What are human universals?

"Human universals" is a term used in anthropology and evolutionary psychology to refer to behavioral or cognitive features common to all neurologically normal people. The idea of ​​human universals was partially formulated as a challenge for cultural relativism, the prevailing view of human nature at the end of the 20th century, which some psychologists and anthropologists consider to be significantly exaggerating the scattering among members of the human species. Society among human type members. Some of these human universals include avoiding incest, territoriality, fear of death, rituals, childcare, pretense of play, sadness, food sharing, groups of relatives, social structure, collective decision making, etiquette, envy, weapons, aesthetics and many others. The wider recognition of human universals has led to any mini-revolution in psychology that began to receive more inputs from the heavier sciences of anthropology and biology and less of the ubiquitous pop-psychology of the 20th century.

One of the greatest popularizers of the concept of human universals in recent years has been Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist at Harvard and the author of four widely read books on the human mind. As a champion of growing science of evolutionary psychology, Pinker claims that we all have ten fingers, ten fingers, two eyes, two ears and mouths in the same way, all with the same basic biological features from man to man, we should expect our cognitive features to have similar in common. Psychological differences between human beings are then differences in degree, not in kind.

The existence of an experimentally verifiable set of human universals has two key consequences. The first is this is another psychological experimentation and research more valuable than some thought. If we can identify common cognitive features between us and their characteristics, we learn not only about every human culture and individuals atThe country today, but about those in the vague future, if their genomes remain essentially human. The second is that the human species have more in common than conventional psychology would mean us - that conflicts arise despite our basic cognitive similarities, rather than from them.