Abstract
‘Cultural neuroscience’ presents itself as a new research paradigm within the neurosciences that takes the mutual constitution of culture, mind and brain seriously. As such, it has already gained considerable attention both among neuroscientists and traditional cultural psychologists. A superficial look at some of the studies published by practitioners in the field, however, might leave one with the impression that cultural neuroscience has more to do with the corroboration of well-established cultural clichés than with the broadening of mind it promises to bring about. In this article, we take a closer look at the emerging field of cultural neuroscience. The first section provides an overview of cultural neuroscience both with respect to the vision put forward by its proponents and to the actual state of research. In the second section, we engage with cultural neuroscience's parent discipline, cultural psychology, to gain a better understanding of the constructs and paradigms used by cultural neuroscientists. We conclude with three constructive proposals for a ‘truly cultural cultural neuroscience’ that avoids the popular pitfalls of essentialism and reductionism.
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Notes
The term is the authors’ and is used here for convenience only.
See http://culturalneuroscience.isr.umich.edu/index.html; http://culturalneuroscience.isr.umich.edu/home.htm, (accessed 30 March 2012).
For a discussion of this sampling bias, see Arnett (2008) and Chiao (2009).
An important exception is John Cacioppo, the Nestor of social neuroscience, who (together with Haotian Zhou) has contributed a major article to the Asian Journal of Social Psychology's special issue on cultural neuroscience.
The following overview of 30 original research articles (see Appendix) is based on literature quoted in cultural neuroscience articles as relevant research in cultural neuroscience. By using this ‘sample strategy’, we utilize the demarcation of the discursive field used by the emerging scientific field of cultural neuroscience itself.
This is not to say, of course, that anthropologists have not made any valuable contributions to cultural neuroscience (they certainly have – cf. Seligman and Kirmayer, 2008, in addition to the articles listed above). The point is just that few transcultural neuroimaging studies so far have been expressly conducted in cooperation with anthropologists.
For the first strategy, see Adams et al (2009); Adams et al (2010); Aron et al (2010); Cheon et al (2011); Chiao et al (2009b); de Greck et al (2012); Freeman et al (2009); Goh et al (2007, 2010, 2011); Goto et al (2010); Gutchess et al (2006, 2010); Hedden et al (2008); Han et al (2011); Jenkins et al (2010); Kobayashi et al (2006, 2007); Lewis et al (2008); Na and Kitayama (2011); Sui et al (2009); Zhu et al (2007); for the second strategy see Ishii et al (2010); Ray et al (2010); for the third strategy, see Chiao et al (2009a); Harada et al (2010); Lin et al (2008); Ng et al (2010); Sui and Han (2007); Sui et al (2012). (Note, however, that Adams et al, 2009 does not really fit our description above as the comparison was really between participants (both American and Japanese) who watched own-culture faces and participants (both American and Japanese) who watched other-culture faces, not between participants from different cultural backgrounds. The same holds true in principle for Adams et al (2010), but here some elements of intercultural comparison were included.)
The connection between views of culture and preferred methodologies is also stressed by Dov Cohen (2007, p. 205), although his analysis of the connection is slightly different from ours.
Critical discussion of the concept of ethnicity that is at work here would require a separate article. For the purpose of this article, we use the term as it is used in the literature we are reviewing, without any commitment to its viability.
Not every researcher talks about ‘values, beliefs and practices’, of course; we will use Chiao's trichotomy here as a convenient shorthand for the aspects of culture cultural psychologists and cultural neuroscientists purport to study.
Provided, of course, they have been living in the country in question for a sufficiently long time, or share their daily life with other members of their ethnic group (there is no ambiguity in the literature concerning the essentially social transmission of cultural values, beliefs and practices).
For an example from cultural neuroscience, see Ng et al (2010).
These types of priming studies seem to be more popular among cultural neuroscientists than the first one (see Chiao et al, 2009a; Harada et al, 2010; Lin et al, 2008; Sui and Han, 2007).
Aron et al (2010); Chiao et al (2009a, 2009b); de Greck et al (2012); Goh et al (2010); Goto et al (2010; Gutchess et al (2006, 2010); Harada et al (2010); Hedden et al (2008); Ishii et al (2010); Lewis et al (2008); Lin et al (2008); Na and Kitayama (2011); Ng et al (2010); Ray et al (2010); Sui and Han (2007); Sui et al (2009, 2012); Zhu et al (2007). The two pairs of constructs (individualism/collectivism and independence/interdependence) actually have different origins and slightly different meanings (the first being mainly associated with research conducted by Geert Hofstede, Harry Triandis and others, the second going back to Hazel Rose Markus and Shinobu Kitayama), but as most cultural psychologists tend to use them interchangeably, we put this complication aside here (cf. Hofstede, 1980; Markus and Kitayama, 1991; Triandis, 1995).
