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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