Douglas L Medin
Biographic Data
| ID | 89620 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Douglas L Medin |
| GIVEN NAMES | Douglas L |
| FAMILY NAME | Medin |
| SIGNATURE | MEDIN D L |
| AFFILIATIONS | Northwestern University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4372-7202 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 52 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 539 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 51 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1972 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2022 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
Hands on
Parent-child communication is a rich, multimodal process. Substantial research has documented the communicative strategies in certain (predominantly White) United States families, yet we know little about these communicative strategies in Native American families. The current study addresses that gap by documenting the verbal and nonverbal behaviors used by parents and their 4-year-old children ( N = 39, 25 boys) across two communities: Menominee…
Tracing culture in children’s thinking
There is considerable agreement that cognitive development is shaped by culture. Less clear, however, is the mechanism by which culture exerts its influence as cognition unfolds. Prior work has primarily focused on culture as a species-specific medium of cognitive development or as an explicative factor of cognitive capacities. Here we describe a more recent alternative, the culture-as-ecosystem approach. In this view, concepts are embedded withi…
Cognition Beyond the Human
We present a new account of the cognitive commitments at stake in animist epistemologies. We use field-based cognitive experiments to contribute to anthropological theories of the new animism, focusing on concepts of nonhuman agency afforded on one animist framework, that of the Ngöbe of Panama. Results from multiple studies using converging methods indicate that Ngöbe individuals have access to an ecocentric conceptual framework within which age…
Categories and Taxonomies
Categories and taxonomies are critical components in uncovering how humans categorize and reason about the world. This entry reviews research in anthropology and psychology to provide cross‐disciplinary insights on conceptual organization of natural kinds. It also summarizes evidence on the use of categories in reasoning to support the proposition for a shift in orientation from a singular focus on taxonomic reasoning to viewing taxonomic and eco…
The Moral Priorities of Rap Listeners
A cross-cultural approach to moral psychology starts from researchers withholding judgments about universal right and wrong and instead exploring what the members of a community subjectively perceive to be moral or immoral in their local context. This study seeks to identify the moral concerns that are most relevant to listeners of hip-hop music. We use validated psychological surveys including the Moral Foundations Questionnaire (Graham, Haidt, …
If Indigenous Peoples Stand with the Sciences, Will Scientists Stand with Us
Indigenous sciences are foundationally based in relationships, reciprocity, and responsibilities. These sciences constitute systems of knowledge developed through distinct perspectives on and practices of knowledge creation and decision-making that not only have the right to be pursued on their own terms but may also be vital in solving critical twenty-first-century challenges. “Science” is often treated as if it were a single entity, free of cul…
Unfolding Futures
In the summer and autumn of 2016, American Indian people1 (re)entered American political consciousness in ways not seen since the takeover of the South Dakota village of Wounded Knee in 1973. Wounded Knee featured a seventy-one-day siege, the mobilization of the American military against Indian activists, and copious media reportage; and it came on the heels of the 1972 takeover of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington, D.C., the seizure and…
Systems of (non-)diversity
Emerging Trends in Culture and Concepts
The relation between culture and concepts has long been a fascinating topic for layperson and scientist alike. But often this topic has generated more heat than light—strong claims have been paired with weak evidence, and anecdotes have been more common than empirical data. More recently, however, interdisciplinary research programs have begun to demonstrate that interest in the relation between culture and concepts is not misplaced. In this essa…
Learning by Observing, Pitching in, and Being in Relations in the Natural World
Commentaries and Rejoinder on
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 …
Naming the Living Things
This work focuses on the underlying conceptual structure of children’s category of living things from a cross-cultural, cross-linguistic perspective. School-aged children ( n = 129) from three Argentinean communities (rural Wichí-speaking, rural Spanish-speaking, urban Spanish-speaking) were asked to generate the names of living things. Analyses were focused on the typicality, semantic organization, and hierarchical level of the names mentioned. …
Perspectives on Culture and Concepts
