Cross‐Cultural Similarities and Differences in Person‐Body Reasoning: Experimental Evidence From the United Kingdom and Brazilian Amazon

Emma Cohen,Nicola Knight,Emily Burdett,Justin Barrett

doi:10.1111/j.1551-6709.2011.01172.x

Abstract

We report the results of a cross-cultural investigation of person-body reasoning in the United Kingdom and northern Brazilian Amazon (Marajó Island). The study provides evidence that directly bears upon divergent theoretical claims in cognitive psychology and anthropology, respectively, on the cognitive origins and cross-cultural incidence of mind-body dualism. In a novel reasoning task, we found that participants across the two sample populations parsed a wide range of capacities similarly in terms of the capacities' perceived anchoring to bodily function. Patterns of reasoning concerning the respective roles of physical and biological properties in sustaining various capacities did vary between sample populations, however. Further, the data challenge prior ad-hoc categorizations in the empirical literature on the developmental origins of and cognitive constraints on psycho-physical reasoning (e.g., in afterlife concepts). We suggest cross-culturally validated categories of "Body Dependent" and "Body Independent" items for future developmental and cross-cultural research in this emerging area.

Highlights

There has been growing interest among cognitive psychologists and sociocultural anthropologists in the developmental origins and cross-cultural incidence of mind-body dualism
Some developmental psychologists have hypothesized that the autonomy of cognitive systems dealing with the social and physical worlds renders naıve, or intuitive, psycho-physical dualism a default cognitive stance in reasoning about human and humanlike agents (Bloom, 2004; Wellman & Johnson, 2008; Wynn, 2008)
We investigated and compared person-body reasoning in two culturally distinct populations, one in the United Kingdom and one in the northern Brazilian Amazon

Summary

Introduction

There has been growing interest among cognitive psychologists and sociocultural anthropologists in the developmental origins and cross-cultural incidence of mind-body dualism The first strand investigates children’s and adults’ reasoning about phenomena that entail interactions across physical ⁄ biological and psychological domains (e.g., psychogenic bodily events). Some researchers have suggested that the domain distinction that enables children to distinguish appropriately between mental events and their physical counterparts (e.g., a thought about a house is different from an actual house; wanting to get taller is different from getting taller) constrains reasoning about phenomena that entail causal interactions across domains (Wellman & Johnson, 2008)

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