Bradley Franks' Culture and Cognition
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- Category: Publications
- Published on Sunday, 01 May 2011 15:45
- Written by Dan Sperber
A new and important book by Bradley Franks: Culture and Cognition: Evolutionary Perspectives ( Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
The blurb: "Human culture depends on human minds for its creation, meaning and exchange. But minds also depend on culture for their contents and processes. Past resolutions to this circularity problem have tended to give too much weight to one side and too little weight to the other.
In this groundbreaking and timely work, Bradley Franks demonstrates how a more plausible resolution to the circularity problem emerges from reframing mind and culture and their relations in evolutionary terms. He proposes an alternative evolutionary approach that draws on views of mind as embodied and situated. By grounding social construction in evolution, evolution of mind is intrinsically connected to culture – resolving the circularity problem.
In developing his theory, Franks provides a balanced critical assessment of modularity-based and social constructionist approaches to understanding mind and culture." For the table of content,
Moral Compensation and the Environment
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- Category: Decision-making for a social world
- Published on Monday, 25 April 2011 11:52
- Written by Hugo Mercier
Moral Compensation and the Environment: Affecting individuals’ moral intentions through how they see themselves as moral (link to the article)
Ann Tenbrunsel, Jennifer Jordan, Francesca Gino & Marijke Leliveld
To maintain a positive moral self-image, individuals engage in compensation: current moral behavior licenses future immoral behavior and current immoral behavior stimulates future moral behavior. In this paper, we argue that moral compensatory effects are a function of changes to one’s moral self-image. In two studies, we examine the relationship between behaviors that stimulate changes to one’s moral self-image and to ethical actions. In Study 1, we have individuals recall either few or many (im)moral behaviors that they take in regards to the environment. In Study 2, we provide individuals with either minor or extreme feedback about the states of their moral selves. We then examine their intent to engage, as well as their actual engagement in, in various moral or immoral behaviors. We find that having people engage in extreme, but not moderate, moral recalls leads to compensatory environment-related moral behavior. We propose that this effect is due to the ability of extreme moral behavior to alter individuals’ moral self-images and hence their desires to alter these states via moral behavior.
Belief ascription in infants and children: the puzzle
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- Category: Pierre Jacob's blog
- Published on Tuesday, 19 April 2011 12:40
- Written by Pierre Jacob
In several recent papers on mindreading and belief-ascription, Ian Apperly and his colleagues have reported evidence suggesting that the process whereby human adults ascribe false beliefs to others is not automatic. They have further argued that efficiency and flexibility make competing and inconsistent demands on the ability of human adults to reason about others’ beliefs. To solve this tension, they have argued for the view that there are two (not one) systems of belief-ascription: an efficient but inflexible system, shared by human infants and adults, underlies the ascription of belief-like states and a flexible but inefficient system (only present in adults) underlies the ascription of genuine beliefs. If Apperly and his colleagues are right, then this two-systems model might help solve a fundamental puzzle in the developmental psychological study of belief-ascription in human children. Are they?
Read more: Belief ascription in infants and children: the puzzle
Where and when did languages emerge? The answer
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- Category: Publications
- Published on Saturday, 16 April 2011 22:26
- Written by Dan Sperber
In Science, a new paper by Quentin D. Atkinson "Phonemic Diversity Supports aSerial Founder Effect Model of Language Expansion from Africa" is generating a lot of well-deserved interest (see here, here, or here for instance).
Abstract: Human genetic and phenotypic diversity declines with distance from Africa, as predicted by a serial founder effect in which
successive population bottlenecks during range expansion progressively reduce diversity, underpinning support for an African origin of modern humans. Recent work suggests that a similar founder effect may operate on human culture and language. Here I show that the number of phonemes used in a global sample of 504 languages is also clinal and fits a serial founder – effect model of expansion from an inferred origin in Africa. This result, which is not explained by more recent demographic history, local language diversity, or statistical non-independence within language families, points to parallel mechanisms shaping genetic and linguistic diversity and supports an African origin of modern human languages.
Cultural evolution of linguistic structures
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- Category: Publications
- Published on Friday, 15 April 2011 21:09
- Written by Dan Sperber
Forthcoming in Nature an article by Michael Dunn, Simon J. Greenhill, Stephen C. Levinson and Russell D. Gray entitled “Evolved structure of language shows lineage-specific trends in word-order universals” available here.
Abstract: Languages vary widely but not without limit. The central goal of linguistics is to describe the diversity of human languages and explain the constraints on that diversity. Generative linguists following Chomsky have claimed that linguistic diversity must be constrained by innate parameters that are set as a child learns a language. In contrast, other linguists following Greenberg have claimed that there are statistical tendencies for co-occurrence of traits reflecting universal systems biases, rather than absolute constraints or parametric variation. Here we use computational phylogenetic methods to address the nature of constraints on linguistic diversity in an evolutionary framework . First, contrary to the generative account of parameter setting, we show that the evolution of only a few word-order features of languages are strongly correlated. Second, contrary to the Greenbergian generalizations, we show that most observed functional dependencies between traits are lineage-specific rather than universal tendencies. These findings support the view that—at least with respect to word order—cultural evolution is the primary factor that determines linguistic structure, with the current state of a linguistic system shaping and constraining future states.
Post-doc in Cultural or Social Neuroscience
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- Category: Jobs
- Published on Wednesday, 13 April 2011 12:05
- Written by Dan Sperber
Applications accepted for a two-year Postdoctoral Fellowship in Interdisciplinary Studies in Cultural or Social Neuroscience, associated with the Foundation for Psychocultural Research – Hampshire College Program in Culture, Brain and Development (FPR-HC CBD).
What the judge ate for breakfast
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- Category: Dan's blog
- Published on Wednesday, 13 April 2011 11:20
- Written by Dan Sperber
How do people make decision? One view is that they arrive at their decisions by reasoning, using as premises their beliefs and desires. Another view is that people’s beliefs, desires, and decisions are largely determined by internalized cultural patterns. Particularly relevant to both approaches are judicial decisions, since judges are supposed to make decisions that apply cultural patterns, viz. laws, to specific cases. How much are their decisions really a matter of reasoning? How much are they quasi-automatic applications of internalized patterns? Or do yet other factors, that are neither a matter of rational choice nor a matter of internalized patterns, affect judicial decisions?