The well-respected tradition of research on concepts uses cross-cultural comparisons to explore which aspects of conceptual behavior are universal versus culturally variable. This work continues, but it is being supplemented by intensified efforts to study how conceptual systems and cultural systems interact to modify and support each other. For example, cultural studies within the framework of domain specificity (e.g., folkphysics, folkpsycholog…
Who's Asking
Analysis and case studies show that including different orientations toward the natural world makes for more effective scientific practice and science education. The answers to scientific questions depend on who's asking, because the questions asked and the answers sought reflect the cultural values and orientations of the questioner. These values and orientations are most often those of Western science. In Who's Asking?, Douglas Medin and Megan …
A garden experiment revisited
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'…
Contents Vol. 55, 2012
Core Folkbiological Concepts
We examine two core folk-biological concepts (e.g., animate, living thing, where small capital letters denote concepts; quotation marks denote their names; italics denote languagespecific names) in adults and children from the Wich community, an indigenous group of Amerindians living in the Chaco forest in north Argentina. We provide an overview of the Wich community, describing in brief their interaction with objects and events in the natural wo…
Cultural Differences in Children’s Ecological Reasoning and Psychological Closeness to Nature
In spite of evidence for cultural variation in adult concepts of the biological world (i.e., folkbiological thought), research regarding the influence of culture on children's concepts is mixed, and cultural influences on many aspects of early folkbiological thought remain underexplored. Previous research has shown that there are cultural differences in ecological reasoning and psychological closeness to nature between Menominee Native American a…
Desettling Expectations in Science Education
Calls for the improvement of science education in the USA continue unabated, with particular concern for the quality of learning opportunities for students from historically nondominant communities. Despite many and varied efforts, the field continues to struggle to create robust, meaningful forms of science education. We argue that 'settled expectations' in schooling function to (a) restrict the content and form of science valued and communicate…
Psychology out of the laboratory
The idea that people inevitably act in accordance with their self-interest on the basis of a calculation of costs and benefits does not constitute an adequate framework for understanding political acts of violence and self-sacrifice. Recent research suggests that a better understanding is needed of how sacred values and notions of self and group identity lead people to act in terms of principles rather than prospects when the two come into confli…
Innovations in Culturally Based Science Education Through Partnerships and Community
Naming the Animals that Come to Mind
This article considers the semantic structure of the animal category from a cross-cultural developmental perspective. Children and adults from three North American communities (urban majority culture, rural majority culture and rural Native American) were prompted to generate animal names, and the resulting lists were analyzed for their underlying dimensionality and for the typicality or salience of specific animal names. The semantic structure o…
Language and Experience Influence Children's Biological Induction
Children's reasoning about biological concepts is influenced not only by their experiences in the natural world and in their classrooms, but also by the way that these concepts are named. In English, 'animal' can refer either to (a) exclusively non-human animals, or (b) all animate beings (human and non-human animals). In Indonesian, this category of animate beings has no dedicated name. Here, we ask whether this difference in naming has conseque…
Cultural processes in science education
Although there has been considerable focus on the underrepresentation of minorities in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines and the need for science instruction that fosters diversity, much of the associated effort has focused on the goal of diversity and tended to assume that science and science learning are acultural. We describe a conceptual framework employed in our work with both urban and rural Native America…
Sinning Saints and Saintly Sinners
The question of why people are motivated to act altruistically has been an important one for centuries, and across various disciplines. Drawing on previous research on moral regulation, we propose a framework suggesting that moral (or immoral) behavior can result from an internal balancing of moral self-worth and the cost inherent in altruistic behavior. In Experiment 1 , participants were asked to write a self-relevant story containing words ref…
Categories and Concepts
Cultural processes in science education
