International Cognition and Culture Institute

the Journal of Cognition and Culture: a new issue

Details: Monday, 07 May 2012; News, Publications

The new issue (vol 12, 1-2) of the Journal of Cognition and Culture is out. For the table of content and abstracts:

2 postdocs at UBC in evolution, cognition and culture

Details: Thursday, 03 May 2012; News, Jobs

Joe Henrich informs us: The Centre for Human Evolution, Cognition and Culture (HECC) at the University of British Columbia will be hiring 5 post-doctoral researchers as part of a large, international, collaboration among psychologists, neuroscientists, anthropologists, historians, and biologists on the evolution of religion. Below is a call for applications for two of these positions. The first is for a historian to spearhead a systematic and comparative study of religion and prosociality (from the historical record). This person will work with Prof. Ted Slingerland. The second is for comparative ethnographic and experimental studies among living populations across the globe (on religion, ritual and prosociality). This person will work with Prof. Ara Norenzayan and me. We are open to anthropologists, psychologists and economists, among others. If possible, we'd like to have this person in place by September 2012 (or at least by Dec). We know that right now is a bad time to search for post-docs to start this fall. For this reason, we would like to consider applicants that can finish their PhD in the fall (perhaps earlier than anticipated) and come immediately to Vancouver.

Lectureship in Cognition and Culture at Belfast

Details: Tuesday, 24 April 2012; News, Jobs

A position of Lecturer is open in the School of History and Anthropology at Queen's University, Belfast, to "teach and supervise at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, to participate in the research activities of the Institute of Cognition and Culture, to undertake research in line with the School’s research strategy, and to contribute to the School’s administration and outreach activities." Deadline: May 21, 2012. Details here.

The social motivation theory of autism

Details: Saturday, 21 April 2012; News, Publications

Just out in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, "The social motivation theory of autism," an article (available here) by Coralie Chevallier, Gregor Kohls, Vanessa Troiani, Edward S Brodkin, and Robert T Schultz that challenges the dominant explanation of autism in terms of a Theory-of-Mind deficit. Given the role that the case of autism plays in our understanding of human sociality, this is of high cognition-and-culture relevance.

The first paragraph of the article: "Over the past three decades, a number of theories have been put forward to account for the pervasive social impairments found in Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). Among the various attempts, the idea of a core deﬁcit in social cognition (theory of mind, or ToM, in particular) has become one of the most prominent accounts of ASD. Concomitantly, the impact of motivational factors on the development of social skills and social cognition has received little attention. Recently, however, social motivation has emerged as a promising research domain at the intersection of social psychology, behavioral economics, social neuroscience and evolutionary biology. In this review, we integrate these diverse strands of research and defend the idea that social motivation is a powerful force guiding human behavior and that disruption of social motivational mechanisms may constitute a primary deﬁcit in autism. In this framework, motivational deﬁcits are thought to have downstream effects on the development of social cognition, and deﬁcits in social cognition are therefore construed as a consequence, rather than a cause, of disrupted social interest."

The concluding remarks: "The social world summons our attention like no other domain: social signals are prioritized by attention, interactions are intrinsically rewarding, and social maintaining permeates interpersonal behaviors. Social motivation is subserved by dedicated biological mechanisms and can be seen as an evolutionary adaptation to humans’ highly collaborative environment: by enhancing attention to social information, by rewarding social interactions, and by promoting the desire to effectively maintain social bonds, social motivation smoothes relationships, promotes coordination and ultimately fosters collaboration. In ASD, by contrast, there appears to be an overall decrease in the attentional weight assigned to social information. Diminished social orienting, social reward and social maintaining are all found in autism and can account for a range of behaviors, including cascading effects on the development of mature social cognitive skills. These deﬁcits appear to be rooted in biological disruptions of the orbitofrontal–striatal–amygdala circuitry, as well as in dysregulation of certain neuropeptides and neurotransmitters. ASD can thus be seen as an extreme case of early-onset diminished social motivation and provides a powerful model for understanding humans’ intrinsic drive to seek acceptance and avoid rejection."

