1.5. Childhood and culture, anthropological approaches
The vast majority of research in the field of developmental psychology suffers from a strong sampling bias: 91% of the studies focus on children in wealthy, industrialized, democratic Western societies; moreover, even in these societies, children from the middle and upper classes are overrepresented1.
Work in anthropology and cross-cultural psychology allows us to overcome these knowledge limitations through two approaches: a depth or precision approach, which often relies on detailed and deeply contextualized ethnographic data, typically from one society, and a breadth or size approach, which relies more on experimental data from standardized tasks deployed in many different societies. These two approaches are complementary, each with its own strengths and weaknesses (see Amir and McAuliffe (2020)).
1.5.1. The phylogenesis of childhood
Like other primates, young humans are dependent on others for long periods after weaning and exhibit a unique life history stage called infancy. Follow-up fossil evidence such as the eruption of the first, second and third molars suggests that the duration of this stage of life history has more than doubled over the past 4 million years.
This lengthening and dependence are at the heart of hominization2, the concept of “neoteny” describes this immaturity at birth of the human baby compared to other species, but it is precisely this immaturity that will allow the development of specifically human characteristics. For example, the infant chimpanzee dominates the infant human in the first months of life in all types of tasks and tests, then progressively, this ratio will reverse.
The length of childhood will allow the human child to acquire an enormous amount of information, directly through its own observations and actions, as well as indirectly through a complex cultural transmission. Moreover, human populations, having colonized the entire planet, live in very different geographical, climatic and social environments, hence the concept of “adaptive phenotypic plasticity” which describes the capacity of an organism to adapt its development to environmental conditions (Amir and McAuliffe 2020).
Adaptation for the individual will consist of developing phenotypes that are suitable to environmental conditions from the start of life; variations in behaviors will result from the responses to the different socioecological indices.
An empirical and developmental example of this type of prediction is that a child’s neighborhood hardship enables his or her prosocial behavior to be predicted in an experimental game: children living in difficult, low-income neighborhoods exhibit less prosocial behavior toward strangers than children in less difficult, higher-income neighborhoods. These patterns mirror those observed among adults living in similar economic conditions (Safra and Tecu 2016).
Development during childhood is a period of heightened sensitivity to environmental indices and developmental research in this area tends to exploit variations in these indices as natural experiments to determine downstream behavioral consequences.
A different, but largely compatible, perspective is that derived from “culture-gene coevolution” theory: like adaptive phenotypic plasticity, this approach also offers a rich perspective on child development, but focuses relatively more on the role of cultural transmission in early childhood (Amir and McAuliffe 2020).
This approach draws on the social learning model and focuses on the variation of cultural norms and their internalization as a driving force for behavioral variation across societies; cultural norms are behavioral heuristics that individuals tend to follow when: (1) a sufficiently large number of community members conform to them – the so-called “empirical expectation” (descriptive norms) – and (2) a sufficiently large number of community members expect the individual to conform, also called “normative expectation” (injunctive norms).
Initial propensities for social learning are likely to be equivalent in all populations, and these shared propensities then interact with varying cultural norms across societies to produce variations in behavior. Cross-cultural work distinguishes the characteristics of our psychology and behavior that are sensitive to cultural input in varying degrees.
In contrast to the concept of universality, which assumes that a phenomenon would be observed everywhere in the world, cross-cultural developmental psychology advances the concept of regularity (Rogoff 2003), to track and measure the regularities of child behaviors and developmental trajectories in various environments.
For example, the rejection of an allowance when they receive more than another person seems to appear with some regularity in children in different societies, which does not irrevocably demonstrate that the aversion to having more than another person is universal, but the regularity of its occurrence may lead to new research questions. For example, can the roots of this form of aversion be traced phylogenetically? Can formal models of cooperative interactions foster inequity aversion? Thus, cross-cultural developmental studies can contribute to broader theoretical and evolutionary debates about human behavior (Amir and McAuliffe 2020).
1.5.2. Theoretical models on the influence of culture on development
A great many theoretical models exist to explain the influence of culture on the child: Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems model (1977), Whiting’s psychocultural research model (1977), Vygotsky’s sociocultural-historical theory (1980), Harkness and Super’s developmental niche model (1994), Weisner’s ecocultural model (2002), Rogoff’s transformation of participation approach (2003), Keller’s ecocultural model of child development (2013) and Worthman’s bioecocultural model of child development (2010).
A general characteristic of these models is that they all seek, in one way or another, to contextualize child development as a dialog between the individual and the various social, ecological and cultural inputs he or she receives.
Harkness and Super’s model, for example, focuses on three elements: the physical and social environments in which the child lives, child education and child care customs and the psychology of caregivers. The authors, and others, have used this framework to assess how parents’ ethnic theories of child development help shape practices, such as daily infant routines, and how these practices in turn influence child behaviors, such as patterns of play and social interaction.
Similarly, Bronfenbrenner’s (1977) ecological systems model, undoubtedly the best-known theoretical development framework, provides a guide for examining how the immediate, internal and external environments in which children live shape their development, with particular attention paid to individual differences, such as temperament, and the ever-changing nature of these pathways over time.
This framework has been used to examine a wide range of behaviors, for example, bullying and peer victimization among youth in the United States, in order to assess how microsystems such as parent–youth relationships, exosystems such as exposure to media violence and macrosystems such as religion all contribute to child behaviors and beliefs.
However, the concept of “culture” is a confusing one; in Bronfenbrenner’s model, the child sits in concentric spheres of cultural influence, with macro- and microsystems influencing his or her development. However, separation of the individual from his or her culture can be problematic, as culture is not separate, but rather a product of human activity (Rogoff 2003).
Indeed, development is a continuous process by which people are transformed by participating in culture, and their participation in turn transforms culture itself; the distinction between biology and culture is also flawed, as they are not alternative influences, but inseparable aspects of the system in which individuals develop. More contemporary conceptualizations thus attempt to position development in both cultural and biological contexts.
1.5.3. Ethnographic approaches and monocultural analyses
The ethnographic study of child development has its roots in the