International Cognition and Culture Institute

PhD in Cognitive Science at the CEU, Budapest

Details: Category: Jobs; Published on Sunday, 23 January 2011 23:19; Written by Dan Sperber

Starting 2011-12, the Department of Cognitive Science at the CEU, Budapest, will offer a PhD programme in Cognitive Science.

The curriculum: The main goal of the PhD program will be to ensure that the students master the basic notions and theories in cognitive science and can do cutting-edge doctoral research in one area of expertise of program, such as social cognitive sciences and the study of social cognition. The PhD program will provide basic training (taught courses) on at least the following topics: Cognitive psychology, Research methods in cognitive science, Social cognition.

Faculty: Gergely Csibra (cognitive development, cognitive neuroscience, József Fiser [from September 2011] (visual perception and cognition, biological and statistical learning), ...

PhD on Animal Cognition and Communication in Vienna

Details: Category: Jobs; Published on Sunday, 23 January 2011 23:09; Written by Dan Sperber

In recent years, Vienna has become an important center for behavioral and cognitive research, with a strong research focus on comparative cognitive biology. The Austrian Science Fund (FWF) and the University of Vienna have supported this development, by funding a multi-level, integrative PhD training programme on cognition and communication in humans and non-human animals.

Neuroscience 'boot camp'

Details: Category: Events; Published on Thursday, 13 January 2011 17:01; Written by Lucien Dontask

The University of Pennsylvania announces their 3rd annual Neuroscience Boot Camp, July 31-August 10. The website is here.

Learning suicide in Sri Lanka, part II: suicide as separation

Details: Category: Tom's blog; Published on Thursday, 13 January 2011 15:44; Written by Tom Widger

My last post in this series asked 'What kinds of cognitive and emotional capacities are required to develop in children before they fully appreciate the social and moral implications and consequences of suicide?' I've been thinking about this problem for a while now, and have to admit that the best answer I've come up with so far is, 'lots.' In this post, I'd like to focus on just one element of suicidal behaviour that the ethnographic record of self-harm and self-inflicted death suggests is crucial across cultures. This is the relationship between suicide and separation.

Raymond Firth was a social anthropologist who in the late 1920s worked with the Tikopia, a small group of Polynesians who live on an island in the south western Pacific Ocean. During his stay with the Tikopia Firth recorded a number of suicides and suicide attempts, on which basis he developed an approach to understanding suicide amongst them as a form of separation from the group. In so doing Firth rejected Durkheim's notion that suicides were caused by social disintegration or deregulation, and argued instead that suicide could be viewed as an act of protest or revenge in the context of what the suicidal individual thought to be unfair treatment, through an act that symbolised his or her detachment or separation from the group. This was expressed by suicidal people through their adoption of one of two methods of suicide, which for men involved canoeing out to sea and being overcome by exhaustion or waves and for women swimming out to sea and, rather gruesomely, being eaten by sharks.

Fastforward to a very different time and place – Sinhalese Buddhist Sri Lanka during the 00's – and suicide can be seen operating in a very similar way.

How much trust should we put in experimental results?

Details: Category: Olivier's blog; Published on Friday, 07 January 2011 13:57; Written by Olivier Morin

Thinking back on the year 2010, cognitive scientists will probably remember it as the year the Hauser affair broke out after years of rumors. That summer, a Harvard investigation committee found Marc Hauser responsible for eight cases of "scientific misconduct". The most serious problem involved a missing control condition in an experiment published in Cognition. Since the experimenters were blind to the conditions they were testing, a weird and important mistake cannot be entirely ruled out. (See here.) The other seven cases involved various forms of sloppiness - whether it was guided by dishonesty is still hard to know. Then informal accusations of misconduct started pouring in, from colleagues and former students. Scientists who spoke against Hauser, like Gordon Gallup or Michael Tomasello, concentrated their attacks on various failures to replicate his results.

This post is not about Marc Hauser. Whether he was guilty of true misconduct or unintentionally produced false results matters less than the fact that we ('we' stands for us, cognitive scientists with an interest in morality, religion or culture) were fooled into accepting this work. "Accepting" is an understatement. We hyped it up, we based arguments upon it, we advertised it to philosophers, anthropologists and the greater public as an example of good science.

The situation would be a little more comfortable if we had not been serving for many years as self-appointed ambassadors of the Scientific Bushido to the social sciences and humanities.

The Smurf Studies: Do 7-month-olds have a "social sense"?

