Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Abstract

This paper discusses the connection between social constructionism and universals in the generation of mind. It proposes a new concept of Cultural Construction, distinct from social construction, and suggests that the latter succumbs to a Paradox of Sociality in which a socially constructed mind is non-social. Cultural construction avoids this paradox, and is best explained by an approach that roots learning in flexible evolutionary dispositions to possess culture. It also offers a novel perspective on traditional and more recent social constructionist accounts of psychological universals (e.g. omniculture) and has different implications for the prospects of reducing conflict in inter-cultural encounters.

Keywords

Social construction cultural construction evolution universals learning inter-cultural conflict essentialism Baldwin Vygotsky

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Austin

J. L.

(1976) How to do things with words, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Baldwin

J. M.

(1896) A new factor in evolution. The American Naturalist 30: 441–451, 536–553.

Baldwin

J. M.

(1897) Social and ethical interpretations in mental development. A study in social psychology, London, UK: Macmillan.

Baldwin

J. M.

(1906) Thought and things: A study of the development and meaning of thought. Or genetic logic. Volume I: Functional logic, or genetic theory of knowledge, London, UK: Macmillan.

Bergesen, A. J. (2012). Commentary. Turning Durkheim on his head: A reply to Peterson and Bjerre. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 42, 485–495.

Bilewicz

(2012) Who defines humanity? Psychological and cultural obstacles to omniculturalism. Culture & Psychology 18(3): 331–344.

Boyd

Richerson

P. J.

Henrich

(2012) The cultural niche: Why social learning is essential for human adaptation. In: Strassman

Queller

D. C.

Avise

J. C.

Ayala

F. J.

(eds) In the Light of Evolution V: Cooperation and Conflict, Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences, pp. 363–382.

Boghossian, P. (2006). Fear of Knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Brown

D. E.

(2000) Human universals and their implications. In: Roughley

(ed.) Being humans: Anthropological universality and particularity in transdisplinary perspectives, New York, NY: Walter de Gruyter.

10.

Burr

(1995) An introduction to social constructionism, London, UK: Routledge.

11.

Chiappe

Gardner

(2012) The modularity debate in evolutionary psychology. Theory & Psychology 22(5): 669–682.

12.

Chomsky

(1965) Aspects of the theory of syntax, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

13.

Cole

(1996) Cultural psychology: A once and future discipline, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

14.

Diaz-Leon, E. (2013). What is social construction? European Journal of Philosophy. Advance online publication. doi: 10.1111/ejop.12033.

15.

Franks

(2011) Culture and cognition: Evolutionary perspectives, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

16.

Franks, B. (2013a). Naturalism versus social constructionism in psychology? Reframing the debate. In Press.

17.

Franks, B. (2013b). The roles of evolution in the social sciences: Is biology ballistic? Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour (in press). doi: 10.1111/jtsb.12043.

18.

Gergen, K. J. (1973). Social psychology as history. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 26, 309–320.

19.

Gergen, K. J. (2003). Constructing human nature: The primordial as prophetic. Human Affairs, 2, 123–136.

20.

Gergen

K. J.

(2009) An invitation to social construction, London, UK: Sage.

21.

Gillespie

Howarth

Cornish

(2012) Four problems for researchers using social categories. Culture & Psychology 18(3): 391–402.

22.

Greenwood

J. D.

(2004) The disappearance of the social in American social psychology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

23.

Griffiths

P. E.

(2003) Beyond the Baldwin effect: James Mark Baldwin’s ‘Social Heredity’, epigenetic inheritance and niche-construction. In: Weber

H. B.

Depew

J. D.

(eds) Learning, meaning and emergence: Possible Baldwinian mechanisms in the co-evolution of language and mind, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

24.

Hacking

(1999) The social construction of what?, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

25.

Haslam

(1998) Natural kinds, human kinds, and essentialism. Social Research 65: 1–10.

26.

Haslam

(2011) Genetic essentialism, neuroessentialism, and stigma: Comment on Dar-Nimrod & Heine. Psychological Bulletin 137: 819–824.

27.

Henrich

(2008) A cultural species. In: Brown

(ed.) Explaining culture scientifically, Washington: University of Washington Press.

28.

Henrich

Heine

S. J.

Norenzayan

(2010) The weirdest people in the world? Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33: 61–83.

29.

Hirschfeld

(1997) The conceptual politics of race: Lessons from our children. Ethos 25(1): 63–92.

30.

Hirschfeld

L. A.

(2008) The bilingual brain revisited: A comment on Hagen (2008). Evolutionary Psychology 6(1): 182–185.

31.

Holtz

Wagner

(2012) Dehumanization, infrahumanization, and naturalization. In: Christie

D. J.

(ed.) Encyclopedia of peace psychology, Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.

32.

Ingold

(1993) The temporality of the landscape. World Archaeology 25(2): 24–174.

33.

Ingold

(2011) Being alive: Essays on movement, knowledge and description, London, UK: Routledge.

34.

Jahoda

(2012) Critical reflections on some recent definitions of “culture”. Culture & Psychology 18(3): 289–303.

35.

James

(1907/1981) Pragmatism: A new name for some old ways of thinking, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing.

36.

Jovchelovitch, S. (2006). Knowledge in Context: Representations, Community, and Culture. London: Routledge.

37.

