Are humans innately bad social scientists?
- Details
- Nicolas Baumard
- Thursday, 26 January 2012
- Blog, Nicolas' Blog
I know, this sounds a bit extreme. How can the ability to do (bad) social science be influenced by our genes? Well, quite easily if you carefully read Robert Trivers’ last book (see reviews in NYT Nature, Science). Indeed, his book is about our innate tendency for self-deception. Here is the blurb:
Whether it’s in a cockpit at takeoff or the planning of an offensive war, a romantic relationship or a dispute at the office, there are many opportunities to lie and self-deceive—but deceit and self-deception carry the costs of being alienated from reality and can lead
In his bold new work, prominent biological theorist Robert Trivers unflinchingly argues that self-deception evolved in the service of deceit—the better to fool others. We do it for biological reasons—in order to help us survive and procreate. From viruses mimicking host behavior to humans misremembering (sometimes intentionally) the details of a quarrel, science has proven that the deceptive one can always outwit the masses.todisaster. So why does deception play such a prominent role in our everyday lives? In short, why do we deceive?
Among all the fascinating consequences of the evolution of self-deception – false memory, parents-offspring conflict, space disasters – one is of particular interest for us here at the ICCI. It is our innate propensity to do bad social science.
Twelve Lessons (Most of Which I Learned the Hard Way) for Evolutionary Psychologists
- Details
- Dan Fessler
- Friday, 20 January 2012
- Blog, Daniel Fessler's blog
As an undergraduate, most of the professors in the Anthropology Department at my university practiced psychological anthropology, a subfield of sociocultural anthropology that combines theories from various branches of psychology with the study of culture. I decided that I was going to be a psychological anthropologist, and I continued on at the same university, with the same professors, for my graduate degrees. Although I was confident that, to understand human behavior, it was necessary to investigate the interaction of mind and culture, I nevertheless became increasingly dissatisfied with psychological anthropology, which lacks an overarching theory from which to derive hypotheses, and which often eschews hypothesis testing in favor of description and interpretation. Anthropologists usually emphasize the differences between people in different societies, yet, during my doctoral field research, I was impressed by the underlying universalities in human emotions. I began thinking more about human evolution, and, with guidance from several primatologists, I gradually began to invent my own version of evolutionary psychology. I was unaware that such a discipline was already emerging – indeed, many of my ‘new’ ideas had already been formulated more clearly by others. It was a revelation when I attended my first meeting of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, and discovered a whole field devoted to my area of interest.
Read more: Twelve Lessons (Most of Which I Learned the Hard Way) for Evolutionary Psychologists
Conference: Culture, Mind, and Brain: Emerging Concepts, Methods, Applications
A conference on "Culture, Mind, and Brain: Emerging Concepts, Methods, Applications" at UCLA, October 19–20, 2012
Many lines of research on culture, mind, and brain can no longer be neatly separated. Some questions run together, thanks to our growing understanding of the genome, the biological roots of human sociality, and the mutual constitution of cultures and selves, as well as the complex interactions between the physical, cultural, and social environments underlying health and illness. The aim of this 2-day conference is to highlight emerging concepts, methodologies and applications in the study of culture, mind, and brain, with particular attention to: (1) cutting-edge neuroscience research that is successfully incorporating culture and the social world; (2) the context in which methods are used as well as the tacit assumptions that shape research questions; and (3) the kinds and quality of collaborations that can advance interdisciplinary research training.
Read more: Conference: Culture, Mind, and Brain: Emerging Concepts, Methods, Applications
International Conference on Thinking 2012 London
The 7th International Conference on Thinking will take place on the 4th to 6th July 2012 at Birkbeck College and University College London focusing on the most recent research on thinking from psychological, cognitive science and cognitive neuroscience perspectives. To submit papers, posters, or symposia proposals and to register please go to http://www.ict2012.bbk.ac.uk/. Deadline for submission: 31 March 2012.
Early social cognition in three cultural contexts
- Details
- Monday, 16 January 2012
- News, Publications
Coming out of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Department of Developmental and Comparative Psychology An important comparative study on Early social cognition in three cultural contexts by T. Callaghan, H. Moll, H. Rakoczy, F. Warneken, U. Liszkowski, T. Behne, & M. Tomasello, published in 2011 (Monograph of the Society for Research in Child Development, 76(2), 1-142) and available here.
Abstract: The influence of culture on cognitive development is well established for school age and older children. But almost nothing is known about how different parenting and socialization practices in different cultures affect infants’ and young children’s earliest emerging cognitive and social-cognitive skills. In the current monograph, we report a series of eight studies in which we systematically assessed the social-cognitive skills of 1- to 3-year-old children in three diverse cultural settings. One group of children was from a Western, middle-class cultural setting in rural Canada and the other two groups were from traditional, small-scale cultural settings in rural Peru and India.
