International Cognition and Culture Institute

Endorsing evolution: A matter of authority?

Details: Category: Helen De Cruz's blog; Published on Tuesday, 27 April 2010 23:00; Written by Helen De Cruz

As I discussed earlier in this blog, there appears to be substantial cross-cultural variation in the degree to which people endorse evolutionary theory. According to a study by Miller et al., some countries are characterized by an almost universal acceptance of evolutionary theory (e.g., Iceland, Japan), whereas in other countries (e.g., USA, Turkey), less than half of the population endorses it. This cross-cultural variation seems to result from an interplay between cognitive factors (what cognitive mechanisms underlie our understanding of evolutionary theory) and cultural ones (why do we endorse evolutionary theory).

pokedarwin

The popularity of evolutionary theory in Japanese pop-culture is nowhere more obvious
than in the Pokemon Universe - Cartoon found on Comics Alliance.

Are variations in economic games really caused by culture?

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

Last month, Science published an research article by Joe Henrich et al. showing that market integration and participation in world religion covary with fairness ('Markets, Religion, Community Size, and the Evolution of Fairness and Punishment'). The team had people from various societies play experimental economic games in which a sum of money given by the experimenter has to be distributed in various ways. The results are presented as supporting cultural evolution theories and contradicting the hypothesis that successful social interaction in large-scale societies arise directly from an evolved psychology. This conclusion might be a bit premature though.

What explains the stability of animal culture?

Details: Category: Nicolas Claidière's blog; Published on Thursday, 15 April 2010 23:00; Written by Nicolas Claidière

Recently, Dan Sperber and I published a paper entitled "Imitation explains the propagation, not the stability of animal culture" in which we argued that contrary to what is generally assumed, imitation and other forms of social learning are generally not faithful enough to explain the stability of culture we observe in the wild. A new article by Charlotte Lindeyer and Simon Reader in the last issue of Animal Behaviour reinforce our main argument.

Implied motion in Hokusai Manga

Details: Category: Publications; Published on Wednesday, 14 April 2010 08:34; Written by Nicolas Baumard

In NeuroReport, 21(4), pp 264-267, an interesting article by N. Osaka, D. Matsuyoshi, T. Ikeda, and M. Osaka of Kyoto and Osaka Universities, entitled "Implied motion because of instability in Hokusai Manga activates the human motion-sensitive extrastriate visual cortex: an fMRI study of the impact of visual art"

The authors write: "Visual artists developed various visual cues for representing implied motion in two-dimensional art. Photographic blur, action lines, affine shear, instability, superimposition, and stroboscopic images are possible technical solutions for representing implied movement. In a realistic painting, artists have tried to represent motion using superimposed or blurred images, while in abstract painting, like Marcel Duchamp artists have tried to portray a moving object on a static canvas by superimposing successive portrayals of the object in action...As one of a leading artist of the ‘Ukiyo-e' school in the 18th century, Hokusai made great progress in representing implied movement using unstable bodily action without introducing action lines or even blur." They go on to investigate how our visual brain creates the impression of motion using such implied movement clues.

The article is available (with subscription) here, and there is a good presentation here at the excellent blog Neurophilosophy.

Workshop: Language as an Evolutionary System

Details: Category: Events; Published on Sunday, 11 April 2010 23:00; Written by Nicolas Claidière

These two days of talks and discussion will bring together scholars from a range of disciplines to discuss the value of applying evolutionary thinking to the cultural evolution of language as well as the commonalities and differences between various existing applications.

Linguistics has traditionally been cautious of analogies between evolution in language an in biology. Common ancestry and descent were proposed earlier for languages than for biological species, but while biological evolution has flourished into a science with solid theories that generate testable hypothesis, the study of the cultural evolution of language -- evolution that is independent of changes in the human genome -- is only beginning to test its innumerable, often speculative and unrigorous, theories. McMahon (1994) concluded that the way forward is Darwinian thinking. Since then, a number of independent proposals have convergently applied explicit analogies with the elements and processes of the evolutionary synthesis (Mayr & Provine, 1998) to cultural language dynamics. They all assume that language evolution and change are caused by cultural mechanisms such as social transmission and language usage in context.

Postdoctoral Research Position in Behavioral Economics

Details: Category: Jobs; Published on Thursday, 08 April 2010 20:43; Written by Christophe Heintz

Central European University announces an opening for a postdoctoral fellow for two years, starting from September 2010 or later, to work on a project in behavioral economics regarding how people take into account their reputation --what others might think of them-- when making decisions. Specific research questions about the role of reputation in decision-making and the cognitive bases of reputation management include: do people use routines or heuristics whose function is to manage their reputation? Is there cross-cultural variations in the ways people manage their reputation and, if there is, why? What, of altruistic behavior, can be accounted for in terms of reputation management? To what extent, and in which sense, are people rational when they manage their reputation?

