How children learn culture — and create it, with Dorsa Amir, PhD

Which aspects of human cognition are universal and which are shaped by the culture we grow up in? Dorsa Amir, PhD, director of the Mind & Culture Lab at Duke University, talks about how children learn cultural norms around things like sharing, risk-taking and cooperation; what she’s learned from her work with the Shuar people in the Ecuadorian Amazon; why children’s “peer cultures” may play a bigger role in human development than we realize; and why parents can take comfort from the vast variety of ways children are raised succesfully around the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:31Speaker 01

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• 1:00Kim Mills?

  It's a question many of us have pondered. If I had been born somewhere else, in another country, another community, another culture, would I be the same person? Would I think the same way? Would I see the world differently? Psychologists have long searched for universal truths about the human mind. But another growing area of research asks a different question. How much of what we think and perceive is shaped by the culture we grow up in? Today, we're going to talk to a psychologist who studies just that. What aspects of human development are consistent across cultures? And what things vary? Can culture influence basic cognitive processes like visual perception and numerical reasoning, not just beliefs and values?

• 1:44Kim Mills?

  How does culture shape children's cognitive development as they grow? And how do children themselves help shape culture over time? Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I'm Kim Mills.

• 2:08Kim Mills?

  My guest today is Dr. Dorsa Amir, an assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University, where she leads the Mind and Culture Lab. Her research explores how cultural environments shape the mind, and how the mind, in turn, shapes culture. She's worked with children and adults across the world, including the Shuar people and indigenous community in the Amazon. She's published dozens of articles in scientific journals, and her research and writing have been featured in media outlets, including The Washington Post, Slate, Eon, and Scientific American. Dr. Amir, thank you for joining me today.

• 2:43Speaker 03

  Thank you so much for having me.

• 2:45Kim Mills?

  Let's start with a couple of definitions. As I said, your work looks at how culture and cognition interact. How do you define those two terms, culture and cognition, in your research?

• 2:56Speaker 03

  Wow, okay, big question, right? Those are very, very tough terms to define. I will say, you know, I have my working definition of those concepts. But one of the things I often encourage people to do is to define their own versions of those concepts when they do their work. And some of my work has really been about having more precision in those definitions. So loosely speaking, I would say I define culture as essentially things that are the product of other people. So one canonical definition of it is about socially transmitted information, so stuff you have to learn from other people. I don't know if that's necessarily broad enough, because there's lots of stuff that we're learning second or third-hand from others.

• 3:39Speaker 03

  And of course, we're interacting with technologies and tools that other people have produced. So that's kind of my fuzzy definition of it. But I think it can vary quite a lot. And cognition, similarly. That is quite a loaded question. What exactly is cognition? And what are its constituent parts? There are people, for instance, that would argue that the way that we visually perceive the world and our knowledge and beliefs about the world are actually different parts of our mind, and maybe dissociate between those two things. I don't necessarily have a dog in that fight, but I guess you could think about it as the way the mind functions, how it interacts with the world, and what those input-output relationships look like. So very broad terms, I would say.

• 4:20Kim Mills?

  Now, has psychology as a field spent a lot of time thinking about these questions? Or has it focused more on looking for universal aspects of cognition rather than how it varies across cultures?

• 4:32Speaker 03

  Well, I will say, this is a very old question, this idea of how cultural influence and how the environment shape our minds. I think it's one of the oldest questions. You can trace the history of this all the way back through diverse cultures and lineages throughout thousands of years. So it's certainly one we've been grappling with for a very long time. I think, in fact, the kind of modern Renaissance that produced cognitive science in its more modern form really actually had cross-cultural studies and anthropology as one of the central foundational disciplines in this view of what cognitive science was. So I think there's long been a theoretical interest in the way that culture shapes the mind and vice versa.

