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A cross-cultural investigation of people’s intuitive beliefs about the origins of cognition
Nature vs. nurture is an enduring theme of studies of the mind. Past studies on American children and adults have revealed a preference for thinking that even fundamental cognitive abilities documented in human infants and non-human species are late-emerging and reliant on learning and nurture. Howe...
Autores principales: | , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Frontiers Media S.A.
2022
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9683109/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36438352 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.974434 |
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author | Meng, Xianwei Wang, Jinjing Jenny Yoshikawa, Yuichiro Ishiguro, Hiroshi Itakura, Shoji |
author_facet | Meng, Xianwei Wang, Jinjing Jenny Yoshikawa, Yuichiro Ishiguro, Hiroshi Itakura, Shoji |
author_sort | Meng, Xianwei |
collection | PubMed |
description | Nature vs. nurture is an enduring theme of studies of the mind. Past studies on American children and adults have revealed a preference for thinking that even fundamental cognitive abilities documented in human infants and non-human species are late-emerging and reliant on learning and nurture. However, little is known about the generalizability of this “intuitive empiricist” belief and what factors may help explain it. Adult participants (N = 600) reported their beliefs about the emergence of several fundamental cognitive abilities demonstrated by preverbal infants. Studies 1A-1C showed that adults from both Japan and the US similarly estimated an older age of onset for cognitive abilities in human children as compared to the findings of cognitive science and consistently attributed acquisition of these abilities to learning rather than innateness in humans, and they made these learning attributions more so for humans than for non-human species. Study 2 showed that participants’ beliefs about biological evolution versus creationism were related to their age onset estimates for fundamental cognitive abilities, and their beliefs about the malleability of intelligence were related to participants’ explanations of the origin of fundamental cognitive abilities. These findings suggest generalizable preferences for nurture over nature across both Eastern and Western cultures (Japan and the United States), which may be related to people’s beliefs about human origins and the power of learning. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-9683109 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2022 |
publisher | Frontiers Media S.A. |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-96831092022-11-24 A cross-cultural investigation of people’s intuitive beliefs about the origins of cognition Meng, Xianwei Wang, Jinjing Jenny Yoshikawa, Yuichiro Ishiguro, Hiroshi Itakura, Shoji Front Psychol Psychology Nature vs. nurture is an enduring theme of studies of the mind. Past studies on American children and adults have revealed a preference for thinking that even fundamental cognitive abilities documented in human infants and non-human species are late-emerging and reliant on learning and nurture. However, little is known about the generalizability of this “intuitive empiricist” belief and what factors may help explain it. Adult participants (N = 600) reported their beliefs about the emergence of several fundamental cognitive abilities demonstrated by preverbal infants. Studies 1A-1C showed that adults from both Japan and the US similarly estimated an older age of onset for cognitive abilities in human children as compared to the findings of cognitive science and consistently attributed acquisition of these abilities to learning rather than innateness in humans, and they made these learning attributions more so for humans than for non-human species. Study 2 showed that participants’ beliefs about biological evolution versus creationism were related to their age onset estimates for fundamental cognitive abilities, and their beliefs about the malleability of intelligence were related to participants’ explanations of the origin of fundamental cognitive abilities. These findings suggest generalizable preferences for nurture over nature across both Eastern and Western cultures (Japan and the United States), which may be related to people’s beliefs about human origins and the power of learning. Frontiers Media S.A. 2022-11-08 /pmc/articles/PMC9683109/ /pubmed/36438352 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.974434 Text en Copyright © 2022 Meng, Wang, Yoshikawa, Ishiguro and Itakura. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. |
spellingShingle | Psychology Meng, Xianwei Wang, Jinjing Jenny Yoshikawa, Yuichiro Ishiguro, Hiroshi Itakura, Shoji A cross-cultural investigation of people’s intuitive beliefs about the origins of cognition |
title | A cross-cultural investigation of people’s intuitive beliefs about the origins of cognition |
title_full | A cross-cultural investigation of people’s intuitive beliefs about the origins of cognition |
title_fullStr | A cross-cultural investigation of people’s intuitive beliefs about the origins of cognition |
title_full_unstemmed | A cross-cultural investigation of people’s intuitive beliefs about the origins of cognition |
title_short | A cross-cultural investigation of people’s intuitive beliefs about the origins of cognition |
title_sort | cross-cultural investigation of people’s intuitive beliefs about the origins of cognition |
topic | Psychology |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9683109/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36438352 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.974434 |
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