The cultural origins of symbolic number

It is popular in psychology to hypothesize that representations of exact number are innately determined-in particular, that biology has endowed humans with a system for manipulating quantities which forms the primary representational substrate for our numerical and mathematical concepts. While this perspective has been important for advancing empirical work in animal and child cognition, here we examine six natural predictions of strong numerical nativism from a multidisciplinary perspective, and find each to be at odds with evidence from anthropology and developmental science. In particular, the history of number reveals characteristics that are inconsistent with biological determinism of numerical concepts, including a lack of number systems across some human groups and remarkable variability in the form of numerical systems that do emerge. Instead, this literature highlights the importance of economic and social factors in constructing fundamentally new cognitive systems to achieve culturally specific goals. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Disaggregating inequalities in the career outcomes of international medical graduates in the United States

Although research finds that international medical graduates (IMGs) fill gaps in US health care left by US medical graduates (USMGs), the extent to which IMGs' career outcomes are stratified along the lines of their country of medical education remains understudied. Using data from the 2019 American Medical Association Physician Masterfile (n = 19,985), I find IMGs from developed countries chart less marginalised paths in their US careers relative to IMGs from developing countries; they are more likely to practise in more competitive and popular medical specialities; to attend prestigious residency programmes; and to practise in less disadvantaged counties that employ more USMGs relative to IMGs. These findings suggest IMGs experience divergent outcomes in the United States based on their place of medical education, with IMGs from developing countries experiencing more constraints in their careers relative to IMGs from developed countries. This understudied axis of stratification in medicine has important implications for our understanding of how nativism and racism may intersect to generate inequalities in the medical profession and in US health care more broadly.

Conceptualizations of Knowledge in Structuring Approaches to Moral Development: A Process-Relational Approach

Like other aspects of child development, views of the nature and development of morality depend on philosophical assumptions or worldviews presupposed by researchers. We analyze assumptions regarding knowledge linked to two contrasting worldviews: Cartesian-split-mechanistic and process-relational. We examine the implications of these worldviews for approaches to moral development, including relations between morality and social outcomes, and the concepts of information, meaning, interaction and computation. It is crucial to understand how researchers view these interrelated concepts in order to understand approaches to moral development. Within the Cartesian-split-mechanistic worldview, knowledge is viewed as representation and meaning is mechanistic and fixed. Both nativism and empiricism are based in this worldview, differing in whether the source of representations is assumed to be primarily internal or external. Morality is assumed to pre-exist, either in the genome or the culture. We discuss problems with these conceptions and endorse the process-relational paradigm, according to which knowledge is constructed through interaction, and morality begins in activity as a process of coordinating perspectives, rather than the application of fixed rules. The contrast is between beginning with the mind or beginning with social activity in explaining the mind.

Xenophobia in the Time of a Pandemic: Social Media Use, Stereotypes, and Prejudice against Immigrants during the COVID-19 Crisis

This study examines the relationship between social media use, disease risk perception, social and political trust, and out-group stereotyping and prejudice during a social upheaval. Analyses of primary data collected during the COVID-19 outbreak in Singapore found that disease risk perception is positively related to stereotyping and prejudice against Chinese immigrants. Individuals who used social media for news were more likely to stereotype and express prejudice. However, those who engaged in frequent heterogenous discussions, and had more extensive social networks, were less likely to stereotype and express prejudice. Higher social and political trust was also associated with lower stereotyping and prejudice. Finally, moderation effects of network characteristics on the relationship between risk perception, social trust, and prejudice were observed.

"My Color Doesn't Lie": Race, Gender, and Nativism among Nurses in the Netherlands

Nursing in white-majority populations tends to be associated with white women. Yet as Western Europe and North America undergo demographic shifts, such associations are challenged as people of different racial and national backgrounds take on positions in nursing and other professional roles in healthcare. This article explores the work experiences of nurses from diverse backgrounds as they confront intersecting forms of sexism, racism, and nativism in the Netherlands. We use the conceptual framework of “appropriate labor” to help explain these experiences in connection with the wider climate of Dutch native homogeneity and race and racism denial. These findings have implications for work policies that might better support minority nurses in contexts of increasing superdiversity while also challenging wider cultural norms in the Netherlands that continue to associate nursing with whiteness and deny the presence of racism.