On the Use of Natural Experiments in Anthropology

Details: Category: Nicolas' Blog; Published on Monday, 05 April 2010 23:00; Written by Nicolas Baumard

Controlled and replicated laboratory experiment, in which an experimenter directly manipulates variables, is often considered the hallmark of the scientific method. It is virtually the only method employed in laboratory physical sciences and in molecular biology. Without question, this approach is uniquely powerful in establishing chains of cause and effect. But the cruel reality is that manipulative experiments are impossible in many fields widely admitted to be sciences, such as evolutionary biology, paleontology, epidemiology, historical geology, and astronomy. When one is studying bird communities, dinosaurs, smallpox epidemics, glaciers, or other planets, manipulative experiments are not possible. One therefore has to devise other methods of "doing science". A technique that frequently proves fruitful in these disciplines is the so-called natural experiment. A natural experiment is a naturally occurring instance of an observable phenomenon which approximates or duplicates the properties of a controlled experiment. In contrast to laboratory experiments, these events are not created or directly controlled by scientists. However, they can yield data that can be used to make causal inferences.

Jared Diamond, of Guns, Germs and Steel fame, has just edited a book along with Harvard Economist James Robinson on natural experiments in history. This book reviews eight comparative studies drawn from history, archaeology, economics, economic history, geography, and political science. The studies cover a spectrum of approaches, ranging from a non-quantitative narrative style in the early chapters to quantitative statistical analyses in the later chapters. The studies range from a simple two-way comparison of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, which share the island of Hispaniola, to comparisons of 81 Pacific islands and 233 areas of India. The societies discussed are contemporary ones, literate societies of recent centuries, and non-literate past societies. Geographically, they include the United States, Mexico, Brazil, Western Europe, tropical Africa, India, Siberia, Australia, New Zealand, and other Pacific islands.

At a time where anthropologists are doing more and more experiments, this books reminds us that laboratory experiments are not the only way to rigorously test a theory.

From cognitive science to an empirically-informed philosophy of logic

Details: Category: Call for Papers; Published on Tuesday, 30 March 2010 09:48; Written by Helen De Cruz

A workshop in Amsterdam (December 7-8 2010) entitled "From cognitive science and psychology to an empirically-informed philosophy of logic" will bring together logicians, philosophers, psychologists and cognitive scientists to discuss the interface between cognitive science and psychology, on the one hand, and the philosophy of logic on the other hand. More specifically, we wish to investigate the extent to which (if at all), and in what ways, experimental results from these fields may contribute to the formulation of an empirically-informed philosophy of logic, taking into account how human agents, logicians and non-logicians alike, in fact reason.

The social rationality of footballers

Details: Category: Hugo's blog; Published on Saturday, 27 March 2010 23:00; Written by Hugo Mercier

Are footballers rational? It all depends on what their goals are (no pun intended). We will not be talking here about behavior outside the field, as it's not entirely clear what norms of rationality one should use in this case (as George Best put it: "I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars. The rest I just squandered."). However, when playing, footballers seem to have a very clear incentive: winning the game. After all, the indecent salaries of many professional footballers depend on their team winning as many games as possible. Nowhere is the situation as clear-cut as in penalty kicks. The kicker must put the ball into the nets while the goalkeeper must stop him from achieving his goal, period. Surely, the combination of huge stakes and intensive training should produce optimal behavior on both sides of a penalty kick. This is what Michael Bar-Eli and his colleagues have tried to find out in research reported here.

barthez

After having watched hundreds of games (or hundreds of penalty kicks at least), the team was able to compute what was the best strategy, both for the goalkeeper and for the kicker. Let's start with the goalkeeper. He has basically three choices: staying where he is, in the center, or diving to the left or to the right. In the sample of penalty kicks analyzed, his chances of stopping the ball were one out of three if he stayed put (very good odds indeed!), and below 15% if he chose to dive right or left. Is this how goalkeepers behave? Not at all. Even though the best bet is to stay in the center, the goalkeepers only did that in 6% of the penalty kicks. How is such an apparently irrational behavior to be explained?

Lévi-Strauss in comic form

Details: Category: Publications; Published on Saturday, 27 March 2010 23:00; Written by Dan Sperber

Thanks to Culture Matters for drawing our attention to this tribute to Claude Lévi-Strauss in comic form published by The Financial Times. It has a clever twist and it might help you procrastinate after missing an hour of sleep on this first Sunday of daylight saving time (in Europe anyhow).

Learn about Social Neuroscience

Details: Category: Publications; Published on Thursday, 25 March 2010 15:07; Written by Dan Sperber

In the last issue of Neuron (65, 6), a "Special Feature: Reviews on Social Neuroscience," of unique interest to cognitive and social scientists, "a series of reviews [most of them freely available online] highlighting exciting research in the field of Social Neuroscience, which seeks to understand how the brain mediates social behaviors, and conversely, how social behaviors influence brain function. The reviews in this issue reflect the diverse and interdisciplinary nature of the field, ranging from the analysis of social interactions in "simple" model systems to the study of complex human behaviors."

From Chris and Uta Frith introductory "Overview":

"We have two suggestions as to what the special feature of human social cognition might be. One idea is that humans have an automatic (unconscious) drive to constantly update the difference between their own knowledge and the knowledge of speciﬁc others. Such a tendency is critical to the human drive to share novel information with others (Fitch et al., 2010). Such sharing, and indeed any useful communication, depends on knowing what other people don't know.

