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What is thought and how does one come to study and understand it? How does the mind work? Does cognitive science explain all the mysteries of the brain? This collection of fourteen original essays from some of the top sociologists opens a dialogue between cognitive science and cultural sociology, encouraging a new network of scientific collaboration and stimulating new lines of social scientific research. Rather than considering thought as just an individual act, Culture in Mind considers it in a social and cultural context. Provocatively, this suggests that our thoughts do not function in a vacuum: our minds are not alone. Covering such diverse topics as the nature of evil, the process of storytelling, defining mental illness, and the conceptualizing of the premature baby, these essays offer fresh insights into the functioning of the mind. Culture in Mind will uncover the mysteries of how we think.

This chapter approaches the question of how languages shape cognition in terms of language use and examines differences in the accessibility of specific linguistic categories across different languages. Here we take a position espoused by Kay. He points out that it is possible to conceptualize and examine linguistic relativity (with more experimental control) in terms of a single language that provides its speakers with different ways of talking and/or representing and, as we shall argue later, perceiving the same thing. This conceptualization of the interface between language and cognition may furnish a novel perspective on the crossroads between language, culture, and cognition. Thus, the central body of the research presented in this chapter is obtained within a single linguistic community and is concerned with how different generic linguistic categories influence perception. This research has a variety of advantages, as we shall detail in the next section. For one thing, the work is experimental and not correlational. Furthermore, the fact that it is conducted within the same linguistic community allows tighter control over data collection than comparative research. We then extrapolate from these within-culture differences in how generic linguistic categories shape perception to between-culture differences on the basis of systematic cultural differences in language use.

We propose a theory of how systems of thought arise on the basis of differing cultural practices and argue that the theory accounts for substantial differences in East Asian and Western thought processes. We find East Asians to be more holistic, attending to the entire field and assigning causality to it, making relatively little use of categories and formal logic, and relying on “dialectical” reasoning. Westerners are more analytic, paying attention primarily to the object and the categories to which it belongs and using rules, including formal logic, to understand its behavior. The two types of cognitive processes are embedded in different naïve metaphysical systems and tacit epistemologies. We speculate that the origin of these differences is traceable to markedly different social systems. The theory and the evidence presented call into question long held assumptions about basic cognitive processes and even about the appropriateness of the process-content distinction.

A large body of research documents cognitive differences between Westerners and East Asians. Westerners tend to be more analytic and East Asians tend to be more holistic. These findings have often been explained as being due to corresponding differences in social orientation. Westerners are more independent and Easterners are more interdependent. However, comparisons of the cognitive tendencies of Westerners and East Asians do not allow us to rule out alternative explanations for the cognitive differences, such as linguistic and genetic differences, as well as cultural differences other than social orientation. In this review we summarize recent developments which provide stronger support for the social orientation hypothesis.

In recent years a proliferation of theoretical and empirical scholarship has emerged on how social and cultural factors shape development. This work has provided important information about the multiple goals and pathways of development throughout the world, yet many issues still remain open for continued analysis and refinement. This book addresses how individual, social, and cultural factors intersect during development by bringing together contributions from an international group of scholars with diverse theoretical perspectives who conduct research in varied cultural contexts. The book is divided into three sections: Contexts of Development, Developing through Culturally Shaped Social Interactions, and Some Final Thoughts: Infancy as the Foundation for Intersecting Individual, Social and Cultural Processes. The first section focuses on how wider contexts of development are structured through interactions among individual, social and cultural processes. Specific chapters in this section consider how the wider cultural context is constituted and enacted by individuals, including children and their caregivers, as they engage in social interactions. The second section focuses on how social interactions and cultural values shape specific aspects of development, including the development of object manipulation, future orientations and self-conceptions. The book ends with an integrative analysis of how infant experiences form the foundation of adult relational self-conceptions.

Researchers are increasingly recognizing the role of culture as a source of variation in many phenomena of central importance to consumer research. This review addresses a gap in cross-cultural consumer behavior literature by providing a review and conceptual analysis of the effects of culture on pre-behavioral processes (perception and cognition). The article highlights a series of important perceptual and cognitive differences across cultures and offers a new perspective of framing these differences among cultures—that of “culturally conditioned” perceptual and cognitive orientations. The article addresses several theoretical issues and suggests directions for future research as well as managerial implications.

