Causal curiosity and the conventionality of culture
Lori Markson a1andGil Diesendruck a2 a1 Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720
markson@berkeley.edu a2 Department of Psychology and Gonda Brain Research Center, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan 52900, Israel
dieseng@mail.biu.ac.il
Abstract
Tomasello et al. argue that cultural cognition derives from humans' unique motivation to share psychological states. We suggest that what underlies this motivation is children's propensity to seek out the underlying causes of behavior. This propensity, combined with children's competence at it, makes them especially skillful at acquiring the intentional, conventional, and reliable forms that constitute culture.
