International Cognition and Culture Institute

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:

Paul the Octopus, relevance and the joy of superstition

Details: Category: Dan's blog; Published on Tuesday, 13 July 2010 00:10; Written by Dan Sperber

So, as you all know, Spain beat the Netherlands and won the World Football Cup in Johannesburg on July 11, 2010. As most of you may also know, this victory was predicted by a German octopus named Paul. Paul was presented before the match with two transparent boxes each baited with mussel flesh and decorated one with the Spanish flag, the other with the Dutch flag, and, yes, Paul the octopus correctly chose the Spanish flag box. One chance out of two, you might sneer, but Paul had correctly predicted, by the same method, the results of the seven matches in which the German team played. The probability of achieving by chance such a perfect series of prediction is 1/256 or 0.003906. More impressive, no? Paul the Octopus is now a TV news star: he has today more than 200,000 Google entries and more than 170,000 Facebook friends; he has received both death threats and commercial offers, and so on. On July 12, Paul's owners presented him with a replica World Cup trophy and announced that "he won't give any more oracle predictions - either in football, or in politics, lifestyle or economy."

Should you be impressed?

Opacity tasting with Dan and Maurice

Details: Category: György's blog; Published on Sunday, 11 July 2010 09:36; Written by György Gergely

A few weeks ago, Maurice Bloch, Dan Sperber and several others had a debate on the nature of those beliefs (in particular 'religious' beliefs) that cannot easily be made fully explicit, or brought to bear on concrete matters (so-called 'semi-propositional beliefs' - here called 'opaque' beliefs). The question, very roughly, was the following. Can such beliefs be arrived at only through some form of reasoning or of trust? In other words, must they be 'reflective' rather than simply 'intuitive'? Maurice argued that such beliefs can be intuitive, but Dan disagreed (if you missed the first installments of the feuilleton, see here and here). Dan imagined a friendly discussion with Maurice, taking place around a glass of wine, which has now prompted György Gergely to jump in the debate. (O.M.)

Under the mild mental pleasure that the virtual and vicarious consumption of wine in the distinguished company of such authorities on both wine and opaque beliefs (pardon me for the expression) as Dan Sperber and Maurice Bloch induced in me, I feel liberated to raise some – admittedly opaque but for me at least mildly intoxicating – questions concerning Dan’s characterization of the nature of having reflective semi-propositional beliefs.

What it is like to be holding a reflective belief of opaque content?

Pierre Soulages (the master of pictorial opacity). Peinture (1956). Musée National d'art Moderne, Paris

The Price of Altruism

Details: Category: Publications; Published on Saturday, 10 July 2010 23:26; Written by Dan Sperber

A new biography of the theorical biologist George Price by Oren Harman that situates Price's contribution in the history of biological ideas about altruism from Darwin and Kropotkin to Hamilton and Maynard-Smith has received raving reviews (here is Frans de Waal's in the New York Times).

From the blurb of The Price of Altruism: George Price and the Search for the Origins of Kindness (Norton 2010): "Since the dawn of time man has contemplated the mystery of altruism, but it was Darwin who posed the question most starkly. From the selfless ant to the stinging bee to the man laying down his life for a stranger, evolution has yielded a goodness that in theory should never be. Set against the sweeping tale of 150 years of scientific attempts to explain kindness, The Price of Altruism tells for the first time the moving story of the eccentric American genius George Price (1922–1975), as he strives to answer evolution's greatest riddle. An original and penetrating picture of twentieth century thought, it is also a deeply personal journey. From the heights of the Manhattan Project to the inspired equation that explains altruism to the depths of homelessness and despair, Price's life embodies the paradoxes of Darwin’s enigma. His tragic suicide in a squatter’s flat, among the vagabonds to whom he gave all his possessions, provides the ultimate contemplation on the possibility of genuine benevolence." (Watch Oren Harman talk about his book here).

Joint Action: What is Shared

Details: Category: Call for Papers; Published on Monday, 05 July 2010 18:50; Written by Dan Sperber

Special issue of the Review of Philosophy and Psychology on "Joint Action: What is Shared?" Guest Editors: Natalie Sebanz & Stephen Butterfill. Call for papers. Deadline for submissions: 15 August 2010.

