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Cognitive Development: Its Cultural and Social Foundations
Alexander Romanovich Luria, one of the most influential psychologists of the twentieth century, is best known for his pioneering work on the development of language and thought, mental retardation, and the cortical organization of higher mental processes. Virtually unnoticed has been his major contribution to the understanding of cultural differences in thinking.
In the early 1930s young Luria set out with a group of Russian psychologists for the steppes of central Asia. Their to study the impact of the socialist revolution on an ancient Islamic cotton-growing culture and, no less, to establish guidelines for a viable Marxist psychology. Lev Vygotsky, Luria's great teacher and friend, was convinced that variations in the mental development of children must be understood as a process including historically determined cultural factors. Guided by this conviction, Luria and his colleagues studied perception, abstraction, reasoning, and imagination among several remote groups of Uzbeks and Kirghiz―from cloistered illiterate women to slightly educated new friends of the central government.
The original hypothesis was abundantly supported by the the very structure of the human cognitive process differs according to the ways in which social groups live out their various realities. People whose lives are dominated by concrete, practical activities have a different method of thinking from people whose lives require abstract, verbal, and theoretical approaches to reality.
For Luria the legitimacy of treating human consciousness as a product of social history legitimized the Marxian dialectic of social development. For psychology in general, the research in Uzbekistan, its rich collection of data and the penetrating observations Luria drew from it, have cast new light on the workings of cognitive activity. The parallels between individual and social development are still being explored by researchers today. Beyond its historical and theoretical significance, this book represents a revolution in method. Much as Piaget introduced the clinical method into the study of children's mental activities, Luria pioneered his own version of the clinical technique for use in cross-cultural work. Had this text been available, the recent history of cognitive psychology and of anthropological study might well have been very different. As it is, we are only now catching up with Luria's procedures.
In the early 1930s young Luria set out with a group of Russian psychologists for the steppes of central Asia. Their to study the impact of the socialist revolution on an ancient Islamic cotton-growing culture and, no less, to establish guidelines for a viable Marxist psychology. Lev Vygotsky, Luria's great teacher and friend, was convinced that variations in the mental development of children must be understood as a process including historically determined cultural factors. Guided by this conviction, Luria and his colleagues studied perception, abstraction, reasoning, and imagination among several remote groups of Uzbeks and Kirghiz―from cloistered illiterate women to slightly educated new friends of the central government.
The original hypothesis was abundantly supported by the the very structure of the human cognitive process differs according to the ways in which social groups live out their various realities. People whose lives are dominated by concrete, practical activities have a different method of thinking from people whose lives require abstract, verbal, and theoretical approaches to reality.
For Luria the legitimacy of treating human consciousness as a product of social history legitimized the Marxian dialectic of social development. For psychology in general, the research in Uzbekistan, its rich collection of data and the penetrating observations Luria drew from it, have cast new light on the workings of cognitive activity. The parallels between individual and social development are still being explored by researchers today. Beyond its historical and theoretical significance, this book represents a revolution in method. Much as Piaget introduced the clinical method into the study of children's mental activities, Luria pioneered his own version of the clinical technique for use in cross-cultural work. Had this text been available, the recent history of cognitive psychology and of anthropological study might well have been very different. As it is, we are only now catching up with Luria's procedures.
175 pages, Paperback
First published December 1, 1976
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About the author
Alexander R. Luria
63books188followersAlexander Romanovich Luria (Russian:
Алекса́ндр Рома́нович Лу́рия
) was a famous Soviet neuropsychologist and developmental psychologist. He was one of the founders of cultural-historical psychology and the leaders of the Vygotsky Circle. Apart from his work with Vygotsky, he is widely known for his later work with two extraordinary psychological case studies, his study of a man with a highly advanced memory published as The Mind of a Mnemonist, and the study of a man with traumatic brain injury published in The Man with a Shattered World.
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September 17, 2013
I struggled to get hold of this book, it having been borrowed from the Uni library and not available from any of my other libraries. So, I’ve spent the last couple of days reading it at the State Library. The reason why this became something urgent for me to read is that I’ve been reading lots of Bourdieu and his criticism of Bernstein. Bernstein sees access to literacy as being something that also gives access to cognitive skills and abilities that are simply not available without it. Bourdieu makes somewhat similar conclusions, but sees some of the advantages of literacy as being subjective � that they give access to things that are considered better by ‘taste�, but less ‘objectively� advantages. Any advantage, according to what I can work out from Bourdieu, is mostly due to what he calls habitas � to the lifestyle of the person and their need for social distinction which is made more ‘distinct� if it is hard to achieve. So, the only ‘objective� advantages of the literacy and cognitive abilities is the difficulty they have in being achieved � a bit like the reason why gold is worth more than bread.
But somewhere at the back of my mind I’ve been thinking about Luria. I learnt of this book from reading a book on research (which I’ll get to reviewing at some stage) and he has been troubling me (although only at the back of my mind, really). The book on research mentions this book as an exemplary example of social research. It would be hard to overstate this. This really is a fantastic book. The fact it was a bit hard to get my hands on probably made it all the more interesting in a way � but it has given me lots to think about.
I’ve written about Vygotsky before () and Luria was involved in Vygotsky’s school. Vygotsky is very trendy (particularly at Melbourne Uni) although, admittedly, much more last year than he has proven to be this year. Mostly people were interested in his Zones of Proximal Development. But he also had ideas about the social nature of cognitive development � and it is these that I’ve been thinking about lately and that have made reading this book important.
To have a theory of cognitive development you need a kind of ladder in your head. You need to know that Kind A cognitive behaviour is of a lower type than Kind B. You need some idea of what you can do, given someone at Kind A level, to move your student towards the Kind B level.
This fits with the Bernstein and Bourdieu concern I have because if you can say that one kind of cognitive behaviour is, in fact, at a lower level to another kind of cognitive behaviour then teaching makes sense � that is, learning makes more sense than just being about show and ostentation.