In a first group of studies, we assessed 1-year-old children’s most basic social-cognitive skills for understanding the intentions and attention of others: imitation, helping, gaze following, and communicative pointing. Children’s performance in these tasks was mostly similar across cultural settings. In a second group of studies, we assessed 1-year-old children’s skills in participating in interactive episodes of collaboration and joint attention. Again in these studies the general finding was one of cross-cultural similarity. In a final pair of studies, we assessed 2- to 3-year-old children’s skills within two symbolic systems (pretense and pictorial). Here we found that the Canadian children who had much more experience with such symbols showed skills at an earlier age.
Our overall conclusion is that young children in all cultural settings get sufficient amounts of the right kinds of social experience to develop their most basic social-cognitive skills for interacting with others and participating in culture at around the same age. In contrast, children’s acquisition of more culturally specific skills for use in practices involving artifacts and symbols is more dependent on specific learning experiences.
Why are the faces of primates so dramatically different from one another?
- Details
- Sunday, 15 January 2012
- News, Publications
UCLA biologists working as "evolutionary detectives" studied the faces of 129 adult male primates from Central and South America, and they offer some answers in research published online Jan. 11, in Proceedings of the Royal Society B and available here. The faces they studied evolved over at least 24 million years, they report.
"If you look at New World primates, you're immediately struck by the rich diversity of faces," said Michael Alfaro, a UCLA associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and the senior author of the study. "You see bright red faces, moustaches, hair tufts and much more. There are unanswered questions about how faces evolve and what factors explain the evolution of facial features. We're very visually oriented, and we get a lot of information from the face."
Some of the primate species studied are solitary, while others live in groups that can include dozens or even hundreds of others.
"We found very strong support for the idea that as species live in larger groups, their faces become more simple, more plain," said lead author Sharlene Santana, a UCLA postdoctoral scholar in ecology and evolutionary biology and a postdoctoral fellow with UCLA's Institute for Society and Genetics. "We think that is related to their ability to communicate using facial expressions. A face that is more plain could allow the primate to convey expressions more easily.
"Humans have pretty bare faces, which may allow us to see facial expressions more easily than if, for example, we had many colors in our faces."
More here
Anthropology of this Century online
- Details
- Sunday, 15 January 2012
- News, Publications
The new online journal Anthropology of this Century edited by Charles Stafford. "publishes reviews of recent works in anthropology and related disciplines, as well as occasional feature articles." While not uniquely focused on cognition-and-culture themes, is quite open to them. In the just published 3rd issue, for instance:
• Rita Astuti: "Some after dinner thoughts on Theory of Mind"
• Maurice Bloch: "The hard problem: Soul dust: the magic of consciousness By Nicholas Humphrey"
Blogs from ICCI contributors
- Details
- Olivier Morin
- Wednesday, 11 January 2012
- Blog, Olivier's blog
ICCI contributors also blog elsewhere. I am happy to recommend two new blogs: Hugo Mercier's Social by Design on Psychology Today is devoted to popularizing his and Sperber's argumentative theory of reasoning. It will teach you the truth about gulliblity (trust me). Simon Barthelmé's Dahtah will enchant statisticians, pop-psychology debunkers, and anyone who is tired of the Mismeasure of Man. One excellent post laments the use that is being made of cognitive science to blame the problems of the poor on bad decision-making.
Flavor network and the principles of food pairing
- Details
- Tuesday, 10 January 2012
- News, Publications
In the online and open access Scientific Reports of Nature, a fascinating paper on "Flavor network and the principles of food pairing" by Yong-Yeol Ahn, Sebastian E. Ahnert, James P. Bagrow and & Albert-László Barabási
The backbone of the flavor network. Each node denotes an ingredient, the node color indicates food category, and node size reflects the ingredient prevalence in recipes. Two ingredients are connected if they share a significant number of flavor compounds, link thickness representing the number of shared compounds between the two ingredients. (Full size image (162 KB)
"The cultural diversity of culinary practice, as illustrated by the variety of regional cuisines, raises the question of whether there are any general patterns that determine the ingredient combinations used in food today or principles that transcend individual tastes and recipes. We introduce a flavor network that captures the flavor compounds shared by culinary ingredients. Western cuisines show a tendency to use ingredient pairs that share many flavor compounds, supporting the so-called food pairing hypothesis. By contrast, East Asian cuisines tend to avoid compound sharing ingredients. Given the increasing availability of information on food preparation, our data-driven investigation opens new avenues towards a systematic understanding of culinary practice.
More here
Summer School "Images: Content, recognition, classification"
A CNRS Summer School on : "Images: Content, recognition, classification", Paris, July 1-5, 2012. Organization: Roberto Casati, Institut Nicod, CNRS-ENS-EHESS, Anouk Barberousse, Université de Lille 1, Alberto Voltolini, Università degli Studi di Torino. Deadline for applications: Feb 10, 2012.