• 5:15Speaker 03

  Though I will say that the empirical work, there was a lot of it, certainly in the mid 20th century, it was really picking up a lot of steam. But then there was a series of essentially historical and epistemological accidents, you could describe them as, that fractured the field a bit. So my home field, I was initially trained in anthropology, adopted the four-field model, which has become emblematic of American anthropology, within which there's cultural, archaeology, linguistic, and biological. And it really spans the entire, the world of methods is quite broad. So you go all the way from extremely qualitative humanities-based inquiry all the way to very quantitative.

• 5:58Speaker 03

  And so as a result of the changes that were happening within anthropology, I think this relationship between culture and cognition became less of a hot topic, so to speak. And I think there's been a revitalization of that effort in recent years. So certainly with the advent of, for instance, a very notable paper in BBS called "The Weirdest People in the World," this idea that the mind should be examined across cultural environments, I think, gained the second wind. So, old question, some ups and downs historically, but I do think there is increased attention and, and energy in this subfield today.

• 6:36Kim Mills?

  Now, you've been working since 2014 with a community in Ecuador called the Shuar.

• 6:42Kim Mills?

  Tell us about that community. How has working with them shaped how you think about these questions of culture and cognition? And why the shuar?

• 6:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, definitely. So the shuar are a hunter horticulturalist group in the Ecuadorian Amazon. And they're one of many different groups around the world now that are still practicing what we call traditional subsistence practices. So they are hunting, gathering, cultivating garden crops, and doing sometimes some small-scale agriculture. And now what's notable about that is that the social structure and the daily activities of people and the ways the communities are organized have a very long tail in history. So I think a lot of those structures and interactions and practices are thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years old. And so you kind of get to see what the human life is like in a structure that maybe resembles

• 7:34Speaker 03

  something very different than what someone in an industrialized society might experience. And so you can really start to tease apart what the role is of those kinds of social, ecological, and environmental factors in shaping some of the things that we're really interested in. So I've been working with the shuar and other communities that still practice some of these more traditional subsistence practices for a long time. And of course, through many collaborations with wonderful researchers all around the globe. And I've really learned a lot, I will say, just in my initial experiences, spending some of my summers out, living among these communities. It really was quite a transformative experience, both personally and professionally, because

• 8:16Speaker 03

  I think you really get to step outside the culture that you are familiar with. And in both these subtle and more seriously and more explicit ways, start to question some of these assumptions that you might have about what life can be like or should be like. And so I think it really helped expand my View on what life could look like. And in particular, as you mentioned earlier, what something like childhood might look like. So one of the things that I've been quite interested in is how children develop across different cultures. And there are really some market differences between children growing up in these more foraging-based societies and what a child in a much more market-integrated, industrialized society might experience.

• 9:01Speaker 03

  And I think seeing that in sharp contrast was really evocative and really interesting intellectually and really trying to understand what are some of the consequences of these changes across a relatively short span of time and what that means for cognitive development more generally.

• 9:19Kim Mills?

  And what do you see? I mean, how do children in a culture like the Shuar differ from kids you might meet in, you're at Duke, I mean, right, kids in North Carolina?

• 9:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I would say some big differences and some surprising similarities. So one of the things to note is that in a lot of these foraging-based societies, communities are smaller. So you have, you know, a number of households that all kind of know each other. Sometimes they're kin, sometimes they're non-kin. But what we also have is a community of children kind of within the larger community of members. And because humans are, you know, we are not seasonal breeders like some other primates, and so we have children all throughout the year. And really, as a function of just the number of people in the community and the fact that

• 10:11Speaker 03

  we, you know, can have children throughout the year, what you end up with are children of various ages. Very rarely do you have a cohort of kids that are exactly the same age in the same way that you might, for instance, in a second-grade classroom. And so the first thing to note is that there are a lot of kids and they are of mixed ages. And actually, the further back you go in time, the more children there are. So this is one big change that's happened with the advent of things like industrialization is that the average family size has changed a lot. So you're going from a fertility rate of, let's say, five to seven kids per family. Only down to something like two or three.

