Lawrence A. Hirschfeld | |
---|---|
Born | Detroit, United States |
Nationality | American |
Occupation(s) | Anthropologist, cognitive scientist, academic and author |
Academic background | |
Education | B.A., Anthropology M.A., Anthropology M Phil., Anthropology PhD, Anthropology |
Alma mater | University of Michigan Columbia University |
Academic work | |
Institutions | University of Michigan New School for Social Research |
Lawrence A. Hirschfeld is an American anthropologist,cognitive scientist,academic,and author. He is a professor in the Departments of Psychology and Anthropology at the New School for Social Research as well as a professor emeritus in the Departments of Psychology and Anthropology at the University of Michigan. [1]
Hirschfeld is most known for his work on cognitive development,social reasoning and categorization,particularly the conceptual development of race and ethnicity. Among his authored works are publications in academic journals,including Cognition , Cognitive Psychology , Current Biology ,and American Anthropologist [2] as well as books such as Race in the Making:Culture and the Child's Construction of Human Kinds, [3] Mapping the Mind:Domain Specificity in Cognition and Culture (co-edited with S. A. Gelman) [4] and Biological and Cultural Bases of Human Inference (co-edited with R. Viale &D Andler). [5]
Hirschfeld went to high school at The New Hampton School,in New Hampshire. He completed his B.A. in Anthropology from the University of Michigan in 1971. He then obtained an M.A. in Anthropology and an M. Phil.,both from Columbia University in 1975. Later,he earned his PhD in Anthropology from the same institution in 1984. [1]
Hirschfeld's first academic post was at the Collège de France,where he served as an associate member of the Social Anthropology Laboratory from 1979 to 1983 under the direction of Claude Lévi-Strauss. Following this,he was appointed assistant scientist at the University of Wisconsin from 1983 to 1989. Concurrently,he was a research associate in the Department of Psychology from 1984 to 1985. In 1989,he joined the University of Michigan as an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology and the School of Social Work,a position he held until 1996. During this period,he was also a faculty associate at the Institute for Social Research from 1992 to 2005. In 1996,he was appointed associate professor in the Departments of Psychology and Anthropology,and in 2004,he became a professor in both departments. Since 2005,he has been a professor in the Departments of Psychology and Anthropology at the New School for Social Research. He also holds the title of professor emeritus in the Departments of Psychology and Anthropology at the University of Michigan. Hirschfeld has held visiting appointments at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences,Stanford University,Le Laboratoire de Psychobiologie de l’Enfant,Centre de Recherche en Epistémologie Appliquée. [1]
Hirschfeld's work has been covered in notable media including the New York Times,National Public Radio,PBS,the Washington Post,the Detroit News,the Detroit Free Press and the Los Angeles Times. [6]
Hirschfeld has contributed to books throughout his career. In 1994,he co-edited Mapping the Mind:Domain Specificity in Cognition and Culture. The book explored the claim that human cognition consists of specialized,domain-specific abilities rather than a general problem-solving mechanism,compiling essays from various disciplines to support this perspectives. [7] His 1996 book Race in the Making:Cognition,Culture and the Child's Construction of Human Kinds argued that racial thinking arose from a specialized cognitive ability for understanding human kinds,challenging the view that race was purely a social construct. [3] Moreover,in 2006,he co-edited Biological and Cultural Bases of Human Inference which explored the interplay between innate cognitive abilities and cultural influences,addressing the debate between nativists and cultural relativists through a multidisciplinary lens encompassing evolutionary theory,cognitive development,and social science perspectives. [5]
Hirschfeld,in his early research,critiqued both formal semantic and symbolic approaches to kinship terms,proposing that their meaning was best understood through the speaker's belief in a systematic,natural resemblance between the individuals linked by relationship terms. [8] His 1988 study examined how young children developed mental representations of racial and ethnic categories,arguing in counterpoint to social constructivists that the acquisition of racial and ethnic concepts is markedly consistent across cultures despite significant cross-cultural variations in social classifications. [9] In a widely cited 1995 paper,he empirically explored young children's sophisticated,domain-specific reasoning about racial variation,challenging the view that