Researchers have appealed to many kinds of sharing in explaining or characterising joint action. Joint actions are variously said to involve shared intentions or goals, shared task representations, shared attention, shared common ground, and more. Each putative case of sharing raises numerous questions. Is talk of sharing in this context literal or metaphorical; and if metaphorical, how is the metaphor to be understood? Is such sharing constitutively necessary for joint action? What cognitive and conceptual demands does such sharing place on the agents? How does such sharing facilitate joint action? How does it develop? What is its role in development? What awareness of other agents of a joint action, if any, does such sharing require? In what ways is such sharing apparent to us when we perceive or recognise joint actions done by others? Further questions concern interactions and conceptual relations between the different kinds of sharing. Do shared intentions interact with shared task representations? How many kinds of sharing are involved in joint action—are intentions shared in the same sense that task representations are, for instance? This special issue of the Review of Philosophy and Psychology aims to address questions such as these with contributions from social, cognitive and developmental psychology, cognitive neuroscience and philosophy.

The weirdest people in the world?

Details: Category: Publications; Published on Friday, 02 July 2010 11:43; Written by Nicolas Baumard

In a forthcoming issue of Brain and Behavioral Sciences, anthropologist Joe Henrich, and psychologists Steven Heine, and Ara Norenzayan review the available database of comparative social and behavioral science studies (here are Science's and Nature's comments). They found that people from Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic (WEIRD) societies — who represent as much as 80 percent of study participants, but only 12 percent of the world’s population — are not only unrepresentative of humans as a species, but on many measures, they’re outliers.

Abstract below the fold.

Homeopathy as witchcraft

Details: Category: Nicolas' Blog; Published on Friday, 02 July 2010 10:48; Written by Nicolas Baumard

The British Medical Association's annual conference of junior doctors has declared that homeopathy is witchcraft. They have voted a blanket ban and an end to all placements teaching homeopathic principles to training doctors (this debate is quite hot in the UK as you can see here).

Dr Tom Dolphin, deputy chairman of the BMA's junior doctors committee in England, told the conference:

"Homeopathy is witchcraft. It is a disgrace that nestling between the National Hospital for Neurology and Great Ormond Street there is a National Hospital for Homeopathy which is paid for by the NHS".

Although this comparison may be quite harsh for homeopathy, the connection between homeopathy and witchcraft may be of some interest from a Cognition & Culture point of view.

Clay Shirky on "cognitive surplus"

Details: Category: Events; Published on Thursday, 01 July 2010 11:53; Written by Dan Sperber

Clay Shirky teaches at New York University’s graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program a course named “Social Weather.” He’s the author of Here Comes Everybody, about the power of crowds, and the new Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. In this TED Talk, he presents the main idea of this last book.

The sacredness of God

Details: Category: Brian's blog; Published on Sunday, 27 June 2010 23:56; Written by Brian Malley

One of the difficulties I run into in expounding Pascal Boyer's theory of the minimal counterintuitiveness of religious concepts ("MCI theory") is that many people feel that the critical feature of god concepts—the gods’ sacredness or ultimacy—is not explained by the theory. Here I propose a sort of solution to this problem, or at least a response to the objection.

Sacredness, holiness, awesomeness, ultimacy, greatness—these terms (at least in their religious uses) denote a quality that seems to elude definition. Let us denote the quality to which these terms refer as A. A may be a simple quality, or some compound of qualities—I do not know and it does not matter for this discussion.

In my own experience, there was a time when I used these terms because they were used by other people in my religious tradition, and early on I discerned that they were used primarily in reference to God, but occasionally and partially in reference to other things as well. They were part of church language, to be used in religious contexts but not, at least in the same sense, elsewhere. They were abstract and theoretical, unconnected to any perceptible quality, and emotionally sterile. Nonetheless, I knew how to use them in socially appropriate ways. Later, after I had a set of experiences, these terms came to life for me...

CFP : Conference on cognitive development, Central European University, Budapest

Details: Category: Call for Papers; Published on Friday, 25 June 2010 20:37; Written by Lucien Dontask

Invited Speakers : Ellen Markman (Stanford University), Josep Call (MPI EVA, Leipzig), and the hosts: György Gergely & Gergely Csibra (CEU)

The conference will be held on January 14-15, 2011. Deadline for symposia: 10th September, 2010, Deadline for posters: 10th October, 2010. Call for symposium and poster submissions - Official website.

