American Exceptionalism

Or, as the researchers put it, Americans are Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic ("WEIRD"), even in comparison with their western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic European cousins.  And yet, because of the fashionable assumption that cognition is hard-wired and somewhat independent of culture, most modern cognitive research unthinkingly relied on American undergraduates as its experimental subjects.

Given the data, they concluded that social scientists could not possibly have picked a worse population from which to draw broad generalizations.  Researchers had been doing the equivalent of studying penguins while believing that they were learning insights applicable to all birds.

In fact, it may not be at all easy to separate the inherent "hard wiring" of our thoughts from either their content or their context:

For some time now, the most widely accepted answer to the question of why humans, among all animals, have so successfully adapted to environments across the globe is that we have big brains with the ability to learn, improvise, and problem-solve. 

Henrich has challenged this “cognitive niche” hypothesis with the “cultural niche” hypothesis.  He notes that the amount of knowledge in any culture is far greater than the capacity of individuals to learn or figure it all out on their own.  He suggests that individuals tap that cultural storehouse of knowledge simply by mimicking (often unconsciously) the behavior and ways of thinking of those around them.  We shape a tool in a certain manner, adhere to a food taboo, or think about fairness in a particular way, not because we individually have figured out that behavior’s adaptive value, but because we instinctively trust our culture to show us the way.

Nor is it only a question of learning rules about concrete physical dangers or building techniques. There are distinct differences across cultures in characteristic solutions to the Prisoner's Dilemma, in the identification of color, in the ability to evaluate differences in size and shape, and in the tendency to defer to group pressure in reaching an abstract judgment. We know less about what is innate in the human mind than one might guess from the way we often talk.