Abstracts

How We Make the Social World: Cultural Niche Construction and the Example of Fictional Bedtime Stories

Anika Fiebich University of Duisburg-Essen

What is and how do we create our social world? How do things like ‘marriage’ or ‘money’ come into existence? The philosophical debate on social ontology deals with questions like that (see e.g., Searle 2010; Gilbert 2013; Tuomela 2010). In our social world, we create and deal with social facts, which can be distinguished between arti-facts that have been designed for a specific purpose (e.g., scissors have been designed for cutting things) and institutional facts that have particular status functions in an institutional context (e.g. a director has a number of rights and duties within a company).

Taking a look into different cultures, the following questions arise: why do our social worlds differ? Why do particular artifacts and institutional facts exist in one culture but not in another one? What is the universal and culture-specific motivation to construct social reality? To address questions like these, I will outline a model that is inspired by literature on so-called ‘cultural niche construction’ (see e.g., Sterelny 2007). The basic idea of cultural niche construction is that social reality is not created unilaterally (i.e., people construct social facts along their needs and values and needs and then recognize them collectively as such) but within a reciprocal process (i.e., people do construct social facts but in turn, engaging in a socially constructed world also impacts their cognitions and hence values and needs).

In my talk I will refer to the various dimensions of culture spelled out by Hofstede (2001) and illustrate the plausibility of a cultural niche construction view by the example of culture-specific fictional bedtime stories. Whereas in Western cultures like America, Grimm’s fairy tales such as ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ are popular bedtime stories, Eastern cultures such as China prefer Aesop’s fables such as ‘The Ant and the Grasshoper’. This culture-specific preference mirrors the values of a given society. On the one hand, for example, ‘The Ant and the Grasshoper’ mirrors culture-specific values present in China (but not in America) such as a ‘long-term future orientation’ (e.g., the Ant collects food in the winter for the summer) or restraint (e.g., the Ant resisting temptations such as playing the violin instead of working) (see Hofstede 2001 for a distinction of the various dimensions that are different among particular cultures). On the other hand, dealing with culture-specific artifacts such as bedtime stories may impact individuals’ (social) cognition; for example, the narrative of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ can only be understood by those children that are capable of understanding the protagonists’ behaviours in terms of mental states, i.e. by folk psychology that is prevalent in Western cultures. For example, children cannot understand why Little Red Riding Hood is surprised that her grandma turns out to be the wolf if they do not recognize that Little Red Riding Hood had the false belief of the wolf being her grandma before. Indeed, dealing with culture-specific narratives correlates with the acquisition of mental state terms and the ontogenetic development of folk psychology (see Fiebich in press for a discussion).