This target article presents a theory of human cultural learning. Cultural learning is identified with those instances of social learning in which intersubjectivity or perspective-taking plays a vital role, both in the original learning process and in the resulting cognitive product. Cultural learning manifests itself in three forms during human ontogeny: imitative learning, instructed learning, and collaborative learning – in that order. Evidence is provided that this progression arises from the developmental ordering of the underlying social-cognitive concepts and processes involved. (...) Imitative learning relies on a concept of intentional agent and involves simple perspective-taking. Instructed learning relies on a concept of mental agent and involves alternating/coordinated perspective-taking (intersubjectivity). Collaborative learning relies on a concept of reflective agent and involves integrated perspective-taking (reflective intersubjectivity). A comparison of normal children, autistic children and wild and enculturated chimpanzees provides further evidence for these correlations between social cognition and cultural learning. Cultural learning is a uniquely human form of social learning that allows for a fidelity of transmission of behaviors and information among conspecifics not possible in other forms of social learning, thereby providing the psychological basis for cultural evolution. (shrink)

The capacity to attribute beliefs to others in order to understand action is one of the mainstays of human cognition. Yet it is debatable whether children attribute beliefs in the same way to all agents. In this paper, we present the results of a false-belief task concerning humans and God run with a sample of Maya children aged 4–7, and place them in the context of several psychological theories of cognitive development. Children were found to attribute beliefs in different ways (...) to humans and God. The evidence also speaks to the debate concerning the universality and uniformity of the development of folk-psychological reasoning. (shrink)

When considering other persons, the human mind draws from folk theories of biology, physics, and psychology. Studies have examined the extent to which people utilize these folk theories in inferring whether or not God has human-like biological, physical, and psychological constraints. However, few studies have examined the way in which these folk attributions relate to each other, the extent to which attributions within a domain are consistent, or whether cultural factors influence human-like attributions within and across domains. The present study (...) assessed 341 individuals’ attributions of anthropomorphic properties to God in three domains (psychological, biological, and physical), their religious beliefs, and their engagement in religious practices. Three Confirmatory Factor Analyses tested hypothetical models of the underlying structure of an anthropomorphic concept of God. The best fitting model was the “Hierarchical Dimensions Concept,” the analyses indicated one overall dimension of anthropomorphism with three sub-domains. Additionally, participants’ religiosity was negatively related to attributing human-like psychological properties to God, suggesting that the more people engage with their religion, the less they think about God as having a ‘human-like’ mind. Religiosity was positively related to individual consistency scores in the biological domain. In other words, greater religiosity was related to less consistent answers about God’s biological properties. As a result, the findings of the current study also suggest that individuals do not just vary between each other in how much they anthropomorphize God, but additionally, variation exists in the type of anthropomorphic reasoning used within an individual person’s concept of God. (shrink)