In the 1930s in the Soviet Union there were all of those republics down near Turkey that end in –stan. One of them was Uzbekistan and Luria headed off there to do some research on the locals. Here were a group of people who were mostly illiterate and essentially feudal peasants. They were being placed in a kind of time machine and raced forward a couple of centuries.
Marxism holds that we are products of our social environment. Not just a little bit, but entirely products of that environment. Luria and Vygotsky took Marx at his word. They said that it should be possible to see real and predictable differences in how people think given the fact they are from socially more backward (less developed) cultures. That is, as Luria puts it, “some mental processes cannot develop apart from the appropriate forms of social life.�
He goes on to say what a rare opportunity has been offered him to do this research, “Psychology has made few attempts to deal with this problem, partly because of the infrequency of occasions when an investigator can observe how the restructuring of social systems has brought about rapidly changing forms of consciousness…�
The point being that, “We hypothesised that people with a primarily graphic-functional reflection of reality would show a different system of mental process from people with a predominantly abstract, verbal, and logical approach to reality.� (By graphic-functional, he just means that these people are fixated with concrete thinking, that they think ‘practically�, but rarely ‘theoretically�)
So, off he goes with other researchers and a series of brilliantly clever tests.
One of the debates that comes up from time to time is whether or not people see colours differently based on the language community they come from � this is particularly interesting if people come from language groups with different names for colours. For example, we have light and dark blue (but both are ‘blue�), whereas languages like Russian and French have quite different words for these two colours � and so they are seen as two colours in those language communities, rather than our one colour and two shades. However, few people in any language community is likely to have more than say 20 words they are likely to use to define colours. After you get through red, blue, green, yellow and so on you are probably going to start struggling. I’m taking it as read that people who can tell the difference between puce, burgundy and scarlet are basically oddities (if not actually wankers).
Luria’s test was to show people a series of coloured pieces of cloth and to ask them to group them according to the colours. Some people found this task quite easy (those schooled in the standard names we have for colours) who could arrange the colours according to those names and intensity � dark red, red, pink, white and so on. Others � a group of illiterate women in particular � simply said it couldn’t be done. And why? Well, they grouped the colours not on any abstract scheme of colour names, but rather according to what the colours reminded them of in the real world. I need to quote this:
“The group of ichkari women, however, presented us with an entirely different system. As a rule, the instruction to divide the colours into groups created complete confusion and called forth responses such as, ‘It can’t be done,� ‘None of them are the same, you can’t put them together,� ‘They’re not at all alike,� or ‘This is like calf’s-dung, and this is like a peach.� The women usually began by putting different skeins together, then attempted to explain their colour groups but shook their heads in perplexity and failed to complete the task.�
It is really important to see what is happening here. The women are not saying, ‘oh yes, nice pink, that will go with the hot pink over there and that will work well with the red�. They are saying, ‘this one looks like a peach and that one looks like cow dung � well, they don’t go together, clearly � hmm, none that look like cream, what to do?� They don’t have an abstract scheme for colours, they have a highly practical understanding of colours as they appear in their daily world.
This is a hurdle that comes to haunt these people time and time again. Often the women grouped the colours by their intensity � so the dark reds, blues and greens were all together, but the light colours of these same colours were in different piles. But invariably these schemas would fall apart for one reason or another.
The researchers tried much the same with geometrical shapes and asked the peasants to group those. There were triangles and squares, but some constructed of lines and some of dashes and some of dots. These would invariably be grouped according their resemblance to concrete objects � a square might look like a watch (particularly one constructed by a series of dots � as these would represent the hours on the face) and a square made of solid lines may be a glass. These would then never be put into the same category. Even when the researcher gave hints and more.
Perhaps the most fascinating of all, though, was the work with optical illusions. When we look at an optical illusion � like those ones where the same size circle is placed in the middle of either a series of small or big other circles � we imagine that every human being would look at these in exactly the same way and be ‘fooled� in the same way. These experiments showed that this was not the case: “It turned out that optical illusions are not universal. � The number of cases (where people saw the illusion) dropped proportionately in groups whose educational qualifications were lower. Thus the data clearly show that optical illusions are linked to complex psychological processes that vary in accordance with socio-historical development.�
The researchers then did interesting things with seeing how well people would be able to categorise objects. This really was mind-blowing. Essentially, they were playing that Sesame Street game where they sing, ‘One of these things is not like the other ones�. The objects presented were an ax, a saw, a hammer and a log. (I presume no one needs to be told the log is the odd one out), people invariably said they all belonged together and none could be taken away (the logic being that a tool is no use without something to work it on, so the log was needed too) The researchers then spoke about a mystery person who had done the test before and was crazy enough to have suggested the log might be the odd one out. I will quote some of the reported conversations this provoked from the illiterate peasants:
“But one fellow picked three things � the hammer, saw and hatchet � and said they were alike.
‘A saw, a hammer and a hatchet all have to work together. But the log has to be there too!�
Why do you think he picked those three things and not the log?
‘Probably he’s got a lot of firewood, but if we’ll be left without firewood, we won’t be able to do anything.�
True, but a hammer, a saw and a hatchet are all tools.
‘Yes, but even if we have tools, we still need wood � otherwise, we can’t build anything.’�
I find that a particularly fascinating exchange. What is most fascinating about it is the fact that the peasant is incapable of thinking outside of the practical situation created. What is also amazing is that their language ever developed a word like ‘tools� if people were unable to distinguish that level of abstraction. Vygotsky’s point is that the language may have this word because those further up the pecking order would have been able to deal more in abstractions, but to the peasants words would actually have much more concrete meanings � they would not really be the basis of abstract categories as they are for us, but have meaning that were much more fluid and much more tied to the practical situations the peasants found themselves in. In some cases ‘food� is also seen as a tool as a man can’t work without a full stomach.
Of the illiterate peasants some 80% of them were never able to do any of the tests in a way that showed they ‘got� the abstract category idea, they always grouped according to the practical principle of a task or a use � if a concrete story could be made to group the elements then all of the elements of the story became part of the category. Of those who had had even a little schooling, but were barely literate 70% were able to form the correct categorical principle � of those more literate 100% were able to.
