Culture and Cognition: Dr. Dorsa Amir on How Culture Shapes the Mind Across Diverse Societies

Overview

In this episode of Speaking of Psychology, Kim Mills speaks with Dr. Dorsa Amir about how culture and cognition interact. Amir, an assistant professor at Duke University, studies how cultural environments shape the mind and how the mind, in turn, shapes culture, with work spanning children and adults around the world including the Shuar in the Ecuadorian Amazon.

Key insights

• Culture and cognition are bidirectionally linked, with context shaping decision making and development.
• Variation across cultures questions universal cognitive timelines, showing how environment and subsistence practices influence time and risk preferences.
• Children contribute to culture through peer cultures, and normative behaviors become internalized over time in a cross cultural pattern.
• Even basic perception may be less malleable than higher level norms, highlighted by studies on visual illusions and cross cultural data.

Overview and intellectual landscape

The episode features Kim Mills interviewing Dr. Dorsa Amir about the interplay of culture and cognition. Amir is an assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University and directs the Mind and Culture Lab. Her work investigates how cultural environments shape the mind and how, in turn, the mind shapes culture. A central theme is whether cognitive processes are universal or culturally variable. The conversation situates this question within a long historical arc, noting that cross cultural studies were part of cognitive science’s early foundations, and that anthropology’s four-field model historically influenced the study of culture and cognition. Amir explains that despite a long history of interest, empirical work on culture and cognition has had its ups and downs, especially as disciplines diverged and as methods evolved. In recent years there has been a renaissance in this subfield, with cross cultural data becoming more available and influential, and with notable work such as the Weirdest People in the World paper prompting renewed attention to cross cultural generalizability.

Core definitions: culture and cognition

Amir offers working definitions to orient the discussion. Culture is described as the product of other people, essentially socially transmitted information and tools that people learn from their social environment. Cognition is framed as the broad definition of mind functioning and its input output relationships with the world, including perception, beliefs, reasoning, and decision making. She emphasizes that precision in definitions matters for empirical work, and she encourages researchers to define their own versions, while acknowledging that these terms can be loaded and contested in philosophy of mind and cognitive science.

The historical arc: culture in cognitive science

According to Amir, the relationship between culture and cognition is old, with cross cultural and anthropological work foundational to cognitive science. The field experienced a period of division and methodological fragmentation, particularly during shifts in anthropology away from four-field models toward more specialized approaches. However, there has been a revitalization of interest in cross-cultural questions in psychology and related disciplines, fueled by broader access to diverse populations and more robust cross-cultural methods. A pivotal moment in this revitalization was publishing that highlighted cultural variation in mind beyond WEIRD populations, which helped reframe debates about universality and cognitive development.

Shuar community and fieldwork

Amir describes her long term work with the Shuar, a hunter horticulturalist group in the Ecuadorian Amazon. The Shuar provide a living contrast to industrialized societies, offering a window into how social organization, subsistence practices, and environmental context shape children’s development and cognitive preferences. Amir stresses that the Shuar community is characterized by large family sizes historically and a broader age range among children within households. In contrast to industrialized settings where classrooms cluster children of the same age, Shuar communities often have mixed age groups among the children who share a close social network of peers. This demography provides a unique lens on how childhood experiences, play, and peer groups influence cognitive and social development.

Key contrasts in childhood and agency

Two major contrasts emerge when comparing Shuar childhood with Western schooling experiences. First, the social locus of control is more distributed in traditional foraging societies, with children often choosing peers and daily activities themselves rather than being steered by adults through fixed schedules such as formal schooling. Second, despite differences in structure and daily routines, children across cultures show similar underlying motivations to connect with peers and form peer cultures. Amir notes that this shared motivation to build peer networks points to fundamental aspects of human social life that transcend culture, even as the content and form of peer culture vary cross culturally.

Time preferences, risk, and local incentives

One of Amir’s most cited lines of evidence concerns time preferences and risk attitudes. In collaboration with colleagues, she examined variations of time preference and risk tolerance across Shuar children living in different ecologies. In remote regions with lower market integration, children tended to be more present oriented and risk averse. In contrast, Shuar children closer to urban centers with greater market integration showed decision patterns more akin to children in the United States. Amir’s interpretation is that preferences reflect local incentive structures: in subsistence-based contexts, waiting for tomorrow carries risk, and foregone present opportunities can be costly in uncertain environments. This pattern challenges the idea of a universal cognitive development timeline and supports a view where cognition is shaped by ecological and economic context.

