Abstract:

"Humans’ ability to create and use tools is one of our species’ defining characteristics and has irreversibly altered our social and ecological environments. All human societies create and use tools, and no other species does so with the complexity and diversity of humans. Yet, paradoxically, it is well-established that western children are remarkably poor at simple tool innovation challenges, such as reshaping pipecleaners to retrieve-out-of reach rewards (widely known as the hook task). Studies have further shown that children in non-western populations perform worse than western ones with some small-scale societies performing at floor. We suggest that the practice of taking western designed and validated cognitive measures and transporting them to non-western populations is flawed and can lead to erroneous and damaging conclusions.

In this ESRC funded project, we will develop, for the first time, culturally fair measures of tool innovation for 4-12-year-old children in four geographically and culturally diverse populations; urban Western children (UK), two small-scale subsistence societies (Congo) and a rural Indigenous population (Malaysia). We will do so by taking a bottom-up approach to developing culturally grounded tool innovation measures, using ethnographic data alongside cycles of feedback from community members and protocol refinement to ensure maximal validity.

Speaker's social media:

@bruce_rawlings