International Cognition and Culture Institute

Which network structures favor the rapid spread of new ideas, behaviors, or technologies?

Details: Category: Publications; Published on Sunday, 21 November 2010 12:21; Written by Dan Sperber

Forthcoming in PNAS, an article entitled "The spread of innovations in social networks" by Andrea Montanari and Amin Saberi (full text available here).

Abstract : Which network structures favor the rapid spread of new ideas, behaviors, or technologies? This question has been studied extensively using epidemic models. Here we consider a complementary point of view and consider scenarios where the individuals' behavior is the result of a strategic choice among competing alternatives. In particular, we study models that are based on the dynamics of coordination games. Classical results in game theory studying this model provide a simple condition for a new action or innovation to become widespread in the network. The present paper characterizes the rate of convergence as a function of the structure of the interaction network. The resulting predictions differ strongly from the ones provided by epidemic models. In particular, it appears that innovation spreads much more slowly on well-connected network structures dominated by long-range links than in low-dimensional ones dominated, for example, by geographic proximity.

Video games as applied anthropology

Details: Category: Nicolas' Blog; Published on Wednesday, 17 November 2010 23:00; Written by Nicolas Baumard

Pursuing its ambitious development, the ICCI blog has decided now to open a "video games" section. And today, we are discussing the release of Civilization V, the last sequel of one of the most famous series in the history of video games.

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OK I was just kidding. There won't be any video games section. But why not after all? Video games are often portrayed as violent and simplistic, consisting only in racing cars or shooting people. Some of them, however, are quite different. Some are about breeding a pet, playing guitar or... developing a culture. In Civilization V, the player leads a civilization from prehistoric times into the future, achieving one of a number of different victory conditions through research, diplomacy, expansion, economic development, government and military conquest.

Of course, one could argue that the view developed in Civilization is quite unrealistic, reductionist and deterministic. You have to go through certain political and technical stages to develop and expand your civilization. In a way, it evokes the old evolutionist theories in anthropology. But is Civilization that bad from an anthropological perspective?

Picture of the week: The colors of the Web

Details: Category: Nicolas' Blog; Published on Monday, 15 November 2010 23:00; Written by Nicolas Baumard

In a recent post, Ophelia wondered about the basis of people's colours preference: Which colour do you prefer ? Have you always preferred it, or did your preference change ? Can you tell why you prefer pink to, let's say, yellow ?

One of the problem here is that, as Ophelia noticed, we lack data, and methods to gather them. As usual, the web may change the debate. The blog COLOURlovers has just released an interesting study of the colors in the brands from the top 100 sites in the world (see also here).

most-powerful-web-colors_2

Unsurprinsingly, the web is dominated by red and blue.

Discovery in the social sciences

Details: Category: Call for Papers; Published on Saturday, 13 November 2010 23:00; Written by Helen De Cruz

A workshop on "Discovery in the social sciences: Towards an empirically-informed philosophy of social science" will take place at the University of Leuven, Belgium, March 22-23, 2011. The aim of this workshop is to bring together scholars who are working in the philosophy of the social sciences, especially those interested in scientific practice. The theme is discovery in the social sciences. The keynote speakers are Alison Wylie (University of Washington) and Jack Vromen (Erasmus University Rotterdam). We invite submissions of extended abstracts (about 1000 words), and we are especially eager to hear from young researchers. Submission deadline for abstracts: 31 December, 2010. Here is the workshop's website.

Temporary Lecturer in Cognition and Culture

Details: Category: Jobs; Published on Monday, 08 November 2010 10:41; Written by Nicolas Baumard

Available from 1 February 2011 to 31 August 2012 at Queen's University Belfast - School of History and Anthropology, a Temporary Lectureship in Cognition and Culture to cover a career break, to teach at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, to assist primarily in the current research activities of the Institute of Cognition and Culture, and to undertake research in line with the School's research strategy.

Anticipated interview date: Tuesday 21 December 2010. Closing date: Monday 6 December 2010.

