[BERG] BERG/SHAIR Wednesday 13th November

[Alejandro Sanchez Amaro]

Dear all,


This is an announcement that this Wednesday  Roman Stengeling from the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Antrhopology in Leipzig, Germany will give a presentation on: Culture and Human Development: Issues of Global Representation and Contextualization. The talk will be online at 4pm and we will also gather in the Psychology Common Room.

Since its inception, child development research has predominantly sampled participants from a narrow and unrepresentative range of cultural communities. Despite this, findings are typically generalized to represent "children" universally. This talk presents a systematic review of studies from five major journals (2016-2020), highlighting the persistent overrepresentation of children from culturally atypical populations, often in the absence of contextual detail. To illustrate the impact of this biased sampling and lack of contextualization, I will discuss recent cross-cultural research conducted in rural Namibia and urban Germany, examining cultural variation in socio-cognitive development—specifically, children’s cooperation in social dilemmas and their understanding of false beliefs. These findings advocate for culturally-inclusive approaches to finally advance a genuinely global, rather than regional, science of child development.


best,
Alex

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