One of the things that is said about this, which I’ve found remarkably interesting, is that, “it is far more difficult to establish a resemblance between objects� than difference between objects. This is actually obvious when you think about it, but a remarkable observation all the same. Asking someone to tell you why two things are different is a ‘concrete task�. All of the differences are apparent and there in front of you. However, asking someone to tell you why two different things are similar is infinitely harder. You need to be able to have abstract categories in which to link the objects to so as to point out their similarities.
People also found it impossible to explain things � when asked to imagine they had to tell someone what a car or the sun were to someone who had never seen either of them before they said that they would not be able to do such a thing � that personal experience was the only means open to people to understand anything.
Which brings me up to the point where I should stop � despite only having explained half of the book. The only other thing I will mention is syllogisms. This, again, needs to be quoted, as it is a deep and important philosophical point � so I’ll end just after this extended quote:
“Conceptual thinking involves an enormous expansion of the resultant forms of cognitive activity. A person capable of abstract thought reflects the external world more profoundly and completely and makes conclusions and inferences from perceived phenomena on the basis not only of his personal experience but also of schemes of logical thinking that objectively take shape in a fairly advanced stage of development of cognitive activity…�
So, a researcher asks the following questions in syllogistic form:
“Now, in the North, in Siberia, there is always snow. I told you that where there is snow the bears are white. What kind of bears are there in the North in Siberia?
‘I never travelled through Siberia. Tadzhibai-aka who died last year was there. He said that there were white bears there, but he didn’t say what kind.�
“We could scarcely find a better example of how the theoretical operation of inference from syllogisms is dealt with than the responses of this subject, who had only just arrived from the remoter regions of the Kashgar country. The subject refused to discuss any topics that went beyond his personal experience, insisting that ‘one could speak only of what one had seen,� and failing to accept the premises presented to him.�
The impossibility of moving these people out of their highly concrete existence and to see the abstract principles behind these tasks is amazing. There is lovely talk at one point of what are basically mathematics problems (if it is three miles to town A and four miles to town B, how far is it to town B from here if you have to go through town A first?) They can do the simple maths, generally, but if the towns are given real names and the distances given didn’t correspond to the actual distances between the towns then everything comes crashing down and no answer is obtained.
I found this book virtually impossible to put down � it really is well worth whatever effort is involved in your finding it and reading it. Laria writes beautifully, truly beautifully � in clear and ‘kind� sentences, unlike Vygotsky, how can be very difficult at times. He writes like someone with something important to say and that he wants to make sure you will understand. Worth more than five stars, to be honest.
But somewhere at the back of my mind I’ve been thinking about Luria. I learnt of this book from reading a book on research (which I’ll get to reviewing at some stage) and he has been troubling me (although only at the back of my mind, really). The book on research mentions this book as an exemplary example of social research. It would be hard to overstate this. This really is a fantastic book. The fact it was a bit hard to get my hands on probably made it all the more interesting in a way � but it has given me lots to think about.
I’ve written about Vygotsky before () and Luria was involved in Vygotsky’s school. Vygotsky is very trendy (particularly at Melbourne Uni) although, admittedly, much more last year than he has proven to be this year. Mostly people were interested in his Zones of Proximal Development. But he also had ideas about the social nature of cognitive development � and it is these that I’ve been thinking about lately and that have made reading this book important.
To have a theory of cognitive development you need a kind of ladder in your head. You need to know that Kind A cognitive behaviour is of a lower type than Kind B. You need some idea of what you can do, given someone at Kind A level, to move your student towards the Kind B level.
This fits with the Bernstein and Bourdieu concern I have because if you can say that one kind of cognitive behaviour is, in fact, at a lower level to another kind of cognitive behaviour then teaching makes sense � that is, learning makes more sense than just being about show and ostentation.
In the 1930s in the Soviet Union there were all of those republics down near Turkey that end in –stan. One of them was Uzbekistan and Luria headed off there to do some research on the locals. Here were a group of people who were mostly illiterate and essentially feudal peasants. They were being placed in a kind of time machine and raced forward a couple of centuries.
Marxism holds that we are products of our social environment. Not just a little bit, but entirely products of that environment. Luria and Vygotsky took Marx at his word. They said that it should be possible to see real and predictable differences in how people think given the fact they are from socially more backward (less developed) cultures. That is, as Luria puts it, “some mental processes cannot develop apart from the appropriate forms of social life.�
He goes on to say what a rare opportunity has been offered him to do this research, “Psychology has made few attempts to deal with this problem, partly because of the infrequency of occasions when an investigator can observe how the restructuring of social systems has brought about rapidly changing forms of consciousness…�
The point being that, “We hypothesised that people with a primarily graphic-functional reflection of reality would show a different system of mental process from people with a predominantly abstract, verbal, and logical approach to reality.� (By graphic-functional, he just means that these people are fixated with concrete thinking, that they think ‘practically�, but rarely ‘theoretically�)
So, off he goes with other researchers and a series of brilliantly clever tests.
One of the debates that comes up from time to time is whether or not people see colours differently based on the language community they come from � this is particularly interesting if people come from language groups with different names for colours. For example, we have light and dark blue (but both are ‘blue�), whereas languages like Russian and French have quite different words for these two colours � and so they are seen as two colours in those language communities, rather than our one colour and two shades. However, few people in any language community is likely to have more than say 20 words they are likely to use to define colours. After you get through red, blue, green, yellow and so on you are probably going to start struggling. I’m taking it as read that people who can tell the difference between puce, burgundy and scarlet are basically oddities (if not actually wankers).