In an article forthcoming in PNAS, “Extraneous factors in judicial decisions” (available here), Shai Danziger, Jonathan Levav, and Liora Avnaim-Pesso present evidence highly relevant to answering this question. They begin:
“Does the outcome of legal cases depend solely on laws and facts? Legal formalism holds that judges apply legal reasons to the facts of a case in a rational, mechanical, and deliberative manner. An alternative view of the law — encapsulated in the highly influential 20th century legal realist movement — is rooted in the observation of US Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes that “ the life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience ”. Realists argue that the rational application of legal reasons does not sufficiently explain judicial decisions and that psychological, political, and social factors influence rulings as well. The realist view is commonly caricaturized by the trope that justice is “what the judge ate for breakfast ”. We empirically test this caricature in the context of sequences of parole decisions made by experienced judges…”
Well, here are the striking results:
Workshop: 'Naturalistic approaches to culture?'
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- Category: Events
- Published on Monday, 11 April 2011 23:00
- Written by Dan Sperber
The European Science Foundation's Standing Committee for the Humanities (SCH) organizes a workshop on naturalistic approaches to culture. on the lake Balaton in Hungary, 4-7 September 2011. 
The aim of the workshop is to initiate a long-term initiative of the SCH, in favour of interdisciplinary and inter-European exchanges of ideas in this domain. Key speakers will be Gergely Csibra, Ágnes Kovács, Olivier Morin, Eugenia Ramirez-Goicoechea and Peter Richerson.
The ESF offers, on a competitive basis, awards to early career scholars to participate in the workshop. A group of 20 early career researchers will be selected by open competition and invited to actively participate in the event, including the presentation of a poster. The ESF award will cover travel costs (up to a maximum of €350), meals and accommodation (3 nights). Deadlline for applications, May 16. The Call for participation can be downloaded here.
Cognitive Migration
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- Category: Decision-making for a social world
- Published on Monday, 11 April 2011 11:00
- Written by Hugo Mercier
Cognitive Migration:The Role of Mental Simulation in the (Hot) Cultural Cognition of Migration Decisions (link to the article)
David Kyle & Saara Koikkalainen
This paper introduces the novel empirical concept of “cognitive migration” to better understand the role of the prospective imagination, or mental simulation, in the decision-making process before major mobility events to a new neighborhood, city, or country. First, relying on existing social science approaches, we describe the problem of how to understand the particularly risky decision to migrate abroad without authorization; Second, we review briefly some of the recent work in social cognitive and decision sciences that could potentially be brought to bear on our case, though undeveloped in the social science migration literature; Third, we describe cognitive migration, and, hence, cognitive migrants, as a concept that allows us to capture a significant, yet largely unidentified temporally-distinct part of migration decision-making amenable to a cultural or social cognitive approach (how our social world affects cognition and vice versa); Lastly, we offer initial support for this empirical concept from recent cognitive and neuro-scientific research on emotions and develop some hypotheses regarding the determinants and effects of cognitive migration--as opposed to the physical migration event itself. We argue that family, friends, recruiters, and smugglers may provoke a less rational (cost-benefit) mode of reasoning and, instead, elicit cognitive migration as we negotiate an imagined social future that feels right.
Is social cognition reducible to theory of mind?
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- Category: Publications
- Published on Saturday, 09 April 2011 23:00
- Written by Dan Sperber
In an article entitled "Social cognition is not reducible to theory of mind when children use deontic rules to predict the behaviour of others” (coming out in the British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 2011, available here), Fabrice Clément, Stéphane Bernard and Laurence Kaufmann argue that “children have a capacity for deontic reasoning that is irreducible to mentalizing" and present two experiments the results of which "point to the existence of such non-mentalistic understanding and prediction of the behaviour of others.”
If "Religion is natural", what about atheism?
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- Category: Helen De Cruz's blog
- Published on Monday, 04 April 2011 23:00
- Written by Helen De Cruz
In 'cognition and culture' circles, it is almost a matter of common wisdom, it seems, to claim that religious belief is natural, whereas atheism, physicalism and other forms of unbelief are unnatural (see for example this paper by Robert McCauley). Sociologist Rodney Stark has announced the death of secularism, and the thesis that religious belief is gradually making way for an age of reason, originally proposed by the architects of the Enlightenment, has been laid to rest as a case of wishful thinking and of old-fashioned cultural evolutionism. Religion is a panhuman cultural phenomenon, which can be materially attested in the form of burials and representations of supernatural agents since least 50 000 years ago. Cognitive scientists of religion argue that religious beliefs are natural: modes of reasoning that are characteristic of religious belief appear spontaneously in young children, without explicit instruction. Examples include an intuitive mind/body dualism (the fact that we have different inference systems about minds and bodies, proposed by Paul Bloom); intuitive afterlife beliefs (the intuition that minds continue to exist after the physical death of the person, due to Jesse Bering) and intuitive creationism (understanding the world in teleological terms and as a product of intentional design, proposed by Deborah Kelemen).
However, the persistence and relatively wide cultural spread of atheism and other forms of unbelief may present a challenge to this received picture of the naturalness of religion. In many secular nations, the number of people who denote themselves as without religious affiliation is on the rise. A recent mathematical model published online on ArXiv indicates that, if current trends continue, religion will soon go extinct in several of these nations. Of course, being without religious affiliation does not always equate with unbelief, but it does seem to suggest a trend of decreased religiosity.
Last year, in a special issue of Religion, Justin Barrett argued that atheism does not defeat the "naturalness of religion" thesis...
Pointing among the Yucatec Maya. A reply to Emmanuel Dupoux
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- Category: Olivier Le Guen's blog
- Published on Tuesday, 29 March 2011 23:00
- Written by Olivier Le Guen
(This
was originally posted as a comment but it seem to us so interesting and relevant that we have asked Olivier Le Guen to revise it into a blog post)
In a recent post, Emmanuel Dupoux asked:
“- Is human pointing avoidance uniform across cultures? Could anyone point to cross-cultural studies, or ask their informants about what are the pointing taboos in their cultures?
- Could it be that pointing avoidance is linked to the fact that in a communicative situation, the target of pointing is reduced to the status of an object, and it may be considered inappropriate or rude to reduce, even implicitly, humans to mere objects? Or is pointing avoidance linked to embarrassment or fear to being brought into the focus of attention?”
