Approaches to Reduction in Treatments of Culture-Cognition Relations: Affordances and Limitations

Gauvain and Munroe take on a provocative question when they ask: how is cultural change related to the cognitive development of individuals? To address the question, they report an ambitious project that contrasts the cognitive development of people from two small-scale traditional societies (in Kenya and Nepal) with those from two industrial societies (in American Samoa and Belize) [Gauvain & Munroe, 2009]. The findings produced are consistent with other studies that have investigated similar questions in less targeted ways: individuals from more industrialized communities perform more successfully on IQ-like measures than individuals from small-scale traditional groups. Further, across communities children’s performances on the IQ-like measures showed the expected correlations with variables associated with industrialization (like the adoption of radios in homes, the use of why? questions with children, and the reduction of open-fire cooking). The conclusion they draw is that, as small-scale traditional communities shift to industrial societies, individual members advance in cognitive development, and the authors point to their correlational analyses as ways of understanding mechanisms.