Recognizing animal personhood in compassionate conservation

Compassionate conservation is based on the ethical position that actions taken to protect biodiversity should be guided by compassion for all sentient beings. Critics argue that there are 3 core reasons harming animals is acceptable in conservation programs: the primary purpose of conservation is biodiversity protection; conservation is already compassionate to animals; and conservation should prioritize compassion to humans. We used argument analysis to clarify the values and logics underlying the debate around compassionate conservation. We found that objections to compassionate conservation are expressions of human exceptionalism, the view that humans are of a categorically separate and higher moral status than all other species. In contrast, compassionate conservationists believe that conservation should expand its moral community by recognizing all sentient beings as persons. Personhood, in an ethical sense, implies the individual is owed respect and should not be treated merely as a means to other ends. On scientific and ethical grounds, there are good reasons to extend personhood to sentient animals, particularly in conservation. The moral exclusion or subordination of members of other species legitimates the ongoing manipulation and exploitation of the living worlds, the very reason conservation was needed in the first place. Embracing compassion can help dismantle human exceptionalism, recognize nonhuman personhood, and navigate a more expansive moral space.

When all life counts in conservation

Conservation science involves the collection and analysis of data. These scientific practices emerge from values that shape who and what is counted. Currently, conservation data are filtered through a value system that considers native life the only appropriate subject of conservation concern. We examined how trends in species richness, distribution, and threats change when all wildlife count by adding so-called non-native and feral populations to the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List and local species richness assessments. We focused on vertebrate populations with founding members taken into and out of Australia by humans (i.e., migrants). We identified 87 immigrant and 47 emigrant vertebrate species. Formal conservation accounts underestimated global ranges by an average of 30% for immigrants and 7% for emigrants; immigrations surpassed extinctions in Australia by 52 species; migrants were disproportionately threatened (33% of immigrants and 29% of emigrants were threatened or decreasing in their native ranges); and incorporating migrant populations into risk assessments reduced global threat statuses for 15 of 18 species. Australian policies defined most immigrants as pests (76%), and conservation was the most commonly stated motivation for targeting these species in killing programs (37% of immigrants). Inclusive biodiversity data open space for dialogue on the ethical and empirical assumptions underlying conservation science.

Is Empiricism Innate? Preference for Nurture Over Nature in People's Beliefs About the Origins of Human Knowledge

The origins of human knowledge are an enduring puzzle: what parts of what we know require learning, and what depends on intrinsic structure? Although the nature-nurture debate has been a central question for millennia and has inspired much contemporary research in psychology and neuroscience, it remains unknown whether people share intuitive, prescientific theories about the answer. Here we report that people (N = 1,188) explain fundamental perceptual and cognitive abilities by appeal to learning and instruction, rather than genes or innateness, even for abilities documented in the first days of life. U.S. adults, adults from a culture with a belief in reincarnation, children, and professional scientists-including psychologists and neuroscientists, all believed these basic abilities emerge significantly later than they actually do, and ascribed them to nurture over nature. These findings implicate a widespread intuitive empiricist theory about the human mind, present from early in life.

Is There Really an Evolved Capacity for Number?

Humans and other species have biologically endowed abilities for discriminating quantities. A widely accepted view sees such abilities as an evolved capacity specific for number and arithmetic. This view, however, is based on an implicit teleological rationale, builds on inaccurate conceptions of biological evolution, downplays human data from non-industrialized cultures, overinterprets results from trained animals, and is enabled by loose terminology that facilitates teleological argumentation. A distinction between quantical (e.g., quantity discrimination) and numerical (exact, symbolic) cognition is needed: quantical cognition provides biologically evolved preconditions for numerical cognition but it does not scale up to number and arithmetic, which require cultural mediation. The argument has implications for debates about the origins of other special capacities - geometry, music, art, and language.

