The information economy model applied to biological similarity judgment

One way cognitive anthropologists discover how cognition is socially shared is through examining how the product of cognition, knowledge, comes to have a patterned social distribution. The strategy is to study the process by examining its consequences. The process of socially shared cognition comprises the collective struggles of individuals to learn, interpret, and understand their world. In building their representations of the world, individuals learn both from what they directly experience and from what others teach them. Because they vary in their experiences and in their goals in interpreting experience, indtviduals vary in their understandings. Thus the consequence of the process of socially shared cognition is a patterned distribution of cultural knowledge through a community. We can use this pattern to make inferences about how people learn. The task is like that of economics: Instead of charting the pattern of the production, distribution, and consumption