Details: Category: Davie Yoon's blog; Published on Sunday, 02 January 2011 08:24; Written by Davie Yoon

In a recent paper published in Science (24 December 2010) and entitled "The Social Sense: Susceptibility to Others' Beliefs in Human Infants and Adults", Agnes Kovacs, Ernő Téglás and Ansgar Denis Endress describe a striking set of experiments that may be of interest to ICCI readers, and suggest that "adults and 7-month-olds automatically encode others' beliefs, and that, surprisingly, others' beliefs have similar effects as the participants' own beliefs." These studies add to a growing empirical literature that started with Onishi & Baillargeon 2005 and that stands in contrast to Sally-Ann-style studies of false belief (which rely on explicit predictions and suggest it is not until 4 or 5 years that children can represent others' false beliefs). Here, the authors argue that representing an agent's beliefs -- even when they contradict one's own beliefs, and even when that agent has left the scene -- is triggered automatically and may be part of an innate human "social sense."

Around the Department of Cognitive Science at the CEU in Budapest, these are known as the "smurf studies", because they all feature a movie with different smurf dolls and a ball that rolls behind an occluder (Figure 1).

Kovacs et al, Figure 1

Denis Dutton (1944-2010)

Details: Category: Olivier's blog; Published on Thursday, 30 December 2010 10:47; Written by Olivier Morin

AP02070316536 In twelve years of existence, Arts and Letters daily hardly ever let a day pass without publishing its three witty three-liners. On the 28th of december, the feed was unusually late. It quickly resumed to announce the death of its founder, Denis Dutton.

Reading the reports (here and here), you may notice that all the authors seem to have started by searching their mailbox for his name. I did the same. The fact that we all found some fond memory there tells you a lot about the man. He was probably the first philosopher to understand how the web could be used.

In addition to being a celebrated editor and writer, Denis was a member of our Institute, which he supported from the beginning (and even before, in the days of Alphapsy). His words of encouragement, the readership he brought us, helped keep us on track. Last year, the site hosted a long, lively (and sometimes bitter) debate about his book, The art instinct, a darwinian theory of art (here and here). Incensed by our review, he was still patient enough to answer it at length, with sound arguments, and his usual wit. An opinionated and influential man, Denis could dislike his opponents as much as he liked controversy, for which he certainly had a knack. His various crusades, from the hilarious charges against postmodernism to his (less felicitous) campaign against global warming science, testify to that. He was not just any polemicist: he was the one who first gave scholarly debates a URL.

The evolutionary and cognitive basis of the cultural success of garbage trucks among western toddlers

Details: Category: Nicolas' Blog; Published on Monday, 27 December 2010 10:55; Written by Nicolas Baumard

The other day, I was browsing Youtube, looking for toddler's cartoons to entertain my 18 months old boy. I was not very optimistic though: Like many toddlers, my son's attention span rarely exceeds a couple of minutes... My best bet was that he would be interested in cartoons involving trucks and cars because these are the things that excite him most in real life. I did find cartoons of that kind but he turned out not to be terribly excited until I inadvertently clicked on a link suggested by Youtube which captured his attention for 9 long minutes. He then begged to watch the same video again... That's 18 minutes overall... much longer than anything he had previously been exposed to and guess what the video was about: A series of demonstration of garbage trucks...

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And that's not all! There is also Garbage Trucks I and Garbage Trucks III (and yes, we watched them all).

Note that the video is especially adapted (albeit probably not intentionally) to toddlers: the same action is repeated again and again so that you know what to expect and you can enjoy the pleasure of repetition.

A bit worried about my son's centre of interest, I looked at the comments and quickly got reassured: it is apparently the favourite video of many children. Moreover, it has been watched more than two million times! Yes, two million times (That is roughly the success of Noam Chomsky's most watched videos).

So I thought that there was something to explain there and that I should share my question with my fellow ICCI readers: What makes garbage trucks so culturally successful? On which cognitive function do they tap? Why are they "cheesecake for the mind"?

"Neurobabble" vs Real Science

Details: Category: Davie Yoon's blog; Published on Monday, 20 December 2010 14:19; Written by Davie Yoon

The New York Times is hosting a piece by Tyler Burge, philosopher of mind, that may be of interest to ICCI readers.

Popular science writing on psychology, Burge argues, is often just "neurobabble" which does three things he strongly dislikes: (1) it provides no additional insight into essentially psychological phenomena, (2) fools people into thinking psychological explanations can be replaced with neural explanations, and (3) tricks people into giving massive amounts of $$$ to neuroimaging studies in order to understand psychological phenomena that should rightly go to psychologists.

Burge thinks this misplaced glory is based on misguided notions of the relative maturity of different fields. Neuroscience, he says, is not more mature than psychology, particularly not subfields such as vision science.

This puts an aspiring visual cognitive neuroscientist (like me) in a funny position. On the one hand, I think it's wonderful when philosophers pay attention to vision science when discussing the mind and mental representation. To this end, Burge includes an interesting discussion about how to distinguish between environment-contingent responsivity in plants and perceptual representation in animals. I also highly approve of sentiments such as those:

Vote on whether you think "the language we speak shapes how we think"

Details: Category: Events; Published on Monday, 20 December 2010 14:11; Written by Davie Yoon

The Economist is hosting a debate in which readers may vote on whether or not they believe that "the language we speak shapes how we think."