To understand culture and cultural evolution we must abandon the atomized and anonymous social environment of neoclassical economics. Culture is a product and a cause of the socialized nature of human action. Examination of the phylogenetic and ontogenetic neural mechanisms that make socialization and culture possible reveals: the ways that culture conserves cognitive resources and makes human interaction possible; and the reason that human culture—but not that of are closest relatives the chimpanzees—is capable of rapid evolution. Understanding the deep cognitive nature of culture explains the sometimes pathological outcomes of cultural evolution and how pathologies may be avoided. An understanding of three aspects of the nature of culture and cultural evolution was found necessary to get at these issues: (1) important components of culture are social constructs; (2) the contents of intentional mental states are insufficient by themselves to determine the meaning of those states—the brain provides the missing data necessary to determine meaning, and a significant portion of the data is a product of cultural evolution and learning. Following the lead of Searle, we called the mechanisms that provide the missing data Background; (3) the process by which culture is learned provides insight into its socially constructed nature, the missing data problem mentioned in (2), and intersubjective nature of human interaction.

Michael Tomasello argues that the roots of the human capacity for symbol-based culture, and the kind of psychological development that takes place within it, are based in a cluster of uniquely human cognitive capacities that emerge early in human ontogeny. These include capacities for sharing attention with other persons; for understanding that others have intentions of their own; and for imitating, not just what someone else does, but what someone else has intended to do. In his discussions of language, symbolic representation, and cognitive development, Tomasello describes with authority and ingenuity the “ratchet effect” of these capacities working over evolutionary and historical time to create the kind of cultural artifacts and settings within which each new generation of children develops. He also proposes a novel hypothesis, based on processes of social cognition and cultural evolution, about what makes the cognitive representations of humans different from those of other primates. Ambitious and elegant, this book builds a bridge between evolutionary theory and cultural psychology. Michael Tomasello is one of the very few people to have done systematic research on the cognitive capacities of both nonhuman primates and human children. “The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition” identifies what the differences are, and suggests where they might have come from. Lucid, erudite, and passionate, “The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition” will be essential reading for developmental psychology, animal behavior, and cultural psychology.

In the effort towards sustainability, it has become increasingly important to develop new conceptual frames to understand the dynamics of social and ecological systems. Drawing on complex systems theory, this book investigates how human societies deal with change in linked social–ecological systems, and build capacity to adapt to change. The concept of resilience is central in this context. Resilient social–ecological systems have the potential to sustain development by responding to and shaping change in a manner that does not lead to loss of future options. Resilient systems also provide capacity for renewal and innovation in the face of rapid transformation and crisis. The term navigating in the title is meant to capture this dynamic process. Navigating Social–Ecological Systems deliberately transcends academic disciplines, because the issues in focus require collaboration over the boundaries of the natural sciences, social sciences, and the humanities. Case studies and examples from several geographic areas, cultures, and resource types are included, merging forefront research from different disciplines into a common framework for new insights into sustainability.

Recently, Early Warning Signals (EWS) have been developed to predict tipping points in Earth Systems. This discussion highlights the potential to apply EWS to human social and economic systems, which may also undergo similar critical transitions. Social tipping points are particularly difficult to predict, however, and the current formulation of EWS, based on a physical system analogy, may be insufficient. As an alternative set of EWS for social systems, we join with other authors encouraging a focus on heterogeneity, connectivity through social networks and individual thresholds to change.

Localized ecological systems are known to shift abruptly and irreversibly from one state to another when they are forced across critical thresholds. Here we review evidence that the global ecosystem as a whole can react in the same way and is approaching a planetary-scale critical transition as a result of human influence. The plausibility of a planetary-scale ‘tipping point’ highlights the need to improve biological forecasting by detecting early warning signs of critical transitions on global as well as local scales, and by detecting feedbacks that promote such transitions. It is also necessary to address root causes of how humans are forcing biological changes.

A climate ‘tipping point’ occurs when a small change in forcing triggers a strongly nonlinear response in the internal dynamics of part of the climate system, qualitatively changing its future state. Human-induced climate change could push several large-scale ‘tipping elements’ past a tipping point. Candidates include irreversible melt of the Greenland ice sheet, dieback of the Amazon rainforest and shift of the West African monsoon. Recent assessments give an increased probability of future tipping events, and the corresponding impacts are estimated to be large, making them significant risks. Recent work shows that early warning of an approaching climate tipping point is possible in principle, and could have considerable value in reducing the risk that they pose.