• 10:50Speaker 03

  So there are more children, about 50% of the population, for instance, among the Shwaran, among, you know, similar communities are under the age of 14. So it's a very young population of mixed ages. So that's just the demography, right? So just structurally very different, smaller population sizes, more children, more mixed ages. And the other thing that I think is quite interesting is the locus of control. I suppose you could describe it as, which is who gets to determine what children are doing on a day to day basis? Who is, who is making those choices? And what you find is that for sure, in industrialized settings, the, the, the daily activities that children participate in are largely adult created.

• 11:33Speaker 03

  So we kind of determine when school starts, for instance, what they do in that classroom. And there are periods, of course, and hopefully increasingly more in these settings where children have some autonomy to decide how to engage with things. But it's a very, very different in terms of the amount of agency and autonomy granted when you look at children in some of these smaller scale societies. And so typically they are deciding what they do on a daily basis. And most of the time what they're doing is assorting into peer groups. That's what they want to do. And this is, I think, one of the nice and really striking similarities, actually, is that, that inherent motivation is still the same in societies like the United States. That's still what kids want to do. But sometimes they have to get a bit more creative about how to do it.

• 12:18Speaker 03

  So maybe they see their friends on Minecraft, right? But they are still really strongly motivated to assort into what we call these peer groups and create what we refer to as peer culture. And so you really do see, again, in this direct comparison, what really stands out, some things that are quite distinct and different. But really you also see this underlying shared capacity and motivation that I think is quite striking.

• 12:45Kim Mills?

  Oh, one of the experiments that I think you've run with the Shore children is to recreate Walter Michel's famous marshmallow test. And you get a very different reaction from these children compared to the ones that we might see in the United States or Westernized cultures. Can you talk about that?

• 13:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. So this is some of my earliest empirical work was trying to test what some of these hallmarks of cognitive development look like across these very different ecologies. And one of the things I was really interested in were these preferences that are kind of at the heart of decision making. So those related to time, like the one you're mentioning now. So how willing are you, for instance, to wait for more rewards in the future? And I also looked at risk preferences. So how likely are you to take on risk, essentially? If I say you can have a candy guaranteed, or you get a one in six chance of two candies, does that seem compelling to you? And what we find in the United States is that there tends to be this change across development where younger kids seem to be more present oriented, so they prefer things

• 13:50Speaker 03

  now, and they tend to be a bit more risk-seeking. They're more exploratory, they take on risk. And this has kind of long been described as a signature of early childhood. But what you find, actually, when you look at communities like the Shore, and this is the work that I conducted over a decade ago now, what you find is that there are differences actually based on what the local environment is incentivizing. So what you find is that kids that are living in these much more remote communities that are less market-integrated, meaning they're less reliant on markets and infrastructure and urbanization for their subsistence, they're mostly, for instance, hunting and growing crops, they are actually pretty present-oriented, but they're also very risk averse.

• 14:32Speaker 03

  And so you see this profile that's kind of more generally risk averse, because waiting for tomorrow for something kind of carries some risk with it. You know, you have to kind of be willing to accept that I'll be there again tomorrow to return, you know, these rewards to you. And so there seems to be just this much more risk averse. Decision profile. And what's really interesting is that when you compare those kids to Schwa kids that are still in Schwa communities, but just much closer to the cities, you start seeing a profile that looks a lot more like the American kids. And so those same patterns seem to be moderated by stuff like industrialization, market integration. And I think that casts a little bit of doubt on this idea that there is kind

• 15:13Speaker 03

  of a universal cognitive developmental timeline that all children go through. And the argument that we try to make is that those types of preferences are really shaped by the local incentive structure and the decisions that you're making based on what's available around you. So it doesn't seem to be the type of thing that's necessarily universal, but much more sensitive to the context.

• 15:35Kim Mills?

  We're going to take a short break. When we return, I'll talk with Dr. Amir about how kids learn about fairness and cooperation in different cultures.

• 15:45Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed sponsored jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.

• 16:16Speaker 04

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• 16:46Kim Mills?

  More recently, you published a study that looked at how cooperation develops in children, both in the US, in the Shwarc children, and several other cultures. Talk about that. What did you find?