Although there has been considerable focus on the underrepresentation of minorities in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines and the need for science instruction that fosters diversity, much of the associated effort has focused on the goal of diversity and tended to assume that science and science learning are acultural. We describe a conceptual framework employed in our work with both urban and rural Native America…
Desettling Expectations in Science Education
Calls for the improvement of science education in the USA continue unabated, with particular concern for the quality of learning opportunities for students from historically nondominant communities. Despite many and varied efforts, the field continues to struggle to create robust, meaningful forms of science education. We argue that 'settled expectations' in schooling function to (a) restrict the content and form of science valued and communicate…
Evolution and devolution of knowledge
Anthropological enquiry suggests that all societies classify animals and plants in similar ways. Paradoxically, in the same cultures that have seen large advances in biological science, practical knowledge of nature has dramatically diminished. Here we describe historical, cross-cultural, and developmental research on the ways in which people ordinarily conceptualize organic nature (folk biology), concentrating on cognitive consequences associate…
Psychology out of the laboratory
The idea that people inevitably act in accordance with their self-interest on the basis of a calculation of costs and benefits does not constitute an adequate framework for understanding political acts of violence and self-sacrifice. Recent research suggests that a better understanding is needed of how sacred values and notions of self and group identity lead people to act in terms of principles rather than prospects when the two come into confli…
Folkbiological reasoning from a cross-cultural developmental perspective
In 2 experiments, the authors examined the evolution of folkbiological reasoning in children (4 to 10 years of age) and adults from 4 distinct communities (rural Native American, rural majority culture, and suburban and urban North American communities). Using an adoption paradigm, they examined participants' intuitions regarding the inheritance of properties and the mechanisms underlying the transmission of kindhood. Across all communities and a…
Categories and Concepts
Who's Asking
Analysis and case studies show that including different orientations toward the natural world makes for more effective scientific practice and science education. The answers to scientific questions depend on who's asking, because the questions asked and the answers sought reflect the cultural values and orientations of the questioner. These values and orientations are most often those of Western science. In Who's Asking?, Douglas Medin and Megan …
Are There Kinds of Concepts
Past research on concepts has focused almost exclusively on noun-object concepts. This paper discusses recent research demonstrating that useful distinctions may be made among kinds of concepts, including both object and nonobject concepts. We discuss three types of criteria, based on structure, process, and content, that may be used to distinguish among kinds of concepts. The paper then reviews a number of possible candidates for kinds based on …
If Indigenous Peoples Stand with the Sciences, Will Scientists Stand with Us
Indigenous sciences are foundationally based in relationships, reciprocity, and responsibilities. These sciences constitute systems of knowledge developed through distinct perspectives on and practices of knowledge creation and decision-making that not only have the right to be pursued on their own terms but may also be vital in solving critical twenty-first-century challenges. “Science” is often treated as if it were a single entity, free of cul…
Unfolding Futures
In the summer and autumn of 2016, American Indian people1 (re)entered American political consciousness in ways not seen since the takeover of the South Dakota village of Wounded Knee in 1973. Wounded Knee featured a seventy-one-day siege, the mobilization of the American military against Indian activists, and copious media reportage; and it came on the heels of the 1972 takeover of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington, D.C., the seizure and…
Folkbiology doesn't Come from Folkpsychology
Nearly all psychological research on basic cognitive processes of category formation and reasoning uses sample populations associated with large research institutions in technologically-advanced societies. Lopsided attention to a select participant pool risks biasing interpretation, no matter how large the sample or how statistically reliable the results. The experiments in this article address this limitation. Earlier research with urban-USA chi…
Essentialism and Folkbiology
Experimental results in reference to Brazilian children and adults are presented in the context of current discussions about essentialism and folkbiology. Using an adoption paradigm, we replicate the basic findings of a previous article in this journal concerning the early emergence in children of a birth-parent bias (Atran et al. 2001). This cognitive bias supports the claim that causal essentialism cross-culturally constrains the reasoning abou…
Influence of deontological versus consequentialist orientations on act choices and framing effects
