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There is no such thing as culture-free intelligence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 September 2022

Gary Lupyan Open the ORCID record for Gary Lupyan [Opens in a new window]
Gary Lupyan*
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Madison, WI 53706, USA. [email protected]; http://sapir.psych.wisc.edu
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Abstract

Cognitive scientists and psychometricians are unaccustomed to thinking about culture, often treating their measures – memory, vocabulary, intelligence – as natural kinds. Relying on these measures, behavioral geneticists likewise seem to not wonder about their origin and cultural provenance. I argue that complex human traits – the sort we are most interested in measuring – are cultural products. We can measure them and their heritability, but to conclude that what we have measured is unbound to a time and place is hubris.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 45 , 2022 , e169
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

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