Culture and Human Development: A New Look

Each culture generates a ‘folk psychology’ in the form of narratives about how people are, how and why they act, and how they deal with trouble. These narratives typically depict a canonical state of things and a deviation from that state. Stories are means for making these deviations comprehensible, if not acceptable. Typically, a culture’s institutional structure serves to ratify and even enforce its folk psychology. Studies are cited to show how and in what settings children come early to master the narrative forms for operating within the culture’s folk psychology. Human intelligence seems to express itself earlier in the social than in the physical domain, as with primates generally.