Learning suicide in Sri Lanka

Details: Category: Tom's blog; Published on Monday, 01 November 2010 16:08; Written by Tom Widger

Durkheim's sociological study of suicide as a 'social fact' was premised, in part, on the idea that only human beings were known to commit suicide. But ethologists tell us that the ability to commit self-injury or to deliberately self-destruct has been found across separate species including other primates and land mammals, dolphins, insects, and even some bacteria. While the evidence is far from definitive and the use of terms like 'deliberate self-injury' or 'suicide' across vastly different species is hugely problematic (just as it is across different human cultures and epochs), the possibility that we might not be the only animal to display suicide-like behaviours raises fascinating questions about how and why the ability to commit suicide evolved at all, and how and why modern humans learn to use suicide as a response to particular kinds of problems in their lives.

Yellow_Oleander

One of the most popular methods of self-harm in Sri Lanka is through the consumption of yellow oleander seeds (in Sinhalese "kaneru atta"). Folklore states that the poison (waha) contained in the seeds is enhanced if they are mixed with water and sugar, and suicidal youth and adults often prepare kaneru atta in this manner. During suicide play children also sometimes mix kaneru atta with water and sugar.

Picture of the week: West African Masquerade by Phyllis Galembo

Details: Category: Blog; Published on Monday, 01 November 2010 09:25; Written by Coralie Chevallier

Halloween is the perfect opportunity to discover Phyllis Galembo's work on masquerade traditions in West Africa (and a nice illustration of the way artifacts build on our social cognitive capacities). This is only a small selection of many amazing pictures Phyllis Galembo took during her trips in Nigeria, Benin and Burkina Faso between 2004 and 2006.

Atam Masquerader, Alok Village, Nigeria, 2004, Ilfochrome, 30 x 30 inches

New book: Human evolution and the origin of hierarchies

Details: Category: Publications; Published on Monday, 25 October 2010 23:00; Written by Lucien Dontask

Philosopher Benoît Dubreuil just published a book at Cambridge University Press: Human evolution and the origins of hierarchies: the state of nature. Based on his dissertation, the book promises to shed fresh light on key anthropological issues, such as social evolution or the origins of the state. Benoît Dubreuil, ICCI fellow, studies philosophy of science and moral philosophy at the Université du Québec à Montréal.

The book on Cambridge UP's site.

Benoît Bubreuil's website.

Rob Kurzban's new blog on evolutionary psychology

Details: Category: Events; Published on Tuesday, 19 October 2010 15:18; Written by Nicolas Baumard

Robert Kurzban (University of Pennsylvania) has launched his new blog. He comments (almost daily!) on articles, news and books related to evolutionary psychology. You may learn the many errors in Buller's recent article against Evolutionary psychology, where to publish evolutionary psychology, or why we always locate our bed in the same place in a room. A must-read if you are interested in the origins of our many cognitive abilities!

Philippa Foot, Famous Philosopher, Unknown Anthropologist (1920-2010)

Details: Category: Nicolas' Blog; Published on Monday, 18 October 2010 09:16; Written by Nicolas Baumard

Philippa Foot died at her home in Oxford, England, on Oct. 3, her 90th birthday (see the NYT here and the Guardian here, and note the difference). In her career, she defended the view that moral judgments have a rational basis and that they can be said to be true or false. Her writing also helped establish virtue ethics as a leading approach to the study of moral problems. She insisted that virtues like courage, wisdom and temperance are indispensable to human life and the foundation stones of morality.

Her work was thus primarily normative. However, she may be remembered more for her description of moral judgements and her indirect contribution to moral psychology. Indeed, along with Judith Thomson, she is the inventor of the trolley dilemma.

In 1967, in the essay "The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of the Double Effect," Philippa Foot discussed the moral distinctions between intended and unintended consequences, between doing and allowing, and between positive and negative duties — the duty not to inflict harm weighed against the duty to render aid.

The most arresting of her examples, offered in just a few sentences, was the ethical dilemma faced by the driver of a runaway trolley hurtling toward five track workers.

Does God's omnipotence extend to vision?

Details: Category: Guillaume's blog; Published on Sunday, 17 October 2010 09:04; Written by Guillaume Dezecache

In a recent paper, Lorenza Colzato and her colleagues have tried to provide some pieces of evidence for cultural influences on perception, and more precisely, for their hypothesis that following religious rules can 'affect' visual processing.

I am very sceptical about this paper. One crucial question I have been obsessed with while reading it was: how can high-level things like beliefs be influential at such a low level as visual perception? For sure, Colzato reports evidence for supporting this hypothesis (as did a previous paper of Colzato's) but what remains unclear is the function such an influence could fulfil, and how this influence could be cognitively realized. Moreover, the authors report that this influence of beliefs on visual processing is not specific to religion.

