The Coexistence Problem in Psychology, Anthropology, and Evolutionary Theory

Imitative flexibility and the development of cultural learning

“…Cultural conventions, such as rituals, customs, and etiquette, are group-specific, socially shared actions (Durkheim, 1915;Gluckman, 1954;Henrich, 2009;Rappaport, 1999;Turner, 1969;Whitehouse, 2012) that resist interpretation from a physical-causal perspective (Humphrey & Laidlaw, 1994), and involve imitating behavior for which physical-causal rationales are never provided and never sought Legare & Souza, 2012Whitehouse, 2011). We propose that start-and end-state equivalency of an action sequence prompts the interpretation that the observed actions are unknowable from a physical-causal perspective and thus, conventional.…”

Seeking a Rapprochement Between Anthropology and the Cognitive Sciences: A Problem‐Driven Approach

“…Rapid technological innovation and scientific advance is a very modern phenomenon and social organization and cultural transmission in much of the world remains highly repetitive and tradition bound. Taking that latter perspective on social learning as our starting point would no doubt produce rather different research agendas in developmental psychology (Whitehouse, 2011). While cross‐cultural psychology can help to address the “Weird” sampling issue, it offers no substitute for systematic documentation of variation in cultural systems.…”

The Common-Core/Diversity Dilemma: Revisions of Humean thought, New Empirical Research, and the Limits of Rational Religious Belief

“…Learning all these arbitrary cultural elements is difficult and extraordinarily costly in time and effort -what purpose could justify such investment in the absence of direct instrumental or pragmatic value? Anthropology's increasingly persuasive answer is social cohesion, 93 and evolutionary theory concurs, particularly with regard to the central role of religion. Evolutionary theories of the origin of religion have ranged from viewing it as a directly biologically-based adaptation promoting cooperation 94 to seeing it as a fuzzy category with no distinctive biological basis, which merely incorporates the haphazard by-products of nonreligious cognitive processes.…”

“…137 Functionally, naturalistic and supernaturalistic thinking can be seen as outcomes of two different human learning systems, the one oriented towards 'understanding and managing physicalcausal relationships in a mechanistic fashion' , and the other 'concerned with understanding and managing social relationships in a normative and deferential fashion' . 138 So even though supernaturalist beliefs serve poorly as explanations of how the world works, they might be seen as well-motivated -even 'rational' in a sense -if they function effectively to improve individual well-being and to supply the norms and customs that hold communities together. 139 Perhaps the various practical benefits of religion to the individualsocial support, sense of meaning and security, comfort in times of grief, prayer-placebo -could equally well be delivered by non-supernatural means (e.g.…”