Agency concepts across cultures: How intuitive is folkpsychology?
نویسندگان
چکیده
The present research investigates cultural variation in conceptual frameworks for interpreting agency. A mind perception measure (Gray, Gray, & Wegner, 2007) was adapted for interviews with Indigenous Ngöbe adults in Panama and US college students. Participants ranked the agency capacities of various entities and provided explanations. Rankings varied systematically, with Ngöbe more likely to ascribe agency to nonhuman natural kinds than US participants. Analysis of explanations indicated that agency concepts are organized under different folktheories: US participants construed agency as a hierarchical, prototypically human capacity requiring consciousness, whereas Ngöbe construed agency as a multidimensional relational capacity expressed in directed interactions. An emphasis on psychological agency as distinct from other (biological, physical) forms of agency is widely assumed to be a conceptual prior, but these findings suggest it may instead be a feature of Western cultural epistemologies.
منابع مشابه
Inferring agency across cultures 1 Grounding principles for inferring agency : Two cultural perspectives
The present research investigates cultural variation in grounding principles for inferring agency. Our motivating question is whether cultural diversity in agency concepts reflects an animistic overextension of a single (universal) folkpsychology, as argued by many researchers, or an alternative folktheory of communication based on relational principles. In two experiments, a mind-perception me...
متن کاملGrounding principles for inferring agency: Two cultural perspectives.
The present research investigates cultural variation in grounding principles for inferring agency in order to address an important theoretical debate: does cultural diversity in agency concepts reflect an animistic overextension of (universal) folkpsychology, as many have argued, or an alternative theory of folkcommunication based on relational principles? In two experiments, mind perception me...
متن کاملReligion's evolutionary landscape: counterintuition, commitment, compassion, communion.
Religion is not an evolutionary adaptation per se, but a recurring cultural by-product of the complex evolutionary landscape that sets cognitive, emotional, and material conditions for ordinary human interactions. Religion exploits only ordinary cognitive processes to passionately display costly devotion to counterintuitive worlds governed by supernatural agents. The conceptual foundations of r...
متن کاملCD8185.Atran 001-058
Religion is not an evolutionary adaptation per se, but a recurring cultural by-product of the complex evolutionary landscape that sets cognitive, emotional, and material conditions for ordinary human interactions. Religion exploits only ordinary cognitive processes to passionately display costly devotion to counterintuitive worlds governed by supernatural agents. The conceptual foundations of r...
متن کاملThe Relationship between the Concepts of Agency-Structure in the Thought of Beheshti
In the present paper, we have been trying mainly to define the concepts of agency-structure, so that by understanding the concepts of agency-structure, we sought to discover these concepts in the mindset of Beheshti. The concepts of agency-structure are among the fundamental and vital concepts associated with how governments are recognized. By identifying the extent of the powers, the rights an...
متن کامل