On the official FOR side: Lera Boroditsky / On the official AGAINST side: Mark Lieberman

So far, opening statements and rebuttals have been posted, as well as comments by the moderator and readers of the site. In addition, Dan Slobin has contributed his reaction, and Lila Gleitman's will be posted on Tuesday. The results of the vote will be announced on Thursday.

So far, the yays have it...

The dawn of "culturomics"

Details: Category: Publications; Published on Sunday, 19 December 2010 17:22; Written by Nicolas Baumard

A team lead by Jean-Baptiste Michel and Erez Lieberman Aiden (Harvard University) just published in Science a paper "Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books" that promises to open a new era in the study of cultural evolution.

We constructed a corpus of digitized texts containing about 4% of all books ever printed. Analysis of this corpus enables us to investigate cultural trends quantitatively. We survey the vast terrain of "culturomics", focusing on linguistic and cultural phenomena that were reflected in the English language between 1800 and 2000. We show how this approach can provide insights about fields as diverse as lexicography, the evolution of grammar, collective memory, the adoption of technology, the pursuit of fame, censorship, and historical epidemiology. "Culturomics" extends the boundaries of rigorous quantitative inquiry to a wide array of new phenomena spanning the social sciences and the humanities.

This research was partly supported by Google's work effort to digitize books. Visit their new Ngram viewer!

Cognitio - Nonhuman Minds: Animal, Artificial or Other Minds

Details: Category: Call for Papers; Published on Saturday, 18 December 2010 13:03; Written by Benoît Dubreuil

3, 4, 5 July 2011 - UQÀM, Montreal

Cognitio is a young researcher's conference now held every two years at the Université du Québec à Montréal, under the auspices of its Cognitive Science Institute. Over the past several years, Cognitio has been a colloquium where many facets of the human mind were explored. We looked at the relationship between mind and its material substrate (2004), at human decision making (2005), at situated minds (2006), at social cognition (2007) and at the evolution of minds and cultures (2009).

The time has come to turn our attention to "nonhuman minds": to reflect on other minds, on minds that could have been and on minds that could be. Do our primate cousins have minds? And what about other animals? Does it make sense to think of "robot minds" and "artificial minds" in general?

This year, Cognitio will be held at the Université du Québec à Montréal on July 3rd, 4thand 5th 2011, just prior to the joint meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology (SPP) and the European Society for Philosophy and Psychology (ESPP). Submission of proposals for the conference is done through the EasyChair system. We are only asking for 600 words abstracts. EasyChair will allow you to upload a PDF paper if you want to, but only your abstract will be evaluated. The deadline for submissions is March 15th, 2011.

Folk epistemology

Details: Category: Publications; Published on Wednesday, 15 December 2010 09:19; Written by Dan Sperber

Of clear cognition-and-culture interest, a special issue of the Review of Philosophy and Psychology (Volume 1, Number 4 / December 2010) on "Folk Epistemology". For the table of content,

In EHB : Sixteen misconceptions about the evolution of human cooperation, by West et al.

Details: Category: Publications; Published on Sunday, 12 December 2010 20:09; Written by Nicolas Baumard

Now officially published online in Evolution and Human Behavior is a paper by West, El Mouden and Gardner (all from Oxford University) that has been circulating, as a manuscript, in the academic community for almost two years.

The paper (of which a copy can be found here) has several goals and everyone can find something in it. For the non-evolutionnist, it draws a pedagogic overview of the litterature on the evolution of cooperation (including in non-human species). For the evolutionnist, it nicely reviews some of the economic litterature, acknowledging the conceptual advances of this field in domains such as repeated interactions. For the cognitive anthropologist interested in the naturalistic foundations of cooperation, it clarifies some of the usual misconceptions behind widespread concepts such as group selection and strong-reciprocity. A must-read for all!

Here is the abstract:

The occurrence of cooperation poses a problem for the biological and social sciences. However, many aspects of the biological and social science literatures on this subject have developed relatively independently, with a lack of interaction. This has led to a number of misunderstandings with regard to how natural selection operates and the conditions under which cooperation can be favoured. Our aim here is to provide an accessible overview of social evolution theory and the evolutionary work on cooperation, emphasising common misconceptions.

Bourgeois Dignity: what doesn't explain the industrial revolution

Details: Category: Hugo's blog; Published on Sunday, 12 December 2010 16:42; Written by Hugo Mercier

Deirdre McCloskey is a very unorthodox economist. Even though she did a lot of classical work on the history of the industrial revolution in England, she is best known for her critical examination of the 'rhetoric' of economics. A good example of her attacks can be found in her latest book on that issue (The Cult of Statistical Significance, with Stephen Ziliak), in which she criticizes the slippery use of 'significance' in statistics (see this post). But McCloskey has now engaged in an even larger enterprise: explaining the unprecedented economic growth observed over the last two centuries. The ambition of the project is reflected in the sheer volume of the treatment: six books, one published in 2006 (The Bourgeois Virtues), one that just came out (Bourgeois Dignity – that is briefly reviewed here), one available in draft form (The Bourgeois Revaluation), and three more that should appear over the next few years. McCloskey's main these is that the period of growth we have experienced was due to a shift in the rhetoric about bourgeois values.

