Career: Building an Interdisciplinary Program in Culture and Cognition

For most of the 20 century the fields of anthropology, psychology and economics have become increasingly insular, despite the substantial overlaps in their domains of inquiry. Recently however, with a growing recognition across these disciplines that human psychology, culture and behavior cannot be understood independently from one another, researchers have begun to integrate across these fields (e.g. Nisbett, forthcoming; Medin & Atran 1999; Lancy 1996; Fiske et. al. 1998; Sperber 1996). To this end, this grant lays out an integrated program of educational and research activities aimed at further developing the emerging field of Culture and Cognition. The first of the project’s five interrelated goals is to create an interdisciplinary network of international researchers from universities with nascent programs in Culture & Cognition. At planned conferences, on the project website, and through a seminar series, network researchers will exchange ideas, methods and students—and collaborative research projects will likely arise. Second, by developing the physical and technological infrastructure of both university-based labs and ‘field labs,’ the project will facilitate several educational and research activities. The university-based lab will provide faculty and students with specialized software for analyzing the full spectrum of field and laboratory data, as well as tools for designing and piloting field experiments and building tailored databases. Thus, this resource center will enhance student training in data collection, experimental design, and data analysis. Faculty and students will also be able to use the lab facilities in the research design and analysis stages of their own projects. Third, by combining the Culture & Cognition network of researchers (many of whom have ongoing field projects) with the construction of permanent field labs, both graduate and undergraduate students will find a substantially richer menu of opportunities for both field and laboratory research— and researchers will have convenient access to a larger pool of talented and trained RA’s. With lab facilities and field research opportunities in place, the fourth goal is to develop a curriculum in Culture & Cognition to attract and train both graduate and undergraduate students from across the social sciences. Two core C&C courses will provide students with an interdisciplinary theoretical foundation and training in a range of methodologies, as well as opportunities for research. Fifth, the project will assemble and integrate a set of methodological and analytical tools that cannot currently be found in any one discipline. Methodologically, the major objective is to combine experimental techniques from psychology and economics with more traditional anthropological approaches involving long-term fieldwork, participant observation and in-depth interviews. Analytically, the project will recombine standard analytical methods for studying culture and social groups (e.g., consensus modeling and social networks) with novel analytical techniques aimed at measuring aspects of cognition and culture that have previously seemed intractable or difficult-to-quantify. After briefly summarizing my prior NSFfunded research, I discuss the planned Fijian fieldwork, emphasizing how this research contributes to both testing specific hypotheses about cultural transmission and the broader integration of methodological and analytical tools (the fifth goal). After this detailed description, I show how this field project promotes and integrates with the broader C&C goals (goals 1-4), and my own career objectives.