“Oy vey, have you got the wrong vampire!” A reply to Frans de Waal

Details: Category: Dan's blog; Published on Tuesday, 22 June 2010 17:15; Written by Dan Sperber

I am used to being attacked by fellow anthropologists for having a naturalistic approach and for arguing that cognitive science, experimental methods, and evolutionary theorizing are highly relevant to anthropology’s pursuit. Some of these attacks have been quite violent (one, in l’Homme 1982 concluded with the suggestion that, in order to show me the irrelevance of what is in the skull, I should be given a blow on the head); few if any have paid much attention to my precise claims, but at least they were quite right in targeting me as a naturalist. I am also used to having to work harder in order to get evolutionary biologists and comparative psychologists to pay attention to what I have to say than I would have to if I were one of them. That is understandable.

However, what happened in the past few days was a novel experience.

Three Questions for Michael Tomasello

Details: Category: Emma's blog; Published on Sunday, 20 June 2010 19:41; Written by Emma Cohen

Mike Tomasello Michael Tomasello is Co-Director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, and Co-Director of the Wolfgang Köhler Primate Research Center. He has conducted and inspired research on a wide range of questions of critical relevance and foundational importance to the cognition and culture area. His 1999 book, The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition (Harvard University Press), won the 2001 APA William James Book Award and has been translated into a dozen languages. (A Brasilia bookshop sold its very last copy of Origens Culturais Da Aquisição Do Conhecimento a few days ago. I was there - Em). Tomasello's awards and distinctions include a Guggenheim Fellowship (1997), a Hegel Prize (2009), and, most recently, the 2010 Dr A H Heineken Prize for Cognitive Science. For a list of selected recent publications, see here. For his thoughts on past, present, and present, see below. All comments welcome!

Three Questions

1. In 1992, you brought us your first book, First Verbs: A Case Study of Early Grammatical Development (CUP). Your most recent book, Why We Cooperate (MIT, 2009) takes us well beyond the realms of cognitive linguistics, focusing on another old – and very hot – chestnut in the human behavioural sciences. What are some of the key intellectual landmarks that have marked your route between the two?

Why do academics oppose capitalism?

Details: Category: Nicolas' Blog; Published on Monday, 14 June 2010 12:44; Written by Nicolas Baumard

A few weeks ago, Megan McArdle, the business and economics editor for The Atlantic, wondered why Academia treats its workforce so badly.

Academia has bifurcated into two classes: tenured professors who are decently paid, have lifetime job security, and get to work on whatever strikes their fancy; and adjuncts who are paid at the poverty level and may labor for years in the desperate and often futile hope of landing a tenure track position. And, of course, graduate students, the number of whom may paradoxically increase as the number of tenure track jobs decreases--because someone has to teach all those intro classes.

There seems to be a paradox here:

What puzzles me is how this job market persists, and is even worsening, in one of the most left-wing institutions in the country. (...) Almost every academic I know is committed to a pretty strongly left-wing vision of labor market institutions. Even if it's not their very first concern, one would assume that the collective preference should result in something much more egalitarian. So what's overriding that preference?

McArdle’s solution to this paradox is that that Academia's leftward drift (some of it at least) can be explained by the fact that it has one of the most abusive labor markets in the world. I’d rather say that it’s probably the other way around and that it is the academics’ moral judgements that permitted these inequalities. But in order to see why, we first need to understand why it is that so many academics oppose capitalism.

Liberalprof

A psychological theory of human tool use

Details: Category: Publications; Published on Sunday, 13 June 2010 23:00; Written by Dan Sperber

An interesting and ambitious article by François Osiurak, Christophe Jarry,and Didier Le Gall: "Grasping the affordances, understanding the reasoning: toward a dialectical theory of human tool use" in Psychological Review, (2010 -117(2):517-40) freely available here.