Do infants understand social dominance relations?

Details: Thursday, 19 April 2012; News, Publications

Forthcoming in PNAS, a groundbreaking article by Olivier Mascaro and Gergely Csibra investigating the "Representation of stable social dominance relations by human infants" (available here).

Abstract: What are the origins of humans’ capacity to represent social relations? We approached this question by studying human infants’ understanding of social dominance as a stable relation. We presented infants with interactions between animated agents in conflict situations. Studies 1 and 2 targeted expectations of stability of social dominance. They revealed that 15-mo-olds (and, to a lesser extent, 12-mo-olds) expect an asymmetric relationship between two agents to remain stable from one conflict to another. To do so, infants need to infer that one of the agents (the dominant) will consistently prevail when her goals conflict with those of the other (the subordinate). Study 3 and 4 targeted the format of infants’ representation of social dominance. In these studies, we found that 12- and 15-mo-olds did not extend their expectations of dominance to unobserved relationships, even when they could have been established by transitive inference. These results suggest that infants' expectation of stability originates from their representation of social dominance as a relationship between two agents rather than as an individual property. Infants’ demonstrated understanding of social dominance reflects the cognitive underpinning of humans’ capacity to represent social relations, which may be evolutionarily ancient, and may be shared with nonhuman species.

Tamar Gendler's online course on human nature

Details: Friday, 13 April 2012; News, Publications

If you want a well taught, well produced free online course on basic classical issues in the philosophy of human nature, here is this Open Yale course by Tamar Gendler:

The course on Philosophy and the Science of Human Nature pairs central texts from Western philosophical tradition (including works by Plato, Aristotle, Epictetus, Hobbes, Kant, Mill, Rawls, and Nozick) with recent findings in cognitive science and related fields. The course is structured around three intertwined sets of topics: Happiness and Flourishing; Morality and Justice; and Political Legitimacy and Social Structures.

Tool use, gesture and the evolution of language

Details: Tuesday, 10 April 2012; News, Publications

A special issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B entitled "From action to language: comparative perspective on primate tool use, gesture and the evolution of human language" edited by James Steele, Pier Francesco Ferrari and Leonardo Fogassi: "The papers in this Special Issue examine tool use and manual gestures in primates as a window on the evolution of the human capacity for language. Neurophysiological research has supported the hypothesis of a close association between some aspects of human action organization and of language representation, in both phonology and semantics. Tool use provides an excellent experimental context to investigate analogies between action organization and linguistic syntax. Contributors report and contextualize experimental evidence from monkeys, great apes, humans and fossil hominins, and consider the nature and the extent of overlaps between the neural representations of tool use, manual gestures and linguistic processes." For the table of contents,

UCLA Conference on culture,mind, and brain:

Details: Tuesday, 10 April 2012; News, Events

An Interdisciplinary Conference on "Culture, Mind, and Brain: Emerging Concepts, Methods, Applications" will take place on October 19–20, 2012 at UCLA with the support of the International Cultural Neuroscience Consortium (ICNC)

Description: 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. The conference is designed to appeal to a wide academic audience of biologists, neuroscientists, psychologists, anthropologists, sociologists, epidemiologists, and those in related fields interested in learning about cutting-edge interdisciplinary research at the intersection of culture, mind, and brain.

What explains foxhole theism?

Details: Helen De Cruz; Wednesday, 04 April 2012; Blog, Helen De Cruz's blog

The well-known dictum that there are no atheists in foxholes (the source of this phrase is uncertain) is false. After all, there is even a military organization for atheists, the Military Association of Atheists & Freethinkers. Having read several the testimonies from these military men and women, I was struck by the extent to which (Christian) religiosity (regular prayer, semi-compulsory meetings with chaplains) is an ingrained part of military practice, and how tough this must be for atheists. As one MAAF member put it: "I was there for most of these prayers thinking, 'Religion is why we are in this war [Iraq] in the first place, haven't you guys figured that out yet?"