Luria’s test was to show people a series of coloured pieces of cloth and to ask them to group them according to the colours. Some people found this task quite easy (those schooled in the standard names we have for colours) who could arrange the colours according to those names and intensity � dark red, red, pink, white and so on. Others � a group of illiterate women in particular � simply said it couldn’t be done. And why? Well, they grouped the colours not on any abstract scheme of colour names, but rather according to what the colours reminded them of in the real world. I need to quote this:
“The group of ichkari women, however, presented us with an entirely different system. As a rule, the instruction to divide the colours into groups created complete confusion and called forth responses such as, ‘It can’t be done,� ‘None of them are the same, you can’t put them together,� ‘They’re not at all alike,� or ‘This is like calf’s-dung, and this is like a peach.� The women usually began by putting different skeins together, then attempted to explain their colour groups but shook their heads in perplexity and failed to complete the task.�
It is really important to see what is happening here. The women are not saying, ‘oh yes, nice pink, that will go with the hot pink over there and that will work well with the red�. They are saying, ‘this one looks like a peach and that one looks like cow dung � well, they don’t go together, clearly � hmm, none that look like cream, what to do?� They don’t have an abstract scheme for colours, they have a highly practical understanding of colours as they appear in their daily world.
This is a hurdle that comes to haunt these people time and time again. Often the women grouped the colours by their intensity � so the dark reds, blues and greens were all together, but the light colours of these same colours were in different piles. But invariably these schemas would fall apart for one reason or another.
The researchers tried much the same with geometrical shapes and asked the peasants to group those. There were triangles and squares, but some constructed of lines and some of dashes and some of dots. These would invariably be grouped according their resemblance to concrete objects � a square might look like a watch (particularly one constructed by a series of dots � as these would represent the hours on the face) and a square made of solid lines may be a glass. These would then never be put into the same category. Even when the researcher gave hints and more.
Perhaps the most fascinating of all, though, was the work with optical illusions. When we look at an optical illusion � like those ones where the same size circle is placed in the middle of either a series of small or big other circles � we imagine that every human being would look at these in exactly the same way and be ‘fooled� in the same way. These experiments showed that this was not the case: “It turned out that optical illusions are not universal. � The number of cases (where people saw the illusion) dropped proportionately in groups whose educational qualifications were lower. Thus the data clearly show that optical illusions are linked to complex psychological processes that vary in accordance with socio-historical development.�
The researchers then did interesting things with seeing how well people would be able to categorise objects. This really was mind-blowing. Essentially, they were playing that Sesame Street game where they sing, ‘One of these things is not like the other ones�. The objects presented were an ax, a saw, a hammer and a log. (I presume no one needs to be told the log is the odd one out), people invariably said they all belonged together and none could be taken away (the logic being that a tool is no use without something to work it on, so the log was needed too) The researchers then spoke about a mystery person who had done the test before and was crazy enough to have suggested the log might be the odd one out. I will quote some of the reported conversations this provoked from the illiterate peasants:
“But one fellow picked three things � the hammer, saw and hatchet � and said they were alike.
‘A saw, a hammer and a hatchet all have to work together. But the log has to be there too!�
Why do you think he picked those three things and not the log?
‘Probably he’s got a lot of firewood, but if we’ll be left without firewood, we won’t be able to do anything.�
True, but a hammer, a saw and a hatchet are all tools.
‘Yes, but even if we have tools, we still need wood � otherwise, we can’t build anything.’�
I find that a particularly fascinating exchange. What is most fascinating about it is the fact that the peasant is incapable of thinking outside of the practical situation created. What is also amazing is that their language ever developed a word like ‘tools� if people were unable to distinguish that level of abstraction. Vygotsky’s point is that the language may have this word because those further up the pecking order would have been able to deal more in abstractions, but to the peasants words would actually have much more concrete meanings � they would not really be the basis of abstract categories as they are for us, but have meaning that were much more fluid and much more tied to the practical situations the peasants found themselves in. In some cases ‘food� is also seen as a tool as a man can’t work without a full stomach.
Of the illiterate peasants some 80% of them were never able to do any of the tests in a way that showed they ‘got� the abstract category idea, they always grouped according to the practical principle of a task or a use � if a concrete story could be made to group the elements then all of the elements of the story became part of the category. Of those who had had even a little schooling, but were barely literate 70% were able to form the correct categorical principle � of those more literate 100% were able to.
One of the things that is said about this, which I’ve found remarkably interesting, is that, “it is far more difficult to establish a resemblance between objects� than difference between objects. This is actually obvious when you think about it, but a remarkable observation all the same. Asking someone to tell you why two things are different is a ‘concrete task�. All of the differences are apparent and there in front of you. However, asking someone to tell you why two different things are similar is infinitely harder. You need to be able to have abstract categories in which to link the objects to so as to point out their similarities.
People also found it impossible to explain things � when asked to imagine they had to tell someone what a car or the sun were to someone who had never seen either of them before they said that they would not be able to do such a thing � that personal experience was the only means open to people to understand anything.
Which brings me up to the point where I should stop � despite only having explained half of the book. The only other thing I will mention is syllogisms. This, again, needs to be quoted, as it is a deep and important philosophical point � so I’ll end just after this extended quote:
“Conceptual thinking involves an enormous expansion of the resultant forms of cognitive activity. A person capable of abstract thought reflects the external world more profoundly and completely and makes conclusions and inferences from perceived phenomena on the basis not only of his personal experience but also of schemes of logical thinking that objectively take shape in a fairly advanced stage of development of cognitive activity…�
So, a researcher asks the following questions in syllogistic form:
“Now, in the North, in Siberia, there is always snow. I told you that where there is snow the bears are white. What kind of bears are there in the North in Siberia?
‘I never travelled through Siberia. Tadzhibai-aka who died last year was there. He said that there were white bears there, but he didn’t say what kind.�
“We could scarcely find a better example of how the theoretical operation of inference from syllogisms is dealt with than the responses of this subject, who had only just arrived from the remoter regions of the Kashgar country. The subject refused to discuss any topics that went beyond his personal experience, insisting that ‘one could speak only of what one had seen,� and failing to accept the premises presented to him.�
The impossibility of moving these people out of their highly concrete existence and to see the abstract principles behind these tasks is amazing. There is lovely talk at one point of what are basically mathematics problems (if it is three miles to town A and four miles to town B, how far is it to town B from here if you have to go through town A first?) They can do the simple maths, generally, but if the towns are given real names and the distances given didn’t correspond to the actual distances between the towns then everything comes crashing down and no answer is obtained.