the acquisition of racial concepts relied principally on superficial appearance. The study presented five experiments revealing children's theory-like understanding of social categories,with implications for theorizing cross-domain knowledge transfer. [10] In the same year,he investigated children's expectations about the inheritability of racial features and racial categories,revealing that by preadolescence,children typically expect mixed-race children to categorically share the identity of the minority parent (consistent with the one-drop rule) but also to have unambiguously Black physical features (despite little evidence that they are taught this). Strikingly,there is individual variation in these expectations,as this is shaped by the communities the children live in rather than by their race. [11]
In a set of widely cited studies published in 1997,Hirschfeld and Gelman investigated preschoolers' understanding of the relationship between language,social group membership,and various aspects of the social environment,finding that children attributed language differences to certain social categories and clothing and architectural styles. The findings also suggested children coordinated knowledge across domains and explored the underlying mechanisms driving these associations. [12] In a 1999 essay examining the concept of essence in a range of empirical domains besides folkbiology,he,along with Gelman,challenged the widely-held claim that essentialist representations are rooted in folkbiology. [13] His 2004 collaboration with Dan Sperber explored how human-specific cognitive abilities,both general and domain-specific,contribute to the emergence and evolution of diverse cultures,integrating perspectives from developmental psychology,evolutionary psychology,and cognitive anthropology. [14] With Frith,White,and Bartmess,in a 2007 study,he provided the first persuasive evidence that social reasoning about group affiliation is independent of Theory of Mind,one that provides a distinct modality of reasoning about behavior governed by a special-purpose cognitive device for folk sociology. [15] Through his 2013 work,he argued that social group affiliation and social roles shape human behavior,emphasizing that actions are influenced more by these aspects of the social environment than individual intentions. The essay also critiqued the over-estimation of mentalizing as a modality for interpreting and predicting behavior,suggesting that these judgments are often independent of attributions to internal states. [16]
Hirschfeld's lab conducted work showing that preverbal infants' expectations about social affiliation are consistent with (and precursor to) later emerging patterns of folk sociological reasoning. In contrast,infants in a control condition (in which the group members perform the same movements while crossing the screen but in the absence of a third party) did not differ in how long they looked at the subsequent cohering and dispersing events. [17]
Hirschfeld lives in New York City with his wife,Ann Laura Stoler,who is the Willy Brandt Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology and Historical Studies at The New School for Social Research in New York City. [18]
Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of mental processes such as attention,language use,memory,perception,problem solving,creativity,and reasoning. Cognitive psychology originated in the 1960s in a break from behaviorism,which held from the 1920s to 1950s that unobservable mental processes were outside the realm of empirical science. This break came as researchers in linguistics and cybernetics,as well as applied psychology,used models of mental processing to explain human behavior. Work derived from cognitive psychology was integrated into other branches of psychology and various other modern disciplines like cognitive science,linguistics,and economics. The domain of cognitive psychology overlaps with that of cognitive science,which takes a more interdisciplinary approach and includes studies of non-human subjects and artificial intelligence.
Essentialism is the view that objects have a set of attributes that are necessary to their identity. In early Western thought,Platonic idealism held that all things have such an "essence"—an "idea" or "form". In Categories,Aristotle similarly proposed that all objects have a substance that,as George Lakoff put it,"make the thing what it is,and without which it would be not that kind of thing". The contrary view—non-essentialism—denies the need to posit such an "essence". Essentialism has been controversial from its beginning. In the Parmenides dialogue,Plato depicts Socrates questioning the notion,suggesting that if we accept the idea that every beautiful thing or just action partakes of an essence to be beautiful or just,we must also accept the "existence of separate essences for hair,mud,and dirt".