The other idea is that much human knowledge is represented in the explicit (conscious) form that is needed for sharing experiences. In other words, there is a special form of human communication where we are aware that we are sending and receiving signals (Sperber and Wilson, 1995). This means that, when we receive a signal we make a distinction (among other distinctions) between unintentional and deliberate signaling. We know that unintentional signals may have more veracity than deliberate signals because deliberate signals can be manipulated by the sender for the purposes of deception. On the other hand, we can use deliberate signals of communication to teach others. Both informal and formal teaching are the building materials of culture and serve to multiply learning from others (Gergely et al., 2007). This multiplication of experience over many generations may be the secret to the success of Homo sapiens."

Here are the abstracts (and an illustration):

Varieties of disbelief

Details: Category: Dan's blog; Published on Tuesday, 23 March 2010 23:06; Written by Dan Sperber

On March 15, the Washington Post website put a link to a small ethnographic study by Daniel Dennett and Linda LaScola entitled "Preachers who are not Believers." In this remarkable piece, the authors present interviews of five protestant pastors who have lost their faith, and analyse their predicament. This is stirring a growing debate not only at the WaPo website, but also on the religious blogosphere (e.g. here, here, and here). It is of cognition-and-culture relevance because the interview, the analyses, and the arguments go into fine-grained discussions of the variety of cognitive attitudes involved in ‘belief', which, with a few exceptions, have been sorely lacking in the ethnography of religion.

Jerry Fodor vs. Elliott Sober on Who Got What Wrong

Details: Category: Events; Published on Sunday, 21 March 2010 23:00; Written by Dan Sperber

For those who want more on the topic, here is, at Blogginghead.tv, a very earnest discussion between Jerry Fodor and Elliott Sober on Fodor and Piatelli-Palmarini's What Darwin Got Wrong.

LSE symposium on Personhood in a Neurobiological Age

Details: Category: Events; Published on Sunday, 21 March 2010 23:00; Written by Dan Sperber

An open and free Symposium on Personhood in a Neurobiological Age - Brain, Self and Society, at the LSE, 13 September 2010.

"It seems that we have learned more about the brain in the last decade than over the previous millennia of human history. But to what extent are developments in the 'new brain sciences' leading to a mutation in our understanding of selfhood? Are we in the midst of a move from ‘soul to brain', a radical restructuring of our understanding of human ‘psychology' and the rise of a ‘neuronal self'? If so, in what ways, and with what consequences, for individuals and for society, and for our ways of governing ourselves and others?"

Is the “problem of evil” universal?

Details: Category: Brian's blog; Published on Thursday, 18 March 2010 23:00; Written by Brian Malley

Reading a book recommended by my brother, Gregory Boyd's God at war (1997), I have recently been thinking about the problem of evil. Boyd suggests that the problem of evil arises because Christians believe that God is both good and in direct control of all things. People in many other societies, Boyd suggests, assume that the spiritual realm is the site of active conflict between different spiritual powers, and so see human suffering as an expected consequence of this warfare: war always involves suffering.

This account runs counter to Pascal Boyer's (2001) account of witchcraft, in which the outputs of several inference systems triggered by misfortune combine to make the notion of a witch conceptually salient in such contexts. According to Boyer's theory, our inference systems have us looking for moral agents with special powers. If the misfortune is economic in nature, we look for economic agents. In many cases, witch concepts fit the bill, thus accounting for widespread witchcraft discourse.

Conflicting accounts help in thinking through the issues, and here are a few thoughts I have had.

Babies got rhythm!

Details: Category: Publications; Published on Thursday, 18 March 2010 10:46; Written by Dan Sperber

A participant listening to Mozart while her mother listens to speech. Watch the video here

Forthcoming in PNAS and freely available here, an article by Marcel Zentner and Tuomas Eerola: "Rhythmic engagement with music in infancy"

Abstract: Humans have a unique ability to coordinate their motor movements to an external auditory stimulus, as in music-induced foot tapping or dancing. This behavior currently engages the attention of scholars across a number of disciplines. However, very little is known about its earliest manifestations. The aim of the current research was to examine whether preverbal infants engage in rhythmic behavior to music. To this end, we carried out two experiments in which we tested 120 infants (aged 5-24 months). Infants were exposed to various excerpts of musical and rhythmic stimuli.... Infants' rhythmic movements were assessed by multiple methods involving manual coding from video excerpts and innovative 3D motion-capture technology. The results show that (i) infants engage in significantly more rhythmic movement to music and other rhythmically regular sounds than to speech; (ii) infants exhibit tempo flexibility to some extent ...; and (iii) the degree of rhythmic coordination with music is positively related to displays of positive affect. The findings are suggestive of a predisposition for rhythmic movement in response to music and other metrically regular sounds.

Cultural differences and linguistic justice

Details: Category: Nicolas' Blog; Published on Monday, 15 March 2010 14:53; Written by Nicolas Baumard

Franz de Waal just wrote an interesting post at 3 Quarks Daily. He is currently in Japan to promote his latest book The Age of Empathy and he writes about cultural differences among scientists: Although Japanese scientists were, he says, far ahead in the '60s, their research was not taken seriously by their Western colleagues:

"Kinji Imanishi was the first to insist that observers give their animals names and follow them for years so that they understand their kinship relations. His concepts are now all around us: every self-respecting field worker conducts long-term studies based on individual identification, and the idea of cultural transmission in animals is one of the hottest topics of today. But that is now: at the time, all Imanishi got was ridicule.