Kappeler

P. M.

Silk

J. B.

(2010) Mind the gap: Tracing the origins of human universals, New York, NY: Springer.

38.

Keller

(2002) Development as the interface between biology and culture: A conceptualization of early ontogenetic experiences. In: Keller

Poortinga

Y. H.

Schoelmerich

(eds) Between culture and biology. Perspectives on ontogentic development. Cambride studies in cognitive and perceptual development, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 215–241.

39.

Kitayama

Park

Sevincer

A. T.

Karasawa

Uskul

A. K.

(2009) A cultural task analysis of implicit independence: Comparing North America, Western Europe, and East Asia. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 97: 236–255.

40.

Laland

Odling-Smee

Feldman

(2000) Niche construction, biological evolution, and cultural change. Behavioural and Brain Sciences 23: 131–175.

41.

Laland

Sterelny

Odling-Smee

Hoppitt

Uller

(2011) Cause and effect in biology revisited: Is Mayr’s proximate-ultimate dichotomy still useful? Science 334: 1512–1516.

42.

Levinson

S. C.

(2006) Introduction: The evolution of culture in a microcosm. In: Levinson

S. C.

Jaisson

(eds) Evolution and culture: A fyssen foundation symposium, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

43.

Mahalingam

(2003) Essentialism, culture and power: Rethinking social class. Journal of Social Issues 59: 733–749.

44.

Mallon, R. (2008). Naturalistic approaches to social construction. In: Edward N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Winter 2008 ed.). Retrieved from http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2008/entries/social-construction-naturalistic/.

45.

Mallon

Stich

S. P.

(2000) The odd couple: The compatibility of social construction and evolutionary psychology. Philosophy of Science 67: 133–154.

46.

Marková, I. (2003). Dialogicality and Social Representations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

47.

Markus

Hamedani

(2007) Sociocultural psychology: The dynamic interdependence among self systems and social systems. In: Kitayama

Cohen

(eds) Handbook of cultural psychology (pp, New York, NY: The Guilford Press, pp. 3–39.

48.

McIntosh

(1998) Symbolism, cognition and political orders. Science and Society 62(4): 557–568.

49.

Miller

Prentice

(1999) Social consequences of a belief in group essence: The category divide hypothesis. In: Prentice

Miller

(eds) Cultural divides: Understanding and resolving group conflict, New York: Russell Sage Foundation, pp. 213–239.

50.

Moghaddam

F. M.

(2012) The omnicultural imperative. Culture & Psychology 18(3): 304–330.

51.

Moll

Tomasello

(2007) Co-operation and human cognition: The Vygotskian intelligence hypothesis. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 362: 639–648.

52.

Oyama

Griffiths

P. E.

Gray

R. D.

(2001) Cycles of contingency: Developmental systems and evolution, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

53.

Papineau

(2005) The cultural origins of cognitive adaptations. In: O'Hear

(ed.) Philosophy, biology and life, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 291–323.

54.

Peterson, D. (2012). Where the sidewalk ends: The limits of social constructionism. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 42, 465–484.

55.

Potts

(1998) Variability selection in hominid evolution. Evolutionary Anthropology 7: 81–96.

56.

Rosaldo

M. Z.

(1982) The things we do with words: Ilongot speech acts and speech act theory in philosophy. Language in Society 11(2): 203–237.

57.

Searle

J. R.

(1996) The construction of social reality, New York, NY: Free Press.

58.

Sperber

(1996) Explaining culture: A naturalistic approach, Oxford, UK: Blackwell.

59.

Sperber

(2004) Modularity and relevance: How can a massively modular mind be flexible and context-sensitive? In: Carruthers

Laurence

Stich

(eds) The innate mind: Structure and content, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

60.

Sperber

Hirschfeld

(2004) The cognitive foundations of cultural stability and diversity. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 8(1): 40–46.

61.

Sterelny

(2004) Externalism, epistemic artefacts and the extended mind. In: Schantz

(ed.) The externalist challenge. New studies on cognition and intentionality, Berlin: de Gruyter.

62.

Tomasello

(1999) The cultural origins of human cognition, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

63.

Tomasello

(2008) Origins of human communication, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

64.

Tomasello

Carpenter

Call

Behne

Moll

(2005) Understanding and sharing intentions: The origins of cultural cognition. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28: 675–735.

65.

Tooby

Cosmides

(1992) The psychological foundations of culture. In: Barkow

J. H.

Cosmides

Tooby

(eds) The adapted mind: Evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

66.

Uher

(2008) Comparative personality research: Methodological approaches (target article). European Journal of Personality 22: 427–455.

67.

Uher

(2013) Personality psychology: Lexical approaches, assessment methods, and trait concepts reveal only half of the story. Why it is time for a paradigm shift. Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science 47: 1–55.

68.

Valsiner

(2001) Process structure of semiotic mediation in human development. Human Development 44: 84–97.

69.

Valsiner

Van der Veer

(2000) The social mind. Construction of an idea, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

70.

Vygotsky

L. S.

(1978) Mind in society, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

71.

Wagner

Holtz

Kashima

(2009) Constructing and deconstructing essence inrepresenting social groups: Identity projects, stereotyping, and racism. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 39(3): 363–383.

72.

Watkins

(1999) A note on Baldwin effects. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 50: 417–423.

Social construction,evolution and cultural universals

Abstract

Keywords

Get full access to this article

References