Summary
Human universals are features of culture, society, language, behaviour and mind found, so far as the record has been examined, among every people known to ethnography and history. The term belongs to the anthropologist Donald E. Brown and his 1991 book ‘Human Universals’. His list of hundreds, from baby talk and gossip to music and mourning, was reprinted in Steven Pinker’s ‘The Blank Slate’ (2002).
Brown thought his discipline “riveted more surely by differences between societies than by their commonalities”. He was careful all the same: it rests on imperfect sampling, some universals have known exceptions, and a shared human mind is “entirely compatible” with wide cultural variation.
Rationale
A counterweight to our emphasis. We write about how cultures form people differently; Brown lists what stays the same. That list holds cooperation and in-group bias alike, so it can’t say which dispositions to grow.