I found this book virtually impossible to put down � it really is well worth whatever effort is involved in your finding it and reading it. Laria writes beautifully, truly beautifully � in clear and ‘kind� sentences, unlike Vygotsky, how can be very difficult at times. He writes like someone with something important to say and that he wants to make sure you will understand. Worth more than five stars, to be honest.
January 20, 2016
Trevor´s ŷ review (/review/show...) is so good I seriously thought of not writing mine. However I finally decided to write my review in order to add a couple of additional observations.
A pretty long time ago I read two of Luria´s wonderful short books and which predate but are similar to some of ´s writings. I had not come across this fascinating early work of Luria, based on what would now be termed cross-cultural psychological explorations. As Luria himself puts it right at the beginning of chapter one:
When asked to pick the odd element out of a list of elements such as "glass, saucepan, spectacles, bottle", the more illiterate tended to group the elements by contexts familiar to them rather than abstract categories. That is instead of picking out saucepan as the only object not made out of glass, they would pick out bottle ("because it contains vodka which is bad, whereas the rest of the things are good" or because bottle was the least useful thing to use while cooking -"you need spectacles to see what you are doing, the saucepan to heat and stir and the glass for pouring into what the saucepan has"). Even more striking was the inability of the more illiterate subjects of conceiving or even understanding that other ways of grouping objects could exist or be valid. After all, as has tirelessly pointed out, if you are striving to develop creativity, why should you pretend there is only one correct answer ( saucepan) when there are other equally valid or at least plausible answers (e.g. spectacles is the odd one because it is the only object that is not a vessel that can hold liquids).
The chapter in syllogisms is also striking. When presented with the premises of a syllogism such as "Bears who live in the far north are white. The city of X (a concrete city) is in the far north" and asked to apply the syllogism ("What color are the bears in X"), the reactions of the more illiterate group is striking. In many cases the syllogism is only turned into questions on the premises (Are bears who live in the far north white? Is X a city in the far north?). In other cases, sometimes when the questioner insists, the answer is that the subject can give no answer because he has no personal experience ("How should I know? I've never been very far north!" or "I don´t know. I've only seen a black bear" or "We always speak only of what we see; we don´t talk about what we haven´t seen"). However I wonder if the point Luria is trying to make, that is that the subjects cannot or will not apply the syllogism because they cannot abstract from their concrete realities is not quite as clear cut as he makes out. What might be happening is a shrewd refusal to grant the premises ("Good men stand drinks. You are a good man, therefore stand me a drink"). After all, in symbolic logic, it is true that a false statement implies anything, and thus in reasoning correctly in practical terms, you have to be on your guard against false or unacceptable premises. A similar point can be made when the subjects refuse to solve a simple arithmetic problem when the premise is blatantly false ("If a man can walk from Moscow to Tashkent in five hours and he can go twice as fast on a bicycle, how long does it take him to cycle between the two cities?") or when he starts thinking about practicalities like "it depends on how many stops he has to make" or "it depends on whether it rains". Schooling trains us to look for the (only) correct answer, to treat as irrelevancies real-life contingencies that may apply. Schools can be (mis-)used for indoctrination to treat as irrelevancies issues that are really very germane to a particular problem (cf. ).
In spite of my caveats and taking into account that Luria is, after all, a pioneering effort in what is now termed cross-cultural psychology, this still remains a very readable, impressive and thought-provoking introduction to a fascinating and controversial field.
A pretty long time ago I read two of Luria´s wonderful short books and which predate but are similar to some of ´s writings. I had not come across this fascinating early work of Luria, based on what would now be termed cross-cultural psychological explorations. As Luria himself puts it right at the beginning of chapter one:
It seems surprising that the science of psychology has avoided the idea that many mental processes are social and historical in origin, or that important manifestations of human consciousness have been directly shaped by the basic practices of human activity and the actual forms of culture.Just how much of what we perceive, our classification categories, how we reason and solve problems, what interests us and how we perceive ourselves and others is culturally determined? This is what Luria sought to find out on extended field trips into the remote rural islamic areas of 1930s Uzbekistan and Kirghizia where he had the rare opportunity of studying a jarring clash of cultures with an intuitive and insightful delicacy that is a joy to read. Reading this book, I am constantly amazed and reminded of how much of a difference a little schooling can make. Luria grouped his subjects into up to five categories which I will regroup into three:
1. Ichkari women, that is illiterate women mainly confined to women´s quarters (ichkari) and with a very limited number of contacts;When presented with a variety of different colors and either asked to name those colors or to group similar colors together, male peasants used the fewest categories and names, Ichkari women used many more (small) categories and tended to group colors sometimes by hues, sometimes by color saturation and other times by brilliance (for example some of them would place pale colors like light green, light yellow and light red together) and identify colors by the names of similar colored objects in their environment, distinguishing for example between the color of pig dung and the color of calf dung whereas the agricultural workers would tend to categorize in, to us, more familiar, school standardized ways. Interestingly, Luria attributes the ichkari women´s finer sense of discrimination to the fact that their household chores included weaving and embroidery.
2. Male illiterate peasants who either devoted themselves to simple animal husbandry or grew small crops of cotton, flowers or vegetables;
3. Agricultural workers working on collective farms with some, albeit limited schooling mostly characterized as barely literate.