György Gergely on the A-not-B task

Details: Category: PedagogyWeek; Published on Friday, 03 December 2010 23:00; Written by György Gergely

This post is part of our 'Pedagogy theory week' series.

Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday

For a very short presentation of pedagogy theory, see the Monday post. In this post, György Gergely replies to Marion's Tuesday post on the A-not-B task.

"I don't agree with Marion that Natural Pedagogy theory should formulate the Genericity Bias so that it should somehow spell out and specify the particular level of genericity, the degree of width of referential scope, or the specific content types that the infant's referential interpretation of different ostensive communicative acts will arrive at. Vagueness with regards to specifying genericity is not a weakness of Natural Pedagogy theory (...) the level of genericity arrived at any given act of ostensive communication is a matter of pragmatic inference that is based on the available communicative and contextual information..."

György Gergely on genericity

Details: Category: PedagogyWeek; Published on Thursday, 02 December 2010 23:00; Written by György Gergely

This post is part of our 'Pedagogy theory week' series.

Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday

For a very short presentation of pedagogy theory, see the Monday post. In this post, György Gergely replies to Marion and Olivier's concerns about the notion of a "Genericity Bias" (see in particular the Wednesday post).

"... overly generic misinterpretations represent an acceptably low cost incurred by the powerful inferential cultural learning system of Natural Pedagogy when compared to the high benefit gained in cognitive relevance provided by the possibility it affords – implemented through the Genericity Bias – for extracting and fast-learning relevant and generalizable cultural knowledge about referent kinds even from single communicative manifestations that employ deictically identified particular referents only. We like to think of the ostensively induced A-not-B search error as a sort of 'conceptual illusion' – the "illusion of being taught" – that is comparable to perceptual illusions that demonstrate the existence of a pre-wired interpretive mechanism of perceptual inference through its rare malfunctioning under specific input conditions."

Read more: György Gergely on genericity

György Gergely replies to Marion Vorms and Olivier Morin

Details: Category: PedagogyWeek; Published on Wednesday, 01 December 2010 23:00; Written by György Gergely

This post is part of our 'Pedagogy theory week' series.

Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday

For a very short presentation of pedagogy theory, see the Monday post. In this post, György Gergely starts to reply to Marion Vorms and Olivier Morin's comments of Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.

In their posts to kick off Natural Pedagogy Week, Olivier Morin and Marion Vorms both raise important - and in many ways converging – questions about some of the basic assumptions of natural pedagogy theory, the recent hypothesis proposed by Gergő Csibra and myself about the functional nature of preverbal infants' innate preparedness to be engaged in ostensive referential communication.

The empirical basis for the NP proposal consists of recent studies demonstrating in a number of task domains that young preverbal infants assign qualitatively different referential interpretations to the same object-directed intentional actions when accompanied by ostensive communicative signals than when seen performed without such cues in a non-communicative third-person observational context. Based on such evidence, NP theory argues for the following proposals:

- Innate sensitivity to ostensive signals: Human infants show evolved sensitivity to a set of behavioural cues (such as direct eye-contact, motherese, or contingent reactivity) that are pre-wired to induce recognition of communicative intention in the other;

- Ostensive signals induce a 'Presumption of relevance': Ostensive cues trigger a presumption of relevance in their infant addressees, an expectation that the other's communicative manifestation will convey new and relevant information to them (the informative or referential intention)

- Ostensive signals induce referential expectation: Ostensive cues activate a referential expectation in infants who will follow the other's referential deictic gestures to target to infer the referential content of the other's informative intention;

- Ostensive signals trigger a Genericity Bias of referential interpretation: Ostensive cues induce a Genericity Bias in infants: a default expectation that – unless further communicative and/or contextual information is made available to specify the intended referential scope of the manifested information to be more narrow – the communicative act is assumed to convey generic (rather than episodic) information that is generalizable beyond the 'here-and-now' of the referential situation to other contexts, other agents other actions of the same kind, or other instances of the generic object kind that the particular referent belongs to.

Olivier and Marion both seem to welcome the empirical evidence that support Natural Pedagogy as a significant step towards understanding the nature of humans' evolved capacity for ostensive communication.

Savage Minds on anthropology, science and truth

Details: Category: Events; Published on Wednesday, 01 December 2010 10:11; Written by Lucien Dontask

In a recent post, Benson Saler commented on the AAA's decision to drop the "science" label for anthropology. In this post Savage Minds blogger Rex criticizes the critics of the decision. Anthropology, he argues, doesn't need to be scientific in order to be true.

