Human universals, human nature & human culture

Human universals--of which hundreds have been identified--consist of those features of culture, society, language, behavior, and mind that, so far as the record has been examined, are found among all peoples known to ethnography and history. After presenting some of the basic conceptions and problems concerning such universals per se--their kinds and causes and the methodological and disciplinary considerations that have shaped their study, this paper explores some of the issues in how human universals relate to human nature and human culture. Particular attention will be given to those universals that are directly related to, or actually comprise, human nature. In addition to the intrinsic interest such universals invoke--because they underlie all human activities--they also promise to yield to a more theoretically informed framework for their study than has been the case for human universals in general. Examples of universals will be given along the way.

• Publication year

  2004

• Venue

  Daedalus

• Publication date

  2004-09-01

• Fields of study

  Sociology, Philosophy, History

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1162/0011526042365645
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

• Being Humans: Anthropological Universality and Particularity in Transdisciplinary Perspectives

  2000cited by this paper
• Human Nature and History

  1999cited by this paper
• Nature and History

  1951cited by this paper
• Human nature and the cultural process.

  1947cited by this paper

• The evolution of the concepts of ‘primate culture’ in Western science

  2026cites this paper
• Culture Affordance Atlas: Reconciling Object Diversity Through Functional Mapping

  2025influential citation
• Cross-modal deep generative models reveal the cortical representation of dancing

  2025cites this paper
• Culture Cartography: Mapping the Landscape of Cultural Knowledge

  2025cites this paper
• Grounding the Language Games of Business Purpose in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

  2025cites this paper
• Understanding cultural differences across global descriptive sensory panels using Generalized Procrustes Analysis

  2025cites this paper
• On the universality of aesthetic preference and inference: a cross-cultural (Chinese–German) study

  2025cites this paper
• Cross-cultural evidence that intergroup conflict heightens preferences for dominant leaders: A 25-country study

  2025cites this paper
• Analyzing Ethnic Chinese Tax Evasion Behavior from Ethical and Government Trust Perspectives

  2025cites this paper
• Strategic Communication and Metamodernism. Shall We Dance? Towards Complexity Beyond Linear Compromise

  2025cites this paper
• “Fiercely Egalitarian”: Thematic Cross-Cultural Analysis Reveals Regularities in the Maintenance of Egalitarianism Across Four Independent African Hunter-Gatherer Groups

  2025cites this paper
• Replication: A Critique and Overview for Kinesiology

  2025cites this paper
• The Semantic Space of Ukrainian National Universals in Olena Lys' Choral Diptych "By the Stairs to Heaven…"

  2025cites this paper
• Diversity Matters in the World of Finance: Does Ethnic and Religious Diversity Hinder Financial Development in Developing Countries?

  2025cites this paper
• Do workplace practices really matter? Role of ostracism and dehumanization at the workplace and psychological well-being of employees

  2024cites this paper
• Keraton Ngayogyakarta Hadiningrat: A plane geometry learning material sources based on the ethnomathematics approaches

  2024cites this paper
• Pace setting as an adaptive precursor of rhythmic musicality

  2024cites this paper
• Universals of Human Nature

  2024cites this paper
• Cultural tightness and resilience against environmental shocks in nonindustrial societies

  2024cites this paper
• Beyond nomothetics and idiographics: Towards a systematization of personality research approaches

  2024cites this paper
• Affect mediates culture’s effects on COVID-19 risk perceptions, behavioral intentions, and policy support among americans

  2024cites this paper
• Three Conceptions of Culture

  2024cites this paper
• Measuring Spiritual Values and Bias of Large Language Models

  2024cites this paper
• Young adults’ desired life tradeoffs: love first, sex last

  2024cites this paper
• Is Culture Learned? The Neglected Role of Evoking Events

  2024cites this paper
• Lullabies and Universality: An Ethnographic Review

  2024influential citation
• The Language of an Empathy-Inducing Narrative

  2024cites this paper
• From Local Concepts to Universals: Evaluating the Multicultural Understanding of Vision-Language Models

  2024cites this paper
• Ownership-attributing intuitions are cross-culturally shared.

  2024cites this paper
• Universal Constraints on Linguistic Event Categories: A Cross-Cultural Study of Child Homesign

  2023cites this paper
• Aesthetic Motivation Impacts Judgments of Others’ Prosociality and Mental Life

  2023cites this paper
• The Natural Emergence of Category Effects on Rugged Landscapes

  2023cites this paper
• Adding online storytelling-based acceptance and commitment therapy to antidepressant treatment for primary care patients: a randomized clinical trial

  2023cites this paper
• Operationalizing cultural adaptation to climate change: contemporary examples from United States agriculture

  2023cites this paper
• (Re)/(Dis)Embodying Love: The Cyborg in Metropolis and Blade Runner

  2023cites this paper
• Grounds of Culture: A Metaphorical and Heuristic Approach

  2023cites this paper
• Thomas Aquinas, Ronald Dworkin, and the Fourth Revolution: The Foundations of Law in the Age of Surveillance Capitalism

  2023cites this paper
• Supernatural explanations across 114 societies are more common for natural than social phenomena

  2023cites this paper
• Moral Foundations Theory: Validation and Replication of the MFQ-2

  2023cites this paper
• Revisiting the relevance of traditional genres: a network analysis of fiction readers' preferences

  2023cites this paper
• Effect of Blood Type on Motivation Process, Theories, and Behaviours

  2022cites this paper
• Evidence for a Shared Instrument Prototype from English, Dutch, and German

  2022cites this paper
• Identifying moments of peak audience engagement from brain responses during story listening

  2022cites this paper
• Response to Erik Goodwyn's paper 'Phenotypic plasticity and archetype: a response to common objections to the biological theory of archetype and instinct'.

