Culture is an optometrist: Cultural contexts adjust the prescription of social learning bifocals.

The "prescription" of humans' social learning bifocals is fine-tuned by cultural norms and, as a result, the readiness with which the instrumental or conventional lenses are used to view behavior differs across cultures. We present evidence for this possibility from cross-cultural work examining children's imitation and innovation.

Teaching Through Collaboration: Flexibility and Diversity in Caregiver-Child Interaction Across Cultures.

Teaching supports the high-fidelity transmission of knowledge and skills. This study examined similarities and differences in caregiver teaching practices in the United States and Vanuatu (N = 125 caregiver and 3- to 8-year-old child pairs) during a collaborative problem-solving task. Caregivers used diverse verbal and nonverbal teaching practices and adjusted their behaviors in response to task difficulty and child age in both populations.

Watch me, watch you: ritual participation increases in-group displays and out-group monitoring in children.

Collective rituals serve social functions for the groups that perform them, including identifying group members and signalling group commitment. A novel social group paradigm was used in an afterschool programme ( = 60 4-11-year-olds) to test the influence of participating in a ritual task on in-group displays and out-group monitoring over repeated exposures to the group. The results demonstrate that ritual participation increases in-group displays (i.

Smart Conformists: Children and Adolescents Associate Conformity With Intelligence Across Cultures.

The current study used a novel methodology based on multivocal ethnography to assess the relations between conformity and evaluations of intelligence and good behavior among Western (U.S.) and non-Western (Ni-Vanuatu) children (6- to 11-year-olds) and adolescents (13- to 17-year-olds; N = 256).

Is non-conformity WEIRD? Cultural variation in adults' beliefs about children's competency and conformity.

Cross-cultural comparisons provide critical insight into variation in reasoning about intelligence. In two studies, the authors used a novel methodology based on multivocal ethnography to assess the role of conformity in U.S.

Imitative flexibility and the development of cultural learning.

Two studies test the hypothesis that imitative fidelity is influenced by cues to interpret behavior as instrumental versus conventional. Study 1 (N=57, 4-5-yr-olds) manipulated non-verbal cues (start- and end-states of action sequences) and Study 2 (N=211, 4-6-yr-olds) manipulated verbal cues to examine the effects of information about instrumental versus conventional goals on imitative fidelity. Imitative fidelity was highest (Studies 1 and 2), innovation was lowest (Study 1), and difference detection was more accurate (Study 2) when cued with information about conventional rather than instrumental behavior.