Is human communication biased?

Details: Category: PedagogyWeek; Published on Tuesday, 30 November 2010 23:00; Written by Olivier Morin

This post is part of our 'Pedagogy theory week' series.

Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday

For a very short presentation of pedagogy theory, see the Monday post. This one is about the genericity bias. You can read György's reply on this topic on Friday. According to Pedagogy theory, we expect communication to teach us something general about a thing or an action : what kind of object, or what kind of action it is. Yet the theory makes room for the fact that not all communicative actions are generic. Communicators know that, and when communication is not generic, they know better than to cling to their expectations of genericity. Still, according to Pedagogy theory, we are biased to treat communication as generic; what does that mean?

Cognitive Science PhD program at Central European University

Details: Category: Initiatives; Published on Tuesday, 30 November 2010 09:05; Written by Lucien Dontask

PhD studentships are available at the new doctoral program in Cognitive Science at Central European University (CEU), Budapest, Hungary.

The newly established Department of Cognitive Science at CEU invites applications for its doctoral program starting September 2011. This is a research-based training program that specializes in, but is not restricted to, the study of social cognition. Research topics include cooperation, communication, social learning, cultural transmission, joint action, developmental social cognition, strategic decision making, visual cognition, statistical learning, and social cognitive neuroscience. Students will follow courses in cognitive psychology, philosophy of mind, cognitive anthropology, computational cognition and linguistics, and will receive practical research training in the laboratories of the members of this new department. Faculty includes...

Natural pedagogy and A-not-B tasks

Details: Category: PedagogyWeek; Published on Monday, 29 November 2010 23:00; Written by Marion Vorms

This post is part of our 'Pedagogy theory week' series.

Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday

For a very short presentation of pedagogy theory, see the Monday post. Here, Marion Vorms describes and discusses the Pedagogical treatment of a famous psychological effect. György Gergely will discuss her critiques on Saturday.

The so-called "perseverative search error" (or "A-not-B error") was first observed by Piaget. A-not-B errors are mistakes performed by infants close to 1 year of age. The standard experimental set up highlighting these errors consists in a hide-and-search task, divided into two phases. During the first phase (habituation, or "A-trials"), the demonstrator repeatedly hides an object under one (A) of two containers (A and B) in full view of the infant, who is allowed to retrieve the object after each hiding event. After this habituation period, the demonstrator hides the object under container B (still in full view of the infant). During this second phase (test trials, or "B-trials"), infants frequently look for the object under container A. Various explanations have been given of this phenomenon, appealing to deficits in inhibitory control over the motor response involved in searching at location A, to constraints on short-term memory, to attentional biases, or even to motor simulation of the observed hiding action at location A through activation of the mirror neuron system. It is worth noting that most of these explanations share the assumption that A-not-B errors have more to do with the development of action, rather than with the development of object representation — they all reject Piaget's original explanation in terms of infants' incomplete understanding of object permanence (indeed, there is now strong evidence for object permanence in 2-months-olds, as Renée Baillargeon for instance has shown).

As often, natural pedagogy's advocates' strategy consists in designing a modified version of the classical experimental paradigm (here, A-not-B tasks), by varying the absence or presence of ostensive-communicative cues, thus highlighting infants' differential responses according to the context (ostensive-communicative or not). So far, indeed, A-not-B errors had always been highlighted in ostensive-communicative contexts.

In their 2008 paper, Topál et al. hypothesize that perseverative search error might (at least partially) be due to a pragmatic misinterpretation of the nature of the conveyed information.

Anthropology is not a science, says the AAA

Details: Category: Benson Saler's blog; Published on Monday, 29 November 2010 15:16; Written by Benson Saler

(editor's note: click here to learn more about the AAA's decision from a partial but enlightening point of view)

The Board of the American Anthropological Association has recently adopted a new "mission statement" that omits any reference to "science" in its characterization of anthropology. The previous mission statement contained such a reference.

A number of US anthropologists have protested the new mission statement. I paste below a recent post from Professor Eric C. Thompson of the National University of Singapore. I find Professor Thompson's post especially interesting because it summarizes some of the data that he and his associates collected from graduate students in several leading US anthropology programs. The student respondents gave their opinions as to which anthropologists they regard as having been most influential on the development of anthropology during the last two decades. Professor Thompson has given me permission to reproduce his post here, along with relevant contact information. Those of you who may want to read his preliminary survey are invited to contact him directly.

Thompson's e-mail:

I'm writing in response to this valuable discussion of dropping the term "science" from the AAA mission statement. I was trained and worked (dissertation, c.1990s) largely in an "interpretive" tradition... with "postmodern" influences - scaremarks and all, haha. But I've followed and signed on to the SASci because I've never agreed with the anti-science ideologues and am not keen on an anthropology that excludes the modern scientific tradition.