When asked to pick the odd element out of a list of elements such as "glass, saucepan, spectacles, bottle", the more illiterate tended to group the elements by contexts familiar to them rather than abstract categories. That is instead of picking out saucepan as the only object not made out of glass, they would pick out bottle ("because it contains vodka which is bad, whereas the rest of the things are good" or because bottle was the least useful thing to use while cooking -"you need spectacles to see what you are doing, the saucepan to heat and stir and the glass for pouring into what the saucepan has"). Even more striking was the inability of the more illiterate subjects of conceiving or even understanding that other ways of grouping objects could exist or be valid. After all, as has tirelessly pointed out, if you are striving to develop creativity, why should you pretend there is only one correct answer ( saucepan) when there are other equally valid or at least plausible answers (e.g. spectacles is the odd one because it is the only object that is not a vessel that can hold liquids).
The chapter in syllogisms is also striking. When presented with the premises of a syllogism such as "Bears who live in the far north are white. The city of X (a concrete city) is in the far north" and asked to apply the syllogism ("What color are the bears in X"), the reactions of the more illiterate group is striking. In many cases the syllogism is only turned into questions on the premises (Are bears who live in the far north white? Is X a city in the far north?). In other cases, sometimes when the questioner insists, the answer is that the subject can give no answer because he has no personal experience ("How should I know? I've never been very far north!" or "I don´t know. I've only seen a black bear" or "We always speak only of what we see; we don´t talk about what we haven´t seen"). However I wonder if the point Luria is trying to make, that is that the subjects cannot or will not apply the syllogism because they cannot abstract from their concrete realities is not quite as clear cut as he makes out. What might be happening is a shrewd refusal to grant the premises ("Good men stand drinks. You are a good man, therefore stand me a drink"). After all, in symbolic logic, it is true that a false statement implies anything, and thus in reasoning correctly in practical terms, you have to be on your guard against false or unacceptable premises. A similar point can be made when the subjects refuse to solve a simple arithmetic problem when the premise is blatantly false ("If a man can walk from Moscow to Tashkent in five hours and he can go twice as fast on a bicycle, how long does it take him to cycle between the two cities?") or when he starts thinking about practicalities like "it depends on how many stops he has to make" or "it depends on whether it rains". Schooling trains us to look for the (only) correct answer, to treat as irrelevancies real-life contingencies that may apply. Schools can be (mis-)used for indoctrination to treat as irrelevancies issues that are really very germane to a particular problem (cf. ).
In spite of my caveats and taking into account that Luria is, after all, a pioneering effort in what is now termed cross-cultural psychology, this still remains a very readable, impressive and thought-provoking introduction to a fascinating and controversial field.
April 26, 2012
I've now read several books by Luria, most of them many years ago. Luria was astounding in his research into human psychology. This book floored me, as well as being an absolute delight to read. In the early 20th century, Luria interviewed peasants in remote areas of Siberia. Some peasants were totally illiterate, some had a little exposure to literacy, and some had a good start on being literate. The interviews reveal the stunning degree to which literacy shapes how you think, how your brain works. Here are some examples:
* Illiterate people don't perceive colors like literate people. At Home Depot, they would organize colors not by "reds," "blues," "greens," but by "darks," "lights," etc. They do not categorize colors like literate people.
* Illiterate people don't classify objects into abstract groups like literate people. For example, literate people classify living things, tools, clothing a certain way--based on abstract concepts. Illiterate people classify objects by the situations they are found in. For example, an axe and a log are classified as "similar" because they are commonly found and used together.
* Illiterate people have much difficulty in posing questions.
* Illiterate people have great difficulty reflecting on and making judgments about their own character.
There are other books that deal with how modern media (e.g., Internet) may be taking humanity into another phase of conscious evolution. It may be that at some point in the future, humans will look back on 20th and 21st century humans and see us as different creatures.
* Illiterate people don't perceive colors like literate people. At Home Depot, they would organize colors not by "reds," "blues," "greens," but by "darks," "lights," etc. They do not categorize colors like literate people.
* Illiterate people don't classify objects into abstract groups like literate people. For example, literate people classify living things, tools, clothing a certain way--based on abstract concepts. Illiterate people classify objects by the situations they are found in. For example, an axe and a log are classified as "similar" because they are commonly found and used together.
* Illiterate people have much difficulty in posing questions.
* Illiterate people have great difficulty reflecting on and making judgments about their own character.
There are other books that deal with how modern media (e.g., Internet) may be taking humanity into another phase of conscious evolution. It may be that at some point in the future, humans will look back on 20th and 21st century humans and see us as different creatures.
August 28, 2021
From what I understand, Luria was the foremost theorist of scientific Marxist psychology. Humans are formed solely by external, environmental factors. From that psychology, which was akin to the then contemporary behaviorism in the U.S., Marxist ideology could take it from there: Humans are products of the means of production, and they can be turned into who and what the state wants them to be. This book is about Luria’s psychology. It is not about Marxist ideology.
Luria made a solid effort to place the study of mind and behavior on a solid foundation. For him, humans reflect their historical era as well as their particular social environment and they,* in turn, transform history and their respective cultures. I presume this means that we are both products and producers. We are driven by social practices and we drive such practices. The pivot point is language. Words inherited from culture frame our social environment in such a way that we “duplicate the world.�** Words are those abstractions that represent who we are and who we want to be. They are our history, and they guide us for a time. Through abstraction, we lift ourselves out of the sensory world and all its limitations. In doing so, we become free with all the creativity and rationality that that term implies. Luria states that this transition from sensory to rational beings is “as important as that from nonliving to living matter.�
Still, there are for Luria gradations of rationality. Rudimentary mental processes do not group according to logical principles. The child’s language lumps things together in inexact or highly situational ways. Thus, “on and off� means anything that is there or not there; kitty is anything that moves. This is stage 1 thinking; stage two is a little better. But with the developed human mind, stage 3 emerges and we place things into highly differentiated, logical categories because we isolate (abstract) key attributes: We get to the species of things. This movement from stage 1 to stage 3 thinking reflects cultures as well, with primitive cultures stuck in stage 1 and 2.*** Education is central for stage 3 thought for it integrates individual thoughts into the wider culturally accepted categories of thought that are hierarchically arranged, much like our classification of life into animal and plant kingdoms. Added to stage 3 thinking is a vigorous imagination that creates anew, in contrast with stage 1 and 2 thinking that is overly stuck on what is already there. Also, stage 3 thinking is applied to the self as an object that is evaluated vis-a-vis its place in a particular culture, and modified accordingly.