I work with Yucatec Maya speakers in Quintana Roo (Mexico) among whom here is a term for pointing, túuch’ub from the verb tuch’ ‘raise over (one’s hand).’ There pointing to people is unproblematic. I don’t think the considerations Emmanuel Dupoux mentioned are involved. Two factors are relevant here, as far as I can tell: (1) conception of space and place/person reference and (2) linguistic features of the pronominal system in Yucatec Maya.
Read more: Pointing among the Yucatec Maya. A reply to Emmanuel Dupoux
Words or Deeds
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- Category: Decision-making for a social world
- Published on Monday, 28 March 2011 12:46
- Written by Hugo Mercier
Words or Deeds? Choosing what to know about others (link to the article)
Erte Xiao & Cristina Bicchieri
Social cooperation often relies on individuals’ spontaneous norm obedience when there is no punishment for violation or reward for compliance. However, people do not consistently follow pro-social norms. Previous studies have suggested that an individual’s tendency toward norm conformity is affected by empirical information (i.e. what others did or would do in a similar situation) as well as by normative information (i.e. what others think one ought to do). Yet little is known about whether people have an intrinsic desire to obtain norm-revealing information. In this paper, we use a dictator game to investigate whether dictators actively seek norm-revealing information and, if so, whether they prefer to get empirical or normative information. Our data show that although the majority of dictators choose to view free information before making decisions, they are equally likely to choose empirical or normative information. However, a large majority (more than 80%) of dictators are not willing to incur even a very small cost for getting information. Our findings help to understand why norm compliance is context-dependent, and highlight the importance of making norm-revealing information salient in order to promote conformity.
False choice: Is the underrepresentation of women in science by choice or by discrimination?
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- Category: Davie Yoon's blog
- Published on Friday, 25 March 2011 23:00
- Written by Davie Yoon
This post is about Ceci and William’s PNAS article, Understanding current causes of women’s underrepresentation in science, which has spawned a particular kind of narrative -- one that has been around for a while, but which now bears the imprint of evidence. This narrative is captured in a recent headline from ScienceDaily: "Choices -- not discrimination -- determine success for women scientists, experts argue." The implication is that if only women would stop complaining about their feelings of “isolation, dissatisfaction and discrimination” (p. 3160), we could pay attention to important problems that are real and not imaginary.
Ceci & Williams 2011, mostly in their own words
Ceci & William’s goal is to find out whether there is currently sex discrimination in three important areas: (1) manuscript reviewing, (2) grant reviewing, and (3) interviewing/hiring. “Current” means within the last 20 years. They make a strong case that while such discrimination may have taken place in the past, there is no evidence of discrimination against women in current large, carefully analyzed studies of real world reviewing and hiring data. On p.3161, Ceci & Williams conclude that “past strategies to remediate women’s underrepresentation can be viewed as a success story; however, continuing to advocate strategies successful in the past to combat shortages of women in math-based fields today mistakes the current causes of women’s underrepresentation.”
Still, it is true that men come out ahead of women in these three areas even in the last 20 years. Ceci & Williams point out, however, that these differences go away if you control for institution, teaching load, funding, and research assistance. “A key issue", they say, "separable from sex discrimination, is why women occupy positions providing fewer resources and what can be done about this situation. Some of these choices are freely made; others are constrained and should be changed.” And (in the supplementary text) “When women PhD recipients choose not to apply for tenure-track posts, their refusal represents a choice, one that many of their male and many of their female colleagues do not make.”
Some grounds for skepticism
Here are just a few of many reasons to be skeptical of Ceci & Williams' claim that they have definitely debunked the existence of sex discrimination in grant/manuscript reviewing, and interviewing/hiring...
Birthers, Obama, and conflicting intuitions
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- Category: Pascal's blog
- Published on Tuesday, 22 March 2011 09:15
- Written by Pascal Boyer
Those of you who deal with psychiatry know of the rare and tragic condition called Capgras delusion. In this condition, the patient ceases to recognize his or her spouse, father, mother, another familiar person or even a pet. The patient is quite certain that this person they interact with, although he or she looks, talks, feels and smells like the original, is not the genuine thing - and many patients actually believe that the original was replaced with a replica, substituted by aliens, etc. In psychiatry there is a standard and plausible interpretation of these delusions in terms of rationalization.
This is called the “two-stage” model, following which [a] the patient’s experience is extraordinary and [b] the delusion is an attempt to make sense of it. In this particular case, the model suggests that [a] the patient’s face-systems, upon seeing the person, deliver the appropriate interpretation (“this is my husband”) and activate the relevant person-file in memory, but fail to create the specific emotional signature previously associated with seeing that person; as a result, seeing the person creates an extremely unusual experience, which [b] the beliefs about aliens contribute to explain in a way that is almost rational. (Note that this interpretation is disputed however).
Now, what about Kenyans in the White House?
Among the many crazy social movements that make up the rich tapestry of fringe politics in America, the Birthers’ movement is probably the craziest...
Instrumentality Boosts Gratitude
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- Category: Decision-making for a social world
- Published on Monday, 14 March 2011 11:00
- Written by Hugo Mercier
Instrumentality Boosts Gratitude: Helpers Are More Appreciated While They Are Useful (link to the article)
Benjamin Converse & Ayelet Fishbach
We propose that in social interactions, gratitude for a helper depends on the helper’s instrumentality: The more motivated one is to accomplish a goal and the more a potential helper facilitates that goal, the more gratitude one will feel for that helper. In one lab experiment with strangers and one field experiment with real study partners, we found support for this instrumentality-boost hypothesis. Beneficiaries felt more gratitude for their helpers while they were receiving help toward an ongoing task than after that task had been completed. Beneficiaries thus felt more gratitude when they had received less benefit.
Cultural relativism: Another victim of Arab revolutions?