Cognitive neuroscience is the scientific field that is concerned with the study of the biological processes and aspects that underlie cognition,with a specific focus on the neural connections in the brain which are involved in mental processes. It addresses the questions of how cognitive activities are affected or controlled by neural circuits in the brain. Cognitive neuroscience is a branch of both neuroscience and psychology,overlapping with disciplines such as behavioral neuroscience,cognitive psychology,physiological psychology and affective neuroscience. Cognitive neuroscience relies upon theories in cognitive science coupled with evidence from neurobiology,and computational modeling.
Moral reasoning is the study of how people think about right and wrong and how they acquire and apply moral rules. It is a subdiscipline of moral psychology that overlaps with moral philosophy,and is the foundation of descriptive ethics.
Modularity of mind is the notion that a mind may,at least in part,be composed of innate neural structures or mental modules which have distinct,established,and evolutionarily developed functions. However,different definitions of "module" have been proposed by different authors. According to Jerry Fodor,the author of Modularity of Mind,a system can be considered 'modular' if its functions are made of multiple dimensions or units to some degree. One example of modularity in the mind is binding. When one perceives an object,they take in not only the features of an object,but the integrated features that can operate in sync or independently that create a whole. Instead of just seeing red,round,plastic,and moving,the subject may experience a rolling red ball. Binding may suggest that the mind is modular because it takes multiple cognitive processes to perceive one thing.
Cognitive development is a field of study in neuroscience and psychology focusing on a child's development in terms of information processing,conceptual resources,perceptual skill,language learning,and other aspects of the developed adult brain and cognitive psychology. Qualitative differences between how a child processes their waking experience and how an adult processes their waking experience are acknowledged. Cognitive development is defined as the emergence of the ability to consciously cognize,understand,and articulate their understanding in adult terms. Cognitive development is how a person perceives,thinks,and gains understanding of their world through the relations of genetic and learning factors. There are four stages to cognitive information development. They are,reasoning,intelligence,language,and memory. These stages start when the baby is about 18 months old,they play with toys,listen to their parents speak,they watch TV,anything that catches their attention helps build their cognitive development.
Cognitive archaeology is a theoretical perspective in archaeology that focuses on the ancient mind. It is divided into two main groups:evolutionary cognitive archaeology (ECA),which seeks to understand human cognitive evolution from the material record,and ideational cognitive archaeology (ICA),which focuses on the symbolic structures discernable in or inferable from past material culture.
Michael Tomasello is an American developmental and comparative psychologist,as well as a linguist. He is professor of psychology at Duke University.
Dedre Dariel Gentner is an American cognitive and developmental psychologist. She is the Alice Gabriel Twight Professor of Psychology at Northwestern University,and a leading researcher in the study of analogical reasoning.
The cognitive revolution was an intellectual movement that began in the 1950s as an interdisciplinary study of the mind and its processes,from which emerged a new field known as cognitive science. The preexisting relevant fields were psychology,linguistics,computer science,anthropology,neuroscience,and philosophy. The approaches used were developed within the then-nascent fields of artificial intelligence,computer science,and neuroscience. In the 1960s,the Harvard Center for Cognitive Studies and the Center for Human Information Processing at the University of California,San Diego were influential in developing the academic study of cognitive science. By the early 1970s,the cognitive movement had surpassed behaviorism as a psychological paradigm. Furthermore,by the early 1980s the cognitive approach had become the dominant line of research inquiry across most branches in the field of psychology.
Evolutionary educational psychology is the study of the relation between inherent folk knowledge and abilities and accompanying inferential and attributional biases as these influence academic learning in evolutionarily novel cultural contexts,such as schools and the industrial workplace. The fundamental premises and principles of this discipline are presented below.
