Agency, time, and causality.

Thomas Widlok

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01264

Abstract

Cognitive Scientists interested in causal cognition increasingly search for evidence from non-Western Educational Industrial Rich Democratic people but find only very few cross-cultural studies that specifically target causal cognition. This article suggests how information about causality can be retrieved from ethnographic monographs, specifically from ethnographies that discuss agency and concepts of time. Many apparent cultural differences with regard to causal cognition dissolve when cultural extensions of agency and personhood to non-humans are taken into account. At the same time considerable variability remains when we include notions of time, linearity and sequence. The article focuses on ethnographic case studies from Africa but provides a more general perspective on the role of ethnography in research on the diversity and universality of causal cognition.

Highlights

Scientific enquiry during much of the 19th and 20th century searched for “weird” examples of human cognition in nonEuropean societies and cultures, typically highlighting extreme departures from Western societies that were considered to be the “standard”
A programmatic turning point in this orientation has recently been marked by Henrich et al (2010) who noted that much of experimental psychology to date is limited by a sample that is made up of “weird” outliers of a different sort, namely a sample of university students conscripted to experiments and of similar subjects from a Western Educational Industrial Rich Democratic (WEIRD) background
As a consequence the preparedness to include “non-WEIRD” groups has grown and is increasingly considered to be obligatory, except that there is often only a very vague sense as to what exactly such a desirable broadening of the sample should look like. Is it enough to include non-Europeans who were initially only considered when extreme contrasts were sought after? For instance, members of the Sudanese Zande, Nuer, and Dinka, people that feature in this contribution, are likely to be considered prototypical examples of a non-WEIRD population because they live in Africa and they have so far featured in ethnographic writing rather than in cognitive experimenting

Summary

Thomas Widlok*

Kulturanthropologie Afrikas, Institut für Afrikanistik, Global South Studies Center, Universität zu Köln, Köln, Germany. Reviewed by: Juergen Bohnemeyer, University at Buffalo – State University of New York, USA Rumen I. University of Michigan, USA Bethany Lynn Ojalehto, Northwestern University, USA. Cognitive Scientists interested in causal cognition increasingly search for evidence from non-Western Educational Industrial Rich Democratic people but find only very few cross-cultural studies that target causal cognition. This article suggests how information about causality can be retrieved from ethnographic monographs, from ethnographies that discuss agency and concepts of time. Many apparent cultural differences with regard to causal cognition dissolve when cultural extensions of agency and personhood to non-humans are taken into account. The article focuses on ethnographic case studies from Africa but provides a more general perspective on the role of ethnography in research on the diversity and universality of causal cognition

INTRODUCTION

CONCLUSION