Culture shapes the evolution of cognition

A central debate in cognitive science concerns the nativist hypothesis, the proposal that universal features of behavior reflect a biologically determined cognitive substrate: For example, linguistic nativism proposes a domain-specific faculty of language that strongly constrains which languages can be learned. An evolutionary stance appears to provide support for linguistic nativism, because coordinated constraints on variation may facilitate communication and therefore be adaptive. However, language, like many other human behaviors, is underpinned by social learning and cultural transmission alongside biological evolution. We set out two models of these interactions, which show how culture can facilitate rapid biological adaptation yet rule out strong nativization. The amplifying effects of culture can allow weak cognitive biases to have significant population-level consequences, radically increasing the evolvability of weak, defeasible inductive biases; however, the emergence of a strong cultural universal does not imply, nor lead to, nor require, strong innate constraints. From this we must conclude, on evolutionary grounds, that the strong nativist hypothesis for language is false. More generally, because such reciprocal interactions between cultural and biological evolution are not limited to language, nativist explanations for many behaviors should be reconsidered: Evolutionary reasoning shows how we can have cognitively driven behavioral universals and yet extreme plasticity at the level of the individual-if, and only if, we account for the human capacity to transmit knowledge culturally. Wherever culture is involved, weak cognitive biases rather than strong innate constraints should be the default assumption.

Face processing in Williams syndrome is already atypical in infancy

Face processing is a crucial socio-cognitive ability. Is it acquired progressively or does it constitute an innately-specified, face-processing module? The latter would be supported if some individuals with seriously impaired intelligence nonetheless showed intact face-processing abilities. Some theorists claim that Williams syndrome (WS) provides such evidence since, despite IQs in the 50s, adolescents/adults with WS score in the normal range on standardized face-processing tests. Others argue that atypical neural and cognitive processes underlie WS face-processing proficiencies. But what about infants with WS? Do they start with typical face-processing abilities, with atypicality developing later, or are atypicalities already evident in infancy? We used an infant familiarization/novelty design and compared infants with WS to typically developing controls as well as to a group of infants with Down syndrome matched on both mental and chronological age. Participants were familiarized with a schematic face, after which they saw a novel face in which either the features (eye shape) were changed or just the configuration of the original features. Configural changes were processed successfully by controls, but not by infants with WS who were only sensitive to featural changes and who showed syndrome-specific profiles different from infants with the other neurodevelopmental disorder. Our findings indicate that theorists can no longer use the case of WS to support claims that evolution has endowed the human brain with an independent face-processing module.

An evaluation of the concept of innateness

The concept of innateness is often used in explanations and classifications of biological and cognitive traits. But does this concept have a legitimate role to play in contemporary scientific discourse? Empirical studies and theoretical developments have revealed that simple and intuitively appealing ways of classifying traits (e.g. genetically specified versus owing to the environment) are inadequate. They have also revealed a variety of scientifically interesting ways of classifying traits each of which captures some aspect of the innate/non-innate distinction. These include things such as whether a trait is canalized, whether it has a history of natural selection, whether it developed without learning or without a specific set of environmental triggers, whether it is causally correlated with the action of certain specific genes, etc. We offer an analogy: the term 'jade' was once thought to refer to a single natural kind; it was then discovered that it refers to two different chemical compounds, jadeite and nephrite. In the same way, we argue, researchers should recognize that 'innateness' refers not to a single natural kind but to a set of (possibly related) natural kinds. When this happens, it will be easier to progress in the field of biological and cognitive sciences.

In defense of change processes

Nativist and constructivist approaches to the study of development share a common emphasis on characterizing beginning and end states in development. This focus has highlighted the question of preservation and transformation-whether core aspects of the adult end state are present in the earliest manifestations during infancy. In contrast, a developmental systems approach emphasizes the process of developmental change. This perspective eschews the notions of objective starting and ending points in a developmental progression and rejects the idea that any particular factor should enjoy a privileged status in explaining developmental change. Using examples from motor development and animal behavior, we show how a developmental systems framework can avoid the pitfalls of the long and contentious debate about continuity versus qualitative change.