Abstract: One of the most exciting issues in psychology is what are the psychological mechanisms underlying human tool use? The computational approach assumes that the use of a tool (e.g., a hammer) requires the extraction of sensory information about object properties (heavy, rigid), which can then be translated into appropriate motor outputs (grasping, hammering). The ecological approach suggests that we do not perceive the properties of tools per se but what they afford (a heavy, rigid object affords pounding). This is the theory of affordances. In this article, we examine the potential of the computational view and the ecological view to account for human tool use. To anticipate our conclusions, neither of these approaches is likely to be satisfactory, notably because of their incapacity to resolve the issue of why humans spontaneously use tools. In response, we offer an original theoretical framework based on the idea that affordance perception and technical reasoning work together in a
dialectical way. The thesis we defend here is that humans have the ability to view body action as a problem to be solved. And it is precisely at this point that technical reasoning occurs. But, even if the ability to do technical reasoning gives humans the illusion of constantly doing less (e.g., TV remote control), they are still forced to use body action – and to perceive affordances – to operate the product of the reasoning (pushing buttons with the fingers). This is the principle of dialectic.

The self in 'face' and 'dignity' cultures

Details: Category: Publications; Published on Saturday, 12 June 2010 18:24; Written by Dan Sperber

Two interesting articles by Young-Hoon Kim and Dov Cohen: "Information, Perspective, and Judgement about the Self in Face and Dignity Cultures" in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (2010 36: 537-550) here; and, with Wing-Tung Au: "The jury and abjury of my peers: The self in face and dignity cultures" in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, (Vol 98(6), Jun 2010, 904-916) here. The latter begins:

"There are two ways to know the self: from the inside and from the outside. In all cultures, people know themselves from both directions. People make judgments about themselves from what they “know” about themselves, and they absorb the judgments of other people so that the judgments become their own. The process is one of constant flow, but there is variation, from both person to person and culture to culture, in which direction takes precedence. In this article, we outline the way face cultures tend to give priority to knowing oneself from the outside, whereas dignity cultures tend to give priority to knowing the self from the inside and may resist allowing the self to be defined by others. We first distinguish between face cultures and dignity cultures, describing the cultural logics of each and how these lead to distinctive ways in which the self is defined and constructed. We discuss the differing roles of public (vs. private) information in the two cultures, noting the way that such public information becomes absorbed into the definition of face culture participants and the way that it can become something to struggle against among dignity culture participants—even when it might reflect positively on the participant. Finally, we describe three cross-cultural experiments in which the phenomena is examined and then close with a discussion of the different ways our selves are “knotted” up with the judgments of other people."

Pinker on Mind and Media

Details: Category: Publications; Published on Friday, 11 June 2010 23:00; Written by Dan Sperber

In a New York Times op-ed entitled "Mind over Mass Media", Steven Pinker (June, 10, 2010) challenges persistent clichés. It begins:

"New forms of media have always caused moral panics: the printing press, newspapers, paperbacks and television were all once denounced as threats to their consumers’ brainpower and moral fiber. So too with electronic technologies. PowerPoint, we’re told, is reducing discourse to bullet points. Search engines lower our intelligence, encouraging us to skim on the surface of knowledge rather than dive to its depths. Twitter is shrinking our attention spans. But such panics often fail basic reality checks. When comic books were accused of turning juveniles into delinquents in the 1950s, crime was falling to record lows, just as the denunciations of video games in the 1990s coincided with the great American crime decline. The decades of television, transistor radios and rock videos were also decades in which I.Q. scores rose continuously." To read more...

Communication, punishment and common pool resources

Details: Category: Hugo's blog; Published on Sunday, 06 June 2010 07:49; Written by Hugo Mercier

Economic games have been discussed several times on this blog. Their extreme simplicity makes them attractive tools for an experimental approach, but it also makes them all too perfect examples of lack of naturalness and ecological validity. Still many would argue that, together with formal modelling, these games have permitted important theoretical advances and demonstrated for instance that punishment of defectors plays a crucial role in explaining human cooperation. But is it really so? How reliable are the insights gained from simple games such as the ultimatum of the common good games, when in real life, the dilemma people are faced with are much more complex, both in terms of the range of choices available, and the dynamics of interaction over time? Elinor Ostrom, the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics (which we hailed at the time), is uniquely well placed to understand the complexity of the dilemma that people face when they have to solve real common goods problems, having studied many such dilemmas in real life herself. She has been developing new ways to test experimentally participants’ reactions when faced with dilemma that offer more complex problems than most experiments so far, while maintaining an adequate degree of control. The results from one of these experimental studies have recently been published in an article in Science (328: 613-617): "Lab Experiments for the Study of Social-Ecological Systems" by Marco A. Janssen, Robert Holahan, Allen Lee, Elinor Ostrom. They put in perspective the more standard approaches and strongly suggest rethinking some of their conclusions.