In collaboration with students in a graduate seminar on anthropology and anthropological theory just completed here at the National University of Singapore, we queried graduate students in cultural anthropology at six leading anthropology departments in the United States (Chicago, Columbia, Duke, Harvard, UCLA, U of Washington) as to the most influential anthropologists of the past two decades. This was a very informal 'survey' but yielded some interesting results; which bear on the discussion here.

Pedagogy week starts today!

Details: Category: PedagogyWeek; Published on Sunday, 28 November 2010 23:00; Written by Olivier Morin

This week, the Cognition and Culture blog will be hosting a series of posts discussing György Gergely and Gergely Csibra's theory of Pedagogy, a theory of communication and cultural transmission that ICCI bloggers love to discuss (see these two posts by P. Jacob, and this one by György Gergely). This theory is one of the most exciting things that happened to the study of communication recently - because it is supported by gorgeous experiments, but above all because of its theoretical ambitions.

This week, Pedagogy theorists will reply to our bloggers' critics. Tomorrow, Marion Vorms will question the way the theory explains a famous effect in developmental psychology; on Wednesday, I will ask some questions about the meaning of their "Genericity Bias". György Gergely was kind enough to consider our arguments at great length, in a series of three posts - one on referentiality (Thursday), one on genericity (Friday), and one on the A-not-B task, which will close the week on Saturday. Comments are open on our posts, and we'll reply to György's replies as they appear. Of course, everyone is free to comment, this week and after.

Like many authors who wrote about communication (such as Michael Tomasello or Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson), Gergely and Csibra believe in the existence of specifically human cognitive capacities that allow us to communicate. However, they differ from most other theories of communication in one important way.

The Zeus problem revisited - or is it the Jedi problem?

Details: Category: Helen De Cruz's blog; Published on Friday, 26 November 2010 12:59; Written by Helen De Cruz

In their recent paper (available here) in Journal of Cognition and Culture, Will M. Gervais and Joseph Henrich call attention to the Zeus problem. If religious belief is solely guided by representational content biases (as many scholars in the cognitive science of religion have argued), why do people generally not come to believe in the gods of their neighbours, or indeed, in gods of the past such as Zeus? Zeus has all the features that are characteristic of successful religious agents, but he is no longer a target for widespread belief and commitment. Of course, what Gervais and Henrich do not mention is that there are in fact modern believers in Zeus and other members of the Greek pantheon, namely adherents to Hellenic Polytheistic reconstructionism. As can be seen in the movie here, Zeus is still an object of worship today. There are about 2000 adherents to this form of paganism in Greece today.

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So is there in fact a Zeus problem? I am not so convinced, since it turns out that even religions that make no secret of their purely fictional origins are quite successful.

In TiCS: Space, Time and Number

Details: Category: Publications; Published on Wednesday, 24 November 2010 08:54; Written by Nicolas Baumard

Trends in Cognitive Sciences is publishing a special issue on space, time and number with articles by Brian Butterworth, Manuela Piazza, Daniel B.M. Haun and collaborators, and Dori Derdikman and Edvard I. Moser. As Manuella Piazza explains in her article, the field is reap for a very interesting "cognition and culture" debate since there are now several detailed theories about the way number symbols recycle old evolutionary capacities :

"Attaching meaning to arbitrary symbols (i.e. words) is a complex and lengthy process. In the case of numbers, it was previously suggested that this process is grounded on two early pre-verbal systems for numerical quantification: the approximate number system (ANS or 'analogue magnitude'), and the object tracking system (OTS or 'parallel individuation'), which children are equipped with before symbolic learning. Each system is based on dedicated neural circuits, characterized by specific computational limits, and each undergoes a separate developmental trajectory. Here, I review the available cognitive and neuroscientific data and argue that the available evidence is more consistent with a crucial role for the ANS, rather than for the OTS, in the acquisition of abstract numerical concepts that are uniquely human."

The same topic is of course discussed at length in Susan Carey's recent major book The origin of concepts.

Workshop on the Social Brain (Cambridge, April 2011)

Details: Category: Call for Papers; Published on Monday, 22 November 2010 10:13; Written by Dan Sperber

The MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit (Cambridge, England) is organising a worshop on "The Social Brain: Evolution, development, psychopathology and future directions" (Scientific Organisers: Dr Dean Mobbs, Prof. Trevor Robbins, and Prof. Ian Goodyer) on the 12th and 13th April, 2011. Application Deadline: 15th January, 2011. The aim: The aim of this workshop is to provide audience members with state of the art coverage of social neuroscience and make translational and theoretical connections between human brainimaging, comparative research, and neuropsychiatric disorders. We aim to keep the workshop small and extremely interactive.

Faculty: Ernst Fehr, Chris Frith, Uta Frith, Nicky Clayton, Robin Dunbar, Molly Crockett, Ben Seymour, Matt Lieberman, Jason Mitchell, Nikolaus Steinbeis, Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, Matthew Rushworth, John O'Doherty, Brian Knutson, Henrik Ehrsson, Tania Singer, Wako Yoshida, Nick Humphrey, Predrag Petrovic, Cindy Hagan, and Simon Baron-Cohen.

Special issue of Mind and Society on experimental economics

Details: Category: Publications; Published on Monday, 22 November 2010 07:37; Written by Dan Sperber

Note the Special issue of Mind and Society on "Experimental economics and the social embedding of economic behavior and cognition". Here is the abstract of the introductory article, "The implication of social cognition for experimental economics" by Christophe Heintz and Nicholas Bardsley: "Can human social cognitive processes and social motives be grasped by the methods of experimental economics? Experimental studies of strategic cognition and social preferences contribute to our understanding of the social aspects of economic decisions making. Yet, papers in this issue argue that the social aspects of decision-making introduce several difficulties for interpreting the results of economic experiments. In particular, the laboratory is itself a social context, and in many respects a rather distinctive one, which raises questions of external validity."

The Table of Content:

Where good ideas come from

Details: Category: Hugo's blog; Published on Sunday, 21 November 2010 17:42; Written by Hugo Mercier

Following up on the news of a few days earlier about the role of different network structures in the spread of new ideas, it's worth mentioning the new Steven Johnson book on a related topic: Where good ideas come from. Johnson sets out to dispel the myth of the lone inventor whose main motivation would be the financial benefits derived from her creativity. Instead, he suggests that most inventions are the result of a kind of undirected cooperation -- not a group of people purposively pursuing an idea, but several groups working on slightly different things that add up to a significant discovery in the end. Moreover, profit seems to be a motive only in a minority of case, despite the 'progress' made in copyright and patent law over the course of the 20th century.

Society for Psychological Anthropology Meetings, April 2011

Details: Category: Call for Papers; Published on Sunday, 21 November 2010 13:43; Written by Dan Sperber

The Society for Psychological Anthropology Biennial Meetings will take place in Santa Monica, CA March 31-April 3, 2011. The theme: "Subjects and Their Milieux in Late Modernity: The Relevance of Psychological Anthropology to Contemporary Problems and Issues" : "In this conference, we continue to innovate within psychological anthropology and reach across subdisciplinary and disciplinary boundaries to explore new areas of practice and theory for the second decade of the 21st century. ... We will focus especially on the relevance of psychological anthropology to problems and issues in the contemporary world--from changing families, workplaces and local communities to religious groups, professions, and transnational institutions like consumer capitalism, world religions, and NGOs. ... Examples of possible panels and papers are ones on child and adolescent development; overlaps between psychological and medical anthropology; transforming perspectives on family, gender, and sexuality; memory and trauma; narrative and identity in institutional contexts; and rethinking theories and research strategies to explore new forms of communication, communities, and being alone. ...Both individual papers (15 minutes) and full panels (1 hour and 45 minutes) are welcome. Younger scholars are particularly encouraged to suggest panel, paper, or discussion group topics."

The deadline for submitting panel and paper proposals is December 1, 2010. More here.

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The condescension factor

Denis Tatone

Sunday, 19 May 2013 14:40

This is a comment wrote by Eva Zemandl on Facebook about the article above. I'm copy-pasting it here with her permission.

"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."

The 'gratitude trap' where Hungarian patients keep falling , Denis Tatone

The firefighters calendar

Guillaume Dezecache

Saturday, 18 May 2013 17:08

Thanks for this brilliant post, Denis!

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...

Not Quite So Simple

Grazzi Yoon

Monday, 01 April 2013 22:08

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.

Why do mathematicians always agree? , Christophe Heintz

The Logical Basis of Kinship Terminologies

Dwight Read

Saturday, 30 March 2013 08:17

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.

Is kinship back? , Dan Sperber

Reclaiming Kinship

Saturday, 30 March 2013 05:55

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

mathematicians do disagree! significantly so

William (Bill) Lawless

Friday, 29 March 2013 18:14

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.

Gullibility and pigheadedness

Hugo Mercier

Monday, 18 March 2013 07:02

Thanks Radu and Christophe for a great post and a great exchange. Just a quick note to point out that the professor mentioned in the story is also described as rarely paying attention to the opinions of others. People had told him he was walking into a trap and he dismissed their advice. As in most other cases, the problem is not really sheer gullibility, but poor discrimination in who to trust, including a large part of refusing to be influenced by some communicated information.

Why do scammers persist in saying they are from Nigeria? , Radu Umbres

A scientist's gullibility

Christophe Heintz

Sunday, 10 March 2013 14:19

Your hypothesis, Radu, that scam targets personality traits more than they exploit the situations has a corroborating story just out in the news (brought to my attention by Denis Tatone): Paul Frampton, a great physicist, has fallen victim of scam, mistakenly thinking that he was corresponding with a young beautiful model and eventually ending up in jail for transporting 2kg of cocaine.

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.

Looking at how people understand complex economic ideas may give us a clue

Stefano Adamo

Friday, 08 March 2013 14:33

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.

Why don’t people like markets? , Pascal Boyer

Answer to Christophe: Personal traits versus distribution of knowledge in epistemic vigilance

Radu Umbres

Thursday, 28 February 2013 00:39

Thanks Christophe for this engaging reply with a number of very important points!. It is evident that, in both cases, victim’s epistemic vigilance is bypassed by deceivers, but mechanisms of deception are different. Scams exploit mainly individual-level weakness, while fool’s errands use institutional-level affordances. Therefore, their respective strategies of targeting victims are distinct.

Let us suppose that there is a characteristic (or a set thereof) which determines the functioning of epistemic vigilance, and let us suppose that this characteristic varies between individuals. Simply put, some individuals are more gullible than others, everything else being held constant. These individuals are unversed in worldly matters, or they have an inclination to believe everything they are being told, or an inclination to trust everyone. Maybe they present a combination of these features. Among these, only the most gullible ones would fall for a 419 Nigerian scam. (I am referring to current circumstances, not to those of initial scams). You must have never paid attention to web security to have never heard about the scam, and you must be very trusting of people to put your money into their hands, or as greedy as to make you blind to the telltale signs. I’d say you are lot more gullible than almost everyone I know - your characteristics of epistemic vigilance make you a clear outlier.

But victims of fool’s errands are no outliers. Although, (in my estimation) most novice workers fall for the prank, I would consider their epistemic vigilance as entirely warranted by the situation. By warranted, I mean that they are as vigilant as required to function as competent social actors given that they know apprentices should trust their masters, that their technical competence is low and obscure terms will appear in conversations, etc. They know no more and no less than the average novice and are as gullible (in terms of personal characteristics - see above) as the next guy. Moreover, they are as epistemically vigilant when they leave to search for a “pipe-stretcher” as when searching for a “round about” (a real tool with funny-sounding name used for pipelines). What differentiates a fool’s errand from a normal request is the malicious intention of pranksters. The “initiated” know that victims cannot tell the difference between a real and an imaginary tool, that victims trust them with expertise and professionalism, etc. The dice are loaded from the start against the “fool”, and the prankster knows it.

To sum up, I would say that deceivers in each case are angling for different fish in different waters. 419’ers search for the easy prey, the most gullible individuals from an immense pool of unknown recipients. They send out the lure and expect the golden fish, yet know nothing about potential victims. Organisers of fool’s errands are shooting fish in a barrel, since they have control over specific victims in advantageous institutional settings ( distribution of knowledge,structure of command, authority of social roles, etc). This explains the vast difference in success rates between the two forms of deception: one is addressed to millions of users to “capture” a few, the other aims at a handful to ensnare most of them. In order to make the contrast clearer, I venture to say that most people tricked in “fool’s errands” would avoid Nigerian scams. A victim of 419 starting as an apprentice is doomed by the double handicap of institutionalised ignorance and personal gullibility. On a more amusing line, 419 artists would like to replicate the power of fool’s errand practitioners, such as by cracking into the email database of “I am wealthy and I trust unknown people too much” Anonymous.

The interesting theoretical implication suggested by your comment addresses the level at which we evaluate epistemic vigilance. On the one hand, we have the level of personal traits of gullibility. On the other hand, we have the level of structures of knowledge distribution. Can we pry them apart analytically? Empirically, it is problematic since it is very possible that forms of deception take into account both levels. For example, one would not attempt a “fool’s errand” with a highly suspicious apprentice bound to ask questions defusing the prank. Perhaps scammers try to eliminate segments of likely targets according to their web expertise (this is Herley’s argument).

One example comes to mind where both levels are addressed by scammers. On La Rambla in Barcelona, extremely well organised groups of con men play the three card trick. They target individuals with scarce local knowledge - tourists - by using a “touristy” location. However, their hope lies with the most gullible (greedy? drunk? careless?) tourists which can be parted with their money. The population of likely “marks” is selected by con artists (at the level of distributed social competence), while the actual mark selects himself by betting on the rigged game (at the level of individual characteristics).

Sorry for the long reply which mostly stated the obvious and restated in a less concise form your keen observations - but I think there is something theoretically interesting here: is epistemic vigilance only something “in the head”? Or do we need to rely upon an externalist perspective in which levels or mechanisms of epistemic vigilance can only be judged in the context of wider institutions of knowledge production and distribution? On my part, I think future explorations in the latter direction are promising.

P.S. Thinking about gains: fool’s errands are about hearty laughs and humiliating social initiation. Three card tricks aim for the quick buck, 50 euros made in a few minutes, a score of marks per day. 419 target the rare and precious victim, stripped of considerable sums after a prolonged investment in deceptive maneuvers. An association between kinds of gain and kinds of exploited weakness in epistemic vigilance?

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