Sergeant York

Cognitive scientists of religion do not deny that people can remain atheist in the face of mortal danger. But there is a steady stream of literature indicating that, although one can be an explicit atheist in such cases, priming people with mortality-salient stimuli seems to increase implicit religiosity. For instance, Tracy et al. (2011) found that reminding people of their mortality increases their propensity to accept creationist accounts and to reject evolutionary theory. This result was obtained regardless of the participants’ religion (or lack thereof), religiosity, educational background, or preexisting attitude toward evolution. Jong et al. (accepted manuscript) showed that although mortality primes do not increase people's explicit religious convictions, they do increase implicit measures of religiosity. I will refer to this phenomenon as Implicit Foxhole Theism (IFT).

The theoretical framework in the literature to explain IFT is terror management theory (TMT). Accordingly, people cope with their awareness of death by investing in some kind of immortality. Religious beliefs, which cross-culturally, but not universally, have a literal form of immortality in their package deals, play a salient role in this.

Admittedly, not all religions paint a rosy picture of the afterlife.

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Nick Enfield reviews Hurford's The Origins of Grammar

Details: Saturday, 31 March 2012; News, Publications

Hurford In the Times Literary Supplement, Nick Enfield reviews James R. Hurford's new book The Origins of Grammar, Oxford UP, 2011 (a sequel to The Origins of Meaning, Oxford UP, 2007):

"If you could travel back to a time around the dawn of humankind, and if you encountered a people there whose only form of language was a list of one-word interjections like Yuck, Wow, Oops, Hey!, No, and Huh?, would you say that these people were of a different species, not quite human? Would they be like today’s apes that simply don’t have it in them to fully acquire a modern human language? Or would they be the same as us only less well equipped for communication, like the eighteenth-century man who is every bit human but happens not to have been born in a world with telephones? If the latter were true, then language would be more technology than biology, more something we build than something that grows. It’s clear that the earliest humans did not possess language as we know it. The question is whether this was because language as we know it hadn’t yet been invented.

In James R. Hurford’s towering account of our species’ path from being once without language to now being emphatically with it, he proposes that just such a monophrase language of the Yuck/Wow variety was an important early human achievement. And, Hurford argues, while our earliest forms of language had no grammatical rules by which words were combined to form sentences, they were far from primitive call systems."

More here

Fluctuations in Word Use from Word Birth to Word Death

Details: Friday, 23 March 2012; News, Publications

A team of mathematicians and phycisists, Alexander M. Petersen, Joel Tenenbaum, Shlomo Havlin, and H. Eugene Stanley, studied the "Statistical Laws Governing Fluctuations in Word Use from Word Birth to Word Death" by analysing the dynamic properties of 10⁷words recorded in English, Spanish and Hebrew over the period 1800–2008. (The paper is published by Arxiv.org.)

xray

We quote at length from the concluding Discussion:

"... words are competing actors in a system of ﬁnite resources. Just as business ﬁrms compete for market share, words demonstrate the same growth statistics because they are competing for the use of the writer/speaker and for the attention of the corresponding reader/listener . A prime example of ﬁtness mediated evolutionary competition is the case of irregular and regular verb use in English. By analyzing the regularization rate of irregular verbs through the history of the English language, Lieberman et al. show that the irregular verbs that are used more frequently are less likely to be overcome by their regular verb counterparts. Speciﬁcally, they ﬁnd that the irregular verb death rate scales as the inverse square root of the word’s relative use. A study of word diffusion across IndoEuropean languages shows similar frequency-dependence of word replacement rates."

Social Norms and Cultural Dynamics

Details: Friday, 23 March 2012; News, Call for Papers

The journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes has a Call for Papers for a Special Issue on "Social Norms and Cultural Dynamics". Guest Editors: Michael W. Morris (Columbia University), Ying-yi Hong (Nanyang Technological University), Chi-yue Chiu (Nanyang Technological University). Submission Deadline: December 30, 2012.