• 16:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. So this is kind of our attempt to enter the social world, so to speak. So I had been working on these preferences and these individual decisions for a long time. And I'd started thinking a lot more about social interactions, because, you know, at the heart of it, the humans are an extremely social species. And we are very much reliant on other people for our success. And so one of the things I was really curious about is what those cooperative preferences look like when we interact with other people. What are the types of preferences that are guiding those decisions? And how are those the types of things that are also shaped by culture? And so we did a very similar exercise here, which was looking at the development of this type of decision across different cultures. We looked at kids in five different countries.

• 17:41Speaker 03

  And we gave them a battery of tasks that were related to social interactions. So for instance, we gave them a chance to either accept or reject a number of candies that was divided between them and another person. So let's say they got four candies, the other person got one. And then you get to decide, does that seem good to you? Do you want to enact that? In which case, you can say yes, or you can say, no, no, maybe that's not fair. Reject it, and nobody gets it. And so we really wanted to look at how these types of responses varied across cultures. And what you find are some interesting, again, similarities and differences. So again, teasing apart this idea of what's shared and what's not. What you find is that five-year-olds everywhere are pretty much the same. I have a five-year-old myself. I guarantee he would do this. You give him four, you give the

• 18:25Speaker 03

  other person one, he goes, that's great, right, accepts that. Because why would you say no to candy? And what you find is that kids everywhere at age five are basically making that same choice. It doesn't really matter if they're hunter-gatherers, you know, in the Amazon, or American kids in Boston. They seem to be making very similar choices. But then what you find is that across this period of what we call middle childhood, so between, let's say, five and 12, You start getting kids changing their mind a little bit. But interestingly, what they're doing is changing their mind in line with what the adults in each of those communities, which we also surveyed, are telling you is the normative thing to do. And so we actually asked other kids and we asked adults in each of those communities

• 19:10Speaker 03

  in person, hey, imagine you're given a context like this. You get four, the other person gets one. Should you accept or reject it? What's the right thing to do? And what you find is that there's actually a lot of disagreement in the adults in what the correct thing is to do, right? So in, for instance, the United States, you have adults saying you should reject it. It's not fair to have more than someone else. But many of the shorter adults are saying, yeah, accept it. Why would you throw it away? It just seems inefficient. And what you find is that across this period of middle childhood, kids start trending toward what the adults are saying is the right thing to do. And so again, you see this really interesting balance of similarities. You see kind of the similar behaviors in early life.

• 19:51Speaker 03

  And then you see that the norm internalization process, them actually internalizing what the thing is that their community endorses and actually behaving in line with that, takes a long time to develop, especially if it's costly. It's hard to say no to candy. But it's taking place approximately at the same timeline across every society that we looked at. So what we would take away from this is the culture is supplying the norms. So what should you do? And development is kind of, development is kind of continuing along this relatively consistent path where this period really seems to be this hot period for learning what those things are and bringing your behavior in line with those norms. And so I think we were able to extract out really cool insights about what's the same

• 20:36Speaker 03

  and what's not, and what that tells us about cognitive development more broadly.

• 20:40Kim Mills?

  It makes intuitive sense that some higher order concepts such as cooperation could be shaped by culture. But you've also written about more basic aspects of cognition, things like perception, visual illusions, numerical reasoning.

• 20:57Kim Mills?

  How can culture influence those processes?

• 21:00Speaker 03

  What a great question. Well, this is an open question, right? So what can culture influence and what doesn't it? And I think this is a great empirical and theoretical question. I think it's really at the heart of this conversation. So I totally agree with you that these, what we call higher order things, so things like social norms, are exactly the types of things that you might expect vary across cultures, right? So I'm Persian. If you come to my house, you have to take your shoes off. I'm sorry. And, you know, my American husband had a long history of trying to understand why that would be the norm. So those are the types of things, you know, anyone who's traveled or has met anyone from other cultures understands that those things can vary. And I think the really interesting and complicated questions arise

• 21:44Speaker 03

  when we start digging deeper, where we say, well, what else can it do? And there's a very, I think, interesting debate, actually arising from right around the 20th century, the early 20th century and through the mid 20th century, that almost sounds like a dorm room conversation, you know, where it's like akin to, do we see the same color red? And it has to do with visual illusions, as you mentioned. Now, there's a very famous visual illusion called the Mueller liar illusion. And if you're, if you're listening, I'll try to describe it. You have two lines of equal length, but the line on top has these outward facing arrowheads. So imagine like two little arrowheads pointing to the center of the line.