  2022cites this paper
• Are emotions contagious? A conceptual review of studies in language education

  2022cites this paper
• The Evolution of Well-Being: An Anthropology-Based, Multidisciplinary Review

  2022cites this paper
• Self, Reality, Knowledge and Theory: Is Social Constructionism Antithetical to Sport and Exercise Psychology Research?

  2022cites this paper
• Disaffiliation from Jewish Ultra-Orthodox Communities: Life Trajectories Shaped by the Axes of Rigidity–Fluidity and Alterity–Inclusion

  2022cites this paper
• The Power of Mimetic Performance: Cognitive Evolution and Supernatural Agency

  2022cites this paper
• Makeup and Its Application Simulation Affect Women’s Self-Perceptions

  2021cites this paper
• Remapping the foundations of morality: Well-fitting structural model of the Moral Foundations Questionnaire

  2021cites this paper
• Function of hierarchy on Cooperation in large-scale human societies

  2021influential citation
• Biophilia as Evolutionary Adaptation: An Onto- and Phylogenetic Framework for Biophilic Design

  2021cites this paper
• Integrating storytelling into the theory and practice of contextual behavioral science

  2021cites this paper
• Theoretical Foundations of the Relationship Management Mid-Range Theory

  2021cites this paper
• The Elephant in the Handaxe: Lower Palaeolithic Ontologies and Representations

  2021cites this paper
• Exploring the differences between men’s and women’s perceptions of gender-based violence in rural Tajikistan: a qualitative study

  2021cites this paper
• Communicating artificial neural networks develop efficient color-naming systems

  2021cites this paper
• Experimental evidence for scale-induced category convergence across populations

  2021cites this paper
• Myth-Making in Early Evolutionary Thought

  2021cites this paper
• Using Evolution to Explain the Evolutionary Imagination

  2021cites this paper
• Éticas falibles para máquinas (in)falibles

  2021cites this paper
• Speciesism and tribalism: embarrassing origins

  2021cites this paper
• How to tear down the walls that separate linguists: continuing the quest for clarity about general linguistics

  2021cites this paper
• How we Think About Human Nature: Cognitive Errors and Concrete Remedies

  2021cites this paper
• How to tear down the walls that separate linguists: Continuing the quest for clarity about general linguistics

  2021cites this paper
• The role of peer reward and punishment for public goods problems in a localized society

  2020cites this paper
• Wisdom of the Ages

  2020cites this paper
• Is it sexist to recognize that men and women are not identical? A critical evaluation of neurofeminist rhetoric

  2020influential citation
• Pilot Randomized Controlled Trial of a Video Self-Help Intervention for Depression based on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: Feasibility and Acceptability.

  2020cites this paper
• How and Why Formal Education Originated in the Emergence of Civilization

  2020cites this paper
• Narratives of resistance to technological change: Drawing lessons for urban energy transitions in southern Chile

  2020cites this paper
• Self-Actualizing and Self-Transcending in a World of Less Available Work

  2020cites this paper
• The Nature and Psychological Foundation of Social Universals

  2020cites this paper
• Impact of Social Concern on Cyberbullying Perpetration in Iran: Direct, Indirect, Mediating, and Conditioning Effects in Agnew’s Social Concern Theory

  2020cites this paper
• Towards a Cognitive Science of the Human: Cross-Cultural Approaches and Their Urgency.

  2020cites this paper
• Disentangling principled and opportunistic motives for reacting to injustice: A genetically-informed exploration of justice sensitivity

  2020cites this paper
• Express Your Self: Exploring the Nature of the Expressive Self and the Health and Well-Being Consequences of Its Restriction in a Market Society

  2020cites this paper
• Justice pénale internationale : la lutte contre l’impunité en tant qu’impératif moral

  2020influential citation
• FROM HOBBES TO HABERMAS: THE ANTI-CULTURAL TURN IN WESTERN POLITICAL THOUGHT

  2020cites this paper
• The Return of Ethnocentrism

  2020cites this paper
• Cognitive Resources Are Recruited Consistently Across People During Story Listening

  2020cites this paper
• To the Question of The Cultural Markedness of The English Anthroponyms In Russian Translations

  2020cites this paper
• Introduction

  2020cites this paper
• Humor in civil case mediations: A functional approach

  2019cites this paper
• Soft Skills: Old & New.

  2019cites this paper
• Death in Literature

  2019cites this paper
• Individual Methodological Orientations – Theoretical Background and a Model of the Phenomenon

  2019cites this paper
• Wandering Machines: Narrativity in Generative Art

  2019cites this paper
• Choosing a Markov blanket

  2019cites this paper
• Boundaries of historical consciousness: a Western cultural achievement or an anthropological universal?

  2019cites this paper
• Behavioral and Brain Sciences (forthcoming)

  2019cites this paper
• Cultural Universals

  2019cites this paper
• Effects of the dimensions of ethnocentrism on consumer ethnocentrism

  2019cites this paper
• Gender segmentation to increase brand preference? The role of product involvement

  2019cites this paper
• A Needs-based Partial Theory of Human Injustice: Oppression, Dehumanization, Exploitation, and Systematic Inequality in Opportunities to Address Human Needs

  2019cites this paper
• You need to show that you are not a robot

  2019cites this paper
• The Social Network Dynamics of Category Formation

  2019cites this paper
• Epidemiology of hallucinogen use in the U.S. results from the National epidemiologic survey on alcohol and related conditions III.

  2019cites this paper
• Humans Before Settlements

  2018cites this paper