Culture is a human universal, yet it is a source of variation in human psychology, behaviour and development. Developmental researchers are now expanding the geographical scope of research to include populations beyond relatively wealthy Western communities. However, culture and context still play a secondary role in the theoretical grounding of developmental psychology research, far too often. In this paper, we highlight four false assumptions that are common in psychology, and that detract from the quality of both standard and cross-cultural research in development. These assumptions are: (i) , that empirical uniformity is evidence for universality, while any variation is evidence for culturally derived variation; (ii), that Western populations represent a normal and/or healthy standard against which development in all societies can be compared; (iii) , that population-level differences in developmental timing or outcomes are necessarily due to something lacking among non-Western populations; and (iv), that using identical research methods will necessarily produce equivalent and externally valid data, across disparate cultural contexts. For each assumption, we draw on cultural evolutionary theory to critique and replace the assumption with a theoretically grounded approach to culture in development. We support these suggestions with positive examples drawn from research in development. Finally, we conclude with a call for researchers to take reasonable steps towards more fully incorporating culture and context into studies of development, by expanding their participant pools in strategic ways. This will lead to a more inclusive and therefore more accurate description of human development.This article is part of the theme issue 'Bridging cultural gaps: interdisciplinary studies in human cultural evolution'.

Human infants are involved in communicative interactions with others well before they start to speak or understand language. It is generally thought that this communication is useful for establishing interpersonal relations and supporting joint activities, but, in the absence of symbolic functions that language provides, these early communicative contexts do not allow infants to learn about the world. However, recent studies suggest that when someone demonstrates something using an object as the medium of instruction, infants can conceive the object as an exemplar of the whole class of objects of the same kind. Thus, an object, just like a word, can play the role of a symbol that stands for something else than itself, and infants can learn generic knowledge about a kind of object from nonverbal communication about a single item of that kind. This rudimentary symbolic capacity may be one of the roots of the development of symbolic understanding in children.

No abstract