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- Category: Nicolas' Blog
- Published on Tuesday, 08 March 2011 20:32
- Written by Nicolas Baumard
As we are watching the fall of dictators and the wind of liberty sweeping in the Arab world, we may not have noticed another victim of this “springtime of Arab people”, namely the individualistic/collectivistic divide. In psychology, many scientists have adopted a kind of culturalism according to which the reason people behave differently across culture because of the “culture” in which they have grown up: People are raised in a particular culture and they come to adopt the particular attitudes and beliefs of their parents, teachers and elders. This explains why people behave differently in different places. For instance, psychologists have often emphasized that some cultures are more individualistic while others are more collectivist and other similar dichotomies have been put forward: sociocentric vs. egocentric, independent vs. interdependent, bounded vs. unbounded.
Tahrir Square, February 10, 2011
Whatever the terms, the central idea in the individualistic framework is that the person is an autonomous agent, whereas the central idea in the collectivist framework is that the group is an interconnected and interdependent network of relationships. In the former, personal goals are primary; in the latter, shared goals are primary.
As Turiel (who is critical of this approach) puts it:
“A core feature of individualistic cultures (usually western ones) is that the highest value is accorded to the person as detached from others and as independent from the social order. People are therefore oriented to self-reliance, independence, and resistance to social pressure for conformity and obedience to authority. By contrast, collectivistic cultures (usually non western ones) are oriented to traditions, duty, obedience to authority, interdependence and social harmony; hierarchy, status and role distinction predominate.”
In fact, it has been argued that this culturalistic dichotomy works pretty well: Westerners are individualistic and that explains why free market and democracy flourishes in the West, whereas the rest of the world is more collectivistic, supporting things like “Asian values” and “Muslim ethos”.
Well, but then, what about Tunisia and Egypt? How to explain their transformation overnight? How could collectivistic people possibly embrace such individualistic ideas as freedom and human rights? How can they rebel against traditional norms?
Read more: Cultural relativism: Another victim of Arab revolutions?
What is anthropology about?
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- Category: Rita's blog
- Published on Tuesday, 01 March 2011 09:39
- Written by Rita Astuti
In a comment just appeared in Nature Adam Kuper and Jonathan Marks give a brief account of how it happened that anthropologists have lost the ability to agree on what their discipline is about – a fact that they regard as much more shocking than the recent elision of the word science from the AAA mission statement (as discussed in the ICCI blog). Kuper and Marks argue that interdisciplinary research across the biological-cum-evolutionary-cum-cognitive and the cultural-cum-social-cum-interpretative divide is imperative, but they also warn against easy short cuts, such as “parachuting into the jungle somewhere to do a few psychological experiments with the help of bemused local interpreters, or garnishing generalizations with a few worn and disputed snippets about the exotic customs and practices.”
Culture evolves
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- Category: Publications
- Published on Monday, 28 February 2011 23:00
- Written by Dan Sperber
A new issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences with the title 'Culture evolves', edited by Andrew Whiten, Robert A. Hinde, Christopher B. Stringer and Kevin N. Laland is available online here. If you do not have free access, we encourage you to check the individual web pages of the author -- whom we encourage to post all their papers, vive le open access! –- and, if need be, to ask them for the Pdf. Here below is the table of contents.
Three posts on ritual and group formation at Oxford
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- Category: Jobs
- Published on Monday, 28 February 2011 14:11
- Written by Nicolas Baumard
Applications are sought for three posts focusing on the history of ritual and group formation, as part of an international project entitled 'Ritual, community and conflict', based in the Centre for Anthropology and Mind at the University of Oxford, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and directed by Professor Harvey Whitehouse.
Read more: Three posts on ritual and group formation at Oxford
Why would (otherwise intelligent) scholars believe in "Religion"?
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- Category: Pascal's blog
- Published on Monday, 21 February 2011 23:00
- Written by Pascal Boyer
I do not know if many scholars of religion still believe in gods or spirits, but I know that a great many of them believe in the existence of religion itself - that is, believe that the term "religion" is a useful category, that there is such a thing as religion out there in the world, that the project of "explaining religion" is a valid scientific project. Naturally, many of the scholars in question will also say that religion is a many splendored thing, that there are vast differences among the varieties of religious belief and behavior. Yet they assume that, underlying the diversity, there is enough of a common set of phenomena that a "theory of religion" is needed if not already available.
One might think this unfortunate and obdurate tendency to believe in the scholarly equivalent of unicorns is chiefly confined to theologians or other marginal scholars. That is not the case. Indeed, quite a lot of people these days argue for a "scientific explanation of religion". In preparation for this they gather the best and most up-to-date scientific gear, from genetics and evolutionary biology to, inevitably, neuro-imaging.
I applaud the use of such tools in general and deplore it all the more in this particularly futile pursuit.
Fang epic recitation - a matter of "religion"?
There really is no such thing as "religion". Most people who live in modern societies think that there is such a thing out there as "religion", meaning a kind of social and cognitive package that includes views about supernatural agency (gods and suchlike), notions of morality, particular rituals and sometimes particular experiences, as well as membership in a particular community of believers and the constitution of specific organizations (castes of prests, churches, etc.). All this, as I said, is thought to be a "package", where each element makes sense in relation to the others, given a coherent and explicit doctrine. Indeed, this is the way most major "religions" – Islam, Hinduism for instance – are presented to us, the way their institutional personnel, many scholars and most believers think about them.
Read more: Why would (otherwise intelligent) scholars believe in "Religion"?
Strategies for coping with questionable decisions
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- Category: Decision-making for a social world
- Published on Monday, 21 February 2011 11:00
- Written by Hugo Mercier
"I read Playboy for the articles": Strategies for coping with questionable decisions (link to the article)
Humans are masters of lying and self-deception. We want others to believe us good, fair, responsible and logical, and we yearn to see ourselves this way. Therefore, when our actions might appear selfish, prejudiced or perverted, we engage a host of strategies to justify our behavior with rational excuses: "I hired my son because he's better educated." "I promoted Ashley because she's more experienced than Aisha." In this article, we review previous studies examining how people restructure situations to view their behavior in a more positive light, and we present the results of our Playboy study. We conclude by briefly reviewing two additional strategies for coping with such difficult situations: forgoing choices, and forgetting decisions altogether.
A longer version of this paper can also be found here.
War as a moral imperative
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- Category: Publications
- Published on Sunday, 20 February 2011 15:53
- Written by Dan Sperber
Jeremy Ginges and and Scott Atran again illustrate the relevance of a cognition and culture approach to major political and societal concerns with their article, "War as a moral imperative (not just practical politics by other means)" published online, Feb. 16, 2011, in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B and available here.