In 1958, he and his students toured American universities to report their findings. They encountered a great deal of skepticism about the ability of mere humans to distinguish between all those monkeys, which all look alike. Weren't the Japanese grossly overestimating the social lives of their monkeys, and who said that monkeys could tell each other apart even if human observers said they could? Also, what about the humanizing inherent in giving names to animals: hadn't they heard that scientists need to keep their distance?"

De Waal points out the role of linguistic factors:

"The lack of credit for the Japanese approach (most treatments of animal culture either forget to mention Imanishi or, worse, claim that the studies of potato-washing were naive and ill-conceived) can be partly attributed to the language barrier. It is just hard for non-English speakers to make themselves heard in an English-speaking world.

Do only humans share with non-kin?

Details: Category: Publications; Published on Sunday, 14 March 2010 17:31; Written by Dan Sperber

"Comparisons between chimpanzees and humans have led to the hypothesis that only humans voluntarily share their own food with others. However, it is hard to draw conclusions because the food-sharing preferences of our more tolerant relative, the bonobo (Pan paniscus), have never been studied experimentally." write Brian Hare and Suzy Kwetuenda in their article "Bonobos voluntarily share their own food with others" (Current Biology, Vol. 20, Issue 5, R230-R231, 9 March 2010 - available here). They explain: "We gave unrelated bonobos the choice of either monopolizing food or actively sharing: we found that bonobos preferred to release a recipient from an adjacent room and feed together instead of eating all the food alone. Thus, food sharing in bonobos does not depend on kinship or harassment and suggests our own species' propensity for voluntary food sharing is not unique among the apes." And best of all, here is the video:

Is hearing God like being a skilled athlete?

Details: Category: Publications; Published on Saturday, 13 March 2010 13:21; Written by Dan Sperber

Not often do we find in the American Anthropologist material of clear Cognition and Culture relevance. Here is a noteworthy exception: "The Absorption Hypothesis: Learning to Hear God in Evangelical Christianity" (vol. 112,March 2010 issue, available here) by Tanya. M. Luhrmann (whose LSE-ICCI lecture on the same topic is now online), Howard Nusbaum, and Ronald Thisted. They say that their approach "builds on but differs from the approach to religion within the culture-and-cognition school."

The article begins: "How does God become real to people when God is understood to be invisible and immaterial, as God is within the Christian tradition? This is not the question of whether God is real but, rather, how people learn to make the judgment that God is present. ... it may be the case that hearing God speak and having other vivid, unusual spiritual experiences that seem like unambiguous evidence of divine presence might be, in some respects, like becoming a skilled athlete. In this article, we argue that something like talent and training are involved in the emergence of certain kinds of religious experiences."

The conclusion: "Religion and spirituality are enormously complex human phenomena. Here we suggest that we may be able to identify one kind of skill that can be cultivated, for which some may have more of a proclivity or talent than others. Absorption does not explain religion and far less does it explain it away. But to understand that some people may have developed their talent more than others may help us to understand why some people become gifted practitioners of their faith and others with the intention and desire to do so struggle and do not. And it reminds us, as Maurice Bloch (2008) remarks, that at the heart of the religious impulse lies the capacity to imagine a world beyond the one we have before us."

Workshop: Culture and Cognition in Asia

Details: Category: Events; Published on Friday, 12 March 2010 09:13; Written by Lucien Dontask

March 11th – 12th, 2010, National University of Singapore, Asia Research Institute.

Research in both the social and cognitive sciences has increasingly focused on the complex dynamic between cultural meaning and practices with cognitive processes. From the sociology of science to the anthropology of religion, cultural studies have taken a cognitive turn to explore a wide range of topics including distributed cognition in technological systems, memory and religious rituals, and the neuroeconomics of decisions about risk. Cognitive neuroscientists have likewise begun to more closely examine how culture influences cognition in areas such as perception and attention, healing and placebo effects, language processing and speech disorders, and even the psychosomatics of meditation. Emerging out of this multidisciplinary interest in culture and cognition is a new understanding of the plasticity of embodiment that emphasizes change in how cultural practices, human cognition and behavior, and even the natural environment influence each other. Cultural change and neurocognitive plasticity are the result of active human agency rather than purely passive inscription by social, technological, or biological systems.

New: Our Cognition and Culture Reader and our Bookstore

Details: Category: Initiatives; Published on Wednesday, 10 March 2010 17:57; Written by Dan Sperber

We are today putting online the beta version of a Cognition and Culture Reader with links to relevant papers, books and blog posts. All the papers are freely available on the Internet. All the books listed (and other books mentioned in our blog or news) can be purchased at our new online Bookstore (and we get a modest percentage on the sale of these and any other Amazon book purchased through our bookstore, which we hope will help us cover our costs).

The reader has been prepared by Nicolas Baumard. Of course, it should be more comprehensive and it will need regular updating. We would be grateful to members of the Institute for comments and suggestions (keeping in mind that we are aiming at a useful short selection, not at exhaustivity). Still, as it is, we hope you will find it of use.

How many minutes does it take for social norms to inhibit survival instinct?

Details: Category: Publications; Published on Friday, 05 March 2010 17:16; Written by Dan Sperber

Forthcoming in PNAS, an innovative study entitled "Interaction of natural survival instincts and internalized social norms exploring the Titanic and Lusitania disasters" by Bruno S. Frey, David A. Savage and Benno Torgler (and already available here alas with subscription; earlier version freely available here)

Abstract: "...This study explores the interaction of natural survival instincts and internalized social norms using data on the sinking of the Titanic and the Lusitania. We show that time pressure appears to be crucial when explaining behavior under extreme conditions of life and death. Even though the two vessels and the composition of their passengers were quite similar, the behavior of the individuals on board was dramatically different. On the Lusitania, selfish behavior dominated (which corresponds to the classical homo economicus); on the Titanic, social norms and social status (class) dominated, which contradicts standard economics. This difference could be attributed to the fact that the Lusitania sank in 18 min, creating a situation in which the short-run flight impulse dominated behavior. On the slowly sinking Titanic (2 h, 40 min), there was time for socially determined behavioral patterns to reemerge. Maritime disasters are traditionally not analyzed in a comparative manner with advanced statistical (econometric) techniques using individual data of the passengers and crew. Knowing human behavior under extreme conditions provides insight into how widely human behavior can vary, depending on differing external conditions."

3 Quarks Daily's Arts and Literature Prize: Nicolas Baumard on the universality of music in the competition

Details: Category: Events; Published on Tuesday, 02 March 2010 23:00; Written by Dan Sperber

The great 3 Quarks Daily blog is holding a competition for the best Arts and Literature blog post and one of Nicolas Baumard's posts on our blog, "The universality of music: Cross-cultural comparison, the recognition of emotions, and the influence of the the Backstreet Boys on a Cockatoo," has been nominated. You have only until Sunday, March 7, 2010 to look here at the various nominees (several of which are quite outstanding, including from a cognition and culture point of view) and to vote for the one you prefer. The three winners will be chosen from a shortlist by Robert Pinsky.

Pictures of the week: Globalized Prehistory in Arunachal Pradesh

Details: Category: Philippe Ramirez's blog; Published on Sunday, 28 February 2010 23:00; Written by Philippe Ramirez

Nibo-Robo, ancestors of the Tani people, ©P.Ramirez

As Dan Sperber was complaining that no anthropologist posted "pictures of the week", here is a follow-up of the Punjabi Jingle Bells video, which also raises questions on cultural "borrowings". These pictures come from India as well, but 2500km to the East. They were taken inside a village temple in the Eastern Himalayas (Arunachal Pradesh). This is a region that had been long kept isolated from the plains. Its recent opening has seen a rapid rise of Christian conversions. Since the 1980, a revivalist movement, Donyi-Polo, aims at "modernising the tribal religions" by unifying the different local practices, developing a "moral code" and promoting the creation of village temples, where the deities are depicted by paintings like the ones shown here. The movement has some backing from Hindu fundamentalists, who try to convince the tribals not to convert to Christianity. Previously, the local religions had neither temples nor permanent shrines and did not use images.

The first painting shows Nibo and Robo, the two apical ancestors, with what clearly looks like prehistoric attire (and which obviously has no equivalent in the local dresses and tools). I suspect the inspiration might be found in a globalized representation of the "ancestors" carried both by schoolbooks and TV programs like Discovery Channel or National Geographic, which are accessible in many villages nowadays.

Block and Kitcher review What Darwin Got Wrong by Fodor and Piatelli-Palmarini

Details: Category: Dan's blog; Published on Wednesday, 24 February 2010 23:00; Written by Dan Sperber

Given the strong reservations that most social scientists have towards evolutionary biology, they might welcome Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini's new book, What Darwin Got Wrong (2010), as they once did Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin famous article, "The Spandrels of San Marco" that criticized the so-called "adaptationist programme." From the book's blurb: "Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, a distinguished philosopher and a scientist working in tandem, reveal major flaws at the heart of Darwinian evolutionary theory. Combining the results of cutting-edge work in experimental biology with crystal-clear philosophical arguments, they mount a reasoned and convincing assault on the central tenets of Darwin's account of the origin of species."

Before getting carried away however, read Ned Block and Philip Kitcher's review (here) in the Boston Review. In their conclusion, Block and Kitcher note: "Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini take the role of philosophy to consist in part in minding other people's business. We agree with the spirit behind this self-conception. Philosophy can sometimes help other areas of inquiry. Yet those who wish to help their neighbors are well advised to spend a little time discovering just what it is that those neighbors do [...] What Darwin Got Wrong shows no detailed engagement with the practice of evolutionary biology..."

Can you tell who will win the election in another society just by looking at the faces of the candidates?

Details: Category: Hugo's blog; Published on Monday, 22 February 2010 23:00; Written by Hugo Mercier

Our face tells a lot about us. Well, at least this is what other people seem to think: having seen our face for a few seconds-or even a few milliseconds-they will think that we are more or less attractive - unsurprisingly - but also competent, dominant or trustworthy (e.g. Todorov et al., 2008). And people seem to act on the basis of these evaluations: such inferences will influence judge's verdicts (Zebrowitz & McDonald, 1991) and employers' decisions (Collins & Zebrowitz, 1995). They also seem to play a role in the way we vote. In a series of studies, Alexander Todorov and his colleagues have shown that the evaluations of politicians' faces, even after an exposure as short as one tenth of a second, can often predict their electoral success: those who were rated higher on competence tended to win more races (Willis and Todorov, 2006, available here).