A tipping point is a critical threshold at which the future state of a system can be qualitatively altered by a small change in forcing. A tipping element is a part of the Earth system (at least sub-continental in scale) that has a tipping point. Policy-relevant tipping elements are those that could be forced past a tipping point this century by human activities. Abrupt climate change is the subset of tipping point change which occurs faster than its cause. Tipping point change also includes transitions that are slower than their cause (in both cases the rate is determined by the system itself). In either case the change in state may be reversible or irreversible. Reversible means that when the forcing is returned below the tipping point the system recovers its original state (either abruptly or gradually). Irreversible means that it does not (it takes a larger change in forcing to recover). Reversibility in principle does not mean that changes will be reversible in practice.

The presence of information in natural systems is not limited to genetic information: all aspects of the functioning of the systems that arise and evolve in nature imply the presence of information (where “information” is used in the sense analogous to that in software systems: it is what codes the behavior of the hardware – in this case, the systems manifest in nature). A key indicator of the presence and adequacy of information in these systems is the coherence discovered within, and between, the systems (where “coherence” is intended as the mutual responsiveness of every part of a system in relation to every other part as well as in relation to other systems in the environment). Information-based coherence is a sine qua non of the persistence and development of systems in nature. In the biosphere the information present in the systems assures their health and viability. Species operating with imperfect information are less-than-optimally coherent and are ultimately eliminated by natural selection. In the human world, however, incoherence between humans, and between humans and other natural systems is artificially maintained, endangering the overall coherence of the web of life in the biosphere. With the information-base of contemporary civilization, the human community represents a cancer rather than a positive factor in the web of life. Restoration of adequate levels of coherence in the human world has now become a precondition of thriving, and in the long-term even of surviving, in the biosphere.

Anthropogenic pressures on the Earth System have reached a scale where abrupt global environmental change can no longer be excluded. We propose a new approach to global sustainability in which we define planetary boundaries within which we expect that humanity can operate safely. Transgressing one or more planetary boundaries may be deleterious or even catastrophic due to the risk of crossing thresholds that will trigger non-linear, abrupt environmental change within continental- to planetary-scale systems. We have identified nine planetary boundaries and, drawing upon current scientific understanding, we propose quantifications for seven of them. These seven are climate change; ocean acidification; stratospheric ozone; biogeochemical nitrogen; global freshwater use; land system change; and the rate at which biological diversity is lost. The two additional planetary boundaries for which we have not yet been able to determine a boundary level are chemical pollution and atmospheric aerosol loading. We estimate that humanity has already transgressed three planetary boundaries: for climate change, rate of biodiversity loss, and changes to the global nitrogen cycle. Planetary boundaries are interdependent, because transgressing one may both shift the position of other boundaries or cause them to be transgressed. The social impacts of transgressing boundaries will be a function of the social–ecological resilience of the affected societies. Our proposed boundaries are rough, first estimates only, surrounded by large uncertainties and knowledge gaps. Filling these gaps will require major advancements in Earth System and resilience science. The proposed concept of “planetary boundaries” lays the groundwork for shifting our approach to governance and management, away from the essentially sectoral analyses of limits to growth aimed at minimizing negative externalities, toward the estimation of the safe space for human development. Planetary boundaries define, as it were, the boundaries of the “planetary playing field” for humanity if we want to be sure of avoiding major human-induced environmental change on a global scale.

Great leaders are often great communicators. However, little is known about the neural basis of leader–follower communication. Only recently have neuroscientists been able to examine interpersonal neural synchronization (INS) between leaders and followers during social interactions. Here, we show that INS is significantly higher between leaders and followers than between followers and followers, suggesting that leaders emerge by synchronizing their brain activity with that of the followers. Moreover, the quality rather than frequency of the leaders’ communications makes a significant contribution to the increase of INS. This result supports the “quality of communication” hypothesis in leader emergence. Finally, our results show that leadership can be predicted shortly after the onset of a task based on INS as well as communication behaviors.

In sum, this study found that leader emergence was characterized by high-level neural synchronization between the leader and followers and that the quality, rather than the frequency, of communications was associated with synchronization. These results suggest that leaders emerge because they are able to say the right things at the right time.

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