Abstract: We present findings from one survey and five experiments carried out in the USA, Nigeria and the Middle East showing that judgements about the use of deadly intergroup violence are strikingly insensitive to quantitative indicators of success, or to perceptions of their efficacy. By demonstrating that judgements about the use of war are bounded by rules of deontological reasoning and parochial commitment, these findings may have implications for understanding the trajectory of violent political conflicts. Further, these findings are compatible with theorizing that links the evolution of within-group altruism to intergroup violence.
Human avoidance in pointing: a cultural universal?
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- Category: Emmanuel Dupoux's blog
- Published on Wednesday, 16 February 2011 14:25
- Written by Emmanuel Dupoux
Emmanuel Dupoux sends a question to our community, on behalf of a team of psychologists studying pointing. The team includes Emmanuel himself, Laurent Cleret de Lagavant, Charlotte Jacquemot and Anne-Catherine Bachoud-Levi.
Pointing is a communicative gesture that enables one to attract the attention of a conspecific on a particular object. Communicative pointing is observed in all human cultures and acquired by infants before language onset. Pointing can be selectively impaired in neuropsychological patients: in heteropopagnosia, patients are grossly impaired in pointing towards humans. Typically, heterotopagnosic patients show a humanity/communicative gradient effect: their pointing performance gradually decrease as the target becomes closer to a real communicative human being (schematic drawings of humans, photographs of a person, dolls, real persons pretending to be a doll and real persons). Interestingly, in a task that is not inherently social like grasping, these patients perform flawlessly on all target types.
This selective impairment of pointing, that gets worse in communicative situations where the target is human, might (we suspect) have a cultural counterpart. In the culture where we have been raised, it is, as they say, "rude to point" at another human. Anthropologists have documented in great richness a variety of taboos associated to pointing in general, but it is still unclear whether these taboos have something special to do with the action of pointing at someone. This is where we could benefit from the unique expertise of anthropologists.
This raises two broad questions for the cognition and culture community.
Read more: Human avoidance in pointing: a cultural universal?
Summer University in Experimental Methods in the Study of Cognition and Culture
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- Category: Initiatives
- Published on Monday, 14 February 2011 10:34
- Written by Dimitris Xygalatas
This 4-week course to take place at Aarhus University, Denmark, August 1 – 26, 2011 is aimed at graduate students in the humanities and social sciences interested in an introduction to experimental methods engaging questions in the interface of cognition and culture. The course will combine top-level lectures by internationally renowned specialists (Pascal Boyer, Jessie Prinz, Quinton Deeley and Chris and Uta Frith), with practical instructions, teaching and workshops aimed to enhance students' abilities to engage in concrete research projects that address well-defined research questions.
Read more: Summer University in Experimental Methods in the Study of Cognition and Culture
Profit-Seeking Punishment Corrupts Norm Obedience
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- Category: Decision-making for a social world
- Published on Monday, 14 February 2011 08:00
- Written by Hugo Mercier
Profit-Seeking Punishment Corrupts Norm Obedience (link to the article)
Punishment typically involves depriving violators of resources they own such as money or labor. These resources can become revenue for authorities and thus motivate profit-seeking punishment. In this paper, we provide a new perspective on the causal relationship between legal institutions that embed corrupting temptations (e.g., profitable punishment) and prevalent norm disobedience within the societies such institutions govern. We emphasize that punishment not only changes the incentives to violate norms but also, perhaps more importantly, expresses disapproval of norm violations. We design a novel experiment to provide direct evidence on the role punishment plays in communicating norms, and provide experimental evidence indicating that when enforcers can benefit monetarily by punishing, people no longer view punishment as signaling a norm violation. The result is substantial mitigation of punishment's ability to influence behavior. Our findings draw attention to the detrimental effect of profit-seeking punishment enforcement on the efficacy of punishment.
You can find the supplementary materials here
Children as scientists
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- Category: Nicolas' Blog
- Published on Thursday, 10 February 2011 15:11
- Written by Nicolas Baumard
(Hat Tip to Ed Yong!)
At the end of December, Biology letters published a quite unusual paper entitled "Blackawton bees". It contains some very refreshing conclusions such as: "We also discovered that science is cool and fun because you get to do stuff that no one has ever done before." The reason it is so refresfing is that it has been written by 25 children aged between 8 and 10 from Blackawton Primary School in Devon, England. Their paper, based on fieldwork carried out in a local churchyard, describes how bumblebees can learn which flowers to forage from with more flexibility than anyone had thought. It's the culmination of a project called 'i, scientist', designed to get students to actually carry out scientific research themselves. The kids received some support from Beau Lotto, a neuroscientist at UCL, and David Strudwick, Blackawton's head teacher. But the work is all their own.
The class (including Lotto's son, Misha) came up with their own questions, devised hypotheses, designed experiments, and analysed data. They wrote the paper themselves (except for the abstract), and they drew all the figures with colouring pencils.
Evolutionary Theory and the Ultimate–Proximate Distinction in the Human Behavioral Sciences
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- Category: Events
- Published on Thursday, 10 February 2011 14:59
- Written by Nicolas Baumard
The January issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science publishes a paper by Thomas Scott-Phillips, Thomas Dickins, and Stuart West entitled "Evolutionary Theory and the Ultimate-Proximate Distinction in the Human Behavioral Sciences." (also discussed here by Rob Kurzban) Although this distinction is well-known and widely used in evolutionary and cognitive approaches, the authors point out that in several areas, including the study of the evolution of cooperation, cultural transmission, and epigenetics debates are fraught with confusions between ultimate ands proximal explanations. They show, for instance, that 'strong reciprocity', as advocated by Ernst Fehr and others, often presented as a solution to the ultimate question "why do we cooperate", is only a solution about the proximal question "how do we cooperate".
Here is the abstract:
To properly understand behavior, we must obtain both ultimate and proximate explanations. Put briefly, ultimate explanations are concerned with why a behavior exists, and proximate explanations are concerned with how it works. These two types of explanation are complementary and the distinction is critical to evolutionary explanation. We are concerned that they have become conflated in some areas of the evolutionary literature on human behavior. This article brings attention to these issues. We focus on three specific areas: the evolution of cooperation, transmitted culture, and epigenetics. We do this to avoid confusion and wasted effort—dangers that are particularly acute in interdisciplinary research. Throughout this article, we suggest ways in which misunderstanding may be avoided in the future.
