Excellent blog. I am probably out of my depth here, but I would like to offer the following quips:

You wrote: ‘There seems to be a tendency to too quickly impute ‘instinctual’ or ‘innate’ tendency to social effects that are likely more of a sum-of-forces, including learned influences, top-down ideological influences, perceptual processes, and perhaps even innate tendencies. For example, racism might be a general label for a host of processes, some of which are very subtle and perceptual (like the one discussed in this article) and some of which are more social-ideological, such as racist media or other influences’.

I think we see the same ‘sum-of-forces’ at play in ascriptions of mental phenomena, to offer an analogy to the discussion on face perception. Consider the extreme diversity of behavioral manifestations of the mental. The term ‘behavior’ includes not just facial expressions and gestures, but also what people do and say, and the circumstances for the use of mental terms. These form a highly complex syndrome. According to Wittgenstein, we can recognize a person’s behavior as expressing sadness only if we approach it ‘from the point of view of ‘sadness’(Philosophical Remarks 89). We do not, accordingly, infer psychologically relevant descriptions of human behavior from austere physical ones. We typically know the conclusions of such inferences without knowing their premises. It is easier to describe a person as ‘sad’ than to describe (measure?) his facial features in physical terms (similarly, it is mistaken to think that a human being is a body).

You wrote: ‘But this research also reminds me of the need to think of ‘culture’ as having significant perceptual dimensions, rather than just thinking of enculturation as entailing mostly internalized cognitive schemas, meaning structures, or other more ideational elements…the way in which facial recognition perception is trainable is an example of how the perceptual system not just interpretive, after-the-sensation mechanisms, might be affected by social training’.

Here is an idea: social training does not presuppose understanding, but only patterns of perception (primitive reactions?) on the part of the trainee? A child will look in the direction in which one points, while a cat will look at the pointing finger.

Sincerely,

Simon van Rysewyk