In my view, Luria misses a key point about our psychological makeup: We are inner-driven beings, full of needs, fears and anger-tendencies related to our survival and well-being, and we are highly individualized that way, reflecting Darwinian variation. We are selves at our core, either relatively fixed in character and temperament, or highly disposed to interact with the world in certain ways. This is our emotional center that is applied to the world. This explains why we interact with it in the way we do, and this is what is absent in Luria. The how and what of that interaction is Luria’s focus, and it is this that transforms us. But it is a transformation, literally, so that we can remain the same. It’s the same concept in adaptation. Animals have an essence but they must adapt (change) so that that essence - life, and life in a particular way - can survive.
Luria doesn’t have a self. The innermost “there� there is formed by external forces. He is a blank slate theorist. He is a Sartrian - we create our essence. He is Platonic. We mold ourselves into perfection by negating our animal being. He is a cultural relativist. He is neuroscience’s mechanical being - the mind goes tick tock, but it is void of ends other than some vague bio-chemical well-being. Emotions are not innate. They are intellectual creations a la Lisa Barrett, responding to the influences of our respective social mediums, or to the whims of our creative but foundationless imagination.
Lauria is a straight-forward writer. He is clear throughout. This is one of the best books that I’ve read on psychology.
*This environment is a “sociohistorical shaping of mental processes� so that the developing adolescent “mediates each behavior act through norms established by social experience.�
**When we perceive, culture provides us with the systems of codes used to process incoming information,� including “assigning the perceived object to the appropriate categories.� Colors for example depend on culture. In the Arctic, there are “dozens of words for white� but no words “for hues of red and green.�
***I believe Luria was criticized for this, a certain ethnocentrism. It’s entirely likely that so-called primitive peoples knew the ins and outs of nature and the logical interrelationships of things, because their survival and well-being depended on it, to such a degree that today’s urbanite would be stage 1 in nature. It’s the same type of division seen today between rural and city people. It all depends on what is most important to the respective cultures involved.
Luria made a solid effort to place the study of mind and behavior on a solid foundation. For him, humans reflect their historical era as well as their particular social environment and they,* in turn, transform history and their respective cultures. I presume this means that we are both products and producers. We are driven by social practices and we drive such practices. The pivot point is language. Words inherited from culture frame our social environment in such a way that we “duplicate the world.�** Words are those abstractions that represent who we are and who we want to be. They are our history, and they guide us for a time. Through abstraction, we lift ourselves out of the sensory world and all its limitations. In doing so, we become free with all the creativity and rationality that that term implies. Luria states that this transition from sensory to rational beings is “as important as that from nonliving to living matter.�
Still, there are for Luria gradations of rationality. Rudimentary mental processes do not group according to logical principles. The child’s language lumps things together in inexact or highly situational ways. Thus, “on and off� means anything that is there or not there; kitty is anything that moves. This is stage 1 thinking; stage two is a little better. But with the developed human mind, stage 3 emerges and we place things into highly differentiated, logical categories because we isolate (abstract) key attributes: We get to the species of things. This movement from stage 1 to stage 3 thinking reflects cultures as well, with primitive cultures stuck in stage 1 and 2.*** Education is central for stage 3 thought for it integrates individual thoughts into the wider culturally accepted categories of thought that are hierarchically arranged, much like our classification of life into animal and plant kingdoms. Added to stage 3 thinking is a vigorous imagination that creates anew, in contrast with stage 1 and 2 thinking that is overly stuck on what is already there. Also, stage 3 thinking is applied to the self as an object that is evaluated vis-a-vis its place in a particular culture, and modified accordingly.
In my view, Luria misses a key point about our psychological makeup: We are inner-driven beings, full of needs, fears and anger-tendencies related to our survival and well-being, and we are highly individualized that way, reflecting Darwinian variation. We are selves at our core, either relatively fixed in character and temperament, or highly disposed to interact with the world in certain ways. This is our emotional center that is applied to the world. This explains why we interact with it in the way we do, and this is what is absent in Luria. The how and what of that interaction is Luria’s focus, and it is this that transforms us. But it is a transformation, literally, so that we can remain the same. It’s the same concept in adaptation. Animals have an essence but they must adapt (change) so that that essence - life, and life in a particular way - can survive.
Luria doesn’t have a self. The innermost “there� there is formed by external forces. He is a blank slate theorist. He is a Sartrian - we create our essence. He is Platonic. We mold ourselves into perfection by negating our animal being. He is a cultural relativist. He is neuroscience’s mechanical being - the mind goes tick tock, but it is void of ends other than some vague bio-chemical well-being. Emotions are not innate. They are intellectual creations a la Lisa Barrett, responding to the influences of our respective social mediums, or to the whims of our creative but foundationless imagination.
Lauria is a straight-forward writer. He is clear throughout. This is one of the best books that I’ve read on psychology.
*This environment is a “sociohistorical shaping of mental processes� so that the developing adolescent “mediates each behavior act through norms established by social experience.�
**When we perceive, culture provides us with the systems of codes used to process incoming information,� including “assigning the perceived object to the appropriate categories.� Colors for example depend on culture. In the Arctic, there are “dozens of words for white� but no words “for hues of red and green.�
***I believe Luria was criticized for this, a certain ethnocentrism. It’s entirely likely that so-called primitive peoples knew the ins and outs of nature and the logical interrelationships of things, because their survival and well-being depended on it, to such a degree that today’s urbanite would be stage 1 in nature. It’s the same type of division seen today between rural and city people. It all depends on what is most important to the respective cultures involved.