An action suit, not a straightjacket: Whorf on language, Guy Deutscher on Whorf
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- Category: Nick Enfield's blog
- Published on Saturday, 05 February 2011 13:06
- Written by Nick Enfield
Guy Deutscher, Through the language glass - Why the world looks different in other languages (2010) - reviewed by Nick Enfield.
In April of 1985, Texas Tech student and rape victim Michele Mallin made about as consequential an error of cognition as one can imagine, when she mistakenly identified 26-year old Timothy Cole as her attacker, first from a photograph, then in a police line-up. Cole would later die in prison after serving 13 years of a 25-year sentence for a crime he didn't commit. Many factors are known to contribute to such unthinkable distortions of memory, but one may seem surprising: the role of language.
The science of memory has shown that if we verbally describe something we have seen, as when a victim first describes an attacker to police, this verbal representation can 'overshadow' our exact recollection of the original experience. By talking about something, we can become more likely to make a wrong decision based on what we said (and now think) we saw. When psychologists Jonathan Schooler and Tonya Engstler-Schooler discovered this effect for faces, they also found that verbal description can make memory worse for another perceptual domain: colour. Their test subjects were shown a set of subtly different shades, and were worse at later identifying the one they had seen if they had verbally described it. Those who had not verbally described the original colour, on the other hand, were better at remembering it. The authors concluded: 'Some things are better left unsaid.'
How is it that the verbal description of an experience can cause a distortion of memory?
Read more: An action suit, not a straightjacket: Whorf on language, Guy Deutscher on Whorf
Introduction - Reasoning as a social device
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- Category: Decision-making for a social world
- Published on Wednesday, 02 February 2011 10:12
- Written by Hugo Mercier
Introduction -- Reasoning as a social device (link to the article)
The social context exerts a very important influence on our decisions, which has not been considered in its full extent by research in decision making. Several strategies are available to take social factors into consideration as much as they deserve. The first is to add a minimal layer of social information and social motivation to the typical methods of decision making. The second is to postulate new mechanisms that pertain only to social aspects of decisions, with their attending biases. The third solution is to reexamine some of the mechanisms classically studied in decision making as social devices. This more radical solution is illustrated here with the case of reasoning. It is suggested that reasoning in fact has a social, argumentative function. An argumentative theory of reasoning makes sense of many puzzling findings from decision making and other areas of psychology. It also provides different, more efficient ideas for debiasing. The third strategy may be usefully implemented for other cognitive mechanisms.
Please post your comments on the paper below.
What’s wrong, in the end, with Homo Œconomicus ?
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- Category: Pascal's blog
- Published on Wednesday, 02 February 2011 07:52
- Written by Pascal Boyer
Everyone likes to bash Homo œconomicus - not one stone was left uncast at the poor chap. Now, don't get me wrong, I enjoy a good stoning just as much as the next religious fanatic, but this may be a case in which we executed the right fellow for the wrong reasons.
Most people argued that Homo oeconomicus (henceforth HE), as described in economics textbooks, was way too smart for his own good. He had complete information and all the computing power required to hold that information; he also had the cognitive capacities to derive valid inferences from all that information, to ignore all trivial or irrelevant inferences, and was able to do all that instantaneously; he was dealing with scarcity but these tremendous computational feats were essentially free.
This was clearly pushing it. To peg him down a notch, many people pointed out that actual economic agents are rather more limited. They do not have full rationality but some form of "bounded rationality". They are swayed by biases and heuristics in situations of uncertainty. Behavioral economics suggested that in many cases they simply ignore their own interest and are motivated by norms of fairness and moral sentiments (although this last point may be misleading, see comments by Nicolas Baumard).
This is all wrong, wrong, wrong. The problem with HE is not that he is too smart - but that he lacks smart instincts. It is not that he is super-human, but that he is infra-cognitive. To explain economic behaviour, we need a model of human beings that is more sophisticated than HE, not less.
It would take a whole book or series of books and articles to justify this - and I expect that these books are being written as we speak, as these are fairly simple points - but here are two illustrations, admittedly far from standard market processes, but clearly relevant to economic theory.
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Denis, your story strikes a Romanian chord. The situation around here is even worse, from what I can tell. But it is quite a fascinating question, with different answers from different points of view.
For an economist, it is a matter of price formation. In the state system, Romanian doctors are paid a fixed (and miserable) wage, largely unrelated to quality or effort. The incentive to pocket bribes is huge, and patients know it so well. In the private sector (with transparent and varied prices for medical services), bribes are almost unheard of. Also, there is a more or less efficient market for bribes. Patients find out how much a doctor expects, usually from past patients, or from other doctors. Surgeons receive more than GPs, professors more than debutants, etc.
But I think there is something more about "medical envelopes", from a cognitive point of view. First of all, there is a vast asymmetry of competence between doctors and patients, which gives the former a large freedom of action. Is this pill better, or another one? Surgery or not? Home treatment or hospitalisation? To make things worse, the post-hoc reckoning is not very helpful, since most decisions may be medically justified, but you might also end up dead. The patient is at the mercy of the practitioner since she does not know what choices are better. The best way to make sure one gets the proper treatment is to insure the benevolence of the doctor, and a bribe is the simplest path to gain the doctor's amity.
Second, there is something special about this particular social exchange: the patient is dealing in an ultimate value - her health. Something everyone in Romania says is that there is no price too high to be healthy. (Paradoxically, giving up smoking somehow does not make the list - self-hint-hint-nudge-nudge). If people would risk not bribing a policeman to avoid a fine, they are extremely unlikely to jeopardise their health in this manner. One cannot afford to stick to abstract principles (like discouraging corruption) when her life is at stake.
Finally, there is something like a Maussian gift in the affair: one passes a fat envelope even without the explicit mention of an economic exchange. It is not that the surgeon would not operate without being bribed - the patient just shows gratitude without visible economic reckoning. Of course, under the veil of generosity stands the solid self-interest of the patient. The fat envelope is meant to make sure that no scalpel is lost in her belly. But no-one says it out loud. It's a "I know that you know that I know etc" which makes sure that the transaction is smooth and polite.
