Introduction: Psychology and Culture

Abstract

Although there might seem to be a natural continuity and interplay between the cognitive sciences and the social sciences, the integration of the two has, on the whole, been fraught with difficulties. In some areas the transition was relatively smooth. For instance, political psychology is now a well-recognized branch both of psychology and of political science. In economics, things have been more difficult, with the entrenched assumption of a perfectly rational homo economicus, but behavioral economics is now well recognized, and one of the founders of the field, Daniel Kahneman, went on to win a Nobel Prize. Social and cognitive sciences have proven more difficult to bridge in anthropology and sociology. Most of the efforts have been pursued—and resisted—in anthropology (although, for sociology, see Clement and Kaufmann 2011). At first, scholars attempted to import the methods of evolutionary biology straight into the study of culture (Dawkins 1976; Lumsden and Wilson 1981). This prompted a severe backlash from anthropologists and other social scientists. Later, and partly as a result of the formation of the field of evolutionary psychology, methods and results from cognitive science were brought to bear on the topic of cultural evolution. One of the most influential attempts to understand cultural phenomena using these new tools is the Gene-Culture Coevolution (or Dual Inheritance Theory) model of Boyd and Richerson (1985). To understand the spread of cultural elements, this framework chiefly relies on simple social psychological biases, such as the tendency to preferentially imitate the behaviors of the majority, or of the most prestigious individuals. The framework also incorporates other psychological mechanisms under the umbrella of content biases: these mechanisms only affect the transmission of particular cultural contents, from representations of faces to knowledge about poisonous plants. However, in order to build tractable models, the Gene Culture Coevolution framework has mostly investigated the effects of simple social biases and has stayed away from the reliance on more complex cognitive mechanisms. The framework of the epidemiology of representation, developed by Sperber (1996; Claidiere and Sperber 2007), may offer a more promising perspective to integrate a rich view of psychology and culture. This model starts from the observation that most cultural transmission is extremely noisy. For instance, when someone says something, the interlocutor might not understand her exact meaning, he is likely to forget some of what was said, and to transform the content again in the process of retelling. As a result, the elements that are most likely to become widespread, or to survive across generations, are not only those that best withstand noisy transmission, but also those towards which noisy transmission converges. Psychological mechanisms are one of the factors that influence which element is more likely to be robust enough, or attractive enough, to become widespread. For instance, a recent study has argued that the strong psychological reaction elicited by direct eye-gaze helps explain why the art of portraiture tends to converge on subjects that gaze right at the viewer (Morin 2013). On the whole, cognitively informed approaches to culture have had a limited impact on mainstream cultural anthropology, in large part, it seems, because of fundamental disagreements about methods or even ontology. In psychology, by contrast, there is much less resistance to the idea that culture ought to be taken into account. For instance, in 2010 Henrich, Heine and Norenzayan H. Mercier (&) Centre de Science Cognitives, Universite de Neuchâtel, Neuchatel, Switzerland e-mail: hugo.mercier@gmail.com