ABSTRACT
Does culture change the way we think? If so, where we are from should influence our cognitive habits. The development of intellectual abilities, such as perception (how we make sense of sensory information) and problem-solving, should owe a great deal to the places, people and values that form our cultural backgrounds. This notion of cognition as a culturally relative phenomenon seems obvious and frankly fairly harmless at first glance. Obviously Germans think about the world differently from the way Papuans or Cubans do. But wait. Can we assume that if the German intellect is qualitatively different from, say, the Pacific intellect, it is quantitatively different too? Could it be that styles of thinking that are indigenous to Culture A are somehow better than those from Culture B? This sounds rather simplistic (even simple-minded), but a glance at Chapter 2 reminds us that psychologists have written many controversial pages down the years about the (now largely discredited) idea that quantitative intellectual differences separate people from different cultures, or with different-coloured skin.