To end with a personal anecdote: I was (and to some extent I still am) very wary of giving out envelopes to doctors. A little bit of moral prudishness, a little bit of fear (what if he feels insulted?), a bit of monetary unsaviness. Those who are more competent in these matters reassured me: "just put the envelope on his desk - he knows what to do next" After all, he is the expert, and I am not.
"Very well-rounded analysis. A few thoughts. First, I am glad you mentioned nurses in your comment* because in the article you discount this, perhaps unintentionally. I remember my aunt consistently bribing the nurses when my uncle was recovering from a stroke for several months in the hospital. Also, I've had many conversations with my family here in Hungary about this, trying to understand the rationale behind this irrational system (I'm originally from the US). I think both motivations could be at play here. I got the impression that, in addition to the bribe, people are still very sensitive to the "wage supplement" aspect. That is, most people I've talked to find the wages of doctors and other health care providers rather deplorable. Even if GMs are a considerable expense for my working class family members, they seems to use the wage supplement as a way to render this dysfunctional reality more palatable somehow. I also think there is a third factor at work here - but I think it's linked to the others. I've witnessed situations where doctors behave very condescendingly toward patients or their families, despite a hefty bribe of some 20,000 HUF. Part of that harks back to the days of the socialist regime - when the power of public authorities was unquestioned. As one of my Hungarian friends likes to say about health clinics here: "they just want to make you feel like they still have power over you." When my aunt and I went to visit my cousin in critical care last year, the doctor didn't want to give us the time of day. We didn't give her a tip, but we kept pressing her for answers. I said to her, "is it a virus or a bacteria?" The doctor looked at me like a deer in headlights. I think she was surprised I even knew the difference. She opened up quite a lot to us after that and we never gave her a tip. Finally- and I'll get off my soapbox - private insurance systems are not necessarily more transparent. The US being a case in point. There is a great (surprisingly) 28-pg TIME article about this, "The bitter pill: why medical bills are killing us." I'm sue you'd find it relevant. Anyway, thanks so much for posting this!!"
*This is the comment by me which Eva refers to:
"I should have also added that, in fact, there is GM directed to nurses when they are perceived as the primary caretakers. Usually this is the case for families having elderly parents in retirement houses."
That GM thing reminds me of a funny routine that happens in France: around the end of the year, firemen and mailmen knock at your door to sell (ugly) calendars. Folk wisdom holds that if you don't buy the calendar, firemen will not rush if there is a fire in your house. Similarly, mailmen will be more likely to lose important mail you receive. What is striking is that this belief seems to carry on though it makes complete non-sense. I bet the situation is a bit different as for GM: the physician obviously remembers you and s/he is more likely to act benevolently towards you with a bit of extra money...
Azzouni certainly has the bona fides to weigh in on this. But it seems to me that the pure sociology of it isn't quite so simple.
Take Wiles' first proof of Taniyama-Shimura. It had an error, but it took concerted efforts by extreme experts to locate it. But that's not the end of the story. It turns out that he and Richard Taylor were able to ascertain that piecing together two parts of the theory that didn't quite seem to work on their own was in fact enough to 'patch' the proof together (Wiles himself says as much).
So, Yes, the original proof was wrong. To a much lesser extent, Perelman didn't fill in all the blanks in his landmark proof of Poincare, leading to a (minor scandal) where two other mathematicians claimed to give the "first" proof based on the "ideas of" Perelman and Hamilton.
The question is this: if someone had done the patching of Wiles' proof for him, would THEY be the prover? How large does the hole have to be? When an error is found, who gets to decide whether it is trivial, whether it wrecks the proof entirely, and who will be the one credited with the insight that makes the whole thing work?
These are not trivial matters, and the issue isn't apportioning credit, but deciding what an error truly is. Typos don't count. Proving incorrect results certainly do. But what about "generally correct" ideas that eventually lead to a proof? How loose do those ideas have to be?
I don't think there's ANY argument about when large, demonstrable errors have been found in published proofs. But there are many other cases -- like de Branges' purported proof of the Riemann Hypothesis -- that fall through these neat cracks.
In respect to kinship terminologies, Levinson's question, "What constrains this exuberant diversity of systems?", is not answered by Kemp and Regier's analysis for one simple reason: Terminologies have a structure and logic, like grammars for language, that determine the possible range of kinship terminologies. Kemp and Regier assume any partition of the space of genealogical relations is a potential terminology and then show that existing terminologies occupy only a small portion of this space due, they assert, to a tradeoff between simplicity and usefulness. This would be like saying a sentence can be any subset of all possible vocabulary words, then asserting that the realized languages have sentences that are a tradeoff between simplicity and usefulness, but ignoring the fact that the simplicity and usefulness of sentences is created through the grammar of the language that constrains what are admissible sentences. The same is true for kinship terminologies, and the answer to Levinson's question has already been made by showing that kinship terminologies have a generative structure that determines the corpus of kinship terms, starting from the primary kin terms of a terminology, along with kinship concepts that are expressed in the terminology (such as reciprocity of kin terms), and the kinship structural properties embedded in a particular terminology (Read 1984, 2001, 2007, 2009; Read and Behrens 1990; Leaf and Read 2012, among others). For example, the difference giving rise to the fundamental division of terminologies into descriptive versus classificatory (bifurcate merging) terminologies derives from two different ways that sibling relations are conceptualized in different societies: (1) a sibling is the child of my parent other than myself (descriptive terminologies) or (2) siblings are those persons who have parents in common (classificatory terminologies) (Bennardo and Read 2007; Read, Fischer and Leaf 2013). Trying to understand kinship terminologies (and hence kinship systems) without first working out the generative logic of a terminology is like trying to understand languages without working out the grammar of a language. Extensive work has already been published on the generative logic of kinship terminologies and this work makes evident what constrains the variability in kinship terminologies that Levinson asks about.
References
Bennardo, G. and D. Read 2007. Cognition, Algebra, and Culture in the Tongan Kinship Terminology. Journal of Cognition and Culture 7: 49-88.
