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Emerging Trends in Culture and Concepts

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Title: Emerging Trends in Culture and Concepts
extracted text: Emerging Trends in Culture
and Concepts
BETHANY OJALEHTO and DOUGLAS MEDIN

Abstract
The relation between culture and concepts has long been a fascinating topic for
layperson and scientist alike. But often this topic has generated more heat than
light—strong claims have been paired with weak evidence, and anecdotes have
been more common than empirical data. More recently, however, interdisciplinary
research programs have begun to demonstrate that interest in the relation between
culture and concepts is not misplaced. In this essay, we review prior, emerging, and
potential future trends in culture and concepts research. Changing conceptions of
culture are in turn affecting how culture is studied as well as our understanding of
concepts.
First, we discuss current challenges in cultural research stemming from the fact that
cognitive science studies have largely been done by Western researchers attempting
to extend observations with Western college students to the world at large. Next,
we highlight cultural research on semantic spaces, agency, and causality and note
intriguing parallels in their development. These bodies of work refine previous views
of concepts as stable units of thought by focusing on how concepts acquire (shifting
sets of) meanings within contextual and epistemological systems.

INTRODUCTION
Having read the title of this review, your first question might be which of
the 7-letter C-words is going to be primary and which secondary. A betting
person might predict that the focus will be on how studies of culture are
modifying our understanding of concepts. The alternative question of how
our understanding of concepts has affected the study of culture would be
more of a long shot. Of course, there is also the possibility that the thesis will
be that changing conceptions of culture are affecting not only how culture is
studied but also our understanding of the concepts employed in such studies.
If you are an experienced multiple choice test taker, you may have settled
on the correct answer, “all of the above.” Although a great deal of previous

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research can be seen as focused on cultural similarities and differences in conceptual spaces (e.g., color terms, folk taxonomies) these domains are themselves being questioned by recent research. These developments, in turn, are
affecting conceptions of culture.
In what follows we first provide some methodological and orienting observations on culture and concepts and then turn to a focus on emerging trends
and perspectives. Finally, we end with some projections concerning future
research and theory.
CURRENT CHALLENGES
Given the diversity of human thought, a salient issue for cross-cultural study
concerns decisions about what the relevant units of similarity or difference
might be. Cognitive science has generally approached this problem by
treating concepts as the “units of thought” that form the building blocks of
folk theories (Barsalou, Wilson, & Hasenkamp, 2010; Carey, 2009). Under
this paradigm, comparisons typically are drawn at the level of individual
concepts (e.g., do two groups share the same concept of agency?) or a series
of related concepts [e.g., do groups share similar folkbiological taxonomies?
(Atran, 2002)].
The overwhelming empirical base for cognitive research, including
research on concepts, comes from samples of undergraduates attending
major research universities, despite evidence that these samples may be
especially unrepresentative of people in general (Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010). For present purposes our concern is somewhat different. We
believe that research and theory tailored to US samples has unfortunate
consequences for how cultural research tends to be framed, producing
what might be called a home-field disadvantage (Medin, Bennis, & Chandler,
2010). That is, there are substantial limitations and opportunities for error
associated with research that reflects a single (Western) perspective and
employs materials and methods adapted for a single study population (i.e.,
Western undergraduates).
Consider the following example. It has proved useful to assume that conceptual development and behavior is organized in terms of domain-specific
processes and principles (Carey, 2009; Gelman & Legare, 2011; Wellman &
Gelman, 1992). Conceptual domains are defined in terms of the ontological
kinds they treat: (human) intentional agents are the proper subjects of folk
psychology; nonhuman animals and plants fall under folk biology; and natural
inanimates under naive physics. But recently there have been signs that this
may be a particularly Western way of parsing knowledge into domains. For
example, Hirschfeld (2013) has suggested that folk sociology is a coherent

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domain—this possibility raises questions about the relations between intuitive social and psychological frameworks.
A critical attitude toward domains is important because domains may affect
both what research is done and how it is conducted. For example, Atran &
Medin (2008) report a body of work on culture and folk biology, focused on
people’s understanding of plants and animals. This research included studies of folk ecological knowledge involving plants and animals (including
humans). Note, however, that if the initial research framing had been in terms
of ecosystems, the researchers likely would have included natural inanimates
such as the sun and moon, rocks, soil, and water in their probes. They did not.
The category, folk biology, may have led to the focus on living kinds. To their
credit, Atran and Medin included human beings in their studies of folk ecology, a species one might overlook from the cultural perspective that humans
are not part of nature (Bang et al., 2007).
Another dimension of home-field disadvantage stems from the logic of the
comparison space. In practice, the question of whether people “have” the
same concepts across cultures has typically been framed as: “Do other people have the same concepts as Westerners?” This approach risks naturalizing
Western concepts, as it relies on methods designed to reveal one particular
conceptual framework (e.g., folk psychology) over others (e.g., social interactions) (Miller, 2004). For example, a recent theory-of-mind study reported
results from three small-scale societies (Barrett et al., 2013). But results from
a fourth field site in Kenya were not included because, according to authors,
young children “fail at our tasks” (Supplementary Materials S.6, p. 27). That
is, Kenyan children did not show the expected preferential-looking patterns
on theory-of-mind tasks. The authors suggest that these children may have
been attending to “the social demands of the testing situation rather than to
the task itself” (p. 27). We suggest that the task failed to tap children’s sophisticated social competencies; indeed, the Kenyan data may have been the most
fertile ground for exploring cultural theory-of-(social)-mind concepts.
This review of concerns and cautions is not exhaustive, but these challenges
are a small price to pay for the fascinating body of work on culture and concepts to which we now turn.
EMERGING TRENDS IN CULTURE AND CONCEPTS
Whorf and Semantic Spaces If languages differ, do their speakers possess correspondingly different concepts? The idea that they do is commonly known
as the Whorfian hypothesis, after Benjamin Whorf. Researchers studying the
language–thought interface have been of two intuitions. Some suspect that
despite surface variation, all languages share similar underlying semantic
structures. This view is well aligned with the idea that human conceptual