How do we interpret images’ content? How do we tell images from other visual media? What can images represent? What ontology better describes their content? How do humans and machines recognize and classify images? Images are universal instruments of representation and communication. In many intellectually complex activities (the execution of plans and projects, the identification of people and places, navigation, data collection, medical diagnoses) the use of images is essential. Their interpretation requires little teaching (as opposed to, say, that of written language). But at the same time images are inherently ambiguous, and their interpretation may pose difficult problems. This is particularly evident now that countless images are available in online archives. Their content is often made explicit by annotations (captions, tags, place and time stamps). Software for automatic image interpretation has developed at an impressive rate in recent years, but some problems remain hard to tackle, especially when moving from the identification of instances of objects (tokens) or the recognition of simple categories (plants, vehicles) to attempts to work with more complex categories. Ontological/philosophical issues interface here with widening knowledge about cognitive processes and technological development.
Read more: Summer School "Images: Content, recognition, classification"
Attributing Mind to Groups vs. Group Members
- Details
- Friday, 06 January 2012
- News, Publications
Forthcoming in Psychological Science, an interesting social cognition article by Adam Waytz and Liane Young entitled "The Group-Member Mind Trade-Off: Attributing Mind to Groups Versus Group Members" available here.
Abstract: People attribute minds to other individuals and make inferences about those individuals’ mental states to explain and predict their behavior. Little is known, however, about whether people also attribute minds to groups and believe that collectives, companies, and corporations can think, have intentions, and make plans. Even less is known about the consequences of these attributions for both groups and group members. We investigated the attribution of mind and responsibility to groups and group members, and we demonstrated that people make a trade-off: The more a group is attributed a group mind, the less members of that group are attributed individual minds. Groups that are judged to have more group mind are also judged to be more cohesive and responsible for their collective actions. These findings have important implications for how people perceive the minds of groups and group members, and for how attributions of mind influence attributions of responsibility to groups and group members.
Why are some languages more regular than others?
- Details
- Dan Sperber
- Sunday, 01 January 2012
- Blog, Dan's blog
Many years ago, I did anthropological fieldwork among the Dorze of Southern Ethiopia. Since no grammar of the Dorze language was available, I had to find out what were its basic morphological and syntactic rules. The good news was that once I had identified a rule, I could apply it across the board: there were hardly any exceptions. From this point of view, Dorze stood in sharp contrast with Amharic, the dominant language of then imperial Ethiopia. Amharic (like English) is a language with many irregularities. Dorze regularity was found not only at the morphological level, but also at the phonological level. The many words that had been borrowed from Amharic into Dorze had all, except for the most recent ones, acquired fully-regular dorze phonology.
Why are some languages quite regular and others not? I remember posing the question to the historical linguist Robert Hertzron, whom I met at the time in Addis Ababa. It is, he suggested, because, in the process of language acquisition, children tend spontaneously to over-regularize. They apply any rule they have acquired to all possible instances (in English, for instance, they may over-generalize the ordinary rule for past tense and say “he goed” instead of “he went”). In societies where adults correct children, these mistaken regularization are suppressed and irregularities are maintained; in societies where adults leave children alone in this respect, irregularities are less stable, and the language tends to be more regular. Gary Marcus et al. in their monograph on “Overregularization in language acquisition” (1992) quote Jill de Villiers half-joking: "Leave children alone and they'd tidy up the English language."
Conference on Social Cognition, Engagement and the Second-Person Perspective
- Details
- Thursday, 29 December 2011
- News, Call for Papers
Interdisciplinary Conference, University of Cologne (Germany), May 25-27, 2012 on Social Cognition, Engagement and the Second-Person Perspective. Deadline for poster submission: March 1st, 2012
What are the psychological processes and neural mechanisms enabling social cognition? How might social cognition be modulated depending on whether one is actively engaged in social interaction with someone or merely observing others interact? What is the impact of this distinction for research methodologies in social psychology and social neuroscience as well as for our understanding of conditions like autism? In particular, this conference brings together experts from various fields to promote the prospects of a second-person approach for future research into the foundations of social cognition.
Read more: Conference on Social Cognition, Engagement and the Second-Person Perspective
Summer Course on "Problems of the Self", CEU, Budapest, June 25-July 5, 2012
Summer Course on "Problems of the Self", CEU, Budapest, June 25-July 5, 2012. Application deadline: February 15, 2012
Brief Course Description:
The course aims to present the state of the art in research on the self from philosophy, psychology, cognitive neuroscience, sociology, and cognitive anthropology. Themes revolve around the nature of the self, as revealed through self-consciousness, body perception, action and joint action, and its embedding in society and culture. Historical and developmental perspectives provide other angles on the self. The course presents a unique opportunity for interdisciplinary discussion on the self from multiple perspectives. It is directed at advanced graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and junior faculty working in philosophy, psychology, cognitive neuroscience and cognate disciplines.