A long tradition in decision making assumes that people usually take a consequentialist perspective, which implies a focus on the outcomes only when making decisions. Such a view largely neglects the existence of a deontological perspective, which implies that people are sensitive to moral duties that require or prohibit certain behaviors, irrespective of the consequences. Similarly, recent research has also suggested that people holding “protect…
Perspectives on Culture and Concepts
The well-respected tradition of research on concepts uses cross-cultural comparisons to explore which aspects of conceptual behavior are universal versus culturally variable. This work continues, but it is being supplemented by intensified efforts to study how conceptual systems and cultural systems interact to modify and support each other. For example, cultural studies within the framework of domain specificity (e.g., folkphysics, folkpsycholog…
Ethnography and Experiments
This article reports the results of two independent studies dealing with saliency effects within the domain of folkbiological knowledge. In study 1, the authors present data from a free-listing task that explored tree-name generation among Tzotzil Maya of Zinacantán (Chiapas). Study 2 compares Menominee Native Americans with majority culture (nonprofessional) fish experts in central Wisconsin. The studies explore patterns of informant agreement a…
Cognition Beyond the Human
We present a new account of the cognitive commitments at stake in animist epistemologies. We use field-based cognitive experiments to contribute to anthropological theories of the new animism, focusing on concepts of nonhuman agency afforded on one animist framework, that of the Ngöbe of Panama. Results from multiple studies using converging methods indicate that Ngöbe individuals have access to an ecocentric conceptual framework within which age…
Why Folkbiology Matters
Systems of (non-)diversity
A garden experiment revisited
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'…
Core Folkbiological Concepts
We examine two core folk-biological concepts (e.g., animate, living thing, where small capital letters denote concepts; quotation marks denote their names; italics denote languagespecific names) in adults and children from the Wich community, an indigenous group of Amerindians living in the Chaco forest in north Argentina. We provide an overview of the Wich community, describing in brief their interaction with objects and events in the natural wo…
Cultural Differences in Children’s Ecological Reasoning and Psychological Closeness to Nature
In spite of evidence for cultural variation in adult concepts of the biological world (i.e., folkbiological thought), research regarding the influence of culture on children's concepts is mixed, and cultural influences on many aspects of early folkbiological thought remain underexplored. Previous research has shown that there are cultural differences in ecological reasoning and psychological closeness to nature between Menominee Native American a…
Naming the Animals that Come to Mind
This article considers the semantic structure of the animal category from a cross-cultural developmental perspective. Children and adults from three North American communities (urban majority culture, rural majority culture and rural Native American) were prompted to generate animal names, and the resulting lists were analyzed for their underlying dimensionality and for the typicality or salience of specific animal names. The semantic structure o…
Hands on
Parent-child communication is a rich, multimodal process. Substantial research has documented the communicative strategies in certain (predominantly White) United States families, yet we know little about these communicative strategies in Native American families. The current study addresses that gap by documenting the verbal and nonverbal behaviors used by parents and their 4-year-old children ( N = 39, 25 boys) across two communities: Menominee…
Commentaries and Rejoinder on
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 …
Role of reinforcement in discrimination learning set in monkeys
The comparative study of memory
Context theory of classification learning.
Most theories dealing with ill-defined concepts assume that performance is based on category level information or a mixture of category level and specific item information. A context theory of classificatio n is described in which judgments are assumed to derive exclusively from stored exemplar information. The main idea is that a probe item acts as a retrieval cue to access information associated with stimuli similar to the probe. The prediction…
Categories and Concepts
Categories and Concepts
Categories and Concepts
The role of theories in conceptual coherence.
The question of what makes a concept coherent (what makes its members form a comprehensible class) has received a variety of answers. In this article we review accounts based on similarity, feature correlations, and various theories of categorization. We find that each theory provides an inadequate account of conceptual coherence (or no account at all) because none provides enough constraints on possible concepts. We propose that concepts are coh…
Concepts and conceptual structure.
Respects for similarity.