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systems “carve nature at its joints,” implying that languages will do so, too.
Others suspect that languages share no universal properties, and argue that
linguistic systems are shaped by sociocultural communicative and cognitive
constraints (Evans & Levinson, 2009). This view may imply far-reaching conceptual diversity.
When respect to word-concept mappings, these questions have typically
been explored through documentation of semantic fields such as ethnobiological names or spatial lexemes. This framework tends to assume that culturally shared semantic structures “reside as localized functional units in the
minds of individuals”—words are thoughts (Romney & Moore, 1998). However, two emerging perspectives assert that linguistic and cognitive diversity
share a more complex relationship (Enfield & Sidnell, 2013; Malt et al., in
press; Malt & Majid, 2013; Núñez & Cornejo, 2012; Sauter, LeGuen, & Haun,
2011).
One approach treats concepts as networks of meaning revealed imperfectly
in language. In a study of human locomotion terms, for example, Malt et al.
(2008) presented action videos to participants and analyzed how speakers
of four languages (English, Spanish, Dutch, Japanese) assigned words to
movements. Differences were found at the level of single lexical items such
as “jumping” versus “hopping” (or what might be identified as “concepts”
under common psychological methods). Although each language made
unique distinctions at the level of individual words, multidimensional
scaling (MDS) showed that languages tracked similar discontinuities in
locomotion. All four languages marked sensitivity to a biomechanical
dimension as well as a speed/aggressiveness movement dimension. Importantly, this shared conceptual space did not map precisely onto the words of
any single language.
Malt et al. (in press) propose that concepts do not represent stable “units”
of meaning, but should be understood in terms of moving dimensions of
thought “experienced as a coherent grouping” (p. 37). Shifting conceptual alignments may form in response to different situations as attention
is drawn to different dimensions, depending on the goals in play. This
suggests that there is no “most basic” concept for a domain. Furthermore,
habitual frames of attention and experiential contexts—cultural life—will be
critical to understanding the range of variation in conceptual systems. Most
psychological tasks have been conceived with a Western (English) language
concept in mind. But as Malt and colleagues caution, “It seems impossible
to discern from only a single language what the shared elements will be and
which parts of the patterns are idiosyncratic to the language” (p. 30).
While locomotion terms differ lexically but converge on a common conceptual space, one domain in which languages appear to exhibit cognitive
divergence is spatial reasoning. Recent investigations focus on how spatial

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language and concepts are emergent products of worldviews. Working
with the Aymara of the Andes, Núñez & Cornejo (2012) explore the origins
of a unique linguistic phenomenon. When Aymara speakers describe
things in space, they use an absolute (cardinal) frame but encode it with
intrinsic lexemes, such that “west/east of” corresponds to “in back/front
of.” This intrinsic-for-absolute encoding is robust, expressed in spontaneous
co-speech gesture, Andean Spanish, metaphors, and urban layouts. But
critically, Aymara language has words corresponding to “east” and “west.”
Why then do Aymara speakers use the intrinsic frame for “back” and
“front”? The authors point to the Aymara worldview whereby the entire
community—humans, animates, environment, and artifacts—is part of
Nature, “the totality of which is canonically oriented toward the location
of the sunrise” (p. 24). Aymara do not use absolute terms to describe their
spatial layout because doing so “would portray an empty meaningless
land, deprived of its constitutive humanity” (p. 24). Núñez & Cornejo’s
conclusions resonate with Malt and colleagues’ argument that both concepts
and words must be contextualized within larger systems, whether across
languages (locomotion terms) or across levels within a culture. As we will
see, this same principle holds for conceptions of agency.
Agency Concepts. The concept of agency is foundational to cognition,
influencing how people think about phenomena ranging from animacy to
morality. Agency can be defined as a capacity for intentional action, and
cognitive scientists have explored how agency concepts inform one’s sense
of self, attributions of causal agency to others, and moral judgments about
(mental) intentions underlying behavior. But is the concept of agency the
same across cultures? Early foundational work on the social construction of
agency suggested not, finding East–West differences in independent versus
interdependent agency (Markus & Kitayama, 1991). Studies since have
explored how these distinct orientations affect cognition across cultural
settings, including social class (e.g., Snibbe & Markus, 2005; Zemba, Young,
& Morris, 2006). More radically, recent cultural research has cast new light
on what it means to be an agent.
Cultural habits of speaking may relate to how people construct notions
of agency, as when ascribing causal agency to the actions of others (Wolff,
Jeon, & Yu, 2009). Linguistically, there are different ways to mark agents for
intentional versus accidental events. English allows speakers to specify the
agent who caused an accidental event (she broke the vase), but Japanese and
Spanish tend to omit the agent in such cases (the vase broke) (Fausey, Long,
Inamori, & Boroditsky, 2010). These cross-linguistic differences affect eyewitness memory for agents involved in accidental events. For example, Spanish