Read more: Summer Course on "Problems of the Self", CEU, Budapest, June 25-July 5, 2012
Middle childhood: Evolutionary and cross-cultural perspectives
- Details
- Tuesday, 27 December 2011
- News, Publications
An interesting special issue of Human Nature (22/3, Sept. 2011) on middle childhood:
From Benjamin C. Campbell’s Introduction:
“Middle childhood is recognized by developmental psychologists as a distinct developmental stage between early childhood and adolescence, defined by increasing cognitive development, emotional regulation, and relative social independence. Adults have increasing expectations of children during middle childhood, as reflected in Sheldon’s White’s (1996) description of this stage as “the age of reason and responsibility.” Developmentally, the onset of middle childhood is defined by Piaget’s (1963) “5 to 7 transition,” with the end marked by the onset of puberty... “In this special issue we examine middle childhood in both evolutionary and cross-cultural perspectives to understand its origins, physiological correlates, and ecological and cultural variability."
Read more: Middle childhood: Evolutionary and cross-cultural perspectives
PhD studentships in Cognitive Science at the CEU, Budapest
PhD studentships are available for the doctoral program in Cognitive Science at Central European University (CEU), Budapest, Hungary. Application deadline: 25 January 2012.
The Department of Cognitive Science at CEU invites applications for doctoral student positions starting in September 2012. This is a research-based training program in human cognition with social cognition and learning as core themes. Research topics include cooperation, communication, social learning, cultural transmission, embodied cognition, joint action, developmental social cognition, strategic decision-making, problem solving, visual cognition, sensory and statistical learning, visual psychophysics, computational neuroscience, and social cognitive neuroscience. Students will follow courses in cognitive psychology, philosophy of mind, cognitive anthropology, computational cognition and linguistics, and will receive practical research training in the laboratories of the members of this new department.
Read more: PhD studentships in Cognitive Science at the CEU, Budapest
Summer school on Theories of Communication in Riga (July 2012)
There will be an International Summer School at the University of Latvia, Riga, 8-18 July 2012, on the theme: Theories of Communication. What linguistic knowledge and interpretive mechanisms are required to explain the phenomena of inferential communication? Should we favour an explanation rooted in Relevance Theory? And what insight can a pragmatic approach give us into the evolution of human communication? These and other questions will be the focus of the 2012 edition of the International Summer School in Cognitive Sciences and Semantics. Among the topics explored will be the following: (i) information structure, (ii) temporal reference, (iii) indirect speech acts, (iv) non-literal uses of language, in particular, metaphor and related tropes, including hyperbole, simile, sarcasm and irony, (v) hinting, (vi) the nature of word meaning, (vii) cooperation and antagonism in conversation, (viii) slurs, and (ix) the idea of a dynamic lexicon.
Invited organizers: Ernie Lepore (Rutgers University, US) & Dan Sperber (Central European University, Budapest, H, & CNRS, Paris, FR). Faculty: Elisabeth Camp (University of Pennsylvania, US), Robyn Carston (University College London, UK), Ivona Kucerova (McMaster University, Canada), Ernie Lepore (Rutgers University, US), Peter Ludlow (Northwestern University, US), Dan Sperber (Central European University, Budapest, H, & CNRS, Paris, FR), Matthew Stone (Rutgers University, US), Deirdre Wilson (University College London, UK).
Read more: Summer school on Theories of Communication in Riga (July 2012)
3-year DPhil studentship in anthropology at Oxford to study ritual
Applications are invited for an ESRC-funded 3-year DPhil studentship based in the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography to begin in October 2012. The student will be supervised by Professor Harvey Whitehouse (Oxford) and Dr Quentin Atkinson (University of Auckland).
This studentship examines the broad question: what is the relationship between ritual and social organization in the human past? The aim will be to build on recent research suggesting that the intensity of emotional (especially dysphoric) arousal experienced by ritual participants correlates inversely with frequency of performance (Atkinson and Whitehouse, 2010). Whereas low-frequency/high arousal ("imagistic") rituals are associated with small, localized, and intensely cohesive communities, high-frequency/low-arousal ("doctrinal") rituals are found in large-scale, fast-spreading, and diffusely cohesive communities (Whitehouse,1995, 2000, 2004). Temporal and spatial distributions of data may also be used to evaluate predictions generated under a range of models of cultural transmission and evolution (Richerson and Boyd, 2005; Henrich, 2009; Pagel, Atkinson, and Meade, 2007; Turchin, 2009). By matching model predictions to observed data under a variety of simulated conditions this DPhil project will seek to identify likely drivers of the cultural shifts as well as to test the performance of competing models of ritual transmission.
Read more: 3-year DPhil studentship in anthropology at Oxford to study ritual
The scope-severity paradox
- Details
- Anikó Sebestény
- Sunday, 30 October 2011
- Blog, Anikó's blog
Do criminals deserve a less severe punishment if they harmed more people ?
Most people would almost certainly answer "no". Of course: punishment should be sensitive to the severity of the crime. That's what we usually think.
Yet in a compelling paper published in Social Psychological and Personality Science in August 2010, Loran F. Nordgren and Mary-Hunter Morris McDonnell found that increasing the number of people victimized by a crime actually decreases the perceived severity of that crime and leads people to recommend less punishment.
The scope-severity paradox presented in the article is indeed astonishing. The paper is also exemplary in how beautifully it combines lab experiments and analysis of real-world data.
EHBEA Conference 2012
A message from Jamie Tehrani:
This year's European Human Behaviour and Evolution Association Conference is being hosted by Durham University on 25-28th March 2012. On behalf of the local organising committee I would like to warmly invite members of the Institute to come along and consider giving a talk. The deadline for the submission of abstracts for presentations is 25th November 2011. Further details about the conference, deadlines and registration can be found on the website: http://www.dur.ac.uk/jeremy.kendal/EHBEA2012/Welcome.html
Atheist clergymen and belief in belief
- Details
- Helen De Cruz
- Saturday, 22 October 2011
- Blog, Helen De Cruz's blog
A while ago, Dan Sperber blogged about research by Daniel Dennett and Linda LaScola on atheist clergymen. Their paper, which is available in open access here, provides a fascinating qualitative study on atheist clergymen from various denominations, all of whom were anonymousmy interviewed about their doubts and loss of religious belief. If found out they risked losing their job at the very least, and being expelled from the religious community that had been their home for so long. Yet, many of them expressed moral qualms about not coming out: was their silence a form of hypocricy, or was it all for the best?
Could Christian atheism rekindle an interest in religion?
"I’m where I am because I need the job still. If I had an alternative, a comfortable paying job, something I was interested in doing, and a move that wouldn’t destroy my family, that’s where I’d go. Because I do feel kind of hypocritical." (Dennett & Lascola 2010, p. 137)
Theoretical Interventions in the Anthropology of Mathematics
- Details
- Saturday, 22 October 2011
- News, Call for Papers
We are seeking abstracts for a session entitled "Theoretical Interventions in the Anthropology of Mathematics" (Panel Organizers: Stephen Chrisomalis and Samar Zebian) to be held at the Society for Anthropological Sciences 8th Annual Meeting in Las Vegas, Nevada, February 22-25, 2012. Deadline for abstract: November 20, 2011.
A considerable body of important research bears directly on the relationship between mathematics and aspects of language, cognition, and culture. However, disciplinary trends in anthropology and linguistics have insufficiently integrated this important work into basic theories of human behavior, cognition, and cultural variability. We are seeking papers on any aspect of mathematics, numeracy, or number systems that clarifies and expands the theoretical contribution of the social-scientific study of mathematics beyond its current purview. We particularly are interested in papers that bridge the various human sciences including cognitive science, anthropology, linguistics, psychology, history, and/or philosophy.
(More below the fold)
Read more: Theoretical Interventions in the Anthropology of Mathematics
An epidemiology-of-representations solution to a WWII shipwreck mystery
- Details
- Dan Sperber
- Sunday, 16 October 2011
- Blog, Dan's blog
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The Australian Cruiser HAMS Sidney
After a shameful lull in the activities of the ICCI (Sorry, folks!), we need something sensational – something, say, like Urbain Le Verrier’s famous conjecture that there had to be a yet unknown planet and his calculation of the location of Neptune that led to its actual sighting in 1846. Well, my story is not quite as sensational but I hope it will kick start a return to ICCI full speed. It involves two psychologists, John Dunn and Kim Kirsner, using cognitive and mathematical analyses of old testimonies to locate a German and an Australian warship that, in 1941, had been engaged in a firefight somewhere off the west coast of Australia and had both sunk. While none of the 645 men onboard the Australian HMAS Sydney survived, 317 sailors from the German cruiser Kormoran did, were picked up by the Australian navy, and interrogated. About 70 of them gave some indications of the location of the event. The locations they indicated however were spread out over hundreds of miles. Even assuming that the prisoners were not trying to deceive their captors, their testimonies seemed impossible to exploit.
Read more: An epidemiology-of-representations solution to a WWII shipwreck mystery
PhD studentships in Cognitive Science at the Central European University (Budapest)
PhD studentships are available for the doctoral program in Cognitive Science at Central European University (CEU), Budapest, Hungary. Application deadline: 25 January 2012.
The Department of Cognitive Science at CEU invites applications for doctoral positions starting in September 2012. This is a research-based training program in human cognition with social cognition and learning as core themes. Research topics include cooperation, communication, social learning, cultural transmission, embodied cognition, joint action, developmental social cognition, strategic decision-making, problem solving, visual cognition, sensory and statistical learning, visual psychophysics, computational neuroscience, and social cognitive neuroscience. Students will follow courses in cognitive psychology, philosophy of mind, cognitive anthropology, computational cognition and linguistics, and will receive practical research training in the laboratories of the members of this new department.
Read more: PhD studentships in Cognitive Science at the Central European University (Budapest)
Anthropological light on the mind-body problem
- Details
- Friday, 30 September 2011
- News, Publications
In the last issue of Cognitive Science (vol. 35, #7, Sept 2011), “Cross-Cultural Similarities and Differences in Person-Body Reasoning: Experimental Evidence From the United Kingdom and Brazilian Amazon”, an excellent article by Emma Cohen, Emily Burdett, Nicola Knight, Justin Barrett (available here).
The abstract begins: "We report the results of a cross-cultural investigation of person-body reasoning in the United Kingdom and northern Brazilian Amazon (Marajó Island). The study provides evidence that directly bears upon divergent theoretical claims in cognitive psychology and anthropology, respectively, on the cognitive origins and cross-cultural incidence of mind-body dualism. The article ends: "The cross-cultural study reported offers the first systematic, cross-cultural analysis of person-body reasoning across a broad range of capacities, provides firm evidential grounds for the refinement of theory and method in future cognitive psychological and anthropological research, and suggests numerous lines of potential further inquiry on the emergence and spread of patterns of recurrence and variation in mind-body dualism in particular, and person-body reasoning generally."
Why are human beings so interested in explaining misfortune?
- Details
- Pascal Boyer
- Friday, 12 August 2011
- Blog, Pascal's blog
(Enter our super-competition and win a mega-prize!)
Some time ago, a lady in France had the pleasure of seeing her lottery ticket win the jackpot (several million euros), only to have her dream blown to smithereens by an untoward incident. To establish that a claim is valid, the lottery is legally bound to bring together [a] the computer printout of the draw, [b] the winning ticket and [c] the computer readout from the place where the ticket was purchased. Unfortunately, that establishment (a bureau de tabac for you connoisseurs of things French) had burned down to a pile of ashes, cash registers and computers included, the day after the poor woman bought the ticket. The claim was denied.
A blow indeed, as her life so far had not quite been a rose petal path. She was unemployed, her husband an invalid with no pension, her equally unemployed son and daughter had both turned into alcoholic vagrants. We can certainly imagine her crying, Why?, Why me?
[Note that I am not sure this story is altogether accurate - I recount from memory]
Why think about misfortune?
Why do people the world over think about misfortune, and construct elaborate theories to explain it? Here surely is one of your massive, elephant-in-the-room quasi-universals of culture, crying out for explanation, and (as usual) thoroughly neglected by standard social sciences. In all human groups, it seems, people notice and remember cases of misfortune, tally them, detect regularities – and most important, try to explain misfortune.
Why?
Also, in most human groups, explanations of misfortune center on agents, imagined (gods, spirits) or real (relatives, enemies), that brought about the untoward events.
Again, why? Why do people do that?
To us evolutionarily minded folks, these universally available accounts of misfortune are puzzling, mostly because they are false. Nor are they just slightly off target – they are downright misguided. Bad things in the world happen for a variety of reasons, but superhuman agents are not among them. There are no witches making you sick, no bad spirits that make you trip up. Why would our evolved design for a mind include the propensity to focus on and ponder at length totally useless explanations? In evolutionary terms, this is all the more puzzling as such thoughts are not just futile but also potentially harmful. The time and energy spent thinking about mystical causes are wasted for a more productive use of one’s reason.
You may tell me that this is just as true of myriad other cultural phenomena, as people fill their heads with nonsense of no possible evolutionary value – and insert your favourite example here, religious beliefs, ethnic hatred, alternative medicine, etc. Well, you may be right – the culture-as-widespread-nonsense phenomenon is much larger than the present question. But saying that there are other problems of a similar nature does not solve this one – unless you assume there should be a unique solution for all domains of culture-as-nonsense, which I do not believe for a minute.
So let me proceed to the four questions we should address if we want to have a decent model of misfortune expanations.
Question 1. Why agents?
Why are agents so frequently recruited in the explanation of misfortune? There are several ways to account for untoward occurrences. One type of explanation is your common covering-law kind of generic causal statement, whereby ordinary impersonal causal processes are involved in producing a specific outcome. The bureau de tabac burned down betcause it was full of flammable stuff, and a small flame (perhaps a cigarette butt) started a fire. Another type is a kind of karmic accounting, where bad things are the outcome of some kind of fault. The place burned down because the lady (or her ancestors) had committed some moral violations in the past. The third model is that an agent was involved. Somehow a spirit or god decided to burn down that place. This latter, agency-based account is by far the most frequent. Why is that the case?
Question 2. Why “why me?” ?
This is another universal feature of misfortune models - they explain, not a generic set of causal processes that would account for the type of event that occurred, but the particular token that is being considered. Or, if you prefer less jargon, consider the most familiar example from classical anthropology. Among the Zande, when the roof of a mud granary collapses, everyone considers this must be a case of witchcraft – bad people are involved. In case you feel superior and smugly inform those benighted Zande that roofs collapse when their pillars are thoroughly gnawed by termites – well, they know that perfectly well, only that is irrelevant – witchcraft is mentioned not to explain why roofs collapse, but why that particular one collapsed at that particular time. I know viruses cause diseases, but wy did it have to happen to me? Why me? Why now?
Why do people ask such questions? I hear you say, of course people want to know why it happened to them, of course that is universal – what could be more natural? Who cares what makes other rooftops collapse? Who cares what triggers diseases in other people? What people want to find out, of course, is the why of this particular roof collapse or disease, the one that affects them.
Now, where does all this of course stuff come from? What is so natural here? All this may seem natural to us… simply because we are human too, but that is all the more reason to try and explain it.
Question 3. Why this asymmetry between good and bad fortune?
This may be simpler to solve (indeed the solution may well be obvious) - still, this is one of the questions a good cognition and culture account should address. Most people in the world construct elaborate explanations for bad things while in many cases they are happy that good things just happen.
Question 4. Why are only some occurrences explained in agentive ways?
In the bad good old days of classical anthropology, people with a magical, primitive or prelogical mentality did everything the prelogical or magical way. They were peasants, barbarians, savages – in other words the unclubbable. But as Evans-Pritchard and many others pointed out, all these people also have causal explanations of the more sober, covering-law kind. True, witches will destroy your granary, but granaries cave in also because of termites. Indeed, in most human groups there is an explicit distinction between “simple” or “straightforward” misfortune, which requires not much explanation beyond a recognition of the generic causal processes involved, and those “special” occurrences that seem to cry out for an agentive, karmic or other explanation. During my fieldwork, I learned that Fang people in Cameroon considered some illnesses and assorted misfortune as “simple misfortune”, to be explained for instance in terms of (local models of) physiology, while others were “special”, recruiting the whole panoply of spirits and ancestors.
Why do people maintain both kinds of models? And more important, are there any recurrent differences in the kinds of events covered by these types of explanations?
My solution and our competition for a MEGA-PRIZE
I have found a marvellous solution to all these questions. Unfortunately, the space of this blog is too small to contain it. So I reserve its full publication for another occasion.
In the meantime, why not let a hundred flowers bloom and a thousand schools compete? This is why ICCI proudly opens a competition for the best evolution-compatible, human-cognition-driven, empirically testable explanatory model of these four features of human reflections on misfortune.
Competition regulations: 1. Only send contributions that would address and answer all four questions above. 2. The winner will receive a prize of US$42, offered by Pascal Boyer, in the form of a voucher for use in their favourite online bookshop. (I offer this precise sum because that’s the amount of a reviewer’s fee that I got and absolutely did not deserve). 3. Pascal Boyer is sole judge of all entries. His judgment is thoroughly subjective and may be swayed by friendship, reputation, good looks, bribes and neural misfirings. The judgment is final and unmotivated.
Epistemic vigilance... and epistemic recklessness
- Details
- Pascal Boyer
- Sunday, 07 August 2011
- Blog, Pascal's blog
We have all enjoyed, if that is the right word, conversations with people who seem to have no great regard for the niceties of argument and evidence - people who tell you that homeopathy does work because it cured them of a common cold, in a few days… Or that the FBI (or other such agencies) deliberately created the AIDS virus (or crack cocaine) to destroy Africans (or black Americans)… In many cases, such epistemic lapses are context-specific - the same person who claims that homeopathy does work will insist on proper evidence when buying a dishwasher or deciding on a school for their children.
A recent book called Panic Virus by Seth Mnookin details the extraordinary story of the “vaccinations cause autism” meme. This started with some inconclusive but over-reported studies by a few marginal scientists, and soon ballooned up into a huge social movement, where thousands of distressed parents could exchange information, share their traumatic experience, and read or listen to many (some naive, some downright mendacious) “scientists” promoting wild theories (autism from vaccines, from the preservatives used in the vaccines, from radiation, from lack of vitamins, etc.) and often peddling expensive, untested and dangerous treatments (like painful testosterone injections).
As Mnookin relates, the movement soon acquired many characteristics of a cult...
Read more: Epistemic vigilance... and epistemic recklessness
Uncovering and Punishing Unconscious Bias
- Details
- Hugo Mercier
- Sunday, 07 August 2011
- Workshops, Decision-making for a social world
Uncovering and Punishing Unconscious Bias (paper here)
Philip E. Tetlock, Gregory Mitchell and L. Jason Anastasopoulos
Recent technological advances in psychology hold out the promise of detecting unconscious biases before they cause harm. Advocates of the technology may fail to appreciate its many potential uses and costs. We present experimental results demonstrating the ideological filters through which this new technology and its potential uses are evaluated: (1) liberals supported use of the technology to detect unconscious racism among company managers but not to detect unconscious anti-Americanism among applicants to security jobs; conservatives showed the reverse pattern; (2) few participants of any ideology supported punishing individuals for unconscious bias, but liberals and conservatives supported punishing organizations that failed to use the technology to root out each group’s prioritized societal harm; (3) concerns about scientific bias and Type I and II errors mediated perceptions of misuse potential and willingness to punish organizations; (4) political “extremists” were more likely than “moderates” to reconsider support for the technology when confronted with a less palatable alternative use they had not considered.
Google Effects on Memory
- Details
- Friday, 05 August 2011
- News, Publications
A new article entitled "Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips" by Sparrow, Liu & Wegner should be of interest to scholars interested in the effect of culture on cognition. It documents the effect of having access to online ressources of information on the way in which people look for answers (Exp. 1), remember things (Exp. 2), remember where to find information (Exp. 3) and whether they are more likely to memorize where to find some information rather than the information itself (Exp. 4).
Abstract: "The advent of the Internet, with sophisticated algorithmic search engines, has made accessing information as easy as lifting a finger. No longer do we have to make costly efforts to find the things we want. We can “Google” the old classmate, find articles online, or look up the actor who was on the tip of our tongue. The results of four studies suggest that when faced with difficult questions, people are primed to think about computers and that when people expect to have future access to information, they have lower rates of recall of the information itself and enhanced recall instead for where to access it. The Internet has become a primary form of external or transactive memory, where information is stored collectively outside ourselves."
Social influences on self-control
- Details
- Hugo Mercier
- Wednesday, 03 August 2011
- Workshops, Decision-making for a social world
Social influences on "self"-control (paper here)
Joe Kable, University of Pennsylvania
As Duckworth and Kern (2011) note, currently over 1% of the abstracts in PsycInfo are indexed by “self-control” or one its synonyms. As part of this widespread interest, cognitive and neural scientists are debating the psychological mechanisms of self-control (Ainslie, 1975; Metcalfe & Mischel, 1999; Muraven & Baumeister, 2000), and the implementation of these mechanisms in the brain (Figner, et al., 2010; Hare, Camerer, & Rangel, 2009; Hare, Malmaud, & Rangel, 2011; Kable & Glimcher, 2007, 2010; McClure, Ericson, Laibson, Loewenstein, & Cohen, 2007; McClure, Laibson, Loewenstein, & Cohen, 2004). These efforts, however, currently proceed without much agreement on a theoretical or operational definition regarding what constitutes “self-control” (Duckworth & Kern, 2011). Definitions have been offered, of course, but one gets the sense that many investigators are content defining self-control in much the same manner that American courts define pornography – “I know it when I see it” (Jacobellis vs Ohio, 1964). Just as our intuitions regarding physics can be mistaken, so too can our intuitions regarding psychology (Stanovich, 1985). This essay argues that an over-reliance on “intuitive psychics” is hindering efforts to identify the cognitive and neural processes involved in self-control. Specifically, current theories tend to underemphasize or ignore completely a factor of critical importance – the social world. Yet, “self-control” is a concept that only emerges at the level of the person in society: it is the social world that defines what is and is not a self-control problem. This realization has important implications for people interested in cognitive and neural mechanisms: it suggests that self-control is unlikely to be a single process; that the computation of social norms is an understudied process that is likely critical for self-controlled behavior; and that interventions that target the social context to increase the influence of norms may prove the strongest way to increase self-controlled behavior.
Generosity as a by-product of selection for reciprocity
- Details
- Wednesday, 27 July 2011
- News, Publications
A new article entitled "Evolution of direct reciprocity under uncertainty can explain human generosity in one-shot encounters" by Andrew W. Deltona, Max M. Krasnowa, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby (Published online in PNAS, 25 July 2011) suggests that 'generosity', the fact that we are willing to incur costs to provide anonymous others with benefits, is a necessary byproduct of an adaptation for reciprocity.
Abstract: Are humans too generous? The discovery that subjects choose to incur costs to allocate benefits to others in anonymous, one-shot economic games has posed an unsolved challenge to models of economic and evolutionary rationality. Using agent-based simulations, we show that such generosity is the necessary byproduct of selection on decision systems for regulating dyadic reciprocity under conditions of uncertainty. In deciding whether to engage in dyadic reciprocity, these systems must balance (i) the costs of mistaking a one-shot interaction for a repeated interaction (hence, risking a single chance of being exploited) with (ii) the far greater costs of mistaking a repeated interaction for a one-shot interaction (thereby precluding benefits from multiple future cooperative interactions). This asymmetry builds organisms naturally selected to cooperate even when exposed to cues that they are in one-shot interactions.
More Articles...
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- The Knowledge Commons: Research and Innovation in an Unequal World
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- Snipe hunters of preys with low epistemic vigilance
- Mèng Zǐ (372 – 289 BCE) on the moral organ
- Adam Smith (1723-1790) on mirror neurons and empathy
- Smith (1723-1790) on innateness and cultural variability
- Adam Smith (1723-1790) on ultimate and proximate causes in psychology
- Adam Smith (1723 – 1790) on intuitive and reflective processes
- History of social sciences week!
- Fast lemons and intuitive beliefs
- Judgments and decisions based on attempts to disambiguate the given information
- Offensive inanity in the name of evolutionary psychology
- Theology and cognitive science
- The cost of collaboration
- Do people ever engage in “magical thinking” ?
- New issue of the Journal of Cognition and Culture
- Exploiting the wisdom of others
- David Hume, the anthropologist, born May 7, 1711
social sciences and folk social sciences
Why we don't get much respect
In praise of anthropologists (and others)
Thanks!
Great idea! Another early contributor to theory of moral emotions
Great article
Sociolinguistic Typology
Who's angry?
Dear angry reader...
anathema to most linguists?