Introduction: Cultural and Linguistic Anthropology and the Opacity of Other Minds

Small-scale societies exhibit fundamental variation in the role of intentions in moral judgment

“…Indeed, High vs. Low Intent had no significant overall effect on severity of moral judgment in two societies, Yasawa and Himba. Interestingly, Yasawa is a society in the Pacific culture area where mental opacity norms, which proscribe speculating about the reasons for others' behavior in some contexts, have been reported (13). In addition, the samples that showed the largest effects of High vs. Low Intent on moral judgments were Los Angeles and Storozhnitsa, the two Western societies in our sample.…”

“…Anthropologists have suggested that the importance of intentions in moral judgments might vary cross-culturally (1,(12)(13)(14), and some prior studies support this possibility. For example, a study comparing American Jews and Christians found that Christians weighed intentions more heavily in moral judgment (15), and a study comparing urban Americans and Japanese found that intentions played a smaller role in the judgments of Japanese than American participants (16).…”

The adolescent mind in school: theory of mind and self-concept in Canadian and Polish youth

“…That is, Samoans assert the 'opacity of other minds' (Robbins & Rumsey, 2008). It is thus possible that the common assumption about the nature of the mind results in forms of interaction that are more rulebased and not much dependent on referring to people's mental states.…”

Intersubjectivity, deception and the ‘opacity of other minds’: Perspectives from Highland New Guinea and beyond

“…One of the areas of apparent difference that has been much discussed in recent anthropological publications, including most of the articles in the present collection, concerns what Robbins and Rumsey (2008) have called the doctrine of the 'opacity of other minds' -the widely attested claim from various locales around the world that one can never really know what other people are thinking -and associated forms of practice that seem to show an adherence to this idea. In a previous publication (Rumsey, 2008), I discussed the forms that this idea takes among the Ku Waru people of highland Papua New Guinea (PNG).…”