Commentary on de Munck and Bennardo’s “Disciplining Culture: A Socio-Cognitive Approach” To appear in Current Anthropology Causes, Effects, and the ‘Mush’ of Culture Jonathan A. Lanman, Hugh Turpin, Samuel Ward Institute of Cognition & Culture School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics Queen’s University Belfast De Munck and Bennardo set an ambitious task for themselves in the target article: ‘disciplining’ the often used but often critiqued concept of ‘culture.’ They seek to move beyond what they call the ‘mush stage’ of defining culture and address central outstanding questions including how culture can be a collective system while only being instantiated within individuals and what constitutes an appropriate ‘unit’ of culture. To do so, they rely on an interdisciplinary set of resources. At the centre is the idea of cultural models, loosely defined here as ‘shared mental constructs.’ They argue that culture should be reconceived as “an organization of cultural models that molds intersubjective, imagined realities” and that, “as a consequence of their assumed sharedness, cultural models generate social commitments to act in appropriate, expected ways.” By focusing on cognitive representations that individuals have of their social identities and the ‘as if’ sharedness that such representations possess for their bearers, the authors argue that they have succeeded in accounting for cultural structure and individual agency in a way that social theorists like Giddens and Bourdieu have not. We applaud the authors’ efforts to increase the scientific precision of our concept of culture. Further, we agree that the notion of cultural models is helpful in this effort, as the methods associated with cultural models (cultural domain analysis and cultural consensus analysis), have proven useful in the measurement of both sharedness and idiosyncrasy in mental representations of such phenomena as romantic love (de Munck & Kronenfeld 2016), domestic violence (Collins & Dressler 2008), and the minds of gods (Purzycki 2016). We would argue, however, that the authors’ goals would be better advanced through further conceptual clarity and engagement with existing bodies of research in the cognitive and evolutionary science of culture, social identity, and cooperation. The word ‘culture’ has been and continues to be used by a number of social actors and scholars to designate an array of distinct phenomena, including but not limited to: 1) a species level trait of human beings, 2) the ‘high’ culture of a society, 3) socially acquired capabilities and habits, and 4) distinct ethnic groups. It is not always clear in the target article which notion of ‘culture’ de Munck and Bennardo are looking to ‘discipline’, yet, what may be helpful in creating a more rigorous account of one phenomena may be less helpful with another. Further, despite being central to the authors’ enterprise, the nature of cultural models is not explained beyond ‘shared mental constructs,’ a definition that raises more questions than it answers. While the notion of cultural models is explained and defended elsewhere (Strauss & Quinn 1997; Shore 1996 ; de Munck & Bennardo 2014), the absence of a full description in the target article is unfortunate. Without a clear and empirically supported account of what cultural models are and why they deserve a place in our scientific ontology, it is difficult to evaluate many of the target article’s claims regarding what is shared and what is not, what possesses causal force and what does not, and what should count as a basic unit of culture and what should not. Given this lack of clarity, it is tempting to follow Sperber in