By: Etienne Benson, APA Monitor
Friday, April 04, 2003


Current research of Adjunct Professor Scott Atran and Douglas Medin of Northwestern University is featured in the April 2003 issue of the APA Monitor on Psychology. The article, "Thinking green", highlights how Atran and Medin combine the research traditions of anthropology and cognitive psychology while looking at what underlies environmentally friendly behavior and, in the process, questions some classic findings in cognitive psychology.

From the article:

What makes a person decide to recycle, carpool to work instead of driving alone or farm sustainably? Why do cultures differ in how they understand and treat the natural world? To answer those questions, psychologists are reaching across disciplinary boundaries to work with urban planners, ecologists, conservationists, product life-cycle experts and many others....

Since the mid-1990s, Medin and Atran have been studying cultural differences in folkbiology and folkecology--the nonscientific ways in which people categorize and reason about the natural world. Those cultural differences, they have found, can have profound effects on how people act toward the natural environment.

Such differences are also proving to be a rich source of insights into basic cognitive processes. When looking for cultural variation in how people categorize, for instance, "Biology is a natural domain to look to," says Medin. "You can't ask how people categorize Chevys and Fords in rural Guatemala because they don't have Chevys and Fords. But they do have plants and animals...."

Copyright 2003, APA Monitor.

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