Kuyper Arguing that "cultural contexts are very hard to capture and to define" (since citizens of a same country could belong to different cultures, a geographical cut-out is not completely sufficient to distinguish between cultural areas), Colzato et al. have decided to focus on religion, and they decided to define a 'religion' as a set of rules. Thus, every follower of a religion is tied to some rules which are, little by little, inducing "particular cognitive-control strategies and establishing default control parameters that generalize to situations that have no bearing for religious beliefs". This argument is supported by other studies such as McCullough and Willoughby's, in 2009, which shows that religious people were less likely to break the law since they were more 'used to' following rules in general (because of their daily, effortful religious training).

Yet, the authors argue, these induced cognitive-control strategies are not limited to complex decisions (such as "to break or not to break the law"). They can be found in low-level processing mechanisms like vision.

For example, Colzato et al.' previous study (already linked to) has shown that Calvinists (whose cultural background is supposed to stress the notion that every sphere of the society should mind its own business) were more likely to be victims of the global precedence effect than were atheists (who, the authors suppose, possess a more "holistic" view of the society). In the global precedence effect, as described by D. Navon in 1977, the global structure of a percept is available earlier than its local features, for example, to see the forest before the trees.

(Photograph: Abraham Kuyper, father of the Dutch Anti-Revolutionary Party, a conservative Calvinist movement.)

Why the West Rules--For Now

Details: Category: Publications; Published on Friday, 15 October 2010 14:00; Written by Hugo Mercier

Ian Morris, a Stanford historian, has just published a new sweeping history of humanity. In Why the West Rules--For Now, he builds a theory of the evolution of human societies and tries to explain why the East and the West have been swapping seats for millennia in world domination. The beginning is very promising, and fans of Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel and Landes' The Wealth and Poverty of Nations are likely to appreciate Morris' verve and breadth of knowledge.

Social interaction in utero?

Details: Category: Publications; Published on Thursday, 14 October 2010 14:37; Written by Dan Sperber

Fascinating findings by Umberto Castiello, Cristina Becchio, Stefania Zoia,Cristian Nelini, Luisa Sartori, Laura Blason, Giuseppina D'Ottavio, Maria Bulgheroni, and Vittorio Gallese in an article entitled: "Wired to Be Social: The Ontogeny of Human Interaction" freely available at PLOS One here.

twins_in_utero

Left: self-directed movement towards the mouth Right: the foetus "caressing" the head of the sibling.

Abstract: Newborns come into the world wired to socially interact. Is a propensity to socially oriented action already present before birth? Twin pregnancies provide a unique opportunity to investigate the social pre-wiring hypothesis. Although various types of inter-twins contact have been demonstrated starting from the 11th week of gestation, no study has so far investigated the critical question whether intra-pair contact is the result of motor planning rather then the accidental outcome of spatial proximity. ...Kinematic profiles of movements in five pairs of twin foetuses were studied by using four-dimensional ultrasonography during two separate recording sessions carried out at the 14th and 18th week of gestation. We demonstrate that by the 14th week of gestation twin foetuses do not only display movements directed towards the uterine wall and self-directed movements, but also movements specifically aimed at the co-twin, the proportion of which increases between the 14thand 18th gestational week. ...We conclude that performance of movements towards the co-twin is not accidental: already starting from the 14th week of gestation twin foetuses execute movements specifically aimed at the co-twin.

Josh Knobe and Lera Boroditsky debate on language and thought

Details: Category: Publications; Published on Monday, 11 October 2010 16:35; Written by Dan Sperber

You have watched Lera Boroditsky's LSE-ICCI lecture. Here you can see her debating with Josh Knobe:

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Poetic rhyme reflects cross-linguistic differences in information structure

Details: Category: Publications; Published on Monday, 11 October 2010 12:00; Written by Nicolas Baumard

An interesting article in the last issue of Cognition suggesting how cognitive differences in language processsing can influence literary tradition. Michael Wagner (McGill) and Katherine McCurdy (Harvard) show that cross-linguistic differences in information structure can explain divergence in French and English poetic tradition (preprint available here).