Do such evaluations vary across cultures? This is the subject of a new paper by Nicholas Rule, and Nalini Ambady from Tufts, Reginald B. Adams from Penn State, and Hiroki Ozono, Satoshi Nakashima, Sakiko Yoshikawa, and Motoki Watabe from Kyoto University. They set out to find if people from different societies would pass similar judgments on the faces of people belonging to other groups (Rule et al., 2010, available here).

VoteFor

Who would you vote for? (OK, Palpatin didn't look like that when he was elected...)

Religion science: if you pay the piper, do you call the tune?

Details: Category: Olivier's blog; Published on Friday, 19 February 2010 14:58; Written by Olivier Morin

A hot debate has been taking place these last few days, in the comments section of Harvey Whitehouse's recent post on religion. Part of the dispute has to do with the way cognitive scientists working on that topic might be influenced by the money they get, particularly from a Christian foundation that hopes to promote a more favorable view of religion by funding research in that area, albeit in a nonintrusive way. What, everyone wonders, does funding of this kind do to the work it finances? Is Christian-funded research biased? Is it more likely to present religious people with a rosy mirror?

This question has been adressed systematically by a recent paper looking at broad trends in the sociology of religion (found via The Immanent Frame). The authors, David Smilde and Matthew May, looked at thirty years of religious sociology in five high-profile social science journals, and (among other things) they looked for correlations between funding types and 'pro-religiousness'. Articles were classified as pro-religious when they considered a religious independent variable and a non-religious dependent variable (say, how being baptized affects your likelihood of being in jail), and concluded that the religious variable had 'positive socio-evaluative effects' (baptized people are less likely to go to jail). As for funding type, they looked more precisely at the papers whose authors were funded by foundations with obvious Christian sympathies like the Pew Foundation, the John Templeton Foundation, the Metanexus Institute, etc. - compared with papers whose authors had money from other sources, and with papers not funded at all.

Bottom line: authors financed by Christian foundations are more likely to write pro-religious papers than authors who declare no funding at all, but the same applies to all financed authors, wherever their money may come from - governments, or non-religious private foundations. This is just one of many surprising findings.

How cultural is sensitivity to shape properties?

Details: Category: Publications; Published on Wednesday, 17 February 2010 23:31; Written by Dan Sperber

In Psychological Science (Vol, 20 (12) pp.1437-1442), an interesting article by Irving Biederman, Xiaomin Yue, and Jules Davidoff entitled: "Representation of Shape in Individuals From a Culture With Minimal Exposure to Regular, Simple Artifacts: Sensitivity to Nonaccidental Versus Metric Properties" freely available here. Abstract below the fold.

Better live in Sweden than in the US: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better

Details: Category: Nicolas' Blog; Published on Thursday, 11 February 2010 23:00; Written by Nicolas Baumard

Let's talk about politics for once. It is common knowledge that in rich societies the poor have shorter lives and suffer more from almost every social problem. In a quite fascinating book, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always do Better, epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett demonstrate that more unequal societies are bad for almost everyone - the well-off as well as the poor (here is the Guardian review, and here is Nature's). The remarkable data the book lays out and the measures it uses are like a 'spirit level' which we can hold up to compare the conditions of different societies. The differences revealed, even between rich market democracies, are striking. Almost every modern social and environmental problem - ill-health, lack of community life, violence, drugs, obesity, mental illness, long working hours, big prison populations - is more likely to occur in a less equal society. The book goes to the heart of the apparent contrast between the material success and social failings of many modern societies. The Spirit Level does not simply provide a key to diagnosing our ills. It tells us how to shift the balance from self-interested 'consumerism' to a friendlier and more collaborative society. It shows a way out of the social and environmental problems which beset us and opens up a major new approach to improving the real quality of life, not just for the poor but for everyone. Last but not least, (at least for the reader of the ICCI's blog), it is a very good piece of sociology based on cognition and evolution.

There is no such thing as sexual intercourse

Details: Category: Pascal's blog; Published on Monday, 08 February 2010 17:14; Written by Pascal Boyer

I happen to know the secret of academic success. So far I have never divulged it because, well, charity begins at home. But it looks like the field of cognition and culture might be in need of a shot in the arm, so to speak. So I agreed to part with the secret, against a small compensation negotiated with the ICCI.

There is some truth in the old adage that it takes an enormous amount of education to be truly credulous. Indeed, years of familiarity with several academic fields have convinced me that the proposition is quite literally true. Being an academic means (at least in some disciplines I am familiar with) believing a great number of impossible things before breakfast, and, it would seem, the more preposterous the better.

LIncolnWoman2

Consider for instance the academic fondness for the idea that madness is “defined by culture”, as discussed here by Ophelia Deroy. One could discuss the serious claims made by Deroy and the various issues they raise (which I did elsewhere). For the time being, note just this. The notion that there is nothing to madness, except what “culture” decrees, is counter-intuitive to most people in most societies in the world - except to Western academics. Most people in most places who had any contact with insanity inferred that something was really non-standard in some other people’s mental functioning. Hence, probably, the frisson of the notion that it is all arbitrary and changing.