Why do the people in a group—a corporation, profession or nation—tend to behave in similar, characteristic ways? Why do they respond to situations and approach problems differently than do the people in other groups? Cultural differences are seen even between firms in same industry, between occupations that overlap, and between adjacent countries —groups that essentially share the same environment—so cultural patterns are not simply adaptations to different environments. Humans differ from other social animals in this tendency of groups to accumulate cultural patterns, and this may explain how we broke away from other primates in developing more complex social organization (Baumeister, 2005). To understand culture and its role in organizational behavior, researchers have grappled with two related problems at different levels of analysis. First, what psychological mechanism causes individuals to behave in culturally characteristic ways? Second, how do these processes keep a population behaving in a certain set of ways (even as the individuals in one generation are replaced by a new generation), or, in other cases, generate cultural change over time? The first problem—cultural influence—arises in traditional organizational behavior research examining the extent to which national, corporate, or occupational traditions constrain a person’s judgments, decisions, or behaviors (e.g. Earley, 1989). The second problem—cultural persistence and evolution—arises in research investigating how collective-level patterns reproduce themselves over time (e.g., Boyd & Richerson, 1985; Harrison & Carroll, 2006; Weick & Gilfillan, 1971).

Emotion in Eastern and Western Music

Details: Tuesday, 20 March 2012; News, Publications

Just out in PLoSOne, an article on musical cognition entitled "Expression of Emotion in Eastern and Western Music Mirrors Vocalization" by Daniel Liu Bowling, Janani Sundararajan, Shui'er Han, Dale Purves (all from the Purves-lab at Duke).

Abstract: In Western music, the major mode is typically used to convey excited, happy, bright or martial emotions, whereas the minor mode typically conveys subdued, sad or dark emotions. Recent studies indicate that the differences between these modes parallel differences between the prosodic and spectral characteristics of voiced speech sounds uttered in corresponding emotional states. Here we ask whether tonality and emotion are similarly linked in an Eastern musical tradition. The results show that the tonal relationships used to express positive/excited and negative/subdued emotions in classical South Indian music are much the same as those used in Western music. Moreover, tonal variations in the prosody of English and Tamil speech uttered in different emotional states are parallel to the tonal trends in music. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that the association between musical tonality and emotion is based on universal vocal characteristics of different affective states.

Policing friendships. Lessons from the equine world

Details: Denis Tatone; Thursday, 15 March 2012; Blog, Denis Tatone's blog

Imagine two young chimpanzees. One is swaggering, stood on two feet, his coat all puffed up, frantically waving his arms. The other, few meters away, is hooting loudly while beating his hands on the bark of a dead mango tree. They’re both ready to charge. Yet, their postures give away much of their fears for the imminent clash. Suddenly, the second chimp stops his dramatic display. Time for reluctance is over. They both rush against each other in a rather clumsy dogtrot. At first, it’s a dust-up, but soon it becomes a chase paced by high-pitched screams. The first chimp tries to flee away from his opponent, without success. There’s no way to slow down the chase. Every time the first chimp tries to whimper submissively toward the rival, the drummer knocks him down. Not even his desperate resort to biting seems to stop the second chimp. Sucked into the fight, neither of the two chimps notices the big female approaching. Only when her furious scream smothers the frightened chimp’s shrieks, they finally see her. The intervention is quick and resolute. She brings herself close to the aggressor, a bulging lip face greeting him. The drummer, still frenzied from the brawl, barely manages to restrain himself. She stomps the ground twice, glancing at her son, now back on his knuckles. The rival retreats. Fight’s over.

Despite my dramatic rendition of the events, the interpretation is definitely straightforward. Two chimps started a fight, the shrieks of the weaker animal alerted the mother, who was probably chewing on some fruits nearby, until she decided to intervene and bring the conflict to an abrupt halt. The reasons for her behavior are easy to guess.

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The Psychosemantics of Free Riding

Details: Sunday, 11 March 2012; News, Publications

Forthcoming in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and available here, "The Psychosemantics of Free Riding: Dissecting the Architecture of a Moral Concept" by Andrew W. Delton, Leda Cosmides, Marvin Guemo, Theresa E. Robertson, and John Tooby. It illustrates the progress that has been made both theoretically and methodologically in the line of research opened by Leda Cosmides' 1989 “The logic of social exchange: Has natural selection shaped how humans reason?” .

