FY 1994 Annual Report to the Regents

Culture and Cognition Program at the University of Michigan

In recent years, researchers in several social science disciplines have found their work converging on projects that seek to understand the relationships between human cognition and culture. The convergence is due in part to the desire to understand social phenomena involving both groups and individual members of groups. At the University of Michigan a new multidisciplinary approach is being developed to explore the relationships between culture and cognition as well as to train future researchers with the special combination of knowledge and skills needed to conduct this kind of research.

With internal funding and a few small outside grants, the UM departments of anthropology and of psychology have collaborated to establish the Culture and Cognition program. The program seeks to meld these two disciplines, so that anthropology taps psychological methods in understanding how people experience their worlds, and psychology uses knowledge about culture to distinguish universal and culturally based cognitive processes.

The Culture and Cognition program brings these perspectives together through a faculty seminar, recently developed courses in psychological anthropology and cultural psychology, international conferences, and collaborative research projects involving faculty from the UM and other universities. These efforts have been recently recognized by the National Science Foundation (NSF) through a major grant to support further development of the UM approach in understanding cognitive processes and their interactions with culture.

Under the NSF training grant, three areas of research will be emphasized. One focus is the study of cognition in its cultural context. This work will examine the assumption that basic cognitive functions are the same for all people. Rather, it is possible that any number of theoretical paradigms used in psychology to explain cognition are culturally bound.

A second focus is examining the interplay of culture and cognitive development. The categories of beliefs, norms, and values that comprise what we call "culture" may be acquired through universal processes, or these processes may differ from culture to culture.

     Marilyn Shatz observes a pre-schooler complete a task.

In addition, the question of how children assemble cultural constructions will be explored, since anthropologists have so far concentrated primarily on adult beliefs and values.

The third research focus aims to understand stereotypes and prejudice. Both anthropology and psychology have examined many aspects of stereotyping, but the interdisciplinary approach at the UM will explore new questions such as how individual internalize prejudice and how stereotypes are transmitted across generations.