How cultural is ‘cultural neuroscience’? Some comments on an emerging research paradigm

Abstract

Cultural neuroscience' presents itself as a new research paradigm within the neurosciences that takes the mutual constitution of culture, mind and brain seriously. As such, it has already gained considerable attention both among neuroscientists and traditional cultural psychologists. A superficial look at some of the studies published by practitioners in the field, however, might leave one with the impression that cultural neuroscience has more to do with the corroboration of well-established cultural cliché s than with the broadening of mind it promises to bring about. In this article, we take a closer look at the emerging field of cultural neuroscience. The first section provides an overview of cultural neuroscience both with respect to the vision put forward by its proponents and to the actual state of research. In the second section, we engage with cultural neuroscience's parent discipline, cultural psychology, to gain a better understanding of the constructs and paradigms used by cultural neuroscientists. We conclude with three constructive proposals for a 'truly cultural cultural neuroscience' that avoids the popular pitfalls of essentialism and reductionism.

Culture as Situated Cognition

“…It is not that cross-national comparisons did not exist before Hofstede, but rather, after Hofstede, researchers using this comparative method commonly organized their results in terms of Hofstede's dimensions, especially individualism-collectivism. Thus, researchers compared countries Hofstede identified as differing in individualism and assumed that the differences they found in various domains were due to this difference (Denkhaus & Bös, 2012;Kitayama & Park, 2010). In practice, this method mostly involves comparison of two countries, typically Japan or China and the United States or Canada.…”

Cultural Diversity and Saccade Similarities: Culture Does Not Explain Saccade Latency Differences between Chinese and Caucasian Participants

“…Rather than simply assume that two groups recruited as described would be culturally different, we wished to try and establish this by finding some means of assessing or “measuring” the culture of the groups. This is not a simple matter, particularly given the difficulty of defining what culture is [31] , [32] and other recent criticisms of cultural neuroscience [9] , [33] . A reasonable definition of culture would include references to shared knowledge, values, beliefs, practices and perhaps even artefacts, of different human groups.…”

“…A reasonable definition of culture would include references to shared knowledge, values, beliefs, practices and perhaps even artefacts, of different human groups. The groups need not necessarily be defined in national or geographical terms, although participant groups have often been defined in these terms, and assumptions then made about culture or cultural differences [32] , [33] . However, in any given group measuring a long list of features (even where suitable measurement instruments are available), in order to “measure” culture, is problematic.…”

Psychology: Where history, culture, and biology meet

“…Most significantly, the requirement to add cultural to neuroscience not only challenges the Cartesian divorce between cultural and neural learning, but also questions whether the same epistemological assumption can be applied to the study of neural and cultural processes. For instance, it is not only that neuro-reductionism cannot easily be applied to sociocultural processes (e.g., west brain–east brain formulas; Denkhaus & Bös, 2012), but also that natural science assumptions of longue durée stability become far more questionable in the sociocultural arena.…”