Leaf, M. and D. Read. (2012) Human Thought and Social Organization: Anthropology on a New Plane. Lanham: Lexington Press
Read, D. l984. An algebraic account of the American kinship terminology. Current Anthropology 25: 4l7-440
Read, D. 2001 What is Kinship? In The Cultural Analysis of Kinship: The Legacy of David Schneider and Its Implications for Anthropological Relativism, R. Feinberg and M. Ottenheimer eds. University of Illinois Press, Urbana. Pp. 78-117.
Read, D. 2007. Kinship Theory: A Paradigm Shift. Ethnology 46(4):329-364
Read, D. 2009. Another Look at Kinship: Reasons Why a Paradigm Shift is Needed. Algebra Rodtsva 12:42-69.
Read, D. and C. Behrens. 1990. KAES: An expert system for the algebraic analysis of kinship terminologies. J. of Quantitative Anthropology 2:353-393.
Read, D., Fischer, M. and M. Leaf. 2013. What are kinship terminologies, and why do we care? A computational approach to analyzing symbolic domains. Social Science Computer Review 31(1): 16-44.
Yes, kinship is back -- or more accurately, it is reclaiming its original vigor. Haven't you heard of the Kinship Circle? For each of the past three years, and as part of this year's annual meeting of the Amerian Anthropological Association as well, we have had highly successful sessions on kinship. The sessions have been integrated with the themes of each of the meetings. We have had an international group of scholars from Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, England, France, Germany, Italy, Qatar and the United States, presenting a wide range of papers, ranging from more "classic" questions about kinship systems to current research that is challenging some of our theoretical ideas about what constitutes kinship. The papers from the first two sessions will be published shortly.
Dwight Read
Fadwa El Guindi
Dear learned scholar of mathematicians, I disagree with your premise that mathematicians do not disagree, and, being wonderful souls, are easily converted to consensus. No less a scholar, intellectual and role model than Von Neumann (1961), the founder of game theory, argued against your premise. In fact, he bemoaned that unlike physicists, mathematicians who don't agree behave in an unsocial manner by striking out in new directions, leaving their conflicts unresolved. In his article, the first in his collected works, Von Neumann wished that mathematicians disagreed as physicists did. Whenever conflict arose between two physicists (e.g., Bohr and Einstein), physicists refused to ignore it, often bringing their field to a standstill until a resolution was found (i.e., consensus via debate, unlike your fanciful example of consensus without debate). I have long cherished Von Neumann's insight, and his remarkable paper on mathematicians. BTW, in my research, I too have found that consensus without conflict is indeed possible, except that none of the participants can agree on the result.
Von Neumann, J. (1961). The mathematician. Collected works, Pergamon.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/10/magazine/the-professor-the-bikini-model-and-the-suitcase-full-of-trouble.html?_r=3&
People concur in saying that Frampton is unusually gullible.
This story of an incredibly gullible scientist (or so it seems) might also be relevant to your remark that the optimality of epistemic vigilance can only be measured in view of its fit to the milieu. An optimal epistemic vigilance would enable people to believe most of the true things they are told and to disbelieve most of the false things they are told (especially the costly one). The inconvincible sceptic as well as the gullible has less than optimal epistemic vigilance. The optimal vigilance fall in between, but its precise position depends on whether the environment is full of false claims or not. It would be interesting to know whether there are different cognitive developments of epistemic vigilance depending on the type of environment in which a child grows up. This could account for some variability across individuals.
As for scientists, they are supposed to instantiate high epistemic vigilance. So how can Frampton be at the same time so gullible and a good physicist? I see two non-exclusive possibilities:
(1) Frampton exercises epistemic vigilance, but only in the domain of physics. This can happen because the scientific environment fosters argumentative abilities. By contrast, Frampton did not wish or need to convince others that he was having a relation with a beautiful model. He did not need to find good reasons for his beliefs and did not wish to adress counter-arguments. Hugo Mercier pointed to me that this difference in the argumentative context could explain the fact that Newton, with so great achievements in physics, did so badly in chemistry/alchemy. There was in alchemy no need to convince others; it was a secret enterprise.
(2) Frampton does not exercise much epistemic vigilance, but does well in physics nonetheless because the process of checking the plausibility of claims is distributed to others. Only very selected information arrives to his creative mind. This is thanks to the process through which scientific information comes to be distributed---the review process for instance. In science, epistemic vigilance is distributed across individuals and institutionalised. In that context, some gullibility might be an advantage. The schoolgirl, in any case, does better by believing the apparently crazy things that her teacher says (e.g. sound is the vibration of matter). At the research level also, it can pay to believe improbable hypotheses; it means pursuing a high risk, high reward research programme.
Thank you all for the very interesting discussion!
First, I would like to recommend a paper by Paul Rubin entitled “Folk Economics," where some of the views that have come out of the discussion are treated in an evolutionary framework.
In addition, I would like to mention that during my doctorate I have worked on the intellectual aversion for the market economy from a historical angle, studying the implications of the rhetorical phenomenon of the personification of money in the English literature of the early modern period. Comparing the economic views expressed by satyrical dramatists and pamphleteers to those of the economists of the time, aka the “early mercantilists,” I found out that the characterization of money as a supernatural force that takes hold of human behavior (a “visible god,” as Shakespeare called it) reveals a naive understanding on the part of the writers of the social and economic transformation taking place at the time. Most of them overlooked the economic implications of that transformation, and construed it merely as a process of corruption of traditional ethical values. This investigation led me to conclude that a promising line of research on the aversion for the market economy might consist in understanding how lay people make sense of complex economic ideas.
Let me give you a hint. When economists use such concepts as rationality, profit, cost, trade, competition, and so on, they are using words that embed a whole set of assumptions, a shared knowledge that defines the economic way of thinking. On the other hand, also common people are exposed to this jargon in their daily life: they often use the same words, but they arguably attach to it a different, non-technical meaning. How does that meaning form? Drawing on the culture and cognition research program, I have hypothesized that it forms according to the way people relate their own understanding on the word in question with real-world examples of which they have personal experience. More generally, our opinion on matters on which we have no special competence may emerge from the relation we establish between the delusively familiar ideas involved in them and our own interpretation of the small piece of world we see around us.
I have more fully developed this hypothesis here. I’ve recently also uploaded a draft here, in which I explore the topic of the aversion to the market using as a case study the Italian movies of the economic boom era. It turns out, that the Italian filmmakers, just as the English dramatists of a few centuries earlier, were quite wary of the capitalistic development of the country.