A screen shot of the experimental environment of the study of Janssen et al. The green star-shaped figures are resource tokens; the circles are avatars of the participants (yellow is participant’s own avatar; blue represents other participants).

Believing Maurice Bloch on doubting, doubting him on believing

Details: Category: Dan's blog; Published on Sunday, 30 May 2010 05:50; Written by Dan Sperber

My friend Maurice Bloch and I have been arguing since even before we first met in the 70s. What makes it worthwhile is that there is much we agree on, and, once in a while, one of us causes the other to change his mind on some issue. There has been one issue however where I have failed to convince Maurice (and reciprocally, of course); it is about an old argument of mine regarding the disunity of beliefs. Since my 1982 paper “Apparently irrational beliefs”, I have argued that we should distinguish two mental attitudes toward a belief content, an ‘intuitive’ and ‘reflective’ belief attitude (see here). Intuitive beliefs are experienced as plain knowledge of fact without attention and generally without awareness of reasons to hold them to be facts. Reflective beliefs are held for reasons that are mentally entertained. These reasons can be of two kinds: the authority of the source of the belief, or the sense that their content is such that it would be incoherent not to accept them.

Why do we make our tastes public?

Details: Category: Nicolas' Blog; Published on Sunday, 23 May 2010 23:00; Written by Nicolas Baumard

Facebook has recently changed the way it asks its users to endorse brands and celebrities on the site. Rather than ask people to "become a fan" of say, Starbucks or Lady Gaga, Facebook will instead let users click to indicate that they "like" the item.

likes

Facebook already lets people "like" comments or pictures posted on the site, and users click "like" almost twice as much as they click "become a fan." Facebook says that replacing "become a fan" with "like" will make users more comfortable with linking up with a brand and will streamline the site. The Independent quotes Michael Lazerow, CEO of Buddy Media, which helps companies establish their brands and advertise on social networks such as Facebook: "The idea of liking a brand is a much more natural action than [becoming a fan] of a brand. In many ways it's a lower threshold."

But while it might seem to be less of a commitment to declare that you "like" Starbucks than to announce you are a fan of it, the meaning essentially would stay the same: Your Facebook friends would see that you clicked that you "like" a page and that’s why users do it anyhow: to advertise their good taste or, to use Bourdieu’s famous term, their “distinction” (below the break is one of the famous Bourdieusian graphs where cultural and economic capital are related to cultural practices. Although the data are quite old now, it still is fun to plot oneself in this kind of space).

Alphapsy blog archive

Details: Category: Initiatives; Published on Saturday, 22 May 2010 23:00; Written by Olivier Morin

Today, we retro-publish twenty posts from the (soon to be definitely closed) Alphapsy blog, that some contributors to the ICCI blog - mostly Nicolas Baumard, Hugo Mercier, Olivier Morin and Karim N'Diaye - started some years ago. Some of these oldies but goodies include a couple of pieces on naïve physics (here and here), some thoughts on shame, a charge against neuroaesthetics, and a praise of babies. Find them all here.

(the blog's logo)

So long, Alphapsy!

Learning and prestige among chimpanzees

Details: Category: Publications; Published on Saturday, 22 May 2010 05:15; Written by Dan Sperber

An interesting article by Victoria Horner, Darby Proctor, Kristin Bonnie, Andrew Whiten, Frans de Waal^:"Prestige Affects Cultural Learning in Chimpanzees" in PLoS ONE, 2010, 5(5) freely available here.

chimp_learning

In Group 1, more prestigious model A was trained to deposit tokens into the spotted receptacle while less prestigious model B was trained to use the striped receptacle. In Group 2, the model and receptacle assignments were reversed.