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and Japanese speakers are less likely to remember the agents involved in accidental, but not intentional, events as compared to English speakers (Fausey
& Boroditsky, 2011).
The relevance of the intentional, accidental contrast itself may be culturally
variable. In many cultures, people are held accountable for their acts, with
no apparent distinction made between intentional or unintentional agency
(Robbins & Rumsey, 2008). For example, Danziger (2006, 2010) demonstrates
that Mopan Maya treat the speaker’s intentions as irrelevant to the question
of lying: Any false utterance is considered a lie even if the speaker believed
it true.
This feature is difficult to reconcile with Western concepts of agency. The
tension between Western and Mopan Mayan concepts of agency is linked to
broader cultural frameworks. Danziger (2010) argues that the Mopan treatment of agency must be understood within a cultural system where words
are seen as having power to affect things directly in the world: “a sacred
morality thus inheres in the relationship of spoken word to actual world, and
the nature of the transgression involved in speaking falsehood is cosmological at least as much as interpersonal” (p. 214). As agency concepts are fundamental to morality, it is perhaps unsurprising that this trend converges with
a systems approach to morality in cultures where the social consequences
of an act are more relevant than individual intentions (Sachdeva, Singh, &
Medin, 2011). Notably, these findings have yet to be taken up by dominant
theories of moral cognition, which rely heavily on the presumed centrality of
intention in moral judgments (Cushman, Sheketoff, Wharton, & Carey, 2013;
Gray, Young, & Waytz, 2012).
These new perspectives on agency have important implications for related
areas of research. For example, they carry over into the understanding of
causal concepts.
Causal Concepts. Agency is arguably central to causality. Causal reasoning
has long been assumed to play a central role in allowing individual agents
to make predictions in the service of actions (Glymour, 2003). Perspectives
on causality are shifting, however, as new theories emphasize the role of
causal interpretation in facilitating social and cultural interaction. On this
view, causal inference is geared not toward “input (obtaining information
from the environment) or output (the direct control of action)” but toward
social coordination (Baumeister & Masicampo, 2010, p. 945; see also Whitehouse, 2011).
The stage was set for such an argument through research demonstrating
cultural variation in causal reasoning (Lloyd, 2007). Compared to Western
societies, for example, East Asians tend to see a wider variety of indirect,

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downstream consequences for causal events (Maddux & Yuki, 2006).
This “ripple effect” suggests that perceived causal complexity varies by
culture. Consistent with this possibility, other research has demonstrated
systems-level causal thinking among nonwestern communities, including
Brazilian urban poor communities (Duarte-Olson, 2013).
Much of the relevant evidence comes from studies of ecological reasoning. Compared to Western, majority-culture counterparts, Indigenous Itza’
Maya and Native-American Menominee participants tend to focus on more
complex interactions spanning multiple entities (e.g., species), contexts (e.g.,
habitats), and time scales (Atran & Medin, 2008; Unsworth et al., 2012). These
insights into systems thinking were made possible by methods that move
away from analyzing people’s reasoning about individual causal links (does
x cause y?) to explore larger systems of causation (how are x and y related to
each other and to the larger system?).
Similarly, the broader perspective on the social function of causal concepts
is contributing new views of cognitive development. Recent research
has demonstrated that young children “overimitate” by initially copying
causally irrelevant actions toward an instrumental end-goal (Gergely &
Csibra, 2006; Lyons, Young, & Keil, 2007; McGuigan, Whiten, Flynn, &
Horner, 2007). The backdrop for these studies is an analysis of “causally
opaque behaviors.” These behaviors involve action sequences that are
culturally dictated (e.g., rituals) rather than empirically self-evident (lacking
transparent physical causal mechanisms). Yet their intended relationships
to the world (e.g., treating illness) are readily intuited and manipulated,
even for young children (Legare & Souza, 2012, 2014). Mundane forms of
causal opacity are common to societies in the form of artifacts, norms, and
conventions. These observations challenge the idea that people intuitively
reason exclusively in terms of (physical) causal mechanisms. How, then, are
such actions conceptualized and why are they intuitively appealing?
Part of the answer may lie in the fact that even young children are highly
sensitive to contextual cues that guide the interpretation of social behavior (Herrmann, Legare, Harris, & Whitehouse, 2013; Legare, Whitehouse,
Wen, & Herrmann, under review). Preschool-aged children will faithfully
imitate an adult model who engages in various causally irrelevant behaviors to achieve an instrumental goal, such as retrieving an object from a box.
Such “over-imitation” has inspired multiple explanations for the conceptual
underpinnings of this development (Nielsen & Tomaselli, 2010). One possibility is that over-imitation results from more general learning processes
for physical causality. Children engage in “automatic causal encoding” of
an adult model’s actions as causally necessary, even if the mechanisms are
unknowable to the child (Lyons, Young, & Keil, 2007). Over-imitation thus
informs the child’s core knowledge of physical causality.