To turn to more telling examples, consider relativism, which tells us that people literally live in incommensurable worlds. Or the common anthropological idea that kinship has nothing to do with reproduction and genetics. Or the literary critics who say that writing is primary and orality is a derived form of communication. Or the notion that gender is completely unrelated to sex.

The mechanism that made these strange notions popular is actually not so mysterious.

Altruistic adoption in chimpanzees?

Details: Category: Nicolas' Blog; Published on Wednesday, 03 February 2010 23:00; Written by Nicolas Baumard

In the last decade, extended altruism towards unrelated group members has been proposed to be a unique characteristic of human societies. Experimental studies on captive chimpanzees have shown, on the other hand, that they are limited in the ways they share or cooperate with others. Individuals are indifferent to the welfare of unrelated group members; they do not care about fairness, and so on (see my previous posts here and here). The behaviour of chimpanzees in the wild is quite selfish, even when some cooperation is involved. For instance, they build coalitions, but that's to climb the social ladder, or they give meat, but only so that they can get sex.

In the last issue of PLoS, however, Boesch, Bolé, Eckhardt and Boesch report 18 cases of adoption, a highly costly behavior, of orphaned youngsters by group members in Taï forest chimpanzees. Half of the orphans were adopted by males and remarkably only one of these proved to be the father. Such adoptions by adults can last for years and thus imply extensive care towards the orphans. These observations suggest that, under the appropriate socio-ecological conditions, chimpanzees do care for the welfare of unrelated group members.

Why are these chimpanzees so altruistic?

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Page 9 of 16

The condescension factor

Denis Tatone

Sunday, 19 May 2013 14:40

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

"Very well-rounded analysis. A few thoughts. First, I am glad you mentioned nurses in your comment* because in the article you discount this, perhaps unintentionally. I remember my aunt consistently bribing the nurses when my uncle was recovering from a stroke for several months in the hospital. Also, I've had many conversations with my family here in Hungary about this, trying to understand the rationale behind this irrational system (I'm originally from the US). I think both motivations could be at play here. I got the impression that, in addition to the bribe, people are still very sensitive to the "wage supplement" aspect. That is, most people I've talked to find the wages of doctors and other health care providers rather deplorable. Even if GMs are a considerable expense for my working class family members, they seems to use the wage supplement as a way to render this dysfunctional reality more palatable somehow. I also think there is a third factor at work here - but I think it's linked to the others. I've witnessed situations where doctors behave very condescendingly toward patients or their families, despite a hefty bribe of some 20,000 HUF. Part of that harks back to the days of the socialist regime - when the power of public authorities was unquestioned. As one of my Hungarian friends likes to say about health clinics here: "they just want to make you feel like they still have power over you." When my aunt and I went to visit my cousin in critical care last year, the doctor didn't want to give us the time of day. We didn't give her a tip, but we kept pressing her for answers. I said to her, "is it a virus or a bacteria?" The doctor looked at me like a deer in headlights. I think she was surprised I even knew the difference. She opened up quite a lot to us after that and we never gave her a tip. Finally- and I'll get off my soapbox - private insurance systems are not necessarily more transparent. The US being a case in point. There is a great (surprisingly) 28-pg TIME article about this, "The bitter pill: why medical bills are killing us." I'm sue you'd find it relevant. Anyway, thanks so much for posting this!!"

*This is the comment by me which Eva refers to:

"I should have also added that, in fact, there is GM directed to nurses when they are perceived as the primary caretakers. Usually this is the case for families having elderly parents in retirement houses."

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

The firefighters calendar

Guillaume Dezecache

Saturday, 18 May 2013 17:08

Thanks for this brilliant post, Denis!

That GM thing reminds me of a funny routine that happens in France: around the end of the year, firemen and mailmen knock at your door to sell (ugly) calendars. Folk wisdom holds that if you don't buy the calendar, firemen will not rush if there is a fire in your house. Similarly, mailmen will be more likely to lose important mail you receive. What is striking is that this belief seems to carry on though it makes complete non-sense. I bet the situation is a bit different as for GM: the physician obviously remembers you and s/he is more likely to act benevolently towards you with a bit of extra money...

Not Quite So Simple

Grazzi Yoon

Monday, 01 April 2013 22:08

Azzouni certainly has the bona fides to weigh in on this. But it seems to me that the pure sociology of it isn't quite so simple.

Take Wiles' first proof of Taniyama-Shimura. It had an error, but it took concerted efforts by extreme experts to locate it. But that's not the end of the story. It turns out that he and Richard Taylor were able to ascertain that piecing together two parts of the theory that didn't quite seem to work on their own was in fact enough to 'patch' the proof together (Wiles himself says as much).

So, Yes, the original proof was wrong. To a much lesser extent, Perelman didn't fill in all the blanks in his landmark proof of Poincare, leading to a (minor scandal) where two other mathematicians claimed to give the "first" proof based on the "ideas of" Perelman and Hamilton.

