Ethnopsychologies : Reply to Wellman ( 1998 ) and Gauvain ( 1998 )

From a cultural psychology perspective, Gauvain (1998) found evidence of folk psychological variations in adulthood to be of great import, whereas Wellman (1998), from a theory of mind perspective, argued that it has little bearing on the issues that drive the theory of mind enterprise. Here I discuss several reasons why this adult evidence is relevant. One prima facie reason is that the comparison evidence, characterizing the European American social science model of folk psychology, comprises a fair portion of the theory of mind literature. The literature rarely specifies when culturally specific versus universal understandings are under discussion, and the overriding sense is that universal ones are being probed. As Wellman admitted, even such seemingly fundamental notions as belief-desireemotion psychology and the centrality of individual agency are culturally biased, but this is rarely noted. When European American folk psychological notions are discussed as if they were universal and then used as evidence for theories about human processes and development, then cross-cultural differences in such notions are certainly relevant. A second reason this evidence is relevant to theory of mind concerns the mindreading process. In my article (Lillard, 1998), I argued that cross-cultural evidence from adults cannot lead to definitive claims in terms of development but that it certainly has implications for the process of mindreading. The major theories of development in the theory of mind domain are of course also theories about the process by which people read minds. The theory theory both specifies how the child develops a theory (development) and how children and adults use a theory (process). Simulation and innate module theories are largely