[3] Cognitive anthropology studies a range of domains including folk taxonomies, the interaction of language and thought, and cultural models.
[4] Its general goal is to break language down to find commonalities in different cultures and the ways people perceive the world.
[6] Cognitive anthropologists believe that cultural meanings arise when people learn, create, interpret and apply these collective representations.
[6] Reapplication and representations reinforce the experienced patterns through the process of implementing appropriateness and relevance, contain the elements for cognitive reorganization and creativity in behavior and understanding.
Cognitive anthropology analyzes cultural views with lexicons as the primary source of data that researches search for definite beliefs, implicit understandings and category systems.
[15] "CA has been alienated from the rest of cultural anthropology because it is seen as too quantitative and scientific for the prevailing post‐modern aesthetic, while at the same time seen as too ethnographic and natural historical for the tastes of CP.
In their widely cited journal article, they attribute this rejection to cognitive anthropology's lack of credibility as a subset of the psychological sciences, focus on common narratives throughout different cultures rather than on the individual mind, and difficulty of getting published.
[13][15] Resistance from more established subfields of cultural anthropology has historically restricted resources and tenure for cognitive anthropologists.