• 22:28Speaker 03

  And the line below has the outward facing arrowheads. And what's interesting about this illusion is that even though the lines actually are the same length, the one with the outward facing arrowheads just appears longer. So you ask people this and they say, this one's longer. It just looks longer. It doesn't matter. If I know they're the same length, I can't get rid of it. And this is actually at the heart, I think, of a very fascinating and longstanding debate about culture. And it really encapsulates these two really interesting bodies of work. So there's one body of work that says visual perception is this core thing that's happening. And the fact that if you measure it and it's exactly the same length, you can't get rid of the illusion, that's the point. There is nothing, there's no knowledge or belief state, and certainly cultural, let's

• 23:11Speaker 03

  say, experience, that can change the fact that it just appears this way. But there was another influential body of work marshaled by Siegel et al. in the mid 20th century that argued the opposite. So they took this illusion to many different cultures and they showed what appeared to be a lot of variation in this illusion across these societies. And so there is a mystery, there's a mystery here as to whether or not this is true, is it true that vision can reach deep down into something that we would describe as a really core, low-level process, like the discrimination of length. And so what my colleague and I, Chas Firestone, did across, actually, almost a decade of thinking and writing this, we tried to marshal the evidence in favor and against what we

• 23:53Speaker 03

  call the cultural by-product hypothesis, the idea that culture actually changes how you see these types of visual illusions. And what we argue is that it's probably not the case that culture is shaping our ability to, let's say, be susceptible to this illusion. And I'll just kind of throw at you a few little highlights of the evidence against it. So the first, for instance, is that humans are not the only ones susceptible to this illusion. Actually, you can see the same illusion, for instance, among guppies and other animals. So first of all, it doesn't seem to be human-specific. The other is that you can actually get this same illusion in a haptic version. So if I touch an embossed version of the illusion, I actually still feel the illusion,

• 24:38Speaker 03

  even though I'm not seeing it. So it doesn't even seem to be about vision. And the last one is quite interesting, the idea that, you know, so the cultural argument was that the types of environments that you're exposed to kind of form these visual habits. And so if you see a lot of, let's say, carpentry that has these sharp angles that look like the arrowheads. That actually produces the illusion. And so it really is about kind of cultural experience during visual development. But what you find in this really remarkable study, where this humanitarian effort went out to correct congenital cataracts in children. So these are children that had not seen for their life because they were born with dense cataracts, but they're reversible. And so this humanitarian effort went out to fix those cataracts.

• 25:21Speaker 03

  And then as part of the assessment of visual acuity, they showed them illusions like the Mueller liar. And what you find is that they are susceptible to the illusion. And so it seems to not even require past visual experience, per se. So I think that's just an example, you know, of the type of research endeavor to try and adjudicate these types of questions, which is like, what are the types of things that culture really can penetrate versus not?

• 25:46Kim Mills?

  You said earlier, you started out as an anthropologist with a PhD in evolutionary anthropology. How did you move from that field to working in a psychology department? And does having both of those perspectives influence the questions you ask?

• 26:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. So so my background is in biological and evolutionary anthropology because I was really, you know, captivated by the idea of human variation, human evolution, and just the really fascinating ways in which we have evolved things like culture to be able to live across every terrestrial ecology on the planet. Like, we live everywhere. How do we pull this off? So I started my PhD in biological anthropology, but I was always really interested in behavior. And what I really appreciated about the anthropological perspective is that culture was really always at the center. This idea that things like subsistence, whether you are, you know, hunting or gathering or farming, really have these important influences on the types of social experiences and behaviors

• 26:46Speaker 03

  and preferences and culture that you produce. That was really central. But I was always interested in behavior and psychology as well. And what I noticed in psychology is that it was really, I think, Quite interesting in that it was looking at cognition itself from this perspective of what are actually the mechanisms, when information comes in, what's actually going on in this black box to produce this output. And what I found there was actually that the conversation around culture was still kind of emerging. And I really felt that that was a good intellectual home in that what I was most interested in is kind of what's going on in the mind. But the piece of culture and the role that it played seemed to be less developed.

