Suchergebnisse

Surveys show that our growing concern over protecting the environment is accompanied by a diminishing sense of human contact with nature. Many people have little commonsense knowledge about nature - are unable, for example, to identify local plants and trees or describe how these plants and animals interact. Researchers report dwindling knowledge of nature even in smaller, nonindustrialized societies. In The Native Mind and the Cultural Construction of Nature, Scott Atran and Douglas Medin trace the cognitive consequences of this loss of knowledge. Drawing on nearly two decades of cross-cultural and developmental research, they examine the relationship between how people think about the natural world and how they act on it and how these two phenomena are affected by cultural differences. These studies, which involve a series of targeted comparisons among cultural groups living in the same environment and engaged in the same activities, reveal critical universal aspects of mind as well as equally critical cultural differences. Atran and Medin find that, despite a base of universal processes, the cultural differences in understandings of nature are associated with significant differences in environmental decision making as well as intergroup conflict and stereotyping stemming from these differences. The book includes two intensive case studies, one focusing on agro-forestry among Maya Indians and Spanish speakers in Mexico and Guatemala and the other on resource conflict between Native-American and European-American fishermen in Wisconsin. The Native Mind and the Cultural Construction of Nature offers new perspectives on general theories of human categorization, reasoning, decision making, and cognitive development

This study reports ethnographic and experimental analyses of inter‐generational changes in nativeItza'Maya and immigrant Ladino populations ofGuatemala's Petén rainforest concerning understanding of ecological relationships between plants, animals, and humans, and the perceived role of forest spirits in sustaining these relationships. We find dramatic changes in understanding ecological relationships and the perceived role of forest spirits.Itza'Maya conceptions of forest spirits (arux) are now more often confounded with Ladino spirits (duendes), withItza' spirits no longer reliably serving as forest guardians. These changes correlate with a shift in personal values regarding the forest, away from concern with ecologically central trees and towards monetary incentives. More generally, we describe how economic, demographic, and social changes relate to the loss of a system of beliefs and behaviours that once promoted sustainable agro‐forestry practices. These changes coincide with open access to common pool resources.

In the hope to resolve the two sets of opposing results concerning the effects of psychological distance and construal levels on moral judgment, Žeželj and Jokić (2014) conducted a series of four direct replications, which yielded divergent patterns of results. In our commentary, we first revisit the consistent findings that lower-level construals induced by How/Why manipulation lead to harsher moral condemnation than higher-level construals. We then speculate on the puzzling patterns of results regarding the role of temporal distance in shaping moral judgment. And we conclude by discussing the complexity of morality and propose that it may be important to incorporate cultural systems into the study of moral cognition.