Our mini-grant competition: The winners

Details: Category: Events; Published on Saturday, 22 May 2010 04:02; Written by Dan Sperber

Here are the winners of the 2010 mini-grant competition organised by the International Cognition and Culture Institute and funded by the Programme in Culture & Cognition at the LSE to encourage anthropologists to perform in the field an experimental study on children’s and adults’ reasoning about human social kinds:

Tamara Hale (LSE): "Essentialism without groups in an afro-descendent village in Peru."
Cristina Moya (UCLA): "The evolution of ethnic categorization: Cross-cultural and developmental tests of innate priors in urban US and the Peruvian altiplano."
Zohar Rotem (The New School for Social Research, New York): "The role of linguistic difference in bilingual children’s essentialist reasoning about social kinds in Israel"
Cătălina Tesar and Radu Umbreş (University College London): "Blood, beakers and dowries. An inquiry into essentialist thinking about kinship and ethnicity among Cortorari Roma in Romania"

We congratulate the winners and express our gratitude to all the participants in the competition!

for a brief description of the winning projets,

A deflationary approach to economic games

Details: Category: Publications; Published on Thursday, 20 May 2010 15:45; Written by Dan Sperber

Forthcoming in PNAS, an important paper by Rolf Kümmerli, Maxwell Burton-Chellew, Adin Ross-Gillespie and Stuart West: “Resistance to extreme strategies, rather thanprosocial preferences, can explain human cooperation in public goods games” (available here) that illustrates "why caution must be exercised when interpreting the evolutionary implications of economic experiments."

Abstract: The results of numerous economic games suggest that humans behave more cooperatively than would be expected if they were maximizing selfish interests. It has been argued that this is because individuals gain satisfaction from the success of others, and that such prosocial preferences require a novel evolutionary explanation. However, in previous games, imperfect behavior would automatically lead to an increase in cooperation, making it impossible to decouple any form of mistake or error from prosocial cooperative decisions.

Doubting among the Zafimaniry

Details: Category: Maurice's blog; Published on Sunday, 16 May 2010 09:21; Written by Maurice Bloch

In 2003, I organized a series of group discussions on psychological matters - thought, language, memory, dreams, ancestors, etc. - among Zafimaniry villagers, a group of forest dwellers in Madagascar who, for historical reasons, are fairly distinct and relatively isolated from other Malagasy. In spite of the presence of a church school, the villagers can be considered as either unschooled or as very little exposed to schools, since the actual school is now hardly ever in proper functioning order. In spite of this, I found that on the whole, my Zafimaniry interlocutors were exceptionally coherent and self-assured in the views they expressed. In this post, though, I would like to describe two different types of shared public manifestations of doubt that arose in the course of these common intellectual journeys.

Type 1 doubt - Doubt as a step on a progression towards truth

Once, we had been discussing the relation of language to thought in people, and I had discovered, somewhat to my surprise, that the Zafimaniry villagers shared a clear theoretical position concerning the question. The more vocal among them told me that thought and language were very different matters and that language was not necessary for thought. It seemed from the general approval with which some statements were greeted that everybody agreed about this and there was no air of doubt that I could detect among the small crowd that had gathered in the house where the experiment had taken place.

TOC of the Journal of Cognition and Culture

Details: Category: Publications; Published on Sunday, 16 May 2010 01:43; Written by Dan Sperber

For the Table of Contents of the latest issue of the Journal of Cognition and Culture (Volume 10, Numbers 1-2, 2010),

Overimitation in Kalahari Bushman: Children and the Origins of Human Cultural Cognition

Details: Category: Publications; Published on Saturday, 15 May 2010 17:34; Written by Dan Sperber

An interesting paper by Mark Nielsen and Keyan Tomaselli “Overimitation in Kalahari Bushman Children and the Origins of Human Cultural Cognition” in Psychological Science,May 2010, 21: 729-736. You will find a freely available version here, and a short presentation of the research with a video at ScienceNow here

kalahari

Abstract: Children are surrounded by objects that they must learn to use. One of the most efficient ways children do this is by imitation. Recent work has shown that, in contrast to nonhuman primates, human children focus more on reproducing the specific actions used than on achieving actual outcomes when learning by imitating. From 18 months of age, children will routinely copy even arbitrary and unnecessary actions. This puzzling behavior is called overimitation. By documenting similarities exhibited by children from a large, industrialized city and children from remote Bushman communities in southern Africa, we provide here the first indication that overimitation may be a universal human trait. We also show that overimitation is unaffected by the age of the child, differences in the testing environment, or familiarity with the demonstrating adult. Furthermore, we argue that, although seemingly maladaptive, overimitation reflects an evolutionary adaptation that is fundamental to the development and transmission of human culture.

