#326 Cristine Legare: Child Development, Culture, and Scientific Reasoning
RECORDED ON FEBRUARY 19th, 2020.
Dr. Cristine Legare is a professor of psychology and the director of the Evolution, Variation, and Ontogeny of Learning Laboratory at The University of Texas at Austin. Her research examines how the human mind enables us to learn, create, and transmit culture. She conducts comparisons across age, culture, and species to address fundamental questions about cognitive and cultural evolution.
In this episode, we first talk about the phylogenetic and ontogenetic bases of culture. We also refer to the cognitive bases of culture. We ask if isolated individuals would ever develop culture. We discuss how children acquire culture; core knowledge, and how it varies across societies; causal learning; imitation; and natural and supernatural explanatory frameworks. We then address what renders it so difficult for people to accept and understand evolution by natural selection.
Time Links:
Studying culture from both a phylogenetic and an ontogenetic perspective
The cognitive bases of culture
Would isolated individuals develop culture?
How children acquire culture
Core knowledge
Causal learning in children
The role of imitation
The co-existence of natural and supernatural explanatory frameworks
The obstacles to understanding evolution
Young children revise explanations in response to new evidence
How anthropomorphic language influences children’s understanding of evolutionary concepts
Are children protoscientists?
Follow Dr. Legare’s work!
Follow Dr. Legare’s work:
Faculty page: http://bit.ly/2qY2s1E
Website: http://bit.ly/2RUtm5n
ResearchGate profile: http://bit.ly/35p20bG
Twitter handle: @CristineLegare