• 27:28Speaker 03

  And so I really thought I could make a bigger impact and find a good community and home for my work in psychology, which I think I've been able to do. It's a bit of a risky gamble, I think, to be truly interdisciplinary. It kind of feels a bit like being bicultural, which I also am, you know, or like, am I American, am I Persian? It's a little bit of both. And so I had to kind of become a dual citizen, so to speak, in anthropology and psychology. And it took a while, I think, to really become fluent, you know, in those languages and those cultures. But now that I have done it, I genuinely appreciate the insight that it gives me into both bodies of knowledge. I think there's a lot of room in between disciplines that is less excavated, and I

• 28:13Speaker 03

  think there's a lot to uncover there. And so it was a little bit of a risky strategy, but I found it quite intellectually fulfilling. And I've really, I think, found a great home in psychology, and I think psychology in general has been very receptive to this approach. And likewise, I think anthropology has been similarly welcoming. So I think in general, it's been a very positive endeavor.

• 28:33Kim Mills?

  Well, given that background and the research you're doing, you're clearly pushing psychological research beyond weird societies. And for our listeners, just so they understand, that means Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic weird. But since most psychological research up until now is biased toward weird samples, do you think the body of research is wrong?

• 28:59Speaker 03

  Great question. So I thought about this a lot. So I don't think the body of research is wrong. So I don't think what I'm saying is no, but I think what I'm saying is yes, and. So I think we have great knowledge about how, for instance, children develop in industrialized societies. We have a lot of insights that we can leverage to create great environments for learning and at home for children, for instance. But I stop short of saying, well, and that can automatically be exported out to every child on the planet because I'm not sure that's true. And I think that there's just a lot to gain here in addition to what we already know, in trying to both stress test some of our theories that we think may be universal, but we don't actually know. But also just this idea that, so, you

• 29:44Speaker 03

  know, kind of challenging and examining long-held assumptions, for instance, about things that are assumed to be universal. I think that's one very useful application of cross-cultural work. But also this other application, which I find much more generative, which is, well, what can cultural diversity tell us about cognitive diversity? What can we gain? So in addition to kind of what we know, how can we understand what else is happening, right? What is variable and what is not? And what does growing up in all these different environments get you? What are the things that are malleable? And what are the things that are less flexible? And so I find it to be a really exciting, you know, addition. And I certainly don't see it as an addendum. So I don't want to be in there

• 30:28Speaker 03

  like, you know, there's a citation and then you go, but see Amir Adal, who found that this wasn't universal. You know, I think there's a lot more we can do beyond just testing assumptions of universality, because culture offers us almost like a natural experiment laboratory. Like, you can go out and find variation and ask really pointed and interesting questions about human cognition, beyond just, does it generalize?

• 30:52Kim Mills?

  To switch gears, I want to talk about a Twitter thread you published a few years ago on things parents don't have to worry about, which sparked a little online debate.

• 31:04Kim Mills?

  Can you talk about that connection to your research? Are there other broader practical lessons you think people, especially parents, should take from your research? And maybe explain what it is that parents don't have to worry about.

• 31:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, I will say, um, there's a lot to worry about as a parent. I'm a parent myself. I have a five-year-old and now I have twin, fraternal twin one-year-olds, by the way, which is a psychologist's dream, really, because I'm running my own nature nurture experiment. By the way, genes matter a lot, it turns out. But I think both those personal experiences of trying to navigate parenthood, you know, in, in the United States, which is where I live, but also having access to what parenting and what childhood could look like across cultures, I think has really alleviated some of my anxiety. So, for instance, um, right now, I have fraternal twins. One of them, they're both 15 months. One of them is walking and has been walking for three months.