September 6, 2017
Socio-historical psychology: putting the macro-social world into psychology
This is an extraordinary book not only for its time, but for right now. The Russian socio-historical school (including Luria) claim that changes in socio-historical institutions (such as the emergence of science, capitalism, absolutist states and media (printing press, newspapers, coined money)demand changes in occupational skills by individuals in order to do their job. These changes in job requirements then became internalized as psychological transformations first at work and then at home and in leisure activities.
As these institutional processes change over history, so do the psychological
processes. For example, the 17th century was a vital time in developing a scientific methodology for experiments. It was also a time when merchants needed to increase the speed with which goods were consumed and produced. In the case of capitalism, this resulted in the increasing use of coined money, paper money and promissory notes and bills of exchange. In learning to use these symbolic tokens, people had to reason differently. It can be argued that Piaget’s formal operation thinking either didn’t exist before the 17th century or it was only developed in a weak form.
At a micro-level, Vygotsky has been called the father of cooperative learning. Vygotsky and his colleagues believed that all higher psychological processes begin and end as social processes. They originate first in structured, meaningful, cooperative and recursive local interpersonal relations between people. Only later do these skills become internalized, private and independent functions, which individuals can carry out alone. Finally these skills are reapplied to the social world to larger contexts at a higher order of complexity.
Vygotsky’s work concentrated on how children learn over a very short period of time. However, it tells us little about how adults learn over the course of generations. But how about when a new economic system (capitalism) or technology (the printing press) revolutionized society as a whole? What happens to adults and their children when new systems emerge which require new occupations as well as upgrades of existing ones over many generations? Can this be traced? This is where Luria comes in.
In the former Soviet Union, Vygotsky, Luria and Leontiev set out to develop a new socialist psychology, separating itself from the rationalist and empiricist traditions in the West. These rationalist and empiricist traditions treated the psychology of the individual as separated from the social and historical context in which he was produced. In the late 1920’s Luria set out to demonstrate how the most basic psychological processes such as perception, the concept of self, how objects are categorized, and how people reasoned were changed by dramatic historical changes such as Russia’s transition to state socialism.
To do this Luria asked questions to three groups: peasants who still lived on farms relatively untouched by the revolution. These were compared to peasants who moved from the farms to factories in the cities as well as those going to schools in cities. What Luria found were very different answers given depending on whether people lived on farms or in cities and whether within the cities they went to school or worked in factories.
It is very sad to me that more historians have not taken Luria up and developed socio-historical psychologies for different historical periods. I’ve attempted to this in my own work.
This is an extraordinary book not only for its time, but for right now. The Russian socio-historical school (including Luria) claim that changes in socio-historical institutions (such as the emergence of science, capitalism, absolutist states and media (printing press, newspapers, coined money)demand changes in occupational skills by individuals in order to do their job. These changes in job requirements then became internalized as psychological transformations first at work and then at home and in leisure activities.
As these institutional processes change over history, so do the psychological
processes. For example, the 17th century was a vital time in developing a scientific methodology for experiments. It was also a time when merchants needed to increase the speed with which goods were consumed and produced. In the case of capitalism, this resulted in the increasing use of coined money, paper money and promissory notes and bills of exchange. In learning to use these symbolic tokens, people had to reason differently. It can be argued that Piaget’s formal operation thinking either didn’t exist before the 17th century or it was only developed in a weak form.
At a micro-level, Vygotsky has been called the father of cooperative learning. Vygotsky and his colleagues believed that all higher psychological processes begin and end as social processes. They originate first in structured, meaningful, cooperative and recursive local interpersonal relations between people. Only later do these skills become internalized, private and independent functions, which individuals can carry out alone. Finally these skills are reapplied to the social world to larger contexts at a higher order of complexity.
Vygotsky’s work concentrated on how children learn over a very short period of time. However, it tells us little about how adults learn over the course of generations. But how about when a new economic system (capitalism) or technology (the printing press) revolutionized society as a whole? What happens to adults and their children when new systems emerge which require new occupations as well as upgrades of existing ones over many generations? Can this be traced? This is where Luria comes in.
In the former Soviet Union, Vygotsky, Luria and Leontiev set out to develop a new socialist psychology, separating itself from the rationalist and empiricist traditions in the West. These rationalist and empiricist traditions treated the psychology of the individual as separated from the social and historical context in which he was produced. In the late 1920’s Luria set out to demonstrate how the most basic psychological processes such as perception, the concept of self, how objects are categorized, and how people reasoned were changed by dramatic historical changes such as Russia’s transition to state socialism.
To do this Luria asked questions to three groups: peasants who still lived on farms relatively untouched by the revolution. These were compared to peasants who moved from the farms to factories in the cities as well as those going to schools in cities. What Luria found were very different answers given depending on whether people lived on farms or in cities and whether within the cities they went to school or worked in factories.
It is very sad to me that more historians have not taken Luria up and developed socio-historical psychologies for different historical periods. I’ve attempted to this in my own work.
Shelved as 'hmm'
May 21, 2020Does anyone else have a hard time reading through some books that are around theories that some of them are "common sense" now?
It's a bit confusing and overwhelming for me.
It's a bit confusing and overwhelming for me.
March 10, 2025
Every philosopher should be required to read this book.
January 1, 2022
This work should be a mandatory read not only to psychologists but also people who study culture. One can't show in more simple terms that the structure how humans think develops, hence cultures do change with it, opposing the current mainstream view.
It is a great reminder for anyone not to take perception or even imagination for granted, for these too develop as one's thinking develops.
As a side note, the funny part in this book is its historical aspect that to get anything published back in the soviet union somehow marxism and the union had to receive some good words. The reader should know it was a necessity, imposed by the state, not desire from the author to add those words.
It is a great reminder for anyone not to take perception or even imagination for granted, for these too develop as one's thinking develops.
As a side note, the funny part in this book is its historical aspect that to get anything published back in the soviet union somehow marxism and the union had to receive some good words. The reader should know it was a necessity, imposed by the state, not desire from the author to add those words.
Want to read
May 24, 2007I read about this in the Orality and Literacy book I'm reading now and was compelled to seek and purchase it immediately.
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