be found online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2020.05.007.
such as the spread of ideologies?

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