• 32:00Speaker 03

  One of them has yet to walk. And I feel that under, you know, normal circumstances, a very well-intentioned parent might see that and be concerned. And I totally understand that. At the same time, you can contextualize that among the broader spectrum of variability, for instance, in milestones like walking, where, for instance, we know that in some cultures where walking is highly encouraged. So among the Hadza, for instance, they hold their babies up as much as they can so they can get their legs strong because they're a mobile group, versus you have populations like the Ache that are in the rainforest. They actually don't want them to walk because they don't want them to wander off. And so they discourage it. And those types of things really do have impact on when children walk.

• 32:42Speaker 03

  And so knowing that there's a lot of both genetic and cultural variability in that really calms me down, frankly. And I'm like, well, we're probably somewhere within the range of normal, you know? And so just being able to see how much variation there is. And, you know, most kids become bipedal when they start, they start walking earlier or a little bit later. Does it make them slow walkers or super walkers? So everyone becomes bipedal to some degree. And so just knowing those types of things, I find quite comforting. And being able to contextualize American parenting and American childhood within the larger kind of evolutionary and cross-cultural picture, I have found very...

• 33:21Speaker 03

  Really illuminating, and I think a lot of these micro decisions that we're often concerned about, and again, it's well-intentioned, we want the best for our kids, I think in the big picture, really wash out. And I find that a lot of my friends and colleagues, you know, there's a lot of pressure to be the perfect parent, and there's a lot of pressure to monitor and set them up for success, and I completely understand that. But my general takeaway, honestly, is that most people are probably doing a good job. If you care about your kids, you know, the fact that you're asking me this question, for instance, is already revealing that you're an engaged parent who cares about your child's well-being. And a lot of the, you know, a lot of the outcomes that we care about,

• 34:04Speaker 03

  I think that's a pretty good predictor of it. And, you know, the other part truly is that, like, you as a parent are also a human being, you know, and there are costs and benefits to you, and you do need to think about yourself. The family is this, you know, it has to be in some degree of harmony. And so if you find yourself really anxious and really upset about some of the choices, that maybe will have a tiny effect down the road, maybe not. You know, I would encourage you to think also about your own experience of that decision. And, you know, it's a little, it's probably fine, is my general takeaway. It's probably fine.

• 34:43Kim Mills?

  Well, I love that you said it's okay for kids to be bored. It's not parents' responsibility, right, to keep your kids entertained all the time?

• 34:50Speaker 03

  Oh, my gosh, yes. I am actually quite a boring parent, I will say. So here's, by the way, talking about the demographic changes that have happened. So children, for a very long time, for basically all of human history, interact with other kids. That's what they do. And in fact, they want to run off with other kids in every situation they can find. One of the things that I feel has happened as a result of these demographic changes is that children are around other children less, and they have less interactions. They have much more interactions with adults than ever before in human history, essentially. And what that creates is this really interesting quirky thing, which is that adults are kind of, in order to interact with their kids, kind of take on a childlike mentality.

• 35:32Speaker 03

  So they will kind of become their zany play friend and play pretend with them the way other children would do. But the problem is I'm an adult. Number one, I'm not good at it. And number two, I don't particularly enjoy it. And so what I try to do as much as possible is get the kids together because I just think that my like, I'm not good at it. And every time I try to pretend something with my five year old, he tells me I'm doing it wrong anyway. So, you know, why am I bothering? But I think, you know, there, there's a lot of pressure to be, you know, be like their zany play friend. And the other thing, you know, that I want to mention is that I think we have this conceptualization of a perfect childhood as one that is always positive. Like we, we, there are no negative experiences.