This article reviews the status of similarity as an explanatory construct with a focus on similarity judgments. For similarity to be a useful construct, one must be able to specify the ways or respects in which two things are similar. One solution to this problem is to restrict the notion of similarity to hard-wired perceptual processes. It is argued that this view is too narrow and limiting. Instead, it is proposed that an important source of co…
Decision Making from a Cognitive Perspective (Psychology of Learning and Motivation
Categorization and Reasoning among Tree Experts
Folkbiology
The term "folkbiology" refers to people's everyday understanding of the biological world—how they perceive, categorize, and reason about living kinds. The study of folkbiology not only sheds light on human nature, it may ultimately help us make the transition to a global economy without irreparably damaging the environment or destroying local cultures. This book takes an interdisciplinary approach, bringing together the work of researchers in ant…
Are There Kinds of Concepts
Past research on concepts has focused almost exclusively on noun-object concepts. This paper discusses recent research demonstrating that useful distinctions may be made among kinds of concepts, including both object and nonobject concepts. We discuss three types of criteria, based on structure, process, and content, that may be used to distinguish among kinds of concepts. The paper then reviews a number of possible candidates for kinds based on …
Folkbiology doesn't Come from Folkpsychology
Nearly all psychological research on basic cognitive processes of category formation and reasoning uses sample populations associated with large research institutions in technologically-advanced societies. Lopsided attention to a select participant pool risks biasing interpretation, no matter how large the sample or how statistically reliable the results. The experiments in this article address this limitation. Earlier research with urban-USA chi…
Essentialism and Folkbiology
Experimental results in reference to Brazilian children and adults are presented in the context of current discussions about essentialism and folkbiology. Using an adoption paradigm, we replicate the basic findings of a previous article in this journal concerning the early emergence in children of a birth-parent bias (Atran et al. 2001). This cognitive bias supports the claim that causal essentialism cross-culturally constrains the reasoning abou…
Obituaries
The Native Mind
This article describes cross-cultural and developmental research on folk biology: that is, the study of how people conceptualize living kinds. The combination of a conceptual module for biology and cross-cultural comparison brings a new perspective to theories of categorization and reasoning. From the standpoint of cognitive psychology, the authors find that results gathered from standard populations in industrialized societies often fail to gene…
Evolution and devolution of knowledge
Anthropological enquiry suggests that all societies classify animals and plants in similar ways. Paradoxically, in the same cultures that have seen large advances in biological science, practical knowledge of nature has dramatically diminished. Here we describe historical, cross-cultural, and developmental research on the ways in which people ordinarily conceptualize organic nature (folk biology), concentrating on cognitive consequences associate…
Ethnography and Experiments
This article reports the results of two independent studies dealing with saliency effects within the domain of folkbiological knowledge. In study 1, the authors present data from a free-listing task that explored tree-name generation among Tzotzil Maya of Zinacantán (Chiapas). Study 2 compares Menominee Native Americans with majority culture (nonprofessional) fish experts in central Wisconsin. The studies explore patterns of informant agreement a…
Caring about framing effects
Cultural mosaics and mental models of nature
For much of their history, the relationship between anthropology and psychology has been well captured by Robert Frost's poem, “Mending Wall,” which ends with the ironic line, “good fences make good neighbors.” The congenial fence was that anthropology studied what people think and psychology studied how people think. Recent research, however, shows that content and process cannot be neatly segregated, because cultural differences in what people …
Sacred bounds on rational resolution of violent political conflict
We report a series of experiments carried out with Palestinian and Israeli participants showing that violent opposition to compromise over issues considered sacred is ( i ) increased by offering material incentives to compromise but ( ii ) decreased when the adversary makes symbolic compromises over their own sacred values. These results demonstrate some of the unique properties of reasoning and decision-making over sacred values. We show that th…
Experience and Cultural Models Matter
This paper builds on Hatano and Inagaki’s pioneering work on the role of experience and cultural models in children’s biological reasoning. We use a category-based induction task to consider how experience and cultural models shape rural and urban children’s patterns of biological reasoning. We discuss the implications of these findings for developmental theory and educational practice
Folkbiological reasoning from a cross-cultural developmental perspective
In 2 experiments, the authors examined the evolution of folkbiological reasoning in children (4 to 10 years of age) and adults from 4 distinct communities (rural Native American, rural majority culture, and suburban and urban North American communities). Using an adoption paradigm, they examined participants' intuitions regarding the inheritance of properties and the mechanisms underlying the transmission of kindhood. Across all communities and a…
Why Folkbiology Matters
Psychology (37 works) · Sociology (27 works) · Epistemology (23 works) · Child and Animal Learning Development (18 works) · Social Psychology (18 works) · Computer Science (14 works) · Categorization, perception, and language (12 works) · Cultural Differences and Values (12 works) · Social Psychology (12 works) · Philosophy (11 works)