Culture and Cognition: Dr. Dorsa Amir on How Culture Shapes the Mind Across Diverse Societies

Overview

In this episode of Speaking of Psychology, Kim Mills speaks with Dr. Dorsa Amir about how culture and cognition interact. Amir, an assistant professor at Duke University, studies how cultural environments shape the mind and how the mind, in turn, shapes culture, with work spanning children and adults around the world including the Shuar in the Ecuadorian Amazon.

Key insights

• Culture and cognition are bidirectionally linked, with context shaping decision making and development.
• Variation across cultures questions universal cognitive timelines, showing how environment and subsistence practices influence time and risk preferences.
• Children contribute to culture through peer cultures, and normative behaviors become internalized over time in a cross cultural pattern.
• Even basic perception may be less malleable than higher level norms, highlighted by studies on visual illusions and cross cultural data.

Introduction and core ideas

The podcast introduces Dr. Dorsa Amir, a psychologist at Duke whose Mind and Culture Lab investigates how cultural settings mold the mind and vice versa. Amir highlights culture as the product of socially transmitted information and cognition as the broad set of mental functions through which we interact with the world. She notes that this is an old question with renewed vigor in cognitive science, especially after cross-cultural work became central to understanding human cognition beyond WEIRD populations.

The Shuar and cross cultural cognition

The conversation centers on Amir's fieldwork with the Shuar, a hunter horticulturalist group in the Ecuadorian Amazon. She explains that their social structure and daily life differ radically from industrialized settings, particularly in demography and children’s daily autonomy. In Shuar communities, children are mixed in age and often organize into peer groups. This structure provides a natural contrast to more individualistic, school-centered environments in the United States and elsewhere.

Time, risk, and environment

One key finding discussed is how local ecology and market integration shape cognitive preferences. In the Marshmallow Test style experiments, Shuar children in remote communities show more present orientation and risk aversion, whereas Schwarz children near cities display patterns more similar to American children. Amir argues these preferences are not universal stages of development but adaptive responses to local incentives, suggesting culture and environment shape cognitive tendencies more than a single universal trajectory.

Cooperation, norms, and development

Amir also discusses a cross cultural study of cooperation across five countries. Five-year-olds across cultures show similar initial preferences in fair divisions, but over time children align their choices with adults in their communities, even when adults disagree about what is fair. This highlights how norms are provided by culture and learned through development, with a relatively universal pattern of development in this respect.

Perception and the question of universality

The podcast addresses the debate about culture's influence on basic perception. Amir and her colleague Chaz Firestone examine the cultural byproduct hypothesis regarding the Muller-Lyer illusion, arguing that culture is unlikely to reshape low-level visual discrimination. They present evidence that the illusion can occur in non human species and even in haptic versions, challenging the claim that culture fundamentally alters basic perception.

Interdisciplinary roots and future directions

Amir reflects on moving from anthropology to psychology to bridge culture and cognition. She argues that cross-cultural research is not about disproving universals but about leveraging cultural diversity to probe cognitive diversity and refine theories. The discussion also touches on a Twitter thread about parenting and common worries, emphasizing that variability in childhood milestones is normal across cultures and can reassure parents who fear that small deviations signal problems.

Peer cultures and the future of culture research

Looking ahead, Amir is exploring peer cultures as active generators of cultural knowledge, not just receivers. She and colleagues propose that children contribute to the cultural toolkit of their communities, a process with implications for how societies adapt to changing environments.