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The difference between pointing by the Great Ape Trust bonobos - the only ones in the world with receptive competence for spoken English - and other captive apes that make hand gestures is explained by the culture in which they were reared, according to the paper's authors: Janni Pedersen, an Iowa State University Ph.D. candidate conducting research for her dissertation at Great Ape Trust; Pär Segerdahl, a scientist from Sweden who has published several philosophical inquires into language; and William M. Fields, an ethnographer investigating language, culture and tools in non-human primates. Fields also is Great Ape Trust's director of scientific research. Because Kanzi, Panbanisha and Nyota were raised in a culture where pointing has a purpose - The Trust's hallmark Pan/Homo environment, where infant bonobos are reared with both bonobo (Pan paniscus) and human (Homo sapiens) influences - their pointing is as scientifically meaningful as their understanding of spoken English, Fields said. The pointing study supports and builds on previous research on the effect of rearing culture on cognitive capabilities, including the 40-year research corpus of Dr. Duane Rumbaugh, Dr. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and Fields, which is the foundation of the scientific inquiry at Great Ape Trust. Those studies included the breakthrough finding that Kanzi and other bonobos with receptive competence for spoken English acquired language as human children do - by being exposed to it since infancy. The bonobos adopted finger-pointing behavior for the same reasons, because they were reared in a culture where pointing has meaning.

"People tend to conform their factual beliefs to ones that are consistent with their cultural outlook, their world view," Braman says. The Cultural Cognition Project has conducted several experiments to back that up. Participants in these experiments are asked to describe their cultural beliefs. Some embrace new technology, authority and free enterprise. They are labeled the "individualistic" group. Others are suspicious of authority or of commerce and industry. Braman calls them "communitarians." In one experiment, Braman queried these subjects about something unfamiliar to them: nanotechnology — new research into tiny, molecule-sized objects that could lead to novel products. "These two groups start to polarize as soon as you start to describe some of the potential benefits and harms," Braman says. The individualists tended to like nanotechnology. The communitarians generally viewed it as dangerous. Both groups made their decisions based on the same information. "It doesn't matter whether you show them negative or positive information, they reject the information that is contrary to what they would like to believe, and they glom onto the positive information," Braman says.

"Basically the reason that people react in a close-minded way to information is that the implications of it threaten their values," says Dan Kahan, a law professor at Yale University and a member of The Cultural Cognition Project. Kahan says people test new information against their preexisting view of how the world should work. "If the implication, the outcome, can affirm your values, you think about it in a much more open-minded way," he says. And if the information doesn't, you tend to reject it. In another experiment, people read a United Nations study about the dangers of global warming. Then the researchers told the participants that the solution to global warming is to regulate industrial pollution. Many in the individualistic group then rejected the climate science. But when more nuclear power was offered as the solution, says Braman, "they said, you know, it turns out global warming is a serious problem."And for the communitarians, climate danger seemed less serious if the only solution was more nuclear power.