Aron et al (2010); Goh et al (2007, 2010, 2011); Goto et al (2010); Jenkins et al (2010); Lewis et al (2008). For analytic and holistic cognition more generally, see Nisbett (2003); Nisbett et al (2001).
Exceptions were Adams et al (2009, 2010); Freeman et al (2009); Han et al (2011); Kobayashi et al (2006, 2007). The bias is noted and discussed by cultural neuroscientists themselves (cf. Kitayama, 2010; Kitayama and Uskul, 2011).
Interestingly, the research design by Zhu and colleagues is also the only one so far that has been adapted to fit the requirements of all of the three basic strategies for cultural comparison described above: Zhu and colleagues relied on the first strategy, Ray and colleagues (2010) on the second, Ng and colleagues (2010) on the third.
Cf. Choudhury et al (2009); Roepstorff (2011); Roepstorff and Vogeley (2009). There is also the more general problem, noted by many critics of the ‘neuro-hype’, that neuroscientists tend to suppose the ontological primacy of the brain. As neurological reductionism is not peculiar to cultural neuroscience, however, and might even be less common there than in other neuro-disciplines (cultural neuroscientists love to talk about the ‘mutual constitution’ of culture, mind and brain, thus committing themselves, at least verbally, to an anti-reductionist agenda), we do not pursue this issue further in this article.
Markus and Kitayama (1991, p. 225) have stressed that the interdependent view is not only characteristic of Asian cultures, but of African, Latin American and many Southern European cultures as well, but they have hardly ever paid attention to these cultural contexts in their own work.
Similar attempts to salvage the culture concept by discarding unwelcome connotations such as boundedness, homogeneity, coherence and stability, thus effectively blocking the transformation of culture into a ‘thing’ or an ‘essence’, can be found among anthropologists, too (cf. Brumann, 1999).
‘Cultural psychology’, in the sense in which the term is used here, is distinguished by its proponents both from ‘cross-cultural psychology’ with its search for hidden universals and from ‘indigenous psychology’ (cf. Greenfield, 2000).
In recent years, Markus and Kitayama (2003b) have developed a second pair of constructs closely related to their original one: that of ‘disjoint’ versus ‘conjoint’ agency.
This is not to say, of course, that the concepts of ‘independence’ and ‘interdependence’ are not frequently used in an essentializing fashion by researchers working with a less sophisticated theoretical framework. As we have tried to show in the section “Independence” and “interdependence” as core constructs in cultural psychology’, though, this is not how they were originally intended.
Kitayama and colleagues tend to work with refined versions of the first and second strategies, whereas both Hong and Oyserman and their respective research teams make use of priming techniques (as explained above).
Cf. again the articles quoted above.
This way of describing the contrast is obviously inspired by the well-known idea that the province of the humanities (or Geisteswissenschaften) is ‘understanding’, while the province of the sciences is ‘explanation’. In other words, the ‘division of labour’ between the disciplines referred to by Kitayama and Tompson (2010, p. 98) is methodological, and nothing that needs to be ‘overcome’ (cf. loc.cit.). Both approaches – the descriptive-hermeneutical and the explanatory – have their distinct advantages as well as their limits.
A first step in this direction has already been taken with the development of the ‘neuro-culture interaction model’ by Kitayama and colleagues (Kitayama and Park, 2010; Kitayama and Tompson, 2010; Kitayama and Uskul, 2011).
A well-known expert on social cognition, in an article about cultural neuroscience, has even claimed that culture is ‘stored in people's brains’ (Ames and Fiske, 2010, p. 72).
Thomas and Thomas (1928, p. 572). Adams and Markus (2001, p. 291) draw attention to the same fact when they argue that ‘the reification of culture into group entities is often not illusory but is present in the structure of worlds that individuals inherit’.
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Acknowledgements
For many suggestions and comments we thank the members of the research project ‘Cultural Neuroscience: Neural processes, social interaction and societal conflicts’ in Marburg, especially Peter Dabrock, Benno Hafeneger, Tilo Kircher and Ulrich Wagner, as well as Gerd Richter and the anonymous referees of BioSocieties. Research leading to this article has been funded by the LOEWE initiative ‘Cultural Neuroscience’ of the State of Hesse.
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Appendix
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Denkhaus, R., Bös, M. How cultural is ‘cultural neuroscience’? Some comments on an emerging research paradigm. BioSocieties 7, 433–458 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1057/biosoc.2012.30
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/biosoc.2012.30