Folk Psychologies Across Cultures

Without taking a single psychology course, ordinary people learn to understand, predict, and explain one anther's actions, thoughts, and motivations.

Many cognitive scientists and philosophers claim that our everyday or folk understanding of mental states constitutes a theory of mind. That theory is widely called folk psychology (sometimes-commonsense psychology). The terms in which folk psychology are couched are familiar ones of "belief" and "desire," "hunger," "pain," and so forth. According to many theorists, folk psychology plays a central role in our capacity to predict and explain the behavior of ourselves and of others. This book has two goals: (a) to provide a framework for analyzing folk psychologies, and (b) to describe multiple forms that folk psychologies assume in different cultures. Features/Benefits: * Cross-cultural perspectives illustrate typical variations of folk thinking in the world's cultures and help readers understand the varied ways that people they encounter will likely view life. * Each chapter opens with and is structured around a central question the chapter is designed to answer, inviting the reader to participate in exploring the issue at hand.

A concluding chapter, "Trends in Folk Psychologies," addresses the value of studying folk psychologies and what can be