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Another possibility is that over-imitation is linked to early ritualistic
behavior and the transmission of cultural conventions rather than core
causal knowledge (Legare & Herrmann, 2013). People engage in rituals to
solve instrumental problems not because they encode actions as causally
necessary, but because rituals satisfy intuitive notions of causal efficacy
associated with goal-directed actions (i.e., repetitive, intentional action
sequences) (Legare & Souza, 2014).
There is mounting evidence that a substantial amount of imitative learning
is geared toward social coordination and is not about causal learning at all.
Imitation is a means to “affirm a shared state” with a model, to “communicate mutuality” and signify shared identity (Over & Carpenter, 2012, citing
Užgiris, 1981). Thus, imitation has social functions: to coordinate with others
and to learn social group conventionsand not simply the causal structure of
the physical world (Kenward, Karlsson, & Persson, 2011).
The social perspective raises the possibility that causal cognition may often
track normative systems for understanding reality rather than approximating some acultural model of the “natural” world. Even the very distinction
between the natural and the social is not universal (Descola & Pálsson, 1996;
Ingold, 2011).
KEY ISSUES GOING FORWARD
Recent studies are notable for their move beyond domain-specific
approaches to individual concepts. Across various levels of analysis,
each research program explores dynamic conceptual systems within larger
contexts of thinking, acting, and relating. Building on the view of concepts as
networks of meaning, we expect that research on language and thought will
increasingly situate questions of cognitive universality or variation within
larger cultural systems. Rather than exporting standard methods for testing
Western-oriented concepts and domains, we hope to see greater attention to
how concepts are uniquely shaped by epistemological frameworks.
We expect that new frameworks will increasingly complicate cultural
dichotomies associated with individual concepts (e.g., independent versus
interdependent agency) to explore underlying conceptual systems from
shifting vantage points. For example, could cognitive signatures of an
“interdependent” self-concept reflect attention to multiple loci of agency,
as part of a cultural system that values patiency and participation in social
structures (Rogoff, Paradise, Arauz, Correa-Chavez, & Angelillo, 2003)? Or
could it reflect a complex systems-like orientation to causality distributed
across actors and environments?
Following new research on complexity of causal concepts, we hope to see
that domain-specific claims premised on convenient dualisms (e.g., physical

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versus social causality) will be further unpacked. Complex systems (e.g.,
ecosystems) in the “real” world involve highly diverse interactions across
levels and domains. Thus, an important question concerns how people
understand complex causal relationships that coevolve through interactions
of organisms and environments at multiple levels (White, 2008, Duarte
Olson, 2013). Such systems demand causal principles (e.g., cyclical feedback,
nonlinear relations) that go beyond those currently afforded in most models
of causal reasoning.
CONCLUSIONS: FROM DOMAINS TO SYSTEMS OF RELATIONS
Emerging trends in semantics, agency, and causal concepts converge on the
idea that individual minds are grounded in systems of social relations, from
the languages we speak to the (cultural) practices we engage in, and concepts must be understood as elements of those systems (Barsalou et al., 2010;
Baumeister & Masicampo, 2010; Chater & Christiansen, 2010; Enfield & Sidnell, 2013; Hutchins, 2010; Mascaro & Csibra, 2012). This perspective sees
individuals more as interactive cooperators than isolated problem solvers, by
exploring how cognition enables people to respond to and interact with others and their environments. The overarching message is that concepts acquire
meaning through relations to larger systems of knowing, speaking, living,
and situational contexts (Cole, 1998; Rogoff, 2003).
How do changing views of culture and concepts feed back into one another?
Murphy and Medin (1985) argued that concepts are embedded in, and organized by, theories. Although they reviewed a body of research supporting
this view in the abstract, they did little by way of specifying what counts as a
theory. More recently, these notions about theories have been operationalized
(or perhaps replaced) by research programs focused on understanding epistemological orientations. Epistemologies are seen as sets of practices that both
support and reflect ideas about what is worthy of attention and observation,
in need of explanation, and counts as a satisfactory explanation. They are not
so much about specific beliefs as they are about ways of relating to the rest of
the world, rooted in practices and values (Cajete, 1999; Ingold, 2011; Medin,
Ojalehto, Marin, & Bang, 2013). If concepts are no longer unit-like, neither
is culture entity-like. Both represent systems that may be better captured on
analogy with ecosystems, reflecting how people’s participation in multiple
spheres of thought and practice influence dynamic habits of thinking.
Finally, it is only a small step to realize that scientific practices are (cultural)
practices, leading us to our concluding comment relating the researchers
to those being researched: if the researched have distinctive practices, then
surely the researchers also do. Consequently, to the extent that science

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incorporates multiple cultural perspectives, it will be the better for it (Medin
& Bang, 2014).
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This material is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Nos. SES 0962185, DRL 1109210, and DRL 1114530, as
well as a Graduate Research Fellowship. We thank Cristine Legare, Sonya
Sachdeva, Rumen Iliev, and Jennifer Woodring for insightful contributions
and suggestions that have greatly improved this essay.

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Over, H., & Carpenter, M. (2012). Putting the social into social learning: Explaining
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BETHANY OJALEHTO SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Bethany Ojalehto is a graduate student in Cognitive Psychology at Northwestern University. Her research explores cultural frameworks for thinking
about minds, nonhuman agents, and ecological systems, and was recently
featured in Trends in Cognitive Sciences. She has been fortunate to have the
opportunity to collaborate with Indigenous Ngöbe communities of Panama

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in research and cultural education programs since 2010, through support
from a Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute Short-Term Fellowship, a
National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, a Language
Preservation Grant from the Endangered Language Foundation, and
Northwestern University.
DOUGLAS MEDIN SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Douglas Medin is a Louis W. Menk Professor of Psychology and holds a
joint appointment in the School of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University. In collaboration with the University of Washington, the
American Indian Center of Chicago (aic-chicago.org), and the Menominee
Indian Tribe of Wisconsin (http://menomineescienceproject.webs.com/),
Medin and his Northwestern colleagues have been studying the role of
culture as it relates to knowledge and reasoning about the natural world
in children and adults, as well as the implications of these observations
for culturally based science education. His webpage may be found at:
http://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/douglas-medin.
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Emerging Trends in Culture and Concepts

15

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and Concepts
BETHANY OJALEHTO and DOUGLAS MEDIN

Abstract
The relation between culture and concepts has long been a fascinating topic for
layperson and scientist alike. But often this topic has generated more heat than
light—strong claims have been paired with weak evidence, and anecdotes have
been more common than empirical data. More recently, however, interdisciplinary
research programs have begun to demonstrate that interest in the relation between
culture and concepts is not misplaced. In this essay, we review prior, emerging, and
potential future trends in culture and concepts research. Changing conceptions of
culture are in turn affecting how culture is studied as well as our understanding of
concepts.
First, we discuss current challenges in cultural research stemming from the fact that
cognitive science studies have largely been done by Western researchers attempting
to extend observations with Western college students to the world at large. Next,
we highlight cultural research on semantic spaces, agency, and causality and note
intriguing parallels in their development. These bodies of work refine previous views
of concepts as stable units of thought by focusing on how concepts acquire (shifting
sets of) meanings within contextual and epistemological systems.

INTRODUCTION
Having read the title of this review, your first question might be which of
the 7-letter C-words is going to be primary and which secondary. A betting
person might predict that the focus will be on how studies of culture are
modifying our understanding of concepts. The alternative question of how
our understanding of concepts has affected the study of culture would be
more of a long shot. Of course, there is also the possibility that the thesis will
be that changing conceptions of culture are affecting not only how culture is
studied but also our understanding of the concepts employed in such studies.
If you are an experienced multiple choice test taker, you may have settled
on the correct answer, “all of the above.” Although a great deal of previous

Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

research can be seen as focused on cultural similarities and differences in conceptual spaces (e.g., color terms, folk taxonomies) these domains are themselves being questioned by recent research. These developments, in turn, are
affecting conceptions of culture.
In what follows we first provide some methodological and orienting observations on culture and concepts and then turn to a focus on emerging trends
and perspectives. Finally, we end with some projections concerning future
research and theory.
CURRENT CHALLENGES
Given the diversity of human thought, a salient issue for cross-cultural study
concerns decisions about what the relevant units of similarity or difference
might be. Cognitive science has generally approached this problem by
treating concepts as the “units of thought” that form the building blocks of
folk theories (Barsalou, Wilson, & Hasenkamp, 2010; Carey, 2009). Under
this paradigm, comparisons typically are drawn at the level of individual
concepts (e.g., do two groups share the same concept of agency?) or a series
of related concepts [e.g., do groups share similar folkbiological taxonomies?
(Atran, 2002)].
The overwhelming empirical base for cognitive research, including
research on concepts, comes from samples of undergraduates attending
major research universities, despite evidence that these samples may be
especially unrepresentative of people in general (Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010). For present purposes our concern is somewhat different. We
believe that research and theory tailored to US samples has unfortunate
consequences for how cultural research tends to be framed, producing
what might be called a home-field disadvantage (Medin, Bennis, & Chandler,
2010). That is, there are substantial limitations and opportunities for error
associated with research that reflects a single (Western) perspective and
employs materials and methods adapted for a single study population (i.e.,
Western undergraduates).
Consider the following example. It has proved useful to assume that conceptual development and behavior is organized in terms of domain-specific
processes and principles (Carey, 2009; Gelman & Legare, 2011; Wellman &
Gelman, 1992). Conceptual domains are defined in terms of the ontological
kinds they treat: (human) intentional agents are the proper subjects of folk
psychology; nonhuman animals and plants fall under folk biology; and natural
inanimates under naive physics. But recently there have been signs that this
may be a particularly Western way of parsing knowledge into domains. For
example, Hirschfeld (2013) has suggested that folk sociology is a coherent

Emerging Trends in Culture and Concepts

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domain—this possibility raises questions about the relations between intuitive social and psychological frameworks.
A critical attitude toward domains is important because domains may affect
both what research is done and how it is conducted. For example, Atran &
Medin (2008) report a body of work on culture and folk biology, focused on
people’s understanding of plants and animals. This research included studies of folk ecological knowledge involving plants and animals (including
humans). Note, however, that if the initial research framing had been in terms
of ecosystems, the researchers likely would have included natural inanimates
such as the sun and moon, rocks, soil, and water in their probes. They did not.
The category, folk biology, may have led to the focus on living kinds. To their
credit, Atran and Medin included human beings in their studies of folk ecology, a species one might overlook from the cultural perspective that humans
are not part of nature (Bang et al., 2007).
Another dimension of home-field disadvantage stems from the logic of the
comparison space. In practice, the question of whether people “have” the
same concepts across cultures has typically been framed as: “Do other people have the same concepts as Westerners?” This approach risks naturalizing
Western concepts, as it relies on methods designed to reveal one particular
conceptual framework (e.g., folk psychology) over others (e.g., social interactions) (Miller, 2004). For example, a recent theory-of-mind study reported
results from three small-scale societies (Barrett et al., 2013). But results from
a fourth field site in Kenya were not included because, according to authors,
young children “fail at our tasks” (Supplementary Materials S.6, p. 27). That
is, Kenyan children did not show the expected preferential-looking patterns
on theory-of-mind tasks. The authors suggest that these children may have
been attending to “the social demands of the testing situation rather than to
the task itself” (p. 27). We suggest that the task failed to tap children’s sophisticated social competencies; indeed, the Kenyan data may have been the most
fertile ground for exploring cultural theory-of-(social)-mind concepts.
This review of concerns and cautions is not exhaustive, but these challenges
are a small price to pay for the fascinating body of work on culture and concepts to which we now turn.
EMERGING TRENDS IN CULTURE AND CONCEPTS
Whorf and Semantic Spaces If languages differ, do their speakers possess correspondingly different concepts? The idea that they do is commonly known
as the Whorfian hypothesis, after Benjamin Whorf. Researchers studying the
language–thought interface have been of two intuitions. Some suspect that
despite surface variation, all languages share similar underlying semantic
structures. This view is well aligned with the idea that human conceptual

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

systems “carve nature at its joints,” implying that languages will do so, too.
Others suspect that languages share no universal properties, and argue that
linguistic systems are shaped by sociocultural communicative and cognitive
constraints (Evans & Levinson, 2009). This view may imply far-reaching conceptual diversity.
When respect to word-concept mappings, these questions have typically
been explored through documentation of semantic fields such as ethnobiological names or spatial lexemes. This framework tends to assume that culturally shared semantic structures “reside as localized functional units in the
minds of individuals”—words are thoughts (Romney & Moore, 1998). However, two emerging perspectives assert that linguistic and cognitive diversity
share a more complex relationship (Enfield & Sidnell, 2013; Malt et al., in
press; Malt & Majid, 2013; Núñez & Cornejo, 2012; Sauter, LeGuen, & Haun,
2011).
One approach treats concepts as networks of meaning revealed imperfectly
in language. In a study of human locomotion terms, for example, Malt et al.
(2008) presented action videos to participants and analyzed how speakers
of four languages (English, Spanish, Dutch, Japanese) assigned words to
movements. Differences were found at the level of single lexical items such
as “jumping” versus “hopping” (or what might be identified as “concepts”
under common psychological methods). Although each language made
unique distinctions at the level of individual words, multidimensional
scaling (MDS) showed that languages tracked similar discontinuities in
locomotion. All four languages marked sensitivity to a biomechanical
dimension as well as a speed/aggressiveness movement dimension. Importantly, this shared conceptual space did not map precisely onto the words of
any single language.
Malt et al. (in press) propose that concepts do not represent stable “units”
of meaning, but should be understood in terms of moving dimensions of
thought “experienced as a coherent grouping” (p. 37). Shifting conceptual alignments may form in response to different situations as attention
is drawn to different dimensions, depending on the goals in play. This
suggests that there is no “most basic” concept for a domain. Furthermore,
habitual frames of attention and experiential contexts—cultural life—will be
critical to understanding the range of variation in conceptual systems. Most
psychological tasks have been conceived with a Western (English) language
concept in mind. But as Malt and colleagues caution, “It seems impossible
to discern from only a single language what the shared elements will be and
which parts of the patterns are idiosyncratic to the language” (p. 30).
While locomotion terms differ lexically but converge on a common conceptual space, one domain in which languages appear to exhibit cognitive
divergence is spatial reasoning. Recent investigations focus on how spatial

Emerging Trends in Culture and Concepts

5

language and concepts are emergent products of worldviews. Working
with the Aymara of the Andes, Núñez & Cornejo (2012) explore the origins
of a unique linguistic phenomenon. When Aymara speakers describe
things in space, they use an absolute (cardinal) frame but encode it with
intrinsic lexemes, such that “west/east of” corresponds to “in back/front
of.” This intrinsic-for-absolute encoding is robust, expressed in spontaneous
co-speech gesture, Andean Spanish, metaphors, and urban layouts. But
critically, Aymara language has words corresponding to “east” and “west.”
Why then do Aymara speakers use the intrinsic frame for “back” and
“front”? The authors point to the Aymara worldview whereby the entire
community—humans, animates, environment, and artifacts—is part of
Nature, “the totality of which is canonically oriented toward the location
of the sunrise” (p. 24). Aymara do not use absolute terms to describe their
spatial layout because doing so “would portray an empty meaningless
land, deprived of its constitutive humanity” (p. 24). Núñez & Cornejo’s
conclusions resonate with Malt and colleagues’ argument that both concepts
and words must be contextualized within larger systems, whether across
languages (locomotion terms) or across levels within a culture. As we will
see, this same principle holds for conceptions of agency.
Agency Concepts. The concept of agency is foundational to cognition,
influencing how people think about phenomena ranging from animacy to
morality. Agency can be defined as a capacity for intentional action, and
cognitive scientists have explored how agency concepts inform one’s sense
of self, attributions of causal agency to others, and moral judgments about
(mental) intentions underlying behavior. But is the concept of agency the
same across cultures? Early foundational work on the social construction of
agency suggested not, finding East–West differences in independent versus
interdependent agency (Markus & Kitayama, 1991). Studies since have
explored how these distinct orientations affect cognition across cultural
settings, including social class (e.g., Snibbe & Markus, 2005; Zemba, Young,
& Morris, 2006). More radically, recent cultural research has cast new light
on what it means to be an agent.
Cultural habits of speaking may relate to how people construct notions
of agency, as when ascribing causal agency to the actions of others (Wolff,
Jeon, & Yu, 2009). Linguistically, there are different ways to mark agents for
intentional versus accidental events. English allows speakers to specify the
agent who caused an accidental event (she broke the vase), but Japanese and
Spanish tend to omit the agent in such cases (the vase broke) (Fausey, Long,
Inamori, & Boroditsky, 2010). These cross-linguistic differences affect eyewitness memory for agents involved in accidental events. For example, Spanish

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

and Japanese speakers are less likely to remember the agents involved in accidental, but not intentional, events as compared to English speakers (Fausey
& Boroditsky, 2011).
The relevance of the intentional, accidental contrast itself may be culturally
variable. In many cultures, people are held accountable for their acts, with
no apparent distinction made between intentional or unintentional agency
(Robbins & Rumsey, 2008). For example, Danziger (2006, 2010) demonstrates
that Mopan Maya treat the speaker’s intentions as irrelevant to the question
of lying: Any false utterance is considered a lie even if the speaker believed
it true.
This feature is difficult to reconcile with Western concepts of agency. The
tension between Western and Mopan Mayan concepts of agency is linked to
broader cultural frameworks. Danziger (2010) argues that the Mopan treatment of agency must be understood within a cultural system where words
are seen as having power to affect things directly in the world: “a sacred
morality thus inheres in the relationship of spoken word to actual world, and
the nature of the transgression involved in speaking falsehood is cosmological at least as much as interpersonal” (p. 214). As agency concepts are fundamental to morality, it is perhaps unsurprising that this trend converges with
a systems approach to morality in cultures where the social consequences
of an act are more relevant than individual intentions (Sachdeva, Singh, &
Medin, 2011). Notably, these findings have yet to be taken up by dominant
theories of moral cognition, which rely heavily on the presumed centrality of
intention in moral judgments (Cushman, Sheketoff, Wharton, & Carey, 2013;
Gray, Young, & Waytz, 2012).
These new perspectives on agency have important implications for related
areas of research. For example, they carry over into the understanding of
causal concepts.
Causal Concepts. Agency is arguably central to causality. Causal reasoning
has long been assumed to play a central role in allowing individual agents
to make predictions in the service of actions (Glymour, 2003). Perspectives
on causality are shifting, however, as new theories emphasize the role of
causal interpretation in facilitating social and cultural interaction. On this
view, causal inference is geared not toward “input (obtaining information
from the environment) or output (the direct control of action)” but toward
social coordination (Baumeister & Masicampo, 2010, p. 945; see also Whitehouse, 2011).
The stage was set for such an argument through research demonstrating
cultural variation in causal reasoning (Lloyd, 2007). Compared to Western
societies, for example, East Asians tend to see a wider variety of indirect,

Emerging Trends in Culture and Concepts

7

downstream consequences for causal events (Maddux & Yuki, 2006).
This “ripple effect” suggests that perceived causal complexity varies by
culture. Consistent with this possibility, other research has demonstrated
systems-level causal thinking among nonwestern communities, including
Brazilian urban poor communities (Duarte-Olson, 2013).
Much of the relevant evidence comes from studies of ecological reasoning. Compared to Western, majority-culture counterparts, Indigenous Itza’
Maya and Native-American Menominee participants tend to focus on more
complex interactions spanning multiple entities (e.g., species), contexts (e.g.,
habitats), and time scales (Atran & Medin, 2008; Unsworth et al., 2012). These
insights into systems thinking were made possible by methods that move
away from analyzing people’s reasoning about individual causal links (does
x cause y?) to explore larger systems of causation (how are x and y related to
each other and to the larger system?).
Similarly, the broader perspective on the social function of causal concepts
is contributing new views of cognitive development. Recent research
has demonstrated that young children “overimitate” by initially copying
causally irrelevant actions toward an instrumental end-goal (Gergely &
Csibra, 2006; Lyons, Young, & Keil, 2007; McGuigan, Whiten, Flynn, &
Horner, 2007). The backdrop for these studies is an analysis of “causally
opaque behaviors.” These behaviors involve action sequences that are
culturally dictated (e.g., rituals) rather than empirically self-evident (lacking
transparent physical causal mechanisms). Yet their intended relationships
to the world (e.g., treating illness) are readily intuited and manipulated,
even for young children (Legare & Souza, 2012, 2014). Mundane forms of
causal opacity are common to societies in the form of artifacts, norms, and
conventions. These observations challenge the idea that people intuitively
reason exclusively in terms of (physical) causal mechanisms. How, then, are
such actions conceptualized and why are they intuitively appealing?
Part of the answer may lie in the fact that even young children are highly
sensitive to contextual cues that guide the interpretation of social behavior (Herrmann, Legare, Harris, & Whitehouse, 2013; Legare, Whitehouse,
Wen, & Herrmann, under review). Preschool-aged children will faithfully
imitate an adult model who engages in various causally irrelevant behaviors to achieve an instrumental goal, such as retrieving an object from a box.
Such “over-imitation” has inspired multiple explanations for the conceptual
underpinnings of this development (Nielsen & Tomaselli, 2010). One possibility is that over-imitation results from more general learning processes
for physical causality. Children engage in “automatic causal encoding” of
an adult model’s actions as causally necessary, even if the mechanisms are
unknowable to the child (Lyons, Young, & Keil, 2007). Over-imitation thus
informs the child’s core knowledge of physical causality.

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

Another possibility is that over-imitation is linked to early ritualistic
behavior and the transmission of cultural conventions rather than core
causal knowledge (Legare & Herrmann, 2013). People engage in rituals to
solve instrumental problems not because they encode actions as causally
necessary, but because rituals satisfy intuitive notions of causal efficacy
associated with goal-directed actions (i.e., repetitive, intentional action
sequences) (Legare & Souza, 2014).
There is mounting evidence that a substantial amount of imitative learning
is geared toward social coordination and is not about causal learning at all.
Imitation is a means to “affirm a shared state” with a model, to “communicate mutuality” and signify shared identity (Over & Carpenter, 2012, citing
Užgiris, 1981). Thus, imitation has social functions: to coordinate with others
and to learn social group conventionsand not simply the causal structure of
the physical world (Kenward, Karlsson, & Persson, 2011).
The social perspective raises the possibility that causal cognition may often
track normative systems for understanding reality rather than approximating some acultural model of the “natural” world. Even the very distinction
between the natural and the social is not universal (Descola & Pálsson, 1996;
Ingold, 2011).
KEY ISSUES GOING FORWARD
Recent studies are notable for their move beyond domain-specific
approaches to individual concepts. Across various levels of analysis,
each research program explores dynamic conceptual systems within larger
contexts of thinking, acting, and relating. Building on the view of concepts as
networks of meaning, we expect that research on language and thought will
increasingly situate questions of cognitive universality or variation within
larger cultural systems. Rather than exporting standard methods for testing
Western-oriented concepts and domains, we hope to see greater attention to
how concepts are uniquely shaped by epistemological frameworks.
We expect that new frameworks will increasingly complicate cultural
dichotomies associated with individual concepts (e.g., independent versus
interdependent agency) to explore underlying conceptual systems from
shifting vantage points. For example, could cognitive signatures of an
“interdependent” self-concept reflect attention to multiple loci of agency,
as part of a cultural system that values patiency and participation in social
structures (Rogoff, Paradise, Arauz, Correa-Chavez, & Angelillo, 2003)? Or
could it reflect a complex systems-like orientation to causality distributed
across actors and environments?
Following new research on complexity of causal concepts, we hope to see
that domain-specific claims premised on convenient dualisms (e.g., physical

Emerging Trends in Culture and Concepts

9

versus social causality) will be further unpacked. Complex systems (e.g.,
ecosystems) in the “real” world involve highly diverse interactions across
levels and domains. Thus, an important question concerns how people
understand complex causal relationships that coevolve through interactions
of organisms and environments at multiple levels (White, 2008, Duarte
Olson, 2013). Such systems demand causal principles (e.g., cyclical feedback,
nonlinear relations) that go beyond those currently afforded in most models
of causal reasoning.
CONCLUSIONS: FROM DOMAINS TO SYSTEMS OF RELATIONS
Emerging trends in semantics, agency, and causal concepts converge on the
idea that individual minds are grounded in systems of social relations, from
the languages we speak to the (cultural) practices we engage in, and concepts must be understood as elements of those systems (Barsalou et al., 2010;
Baumeister & Masicampo, 2010; Chater & Christiansen, 2010; Enfield & Sidnell, 2013; Hutchins, 2010; Mascaro & Csibra, 2012). This perspective sees
individuals more as interactive cooperators than isolated problem solvers, by
exploring how cognition enables people to respond to and interact with others and their environments. The overarching message is that concepts acquire
meaning through relations to larger systems of knowing, speaking, living,
and situational contexts (Cole, 1998; Rogoff, 2003).
How do changing views of culture and concepts feed back into one another?
Murphy and Medin (1985) argued that concepts are embedded in, and organized by, theories. Although they reviewed a body of research supporting
this view in the abstract, they did little by way of specifying what counts as a
theory. More recently, these notions about theories have been operationalized
(or perhaps replaced) by research programs focused on understanding epistemological orientations. Epistemologies are seen as sets of practices that both
support and reflect ideas about what is worthy of attention and observation,
in need of explanation, and counts as a satisfactory explanation. They are not
so much about specific beliefs as they are about ways of relating to the rest of
the world, rooted in practices and values (Cajete, 1999; Ingold, 2011; Medin,
Ojalehto, Marin, & Bang, 2013). If concepts are no longer unit-like, neither
is culture entity-like. Both represent systems that may be better captured on
analogy with ecosystems, reflecting how people’s participation in multiple
spheres of thought and practice influence dynamic habits of thinking.
Finally, it is only a small step to realize that scientific practices are (cultural)
practices, leading us to our concluding comment relating the researchers
to those being researched: if the researched have distinctive practices, then
surely the researchers also do. Consequently, to the extent that science

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

incorporates multiple cultural perspectives, it will be the better for it (Medin
& Bang, 2014).
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This material is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Nos. SES 0962185, DRL 1109210, and DRL 1114530, as
well as a Graduate Research Fellowship. We thank Cristine Legare, Sonya
Sachdeva, Rumen Iliev, and Jennifer Woodring for insightful contributions
and suggestions that have greatly improved this essay.

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BETHANY OJALEHTO SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Bethany Ojalehto is a graduate student in Cognitive Psychology at Northwestern University. Her research explores cultural frameworks for thinking
about minds, nonhuman agents, and ecological systems, and was recently
featured in Trends in Cognitive Sciences. She has been fortunate to have the
opportunity to collaborate with Indigenous Ngöbe communities of Panama

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

in research and cultural education programs since 2010, through support
from a Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute Short-Term Fellowship, a
National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, a Language
Preservation Grant from the Endangered Language Foundation, and
Northwestern University.
DOUGLAS MEDIN SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Douglas Medin is a Louis W. Menk Professor of Psychology and holds a
joint appointment in the School of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University. In collaboration with the University of Washington, the
American Indian Center of Chicago (aic-chicago.org), and the Menominee
Indian Tribe of Wisconsin (http://menomineescienceproject.webs.com/),
Medin and his Northwestern colleagues have been studying the role of
culture as it relates to knowledge and reasoning about the natural world
in children and adults, as well as the implications of these observations
for culturally based science education. His webpage may be found at:
http://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/douglas-medin.
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