Cooperation, fairness, and normative learning

The podcast moves to a study on cooperation and fairness across cultures. Amir and colleagues designed tasks in which children from several countries faced social dilemmas such as accepting or rejecting a share of candies divided between themselves and another person. Notably, five year olds across cultures showed similar initial preferences, accepting unequal distributions. Over the middle childhood years, children began to align their choices with the normative expectations of their communities. When adults in the same communities offered guidance about what is considered fair, children gradually internalized those norms, even if adults within cultures disagreed on what is considered the right action. This pattern suggests culture supplies normative guidance, while development reveals how individuals adopt and internalize culturally endorsed behaviors over time.

Basic perception and the cultural byproduct debate

The discussion then tackles whether culture can alter core perceptual processes such as visual illusions. The Muller-Lyer illusion is used as a focal point in the debate about whether culture can penetrate core perceptual mechanisms. Amir and her co author Chaz Firestone present a cautious view that culture is unlikely to reshape low level perceptual functions. They marshal several lines of evidence: non humans show susceptibility to the illusion, a haptic version of the illusion yields the same percept, and repair of congenital cataracts shows adults still susceptible to the illusion after visual experience. This body of work challenges the notion that culture can fundamentally alter basic perception, while acknowledging that higher level cognitive tasks and learned expectations can be culturally specific.

Interdisciplinary roots and bi cultural identity

Amir reflects on her intellectual journey from anthropology to psychology. She explains that interdisciplinary work is inherently risky, akin to being bicultural. The cross-disciplinary stance has yielded a productive niche where cultural context can be studied with robust experimental methods, while psychology benefits from rich causal explanations of mental processes that can be tested across diverse settings. The conversation emphasizes that cultural psychology can push beyond the idea of universal cognitive mechanisms and use cross cultural variation as a tool to test the limits of theory and to map cognitive diversity.

Weird samples and the value of cognitive diversity

Addressing critiques about reliance on WEIRD samples, Amir states that the body of research is not necessarily wrong but that it is insufficient to assume universality. She highlights two main benefits of cross cultural work. First, it can stress test universal claims that may be overgeneralized from a subset of populations. Second, it can illuminate how cognitive processes vary with environmental and cultural contexts, enriching our understanding of what aspects of cognition are malleable and which are robust. The overarching aim is to view culture as a natural laboratory for investigating human cognition rather than an obstacle to universal claims.

Parenting, boredom, and practical takeaways

The conversation includes a lively discussion of Amir's Twitter thread about parenting. She emphasizes that variability in childhood milestones is common across cultures and that worry about every deviation may be less warranted than assumptions suggest. She argues that parental concerns should be contextualized within broader variability across cultures, and that what we see as negative or troubling in one culture may be ordinary in another. Amir also discusses the balance between protecting children from harm and allowing for growth through manageable friction, boredom, and day to day challenges. Modeling repair and narrative context is presented as a constructive approach to parenting within diverse cultural contexts.

Peer cultures and the future of cultural cognitive science

In looking forward, Amir focuses on peer cultures as an important mechanism in cultural evolution. Peer groups are not just social networks but engines of cultural knowledge generation. In some societies, children gather in peer groups that actively generate and transmit material knowledge, language, social norms, and even foraging skills. The argument is that children, through peer cultures, contribute to the human capacity to adapt to changing environments by diversifying the culture through which communities learn and evolve. This perspective reframes childhood as a more active agent in human evolution rather than a passive stage of learning.

Concluding perspective

Overall, the podcast presents culture and cognition as deeply intertwined yet variable. Dr. Amir emphasizes the value of cross cultural research for advancing cognitive science past WEIRD samples, while also outlining the kinds of robust empirical patterns that seem to hold across cultures. The exchange highlights the rich potential of interdisciplinary collaboration and points to exciting avenues for future work on peer cultures, early cooperation, and the complex ways in which culture shapes and is shaped by the developing mind.