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I now tend to think culture matters more than I realized for shaping cognition and mentality.
But the specific load-bearing cultural elements are baked so deeply into social reality that it doesn't even make sense to try and change them with "programs" and "interventions".
But the specific load-bearing cultural elements are baked so deeply into social reality that it doesn't even make sense to try and change them with "programs" and "interventions".
E.g. relative to most human beings who have ever lived, we are far more familiar with a cultural mode you might call "typographic bureaucracy", and this very plausibly affects our habits of thought.
But try access-to-resources-ing yourself out of typographic bureaucracy.
But try access-to-resources-ing yourself out of typographic bureaucracy.
Similarly, you could say that there really is a "cultural bias" in IQ tests.
(This is completely consistent with IQ being a robust predictor of real world outcomes, intelligence psych being the most replicable branch of psych, &c. I'm not a hater.)
(This is completely consistent with IQ being a robust predictor of real world outcomes, intelligence psych being the most replicable branch of psych, &c. I'm not a hater.)
But this bias goes way beyond the typical "oarsman / regatta" stuff that typically gets trotted out.
(and which actually proves the opposite of what its proponents want, since the group that example is raised in defense of actually does relatively better on Verbal but anyway.)
(and which actually proves the opposite of what its proponents want, since the group that example is raised in defense of actually does relatively better on Verbal but anyway.)
The biases are more like:
"do you have the concept of an abstract category per se?"
"do you think that words are the fundamental units of language?"
"do you accept the idea of a written examination?"
"do you embrace Hellenistic reason?"
&c.
"do you have the concept of an abstract category per se?"
"do you think that words are the fundamental units of language?"
"do you accept the idea of a written examination?"
"do you embrace Hellenistic reason?"
&c.
All of which took thousands of years to work out in Western culture (which culture is in no small part *defined* by its answers to such questions).
When oral cultures encounter this bundle of cognitive technologies, think Spanish cannon vs. Aztec spears.
When oral cultures encounter this bundle of cognitive technologies, think Spanish cannon vs. Aztec spears.
And of course Western populations have co-evolved with these technologies, and if you come from one of these populations your ancestors largely got gud at navigating AquinasWorld.
(Which itself still had a much greater degree of residual orality than modern print culture.)
(Which itself still had a much greater degree of residual orality than modern print culture.)
Anyway, people pick at the "oarsman / regatta" stuff but you can't really pick at the assumption of structuring modern life much as an IQ test. You still deal with bureaucracies, interpret texts prepared in absentia by committees, satisfy necessary and sufficient criteria &c.
The slow march from orality to manuscripts and ultimately print plausibly affected how we think about language, information, authority, perhaps even personal identity.
(The breadth of this transition suggests an account of why we find some elements of oral culture so strange.)
(The breadth of this transition suggests an account of why we find some elements of oral culture so strange.)
So culture influences cognition, fine. But if you want to change it you really want to be working on the next printing press, not the next after-school program.
