Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7czq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-30T19:44:30.676Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Is the inherence heuristic simply WEIRD?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2014

Andrew Scott Baron*
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z4, Canada. [email protected]://www.psych.ubc.ca/~abaron

Abstract

Although many studies suggest that children and adults focus more on internal causes rather than situational causes to explain observed patterns, such findings may be more limited to WEIRD populations (western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic) samples. Evidence from cross-cultural studies may point to several distinct attribution mechanisms with their culturally specific deployment reflecting both a developmental achievement as well as a possible signal of group boundaries.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Astuti, R., Carey, S. & Solomon, G. (2004) Constraints on conceptual development: A case study of the acquisition of folkbiological and folksociological knowledge in Madagascar. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 69(3, whole no. 277).Google ScholarPubMed
Atran, S. (1998) Folk biology and the anthropology of science: Cognitive universals and cultural particulars. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 21:547609.Google Scholar
Bloch, M., Solomon, G. & Carey, S. (2001) Zafimaniry: An understanding of what is passed on from parents to children: A cross-cultural investigation. Journal of Culture and Cognition 1(1):4368.Google Scholar
Csibra, G. & Gergely, G. (2011) Natural pedagogy as evolutionary adaptation. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society Series B: Biological Sciences 366:1149–57.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Henrich, J. & Broesch, J. (2011) On the nature of cultural transmission networks: Evidence from Fijian villages for adaptive learning biases. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 366(1567):1139–48. doi:10.1098/rstb.2010.0323.Google Scholar
Henrich, J., Heine, S. & Norenzayan, A. (2010) The weirdest people in the world? Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33:61135. doi:10.1017/S0140525X0999152X.Google Scholar
Henrich, J. & McElreath, R. (2003) The evolution of cultural evolution. Evolutionary Anthropology 12(3):123–35. doi:10.1002/evan.10110.Google Scholar
Herrmann, E., Call, J., Lloreda, M., Hare, B. & Tomasello, M. (2007) Humans have evolved specialized skills of social cognition: The cultural intelligence hypothesis. Science 317:1360–66.Google Scholar
Miyamoto, Y. & Kitayama, S. (2002) Cultural variation in correspondence bias: The critical role of attitude diagnosticity of socially constrained behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 83:1239–48.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Morris, M. & Peng, K. (1994) Culture and cause: American and Chinese attributions for social and physical events. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 67:949–71.Google Scholar
Moya, C., Boyd, R. & Henrich, J. (under review) Reasoning about cultural and genetic transmission: Developmental and cross-cultural evidence from Peru, Fiji, and the U.S. on how people make inferences about trait and identity transmission.Google Scholar
Norenzayan, A., Choi, I. & Nisbett, R. E. (2002) Cultural similarities and differences in social inference: Evidence from behavioral predictions and lay theories of behavior. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 28(1):109–20.Google Scholar
Richerson, P. & Boyd, R. (2005) Not by genes alone: How culture transformed human evolution. University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar