Abstract
In their landmark 2010 paper, “The weirdest people in the world?”, Henrich, Heine, and Norenzayan outlined a serious methodological problem for the psychological and behavioural sciences. Most of the studies produced in the field use people from Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) societies, yet inferences are often drawn to the species as a whole. In drawing such inferences, researchers implicitly assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that WEIRD populations are generally representative of the species. Yet neither of these assumptions is justified. In many psychological and behavioural domains, cultural variation begets cognitive variation, and WEIRD samples are recurrently shown to be outliers. In the years since the article was published, attention has focused on the implications this has for research on extant human populations. Here we extend those implications to the study of ancient H. sapiens, their hominin forebears, and cousin lineages. We assess a range of characteristic arguments and key studies in the cognitive archaeology literature, identifying issues stemming from the problem of sample diversity. We then look at how worrying the problem is, and consider some conditions under which inferences to ancient populations via cognitive models might be provisionally justified.
Highlights
In 2010 Henrich and colleagues argued that the behavioural sciences face a serious methodological issue: most of the results in the field are produced using participants from WEIRD populations, yet these results often fail to replicate in cross-cultural studies (Henrich et al 2010)
Wynn’s application of Piagetian psychological theory to the stone tool record is one of the earliest examples of a cognitive archaeological argument. This demonstrates that the problem of sample diversity was inherited by cognitive archaeology from the outset; Piagetian theory’s failure to generalise is one of the reasons Wynn discarded it in later work
We have argued that cognitive archaeology inherits this problem insofar as it uses models from the cognitive sciences to provide epistemic licence for its inferences to the past
Summary
In 2010 Henrich and colleagues argued that the behavioural sciences face a serious methodological issue: most of the results in the field are produced using participants from WEIRD populations, yet these results often fail to replicate in cross-cultural studies (Henrich et al 2010). Cross-cultural research suggests that WEIRD people are often outliers with respect to many cognitive and behavioural traits. It seems that inferences from culturally localised samples to species-wide psychological claims are unjustified. Cognitive archaeologists typically appeal—either implicitly or explicitly—to a theory or model from the cognitive/psychological/behavioural ( ‘cognitive’) sciences; one which is thought to be independently plausible. Using this model, inferences are made from artefacts to cognitive capacity. We outline four case studies which exemplify the issue of cross-cultural sample diversity in cognitive archaeology (Section 3).
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