Abstract: Identical rhymes (right/write, attire/retire) are considered satisfactory and even artistic in French poetry but are considered unsatisfactory in English. This has been a consistent generalization over the course of centuries, a surprising fact given that other aspects of poetic form in French were happily applied in English. This paper puts forward the hypothesis that this difference is not merely one of poetic tradition, but is grounded in the distinct ways in which information-structure affects prosody in the two languages. A study of rhyme usage in poetry and a perception experiment confirm that native speakers' intuitions about rhyming in the two languages indeed differ, and a further perception experiment supports the hypothesis that this fact is due to a constraint on prosody that is active in English but not in French. The findings suggest that certain forms of artistic expression in poetry are influenced, and even constrained, by more general properties of a language.

Picture of the week: How segregated is your city?

Details: Category: Nicolas' Blog; Published on Monday, 04 October 2010 23:00; Written by Nicolas Baumard

One of the tools that may change our view of culture is modelization. It helps us understand big phenomena such as language change or the dynamics of hot topics. One of the first and the most convincing use of models in social sciences probably comes from Nobel prize winner Thomas Schelling. In a famous paper, he showed that a small preference for one's neighbors to be of the same color could lead to total segregation. He used coins on graph paper to demonstrate his theory by placing pennies and nickels in different patterns on the "board" and then moving them one by one if they were in an "unhappy" situation.

Now, cartographer Bill Rankin produced an astounding map of Chicago, which beatifully illustrate the segregation phenomenon. Eric Fischer saw these maps, and took it upon himself to create similar ones for the top 40 cities in the United States. Fisher used a straight forward method borrowed from Rankin: Using U.S. Census data from 2000, he created a map where one dot equals 25 people. The dots are then color-coded based on race: White is pink; Black is blue; Hispanic is orange, and Asian is green. Here, I borrow Cliff Kuang's simple and efficient presentation.

Washington, D.C., for example (see figure on the right), has a stark east/west divide between Blacks and Whites.

Epistemic trust in scientific practice: The case of primates studies

Details: Category: Helen De Cruz's blog; Published on Wednesday, 29 September 2010 23:00; Written by Helen De Cruz

tamarins A few days ago, I received a favorable review of a paper of mine. The reviewer suggested some minor improvements, one of which led me to reflect on epistemic trust in scientific practice. In the paper, I cited a recent study of which Marc Hauser was the lead author. The reviewer suggested that I replace this reference by a similar study on primate cognition. Fortunately, in this case, it turns out that there were other studies that reach similar findings. My paper was a revision of an earlier submission which I had been told to 'revise and resubmit'. At the time of this earlier submission, the Hauser investigation had not yet been made public.

The paper I cited was not compromised in the recent Harvard investigation, but it is nevertheless tainted since it has appeared in the time when the scientific misconduct took place. I would have changed the reference anyway, even if the reviewer had not brought it up. For some researchers, the consequences of this affair may be much more dramatic, if they directly relied on Hauser's findings in their experimental designs or conclusions. I am thinking in particular about his language research, which has led to the retraction of the 2002 paper in Cognition.

Is philosophy universal?

Details: Category: Publications; Published on Thursday, 23 September 2010 08:29; Written by Dan Sperber

Justin Erik Halldor Smith has won this year's 3 Quarks Daily 2010 top philosophy prize with a post on his blog entitled "More on Non-Western Philosophy (the Very Idea)". This provocative essay is of clear cognition-and-culture relevance. It begins:

Roughly speaking, we might conceptualize the attainments of a given culture as falling into two broad categories. On the one hand, there are things like wagons, gunpowder, and telephony: cultural attainments that, once they have caught on in one society, they cannot but spread to all societies that have the means of acquiring them. There is nothing, for example, intrinsically Chinese about printing. These are things that do not have any special relationship to the context of their origin. On the other hand, there are things like the Pythagorean chromatic scale as opposed to the Indian sargam, or the unicorn motif in Indo-European art: innovations of culture that do not automatically result in global diffusion, since they are only variations on a fixed range of possibilities for the expression of elements of culture --in this instance, music and figurative art-- that are in some form always already there in every culture. In general, inventions diffuse, motifs do not (unless the motifs are from a higher-status conquering elite, which explains in part the abundance of copyright-infringing knock-offs of Disney characters in the developing world...). What sort of innovation is philosophy?

To read more

Creative pairs

Details: Category: Dan's blog; Published on Monday, 20 September 2010 12:17; Written by Dan Sperber

Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe (photo by Norman Seeff)

Hugo Mercier and I have of late been developing the idea that reasoning, typically seen as an activity of the individual thinker, is in fact a social activity aimed at exercising some control on the flow of communicated information by arguing in order to convince others and by examining others' arguments in order to be convinced only when appropriate (see here). With such ideas in mind, I was struck by the opening paragraphs of a the first of a series of essays by Joshua Wolf Shenk, (the author of Lincoln's Melancholy and a variety of essays in The New Yorker, Harper's, The Nation, Mother Jones, or the Atlantic Monthly) on "Creative pairs" published at Slate:

"What makes creative relationships work? How do two people—who may be perfectly capable and talented on their own—explode into innovation, discovery, and brilliance when working together? These may seem to be obvious questions. Collaboration yields so much of what is novel, useful, and beautiful that it's natural to try to understand it. Yet looking at achievement through relationships is a new, and even radical, idea. For hundreds of years, science and culture have focused on the self. We talk of self-expression, self-realization. Popular culture celebrates the hero. Schools test intelligence and learning through solo exams. Biographies shape our view of history.

This pervasive belief in individualism can be traced to the idea most forcefully articulated by René Descartes. "Each self inhabits its own subjective realm," he declared, "and its mental life has an integrity prior to and independent of its interaction with other people." ..."

Can Antropologists and other Cognitive Scientist live together?

Details: Category: Maurice's blog; Published on Sunday, 12 September 2010 23:00; Written by Maurice Bloch

How can we go beyond the rhetorical dichotomy between nature and culture and avoid misunderstandings that repeatedly occur when social/cultural anthropologists and natural scientists try to co-operate? It shouldn’t be all that difficult if we think, as I believe we should, of human cognition not as a state but as a single process where history and individual cognitive development interact.

Bronislaw Malinowski among Trobriand Islanders, 1918

One can put the matter over simply by saying that the theoretical starting point of, for example, a cognitive psychologist is "external" while the starting point of a social anthropologist is "internal". The analytical tools of the psychologist, the questions she ask, the categories of analysis she uses – categories such as "concepts" or "mind" – have all been defined in a discourse that is external to the subjects of the enquiry. On the other hand, an anthropologist tries to use as the ground from which to produce her analysis the cognitive tools of the subjects of her enquiry as they are available to them in the particular place and the particular time they are located. The significance of using this "internal" base line has been stressed by anthropologists again and again, perhaps most eloquently by Malinowski with his well known phrase "from the native's point of view".

Nick Enfield reviews Searle and Runciman

Details: Category: Publications; Published on Thursday, 09 September 2010 12:56; Written by Dan Sperber

In the Times Literary Suppement, September 3, 2010, 3-4, an interesting review (available here) by Nick Enfield of Making the social world by John Searle and The theory of social and cultural selection by W.G. Runciman.

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From Gérard Lampin's L'idiot (1946 - with Gérard Philippe and Edwidge Feuillère - in French)

The review begins:

"In a characteristically riotous scene from The Idiot, Dostoyevksy's chaotic anti-heroine Nastasya Filipovna takes a package of 100,000 roubles brought to her by lovelorn admirer Rogozhin and throws it into the fire to burn. She is using this gift from one suitor as a weapon against another—the ambitious Ganya—whom she publicly taunts to reach in barehanded and remove the burning bills. Mayhem ensues. By what magic does the burning of paper evoke emotions from bewilderment to horror to panic? When that paper happens to be money we catch full view of a curious dual reality that characterizes human affairs. There is a realm of facts that do not follow from physical reality, that inescapable world in which slips of paper are worthless other than as fire starters or snack food for goats. Our trick is the creation of what philosopher John Searle calls institutional reality, a uniquely human reality in which those otherwise ineffectual slips of paper are readily accepted in exchange for valuable goods and services, based on a virtually unshakeable sense of trust that someone else will later accept the same slips of paper in turn. In Making the Social World, Searle asks how human institutional reality is possible. His considered opinion is that language carries the entire load."

To read more...

Why pink? Color matters

Details: Category: Ophelia's blog; Published on Sunday, 05 September 2010 23:00; Written by Ophelia Deroy

Just ask yourself : Which colour do you prefer ? Have you always preferred it, or did your preference change ? Can you tell why you prefer pink to, let's say, yellow ? If you have no answer to these questions, you may wonder what's so interesting about colour preferences. And if you have no answer, or no interest in the questions, it's perhaps because they are not very well shaped.

pink_tutu_copy

Let's first agree that color preference is an important aspect of human behavior. It influences a large number of decisions people make on a daily basis, including the clothes and make up they wear (I will never wear a kaki jacket !), the way they decorate their homes (I like dark furniture), the artifacts they buy or create, to name but a few examples. What is more interesting is that color is, in some sense, a superficial quality that seldom influences the practical function of artifacts. What's more interesting for psychologists, is that we still know very little on which factors actually determine these preferences. We still don't have a good grasp on what they are, and how to capture them descriptively: some studies have reported universal preferences (for blue rather than red); others. for highly saturated colors ; some, finally, stress cultural and individual differences.

Pragmatics of religious transmission

Details: Category: Call for Papers; Published on Sunday, 05 September 2010 15:10; Written by Dan Sperber

At the 10th international SIEF (Societé Internationale d´Ethnologie et de Folklore) Congress, "People make places - ways of feeling the world" to take palce in Lisbon, 17 to 21 April 2011, a call for papers (deadline: October 15) on "The pragmatics of religious transmission: contexts, case studies and theoretical departures" for a panel convened by Ruy Blanes (University of Lisbon), Vlad Naumescu (Central European University), and Arnaud Halloy (Université de Nice Sophia Antipolis):

"The issue of religious transmission and learning has become a thriving topic in the contemporary anthropology of religion. Driven by the creative tension between cognitive and culturalist approaches it prompts interesting debates and exchanges, and the exploration of new methodological and heuristic paths addressing the problem of transmission.

In this panel we invite our colleagues to explore pragmatic contexts of religious transmission: the complex of communicational and active conditions that affect (through perception, cognition, emotion, interaction and materiality) individuals engaged in religious action. From this perspective, religious transmission operates through both implicit and explicit regimes. It can take complex and defined forms in ritual contexts, but it can also impregnate various contexts of the quotidian through different dimensions and agencies: discipline, imagination or aesthetics. Taking these as fundamental dimensions of religious transmission, we invite participants to reflect on their articulation in concrete ethnographic cases."

Scott Atran on religion and political violence

Details: Category: Events; Published on Friday, 20 August 2010 15:24; Written by Dan Sperber

Sc atran ott Atran gave a lecture entitled "For Friends and Faith: Understanding the Paths and Barriers to Political Violence" at Hampshire College in the lecture series on science and religion. The abstract: "Many creatures will fight to the death for their close kin, but only humans fight and sacrifice unto death for friends and imagined kin, for brotherhoods willing to shed blood for one another. The reason for brotherhoods-- unrelated people cooperating to their full measure of devotion--are as ancient as our uniquely reflective and auto-predatory species. Different cultures ratchet up these reasons into great causes in different ways. Call it love of God or love of group, it matters little in the end... especially for young men, mortal combat in a great cause provides the ultimate adventure and glory to gain maximum esteem in the eyes of many and, most dearly, in the hearts of their peers. This century's major terrorist incidents are cases in point."

The video of the lecture is available here and that of the Q&A session here.

Distress, culture and gene expression

Details: Category: Publications; Published on Friday, 20 August 2010 14:58; Written by Dan Sperber

An interesting paper forthcoming in PNAS showing how cultures may favour different expressions of the same gene: "Culture, distress, and oxytocin receptor polymorphism (OXTR) interact to influence emotional support seeking" by Heejung S. Kim, David K. Sherman, Joni Y. Sasaki, Jun Xu,Thai Q. Chu, Chorong Ryu, Eunkook M. Suh, Kelsey Graham, and Shelley E. Taylor.

Abstract: Research has demonstrated that certain genotypes are expressed in different forms, depending on input from the social environment. To examine sensitivity to cultural norms regarding emotional support seeking as a type of social environment, we explored the behavioral expression of oxytocin receptor polymorphism (OXTR) rs53576, a gene previously related to socio-emotional sensitivity. Seeking emotional support in times of distress is normative in American culture but not in Korean culture. Consequently, we predicted a three-way interaction of culture, distress, and OXTR genotype on emotional support seeking. Korean and American participants (n = 274) completed assessments of psychological distress and emotional support seeking and were genotyped forOXTR. We found the predicted three-way interaction: among distressed American participants, those with the GG/AG genotypes reported seeking more emotional social support, compared with those with the AA genotype, whereas Korean participants did not differ significantly by genotype; under conditions of low distress, OXTR groups did not differ significantly in either cultural group. These findings suggest that OXTR rs53576 is sensitive to input from the social environment, specifically cultural norms regarding emotional social support seeking. These findings also indicate that psychological distress and culture are important moderators that shape behavioral outcomes associated with OXTRgenotypes.

Laurie Santos on monkeynomics

Details: Category: Publications; Published on Monday, 16 August 2010 08:52; Written by Dan Sperber

An interesting TED talk: Laurie Santos looks for the roots of human irrationality by watching the way our primate relatives make decisions. A clever series of experiments in "monkeynomics" shows that some of the silly choices we make, monkeys make too.

The Zeus Problem

Details: Category: Publications; Published on Saturday, 07 August 2010 16:41; Written by Dan Sperber

Forthcoming in the Journal of Cognition and Culture and available here, an article by Will M. Gervais and Joseph Henrich, "The Zeus Problem: Why Representational Content Biases Cannot Explain Faith in Gods" that deserves being read and discussed.

Abstract: In a recent article, Barrett (2008) argued that a collection of five representational content features can explain both why people believe in God and why people do not believe in Santa Claus or Mickey Mouse. In this model—and within the cognitive science of religion as a whole—it is argued that representational content biases are central to belief. In the present paper, we challenge the notion that representational content biases can explain the epidemiology of belief. Instead, we propose that representational content biases might explain why some concepts become widespread, but that context biases in cultural transmission are necessary to explain why people come to believe in some counterintuitive agents rather than others. Many supernatural agents, including those worshipped by other cultural groups, meet Barret’s criteria. Nevertheless, people do not come to believe in the gods of their neighbors. This raises a new challenge for the cognitive science of religion: the Zeus Problem. Zeus contains all of the features of successful gods, and was once a target for widespread belief, worship, and commitment. But Zeus is no longer a target for widespread belief and commitment, despite having the requisite content to fulfill Barret’s criteria. We analyze Santa Claus, God, and Zeus with both content and context biases, finding that context—not content—explains belief. We argue that a successful cognitive science of religious belief needs to move beyond simplistic notions of cultural evolution that only include representational content biases.

Paul Rozin on what psychologists should study

Details: Category: Hugo's blog; Published on Wednesday, 28 July 2010 13:12; Written by Hugo Mercier

Paul Rozin, one of the founding fathers of cognition-and-culture studies, is a psychologist with a rich set of interests. Even though he’s often known for his work on food, and disgust in particular (cockroach in your drink anyone?), the list of his current projects alone would make many a psychological career look narrowly focused. However, this post will not dwell on the value of having such diverse interests, but on the value for psychology of adopting a richer set of methodologies.

In an insightful series of articles (see below), Rozin highlights some of the shortcomings of modern psychology (while his focus is primarily on social psychology, his remarks apply equally well to most of cognitive psychology). One of these shortcomings is the failure to sufficiently take into account—and study—cultural variability. Even the bulk of cross-cultural psychology only compares undergrads across countries (usually a ‘Western’ sample and an ‘Eastern’ sample). But Rozin draws our attention to the even less forgivable paucity of data regarding presumably less stark cultural variations along ethnic, religious, political or social lines. Understandably, for most Western researchers, a trip to Shanghai or Kyoto to carry out an experiment will be more attractive than one to, say, inner-city Detroit (I plead guilty here). But there also seems to be a publication bias: cross-cultural psychology journals are likely to publish more easily a comparative study of Chinese and American undergraduates rather than one comparing, say, blue and white collar workers in Philadelphia (coda: a publication bias nearly automatically translates into a grant bias which further compounds the problem). But I will not belabor this point, as the lack of cultural variability in the samples of psychologists has already been discussed on this blog.