• 36:14Speaker 03

  They're not bored, they're entertained, they're learning all the time, they're really happy. And I think those are good goals. But I also think that that's not necessarily what life is like, right? Like my life is not one that it, the absence of negative things is not necessarily the thing that makes something perfect. And so things like friction and boredom and even conflict, I think are actually extremely important. They are formative experiences for children to really internalize and understand things like social interactions. So I can tell my child not to cut in front of someone in the line at the slide until my, you know, I lose my voice. But until he gets cut in line and knows what that feels like, maybe he doesn't have

• 36:57Speaker 03

  this deep appreciation for why that rule exists in the first place, right? Like, there is so much to learn from the, the ups and downs of day to day life that I don't think are bad per se. And so obviously, we want to avoid the big negative things, right? We want to provide a nourishing and safe environment for our children. That is, I think, 100% the right goal. But I'm much more tolerant, perhaps as a parent and a scientist, of the little perturbations of day to day life, even when I get frustrated or I have an argument with my partner. I think it's okay for those things to exist because those things do exist in the world. And what I can model is kind of how to repair it and how I talk about the narrative of what I experienced.

• 37:41Speaker 03

  And, you know, I think giving children access to the real world in age appropriate ways, I don't think is a bad thing.

• 37:49Kim Mills?

  So just to wrap up, what's next for you? What are you working on now? What do you hope to work on in the future?

• 37:54Speaker 03

  Lots of fun things going on in the lab right now that I've been setting up here. I will say, one of the things that you mentioned has become increasingly an interest of mine, which is this idea of peer cultures. So I mentioned that children assort into these peer groups and they love spending time with their friends. They actually don't want adults involved at all, frankly, and this seems to be a cross-cultural universal. And the question we can ask is, why are they doing this? And there's one version of it, and one version of childhood more generally, which is that children are kind of there to learn. And this is the, I think, canonical view of children. They need to learn about things, they're copying us, they're great imitators, they're sophisticated emulators.

• 38:38Speaker 03

  And it's all about kind of the receiving of cultural information. And some people have argued that childhood is really long in the human species to allow for learning, which is true. But I feel like there's a little bit more to the story, and I think it's related to what kids are doing in their little peer groups. So my colleague, Shannon Levvy, and I recently published an article outlining this idea that maybe what they're doing is a lot more important and sophisticated than we're giving them credit for. Because we think in their peer groups, they are not just playing and socializing, but they're actually producing culture. There's actually a term we borrow from sociology called peer culture, and it's the body of cultural information generated and transmitted between children.

• 39:23Speaker 03

  And you might think of your own experiences of peer culture, for instance, in the West as like little playground games, or, you know, little hand clapping games, or rhymes, or whatever. And that's true. Like, I think a lot of the peer culture in the West encompasses these things about play. But we did this broader analysis of peer culture, and what you find is that in a lot of other societies, especially these foraging societies, it is much more complex and much broader than that. Children have lots of cultural information, for instance, about how to forage for food, they target different game, they make their own material culture, they pick up the social and linguistic conventions of groups around them, they're much more exploratory.

• 40:05Speaker 03

  And one thing that we're arguing is that this kind of exploratory and distinct culture... It's actually really important in the history of cultural evolution because it can help us as a whole community adapt when environments change. So as an adult, you're maybe set in your ways, you're doing things that you've probably been doing for 20 years. Lord knows, I'm already at the point now where I can't adopt new technologies, I'm done. You know, but my kids can pick it up really quickly. And we think there's something really profound going on there, which is that as an entire unit, the human community, children and their peer groups are playing a really interesting role in the generation and evolution of cultural knowledge in a way that I don't think they have been recognized for yet.

• 40:49Speaker 03

  So a lot of the questions, both empirically and theoretically, that we've been grappling with are about this, like what, how do peer cultures change across time? What do they contribute to the whole community? And more generally, are we undervaluing and underappreciating children's roles in the human story?

• 41:07Kim Mills?

  Well, that's all great information, and I look forward to seeing more of your research. Dr. Amira, I want to thank you for joining me today.

• 41:14Speaker 03

  Thank you for having me on. This is wonderful.

• 41:16Kim Mills?

  You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at speakingofpsychology.org or on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like what you've heard, please follow us and leave a review. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can email us at [email protected]. Speaking of Psychology is produced by Lee Weinerman. Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I'm Kim Mills.

• 42:32Speaker 05

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