Abstract: For collective action to evolve and be maintained by selection, the mind must be equipped with mechanisms designed to identify free riders—individuals who do not contribute to a collective project but still benefit from it. Once identified, free riders must be either punished or excluded from future collective actions. But what criteria does the mind use to categorize someone as a free rider? An evolutionary analysis suggests that failure to contribute is not sufficient. Failure to contribute can occur by intention or accident, but the adaptive threat is posed by those who are motivated to benefit themselves at the expense of cooperators.

The Social Evolution Forum

Details: Friday, 09 March 2012; News, Initiatives

Peter Turchin (co-author of Secular Cycles) and Michael Hochberg recently launched the Social Evolution Forum, a web platform dedicated to naturalistic thinking about institutions.

From the site's presentation:

The Social Evolution Forum has three dimensions. First, it is a virtual seminar, that is, a website dedicated to promoting the presentation and discussion of the most novel and important questions in social evolution theory. Second, it houses a blog dedicated to an informal discussion of current topics in social evolution, as well as policy implications of social evolution research (this blog is currently authored by Peter Turchin, but we expect that other authors will be joining in on the fun). And third, although fundamentally a communication network, the SEF also provides the foundations for inter- and pluri-disciplinary – and, ultimately, trans-disciplinary – collaboration. This takes the form of adverts to workshops and conferences, international funding opportunities, and the posting or publication of interim reports for specialists and for the broader community interested in social evolution.

Spatial cognition, culture and epistemological frameworks

Details: Norbert Ross; Thursday, 01 March 2012; Lectures, The Study of Cognition and Culture Today

This lecture is part of the special series of lectures 'The Study of Cognition and Culture Today' supported by the LSE Annual Fund, organised by the department of anthropology of the LSE and the International Cognition and Culture Institute.

David Graeber interviewed on Debt: the first 5000 years

Details: Sunday, 26 February 2012; News, Events

David Greaber, the anarchist anthropologist, talks about his important book, Debt: The First 5000 years (Melville House, 2011):

A new "Journal for the Cognitive Science of Religion"

Details: Saturday, 25 February 2012; News, Publications

The new "Journal for the Cognitive Science of Religion" is the official journal of the International Association for the Cognitive Science of Religion (founded in 2006).

Blurb: "The cognitive science of religion is a burgeoning field that finds itself in the center of cross-disciplinary research. Cognition is understood in a variety of ways from bottom-up to top-down models and theories. New insights into cognition, culture and religion are being discovered, new ways of doing research are being established and new methodologies and technologies are being used in the cognitive science of religion. The number of scholars and scientists working in this exciting field are expanding exponentially, and the journal provides a cutting-edge publication channel for this field."

Editors: Pascal Boyer, University of Washington in St. Louis; Armin W. Geertz, Aarhus University; Luther H. Martin, University of Vermont.

Summer Institute on Bounded Rationality in Berlin

Details: Saturday, 25 February 2012; News, Events

A Summer Institute on "Bounded Rationality 2012 – Foundations of an Interdisciplinary Decision Theory" Directed by Gerd Gigerenzer will take place from July 3 – 10, 2012 at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin.

The Summer Institute will provide a platform for genuinely interdisciplinary research, bringing together young scholars from psychology, biology, philosophy, economics, and other social sciences. Its focus will be on “decision making in the wild” – how cognition adapts to real-world decision-making environments. One of its aims is to provide participants a deeper understanding of the way humans come to grips with a fundamentally uncertain world, with an emphasis on applied contexts such as social interactions, medicine, justice, business, and politics. Graduate students and postdoctoral fellows from around the world are invited to apply by March 31, 2012. We will provide all participants with accommodation and stipends to cover part of their travel expenses. Details on the Summer Institute and the application process are available here .

What it is about women?

