Exploring Cognitive Diversity Across Disciplines and Cultures

Since the cognitive revolution, a widely held assumption has been that—whereas content may vary across cultures—cognitive processes would be universal, especially those on the more basic levels. Even if scholars do not fully subscribe to this assumption, they often conceptualize, or tend to investigate, cognition as if it were universal (Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010). The insight that universality must not be presupposed but scrutinized is now gaining ground, and cognitive diversity has become one of the hot (and controversial) topics in the field (Norenzayan & Heine, 2005). We argue that, for scrutinizing the cultural dimension of cognition, taking an anthropological perspective is invaluable, not only for the task itself, but for attenuating the home-field disadvantages that are inescapably linked to cross-cultural research (Medin, Bennis, & Chandler, 2010). In a recent debate on the role of anthropology in and for cognitive science, obstacles that may hamper rapprochement were discussed in detail (Bender, Beller, & Medin, 2012). In this symposium, we intend to move a step forward and showcase efforts to overcome these obstacles. The contributions to this symposium pursue a problem-driven approach to tackle specific questions of shared interest. The symposium brings together scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds (including cognitive and evolutionary anthropology, psycholinguistics, and cognitive, developmental, and comparative psychology), who are among the leading scientists in their fields. Each of them has contributed considerably to our expanding knowledge on how culture and cognition interact (e.g., Beller & Bender, 2008; Haun et al., 2011; Legare & Souza, 2012; Majid, Boster, & Bowerman, 2008; Medin & Atran, 2004). They present current research on different domains, ranging from causal cognition on the physical world through semantic categorization of olfaction and mental state understanding to processes of cultural transmission and moral reasoning in the biological domain, thus shedding new light on a field in cognitive science, in which recent years have seen an upsurge of interest and controversial debates.