The question is this: if someone had done the patching of Wiles' proof for him, would THEY be the prover? How large does the hole have to be? When an error is found, who gets to decide whether it is trivial, whether it wrecks the proof entirely, and who will be the one credited with the insight that makes the whole thing work?

These are not trivial matters, and the issue isn't apportioning credit, but deciding what an error truly is. Typos don't count. Proving incorrect results certainly do. But what about "generally correct" ideas that eventually lead to a proof? How loose do those ideas have to be?

I don't think there's ANY argument about when large, demonstrable errors have been found in published proofs. But there are many other cases -- like de Branges' purported proof of the Riemann Hypothesis -- that fall through these neat cracks.

Why do mathematicians always agree? , Christophe Heintz

The Logical Basis of Kinship Terminologies

Dwight Read

Saturday, 30 March 2013 08:17

In respect to kinship terminologies, Levinson's question, "What constrains this exuberant diversity of systems?", is not answered by Kemp and Regier's analysis for one simple reason: Terminologies have a structure and logic, like grammars for language, that determine the possible range of kinship terminologies. Kemp and Regier assume any partition of the space of genealogical relations is a potential terminology and then show that existing terminologies occupy only a small portion of this space due, they assert, to a tradeoff between simplicity and usefulness. This would be like saying a sentence can be any subset of all possible vocabulary words, then asserting that the realized languages have sentences that are a tradeoff between simplicity and usefulness, but ignoring the fact that the simplicity and usefulness of sentences is created through the grammar of the language that constrains what are admissible sentences. The same is true for kinship terminologies, and the answer to Levinson's question has already been made by showing that kinship terminologies have a generative structure that determines the corpus of kinship terms, starting from the primary kin terms of a terminology, along with kinship concepts that are expressed in the terminology (such as reciprocity of kin terms), and the kinship structural properties embedded in a particular terminology (Read 1984, 2001, 2007, 2009; Read and Behrens 1990; Leaf and Read 2012, among others). For example, the difference giving rise to the fundamental division of terminologies into descriptive versus classificatory (bifurcate merging) terminologies derives from two different ways that sibling relations are conceptualized in different societies: (1) a sibling is the child of my parent other than myself (descriptive terminologies) or (2) siblings are those persons who have parents in common (classificatory terminologies) (Bennardo and Read 2007; Read, Fischer and Leaf 2013). Trying to understand kinship terminologies (and hence kinship systems) without first working out the generative logic of a terminology is like trying to understand languages without working out the grammar of a language. Extensive work has already been published on the generative logic of kinship terminologies and this work makes evident what constrains the variability in kinship terminologies that Levinson asks about.

References

Bennardo, G. and D. Read 2007. Cognition, Algebra, and Culture in the Tongan Kinship Terminology. Journal of Cognition and Culture 7: 49-88.

Leaf, M. and D. Read. (2012) Human Thought and Social Organization: Anthropology on a New Plane. Lanham: Lexington Press

Read, D. l984. An algebraic account of the American kinship terminology. Current Anthropology 25: 4l7-440

Read, D. 2001 What is Kinship? In The Cultural Analysis of Kinship: The Legacy of David Schneider and Its Implications for Anthropological Relativism, R. Feinberg and M. Ottenheimer eds. University of Illinois Press, Urbana. Pp. 78-117.

Read, D. 2007. Kinship Theory: A Paradigm Shift. Ethnology 46(4):329-364

Read, D. 2009. Another Look at Kinship: Reasons Why a Paradigm Shift is Needed. Algebra Rodtsva 12:42-69.

Read, D. and C. Behrens. 1990. KAES: An expert system for the algebraic analysis of kinship terminologies. J. of Quantitative Anthropology 2:353-393.

Read, D., Fischer, M. and M. Leaf. 2013. What are kinship terminologies, and why do we care? A computational approach to analyzing symbolic domains. Social Science Computer Review 31(1): 16-44.

Is kinship back? , Dan Sperber

Reclaiming Kinship

Saturday, 30 March 2013 05:55

Yes, kinship is back -- or more accurately, it is reclaiming its original vigor. Haven't you heard of the Kinship Circle? For each of the past three years, and as part of this year's annual meeting of the Amerian Anthropological Association as well, we have had highly successful sessions on kinship. The sessions have been integrated with the themes of each of the meetings. We have had an international group of scholars from Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, England, France, Germany, Italy, Qatar and the United States, presenting a wide range of papers, ranging from more "classic" questions about kinship systems to current research that is challenging some of our theoretical ideas about what constitutes kinship. The papers from the first two sessions will be published shortly.
Dwight Read
Fadwa El Guindi

mathematicians do disagree! significantly so

William (Bill) Lawless

Friday, 29 March 2013 18:14

Dear learned scholar of mathematicians, I disagree with your premise that mathematicians do not disagree, and, being wonderful souls, are easily converted to consensus. No less a scholar, intellectual and role model than Von Neumann (1961), the founder of game theory, argued against your premise. In fact, he bemoaned that unlike physicists, mathematicians who don't agree behave in an unsocial manner by striking out in new directions, leaving their conflicts unresolved. In his article, the first in his collected works, Von Neumann wished that mathematicians disagreed as physicists did. Whenever conflict arose between two physicists (e.g., Bