A Call for Greater Attention to Culture in the Study of Brain and Development

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Abstract

Despite growing research on neurobiological development, little attention has been paid to cultural and ethnic variation in neurodevelopmental processes. We present an overview of the current state of developmental cognitive neuroscience with respect to its attention to cultural issues. Analyses based on 80 publications represented in five recent meta-analyses related to adolescent developmental neuroscience show that 99% of the publications used samples in Western countries. Only 22% of studies provided a detailed description of participants’ racial/ethnic background, and only 18% provided for socioeconomic status. Results reveal a trend in developmental cognitive neuroscience research: The body of research is derived not only mostly from Western samples but also from participants whose race/ethnicity is unknown. To achieve a holistic perspective on brain development in different cultural contexts, we propose and highlight an emerging interdisciplinary approach—developmental cultural neuroscience—the intersection of developmental psychology, cultural psychology, and cognitive neuroscience. Developmental cultural neuroscience aims to elucidate cultural similarities and differences in neural processing across the life span. We call attention to the importance of incorporating culture into the empirical investigation of neurodevelopment.

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The weirdest people in the world?

Joseph Henrich, Steven Heine, Ara Norenzayan (2010)

Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world's top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers - often implicitly - assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these "standard subjects" are as representative of the species as any other population. Are these assumptions justified? Here, our review of the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there is substantial variability in experimental results across populations and that WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species - frequent outliers. The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, self-concepts and related motivations, and the heritability of IQ. The findings suggest that members of WEIRD societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans. Many of these findings involve domains that are associated with fundamental aspects of psychology, motivation, and behavior - hence, there are no obvious a priori grounds for claiming that a particular behavioral phenomenon is universal based on sampling from a single subpopulation. Overall, these empirical patterns suggests that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions of human nature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity. We close by proposing ways to structurally re-organize the behavioral sciences to best tackle these challenges.