Details: Pascal Boyer; Monday, 20 February 2012; Blog, Pascal's blog

A few weeks a go, a young girl was assaulted in the othodox Jewish community of Beit Shemesh near Jerusalem. Being from an orthodox family, the girl was dressed in what most people in Israel and the rest of the world would judge an inordinately puritanical fashion. Apparently, that was not enough for a group of enraged young men, who ganged up on her and terrorized her, spat at her, shouted in her face and called her a “whore” and other assorted insults. The main source of their righteous anger was her bare arms. She is eight years old.

modesty police

The incident did not pass unnoticed. Israel is probably one of the most secular places in the world.The extremism of the Haredis and other fanatics are a perennial concern and irritant to most Israelis. Thousands joined demonstrations in several towns to denounce this latest eruption of puritanical folly.

Obviously, this kind of incident is far from special to Israel. In most of the Muslim world, men routinely gang up on women who fail to dress according to their standard of Islamic modesty. Women are just as routinely beaten up or even sent to jail for real or imagined violations of some extravagant regulation on what they should wear, say or do. In the US, many of the religiously inspired “social conservatives” are also obsessed with women, forever trying to push back on the very limited legal acceptance of abortion, but also on the availability or funding of contraception and genetic counselling.

None of this is new to our readers. But it raises, again, the question, What is it about women? that is, what is it that triggers that kind of apparently irrational hatred? Obviously, the question really is about men and their ever so mysterious psychological makeup.

Learning word meanings at 6 months?

Details: Sunday, 19 February 2012; News, Publications

Forthcoming in PNAS, an article by Elika Bergelson and Daniel Swingley arguing that "At 6–9 months, human infants know the meanings of many common nouns" with obvious implications for the study of cultural learning. The authors link their findings to the recent discovery of mindreading abilities in infants at the same early age (see for instance for instance Kovács, Téglás , and Endress, [2010] 'The social sense: Susceptibility to others’ beliefs in human infants and adults. Science 330:1830–1834)

Abstract: It is widely accepted that infants begin learning their native language not by learning words, but by discovering features of the speech signal: consonants, vowels, and combinations of these sounds. Learning to understand words, as opposed to just perceiving their sounds, is said to come later, between 9 and 15 mo of age, when infants develop a capacity for interpreting others’ goals and intentions. Here, we demonstrate that this consensus about the developmental sequence of human language learning is ﬂawed: in fact, infants already know the meanings of several common words from the age of 6 mo onward. We presented 6- to 9-mo-old infants with sets of pictures to view while their parent named a picture in each set. Over this entire age range, infants directed their gaze to the named pictures, indicating their understanding of spoken words. Because the words were not trained in the laboratory, the results show that even young infants learn ordinary words through daily experience with language. This surprising accomplishment indicates that, contrary to prevailing beliefs, either infants can already grasp the referential intentions of adults at 6 mo [the explanation the authors prefer] or infants can learn words before this ability emerges. The precocious discovery of word meanings suggests a perspective in which learning vocabulary and learning the sound structure of spoken language go hand in hand as language acquisition begins.

Tübingen summer school on “The Evolution of Morality”

Details: Sunday, 19 February 2012; News, Events

The Forum Scientiarum of Tuebingen University organises a summer school on “The Evolution of Morality” (June 12th – 16th, 2012). Twenty graduate students and junior scientists from all over the world will have the opportunity to work on the question of the evolution of morality with Professor Frans de Waal and Professor Gerhard Ernst. Application deadline, March 30.

Topic: What kind of new perspectives and implications can be drawn from insights of the theory of evolution for the understanding of the morality of human beings? The summer school will focus on the evolutionary fundaments of morality presenting as lecturer the primatologist Frans de Waal. Spending much time watching the behavior of apes and monkeys, de Waal brings forward the argument that the core concept of morality has already been present in the pre-social tendencies of nonhuman primates. As a consequence he attacks what he calls the "Veneer Theory", which holds that human ethics and morality - established as a cultural innovation - would only be a thin crust masking our Hobbesian brutish nature.

Evolutionary, cognitive and anthropological issues in the study of morality

Details: Dan Sperber; Thursday, 16 February 2012; Lectures, The Study of Cognition and Culture Today

What's the point of talking to your child?

Details: Alex Cristia; Saturday, 11 February 2012; Blog, Alex's blog

I would like to recruit ICCI readers to help me solve a mystery that has long puzzled me. I have met many linguists who know (or think they know) that:

1) There are cultures where children are not spoken to until they already talk fluently (1 or 2 years of age).

2) In some cultures, infants are spoken to in exactly the same way as adults are; that is, infant-directed speech = adult-directed speech.

It follows from (1) and (2) that infant-directed speech is a superfluous occurrence, and children can develop language perfectly well even if they are never addressed, or if they are talked to in run-of-the-mill sentences.

What are the sources of these firm linguistic beliefs? I've been able to trace some statements that could be interpreted as evidence for (2), but in each case there is some counterevidence or counterarguments to be found...

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The origin of essentialist reasoning

Details: Susan Gelman; Saturday, 04 February 2012; Lectures, The Study of Cognition and Culture Today

Incredible! Listening to ‘When I’m 64’ makes you forget your age

Details: Olivier Morin; Monday, 30 January 2012; Blog, Olivier's blog

As an illustration of the power of priming experiments to produce astonishing findings, a recent study shows that people tend to underestimate their age (but not their father’s) after listening to the Beatles’ song « When I’m 64 ». The study was published in Psychological Science.

"We asked 20 University of Pennsylvania undergraduates to listen to either “When I’m Sixty-Four” by The Beatles or “Kalimba.” Then, in an ostensibly unrelated task, they indicated their birth date (mm/dd/ yyyy) and their father’s age. We used father’s age to control for variation in baseline age across participants. An ANCOVA revealed the predicted effect: According to their birth dates, people were nearly a year-and-a-half younger after listening to “When I’m Sixty-Four” (adjusted M = 20.1 years) rather than to “Kalimba” (adjusted M = 21.5 years), F(1, 17) = 4.92, p = .040."

The effect is both statistically significant and fairly important: it really seems that the song induces a downward bias in a subject's estimation of his own age. Incredible? Maybe, but not more so than other priming studies. It has been shown, after all, that subjects primed with words related to old age walk more slowly than others (here); that infants are twice more likely to help an adult spontaneously after they have seen two puppets facing each other (rather than turning their back to each other) (here); that people are more generous when they are holding a cup of hot (versus iced) coffee (here). Strange as they are, those are widely cited results. Yet, the Beatles’ song experiment was not greeted with the same enthusiasm. Why was that?

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Sterelny's 'The Evolved Apprentice'

Details: Sunday, 29 January 2012; News, Publications

A new book by Kim Sterelny: The Evolved Apprentice: How Evolution Made Humans Unique (MIT Press 2012) : "Over the last three million years or so, our lineage has diverged sharply from those of our great ape relatives. Change has been rapid (in evolutionary terms) and pervasive. Morphology, life history, social life, sexual behavior, and foraging patterns have all shifted sharply away from other great apes. No other great ape lineage--including those of chimpanzees and gorillas--seems to have undergone such a profound transformation. In The Evolved Apprentice, Kim Sterelny argues that the divergence stems from the fact that humans gradually came to enrich the learning environment of the next generation. Humans came to cooperate in sharing information, and to cooperate ecologically and reproductively as well, and these changes initiated positive feedback loops that drove us further from other great apes.

Sterelny develops a new theory of the evolution of human cognition and human social life that emphasizes the gradual evolution of information sharing practices across generations and how information sharing transformed human minds and social lives. Sterelny proposes that humans developed a new form of ecological interaction with their environment, cooperative foraging, which led to positive feedback linking ecological cooperation, cultural learning, and environmental change. The ability to cope with the immense variety of human ancestral environments and social forms, he argues, depended not just on adapted minds but also on adapted developmental environments."

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.

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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.

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Conference: Culture, Mind, and Brain: Emerging Concepts, Methods, Applications

Details: Friday, 20 January 2012; News, Events

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.

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