Evolved dispositions and cultural norms. A discussion in Science

Details: Category: Publications; Published on Wednesday, 28 July 2010 08:23; Written by Lucien Dontask

In March, Science published a research article by Joe Henrich et al. ("Market, Religion, Community Size and the Evolution of Fairness and Punishment") showing that market integration and participation in world religion covary with fairness (an article that Nicolas Baumard discussed here). This week Science (23 July 2010: 388-390) publishes two letters discussing Henrich et al's article, and in particular the relative role of evolved disposition and cultural norms in explaining these finding, one by Nicolas Baumard, Pascal Boyer and Dan Sperber, and the other by Andrew Delton, Max Krasnow, Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby, together with a reply from the authors.

What if there had never been a Cognitive Revolution?

Details: Category: Nicolas' Blog; Published on Thursday, 22 July 2010 23:00; Written by Nicolas Baumard

What_if In a previous post, I questioned the relevance of the label “Cognition and Culture” for our institute. Why not ‘Cognition and Society’ instead? Choosing ‘culture’ over ‘society’, I argued, is not arbitrary and implicate that some questions (religion, transmission) are preferred over some others (cooperation, institutions). The same remark holds for the term cognition. Why not cognition and not simply psychology? Why aren’t we part of an International Psychology and Culture Institute? Arguably, we use the term ‘cognition’ because we reckon that we are the heirs of the Cognitive Revolution. But is it really the case? Would the field of ‘Cognition and Culture’ be different if the Cognitive Revolution never happened? My guess is: not so much.

Let’s imagine an uchronia, a different version of our world in which history diverged from the actual history of the world. But this time, it is not about the Nazis winning World War II, the Spanish Armada successfully invading England or the Black Death of the 14th century killing 99% of Europe. It is about the Cognitive Revolution.Yes, that’s not the most funky uchronia ever (although some writers have imagined some cognitive related uchronia, the most famous being probably The difference engine by Gibson and Sterling in which Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine takes on the roles of modern computers a century in advance). Still, the question remains interesting: What if the Cognitive revolution had never happened?

Moral camouflage or moral monkeys?

Details: Category: Publications; Published on Thursday, 22 July 2010 05:46; Written by Dan Sperber

An interesting short essay by Peter Railton on the authenticity of morality from an evolutionary point of view available here and open to discussion here with already some interesting contributions e.g. by Bill Benzon, Frans de Waal or Sally Haslanger. Railton argues:

"A picture thus emerges of selection for “proximal psychological mechanisms”— for example, individual dispositions like parental devotion, loyalty to family, trust and commitment among partners, generosity and gratitude among friends, courage in the face of enemies, intolerance of cheaters — that make individuals into good vehicles, from the gene’s standpoint, for promoting the “distal goal” of enhanced inclusive fitness."

See also PeterRailton's discussion with Robert Wright on "Evolutionary Psychology and Moral Thinking" at Bloggingheads.tv:

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Page 7 of 16

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...

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

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?

Low epistemic vigilance or ignorance?

Wednesday, 27 February 2013 18:57

Thanks Radu for providing though-provoking instances where epistemic vigilance fails to filter out false information.

Your two posts on the targets of fool's errands and scams raise the question: are the victims less epistemically vigilant than is usually the case?

It seems that authors of fool's errands and scams exploit the normal mechanisms of epistemic vigilance. In the case of fool's errands, as you nicely explained, they exploit expert status. For instance, if you are a newcomer in a construction site, the best thing for you to do is to trust what a veteran tells you, and go for the "pipe-stretcher" ... whatever this might be. Your trust is well calibrated to the situation thanks to your epistemic vigilance, and this is exploited by the authoritative person making the joke.
In the case of scams, you point out all the argumentation that comes with a mail and the ensuing procedures. Your alternative explanation of the persistence of Nigeria in scams is to say that, for historical reasons, the place allows for low cost production of arguments. If Herley's filtering hypothesis is true, then those that are filtered out are those that know about scams more than those that are more epistemically vigilant.

Cognitive mechanisms of epistemic vigilance are not foolproof mechanisms. Bounded rationality applies to all domains. So vigilant people can be tricked in believing false information.

This is why I'm wondering whether what is targeted in fool's errands and scams is:
(a) personality traits taking the form of general gullibility and low epistemic vigilance, or
(b) ignorance in some specific domains and the communicative context

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