The Social Nature of Mind
In 1931 Soviet
neuropsychologist Alexander Romanovich Luria traveled to central Asia to study
the psychology of the people in that region. His goal was to test a bold
hypothesis proposed by his colleague and mentor, Lev Vygotsky.
Though trained as a
literary critic, who wrote a dissertation on Hamlet, Vygotsky became one of the giants of developmental
psychology, the field that studies how behavior and thinking changes over a
life span. It seems fair to say prior to Vygostky that most developmental
theories emphasized the idea that the stages of cognitive development are
encoded into the child at birth. It was also then common to use analogies from
botany to describe child development. The child was seen as a plant unfolding
through a prearranged sequence from seed to flower. It was no accident, as
Vygotsky wryly noted, that children were sent to a place called
kindergarten.
In contrast, Vygotsky
embraced a radically different understanding of development. To him, the
child’s major task is to become a competent member of society. This meant that
the goals of development would be specific to particular cultures and
historical contexts. For example, it is now considered important that children
in the first years of school learn to read and write. Yet reading and writing
are cultural inventions, less than 10,000 years old and the phenomenon of mass
literacy arose only with the industrial revolution. In modern societies, the
ability to read and write had become important developmental milestones. While
some developmental sequences, such as the transition from crawling to walking,
may indeed be hard wired into us, others are created by society and, then,
transmitted by culture.
Vygotsky and Luria built
on this observation. Just as people create and improve physical tools to
manipulate the environment and pass this technology onto future generations,
they also invent psychological tools. A psychological tool (sometimes called a
cognitive tool) can be understood as a technique or strategy that alters human
cognition or behavior. Physical tools alter the material environment,
psychological tools are cultural inventions that change how we process
information or how we behave. For example, the Hindu-Arabic number system is a
case of just such a tool. Hindu-Arabic numbers allow us to perform calculations
much more efficiently than previous systems of representing quantities. If you
doubt this, try doing multiplication with Roman numerals. Reading and writing
themselves are cognitive tools - they allow us to create an external form of
memory and receive information from distant sources. Cognitive tools shift
human consciousness in important ways. In a well-documented example, mass
literacy empowered masses of people to directly read and interpret scriptures,
with the importance consequence of loosening the authority of priestly
mediation.
An inescapable
consequence of this view is that different cultures and different
socio-economic arrangements encourage different mentalities. This would be
particularly true of different historical stages and different levels of social
complexity. From Vygostsky’s view we should not expect ancient people to think
about the world in the same way as modern people do.
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