How Children Learn Culture — and Create It, with Dorsa Amir, PhD

Why It Matters

Understanding how culture sculpts cognition — and how children propagate cultural change — reframes assumptions about universal human psychology and has implications for education, policy, and the generalizability of psychological science.

Summary

Dorsa Amir, a psychologist at Duke, explores how culturally transmitted practices shape basic cognitive processes and how developing children, in turn, help create culture. She argues for precise definitions of ‘culture’ (socially learned information and tools) and ‘cognition’ (mind’s input–output functions), and highlights a renewed empirical focus on cross-cultural work after historical gaps in the field. Her fieldwork with the Shuar of the Ecuadorian Amazon illustrates how different subsistence and social environments produce divergent childhoods and cognitive patterns compared with industrialized societies. Amir frames culture–mind interactions as bidirectional and measurable across perception, reasoning, and development.

Original Description

Which aspects of human cognition are universal and which are shaped by the culture we grow up in? Dorsa Amir, PhD, director of the Mind & Culture Lab at Duke University, talks about how children learn cultural norms around things like sharing, risk-taking and cooperation; what she’s learned from her work with the Shuar people in the Ecuadorian Amazon; why children’s “peer cultures” may play a bigger role in human development than we realize; and why parents can take comfort from the vast variety of ways children are raised succesfully around the world.

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