Dan Sperber is a French social and cognitive scientist,anthropologist and philosopher. His most influential work has been in the fields of cognitive anthropology,linguistic pragmatics,psychology of reasoning,and philosophy of the social sciences. He has developed:an approach to cultural evolution known as the epidemiology of representations or cultural attraction theory as part of a naturalistic reconceptualization of the social;relevance theory;the argumentative theory of reasoning. Sperber formerly Directeur de Recherche at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique is Professor in the Departments of Cognitive Science and of Philosophy at the Central European University in Budapest.
Domain specificity is a theoretical position in cognitive science that argues that many aspects of cognition are supported by specialized,presumably evolutionarily specified,learning devices. The position is a close relative of modularity of mind,but is considered more general in that it does not necessarily entail all the assumptions of Fodorian modularity. Instead,it is properly described as a variant of psychological nativism. Other cognitive scientists also hold the mind to be modular,without the modules necessarily possessing the characteristics of Fodorian modularity.
Cognitive anthropology is an approach within cultural anthropology and biological anthropology in which scholars seek to explain patterns of shared knowledge,cultural innovation,and transmission over time and space using the methods and theories of the cognitive sciences often through close collaboration with historians,ethnographers,archaeologists,linguists,musicologists,and other specialists engaged in the description and interpretation of cultural forms. Cognitive anthropology is concerned with what people from different groups know and how that implicit knowledge,in the sense of what they think subconsciously,changes the way people perceive and relate to the world around them.
Susan E. Carey is an American psychologist who is a professor of psychology at Harvard University. She studies language acquisition,children's development of concepts,conceptual changes over time,and the importance of executive functions. She has conducted experiments on infants,toddlers,adults,and non-human primates. Her books include Conceptual Change in Childhood (1985) and The Origin of Concepts (2009).
Susan A. Gelman is currently Heinz Werner Distinguished University Professor of psychology and linguistics and the director of the Conceptual Development Laboratory at the University of Michigan. Gelman studies language and concept development in young children. Gelman subscribes to the domain specificity view of cognition,which asserts that the mind is composed of specialized modules supervising specific functions in the human and other animals. Her book The Essential Child is an influential work on cognitive development.
Mark Schaller is an American psychological scientist who has made many contributions to the study of human psychology,particularly in areas of social cognition,stereotyping,evolutionary psychology,and cultural psychology. He is a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia.
Epidemiology of representations,or cultural epidemiology,is a theory for explaining cultural phenomena by examining how mental representations get distributed within a population. The theory uses medical epidemiology as its chief analogy,because "...macro-phenomena such as endemic and epidemic diseases are unpacked in terms of patterns of micro-phenomena of individual pathology and inter-individual transmission". Representations transfer via so-called "cognitive causal chains";these representations constitute a cultural phenomenon by achieving stability of public production and mental representation within the existing ecology and psychology of a populace,the latter including properties of the human mind. Cultural epidemiologists have emphasized the significance of evolved properties,such as the existence of naïve theories,domain-specific abilities and principles of relevance.
Cognitive ecology is the study of cognitive phenomena within social and natural contexts. It is an integrative perspective drawing from aspects of ecological psychology,cognitive science,evolutionary ecology and anthropology. Notions of domain-specific modules in the brain and the cognitive biases they create are central to understanding the enacted nature of cognition within a cognitive ecological framework. This means that cognitive mechanisms not only shape the characteristics of thought,but they dictate the success of culturally transmitted ideas. Because culturally transmitted concepts can often inform ecological decision-making behaviors,group-level trends in cognition are hypothesized to address ecologically relevant challenges.
Intuitive statistics,or folk statistics,is the cognitive phenomenon where organisms use data to make generalizations and predictions about the world. This can be a small amount of sample data or training instances,which in turn contribute to inductive inferences about either population-level properties,future data,or both. Inferences can involve revising hypotheses,or beliefs,in light of probabilistic data that inform and motivate future predictions. The informal tendency for cognitive animals to intuitively generate statistical inferences,when formalized with certain axioms of probability theory,constitutes statistics as an academic discipline.