Do not confound homophily and contagion!

Details: Category: Publications; Published on Saturday, 15 May 2010 16:57; Written by Dan Sperber

At arXiv.org, a relevant paper by Cosma Shalizi and Andrew C. Thomas “Homophily and Contagion Are Generically Confounded in Observational Social Network Studies”( available here).

Abstract: We consider processes on social networks that can potentially involve three phenomena: homophily, or the formation of social ties due to matching individual traits; social contagion, also known as social influence; and the causal effect of an individual's covariates on their behavior or other measurable responses. We show that, generically, all of these are confounded with each other. Distinguishing them from one another requires strong assumptions on the parametrization of the social process or on the adequacy of the covariates used (or both). In particular we demonstrate, with simple examples, that asymmetries in regression coefficients cannot identify causal effects, and that very simple models of imitation (a form of social contagion) can produce substantial correlations between an individual's enduring traits and their choices, even when there is no intrinsic affinity between them. We also suggest some possible constructive responses to these results.

camphor - ammonia = anniseed x peppermint

Details: Category: Olivier's blog; Published on Sunday, 09 May 2010 23:00; Written by Olivier Morin

How can we count? Where does our arithmetic capacity come from? A lot of progress has been made on this question, thanks, in no small part, to the work of cognitive scientists like Susan Carey and Stanislas Dehaene. The picture that emerges from this kind of work looks something like this: many animals are equipped with crude but roughly efficient devices that help them estimate quantities. Those devices are ready for use, they require very little in the way of cultural fine-tuning. In addition to that, we can try and track discrete quantities (those expressed by numbers) and make operations on them, but this capacity is woefully limited, and it requires a lot of cultural input to really get off the ground.

This post is not about that theory ; it is about how lovely these theories, and the field as a whole, have become - how subtle, how nuanced, how specific if you compare it with the clumsy nativism and blunt blank-slateism that used to rule over the psychology and philosophy of counting. There was a time when believing in innate constraints on thought meant being a devotee of Immanuel Kant. There was a time, oh you spoiled twenty-first century reader, when you had to prove the most obvious hypotheses against the dogmas of associationism. In thosed days, people thought of cognitive faculties as general competences, unconstrained by anything, independent of modalities, built by general associative learning alone. Yes, ours is a lucky time to read psychology in.

Now, if you are not yet about to send a thank-you email to the closest psychologist of arithmetic in your area, here is a story to nudge you. It involves Francis Galton and his nostrils.

Sir Francis Galton

The Moral Life of Babies

Details: Category: Publications; Published on Sunday, 09 May 2010 22:20; Written by Dan Sperber

In Today's New York Times Magazine, Paul Bloom has a long interesting and easy-read piece (freely available here) on "The Moral Life of Babies" that concludes:

"Morality, then, is a synthesis of the biological and the cultural, of the unlearned, the discovered and the invented. Babies possess certain moral foundations - the capacity and willingness to judge the actions of others, some sense of justice, gut responses to altruism and nastiness. Regardless of how smart we are, if we didn't start with this basic apparatus, we would be nothing more than amoral agents, ruthlessly driven to pursue our self-interest. But our capacities as babies are sharply limited. It is the insights of rational individuals that make a truly universal and unselfish morality something that our species can aspire to."

Heaven before the space age

Details: Category: Brian's blog; Published on Friday, 07 May 2010 23:00; Written by Brian Malley

or How I grew up with two parallel cosmologies

Much has been said in cognitive approaches to religion about the co-existence in believers of beliefs that may seem blatantly inconsistent. The way religious ideas about the heavens co-exist with Space Age understanding the Universe is an interesting case in point that has not yet attracted much attention.

In reading Biblical texts as an adult, I have assumed that the New Testament writers (but not necessarily the writers of the Hebrew Bible) conceptualized themselves in a three tier universe: "the heavens" above (clouds, the sky, Sun, planets, stars), earth in the middle, and the underworld (Hades, the nondescript realm of the dead) below. I thought that this general cosmology was shared (more or less--medieval Europeans substituted Heaven for the heavens and Hell for Hades) until the development of modern astronomy.

Additional information

Close Comments

Latest comments

Is this more than illegal tipping, and if so, how?

Dan Sperber

Thursday, 23 May 2013 16:52

Tips (to waiters, taxis, etc) are paid (1) because of precedent: if they are customarily given, it is more of a decision not to give rather than to give - with precedents producing an anchoring effect, being stingy in tipping may have reputational costs, and so on (2) because it is a normal part of the income for some professions so tipping may be a moral thing to do (3) because these are professions where typically people can treat customers etc. more or less well, so that a tip may be a sensible investment.

In the medical case nicely described by Denis, there is the added fact that such tipping is illegal. Any other important difference? We may feel that doctors should treat all patients equally well, but then we should object to private medecine or surgery, and so on when it can fix its prices and offer better services to patients who can pay more. My guess is that even people who don't object might still see tipping doctors are immoral.

The general point is this: this case might be best approached within a discussion of tipping in general, a discussion very well worth having from avariety of points of view: cultural, economic, rational choice, reputation, and so on.

Anyhow Denis, get well soon!

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

The envelope that makes the Romanian medical system go around

Radu Umbres

Tuesday, 21 May 2013 21:45

Denis, your story strikes a Romanian chord. The situation around here is even worse, from what I can tell. But it is quite a fascinating question, with different answers from different points of view.

For an economist, it is a matter of price formation. In the state system, Romanian doctors are paid a fixed (and miserable) wage, largely unrelated to quality or effort. The incentive to pocket bribes is huge, and patients know it so well. In the private sector (with transparent and varied prices for medical services), bribes are almost unheard of. Also, there is a more or less efficient market for bribes. Patients find out how much a doctor expects, usually from past patients, or from other doctors. Surgeons receive more than GPs, professors more than debutants, etc.

But I think there is something more about "medical envelopes", from a cognitive point of view. First of all, there is a vast asymmetry of competence between doctors and patients, which gives the former a large freedom of action. Is this pill better, or another one? Surgery or not? Home treatment or hospitalisation? To make things worse, the post-hoc reckoning is not very helpful, since most decisions may be medically justified, but you might also end up dead. The patient is at the mercy of the practitioner since she does not know what choices are better. The best way to make sure one gets the proper treatment is to insure the benevolence of the doctor, and a bribe is the simplest path to gain the doctor's amity.

Second, there is something special about this particular social exchange: the patient is dealing in an ultimate value - her health. Something everyone in Romania says is that there is no price too high to be healthy. (Paradoxically, giving up smoking somehow does not make the list - self-hint-hint-nudge-nudge). If people would risk not bribing a policeman to avoid a fine, they are extremely unlikely to jeopardise their health in this manner. One cannot afford to stick to abstract principles (like discouraging corruption) when her life is at stake.

Finally, there is something like a Maussian gift in the affair: one passes a fat envelope even without the explicit mention of an economic exchange. It is not that the surgeon would not operate without being bribed - the patient just shows gratitude without visible economic reckoning. Of course, under the veil of generosity stands the solid self-interest of the patient. The fat envelope is meant to make sure that no scalpel is lost in her belly. But no-one says it out loud. It's a "I know that you know that I know etc" which makes sure that the transaction is smooth and polite.

To end with a personal anecdote: I was (and to some extent I still am) very wary of giving out envelopes to doctors. A little bit of moral prudishness, a little bit of fear (what if he feels insulted?), a bit of monetary unsaviness. Those who are more competent in these matters reassured me: "just put the envelope on his desk - he knows what to do next" After all, he is the expert, and I am not.

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

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...

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

Dwight Read

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

Is kinship back? , Dan Sperber

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.

Why do mathematicians always agree? , Christophe Heintz

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.

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

Nav view search

Navigation

Search

Latest blog posts

Related Sites

More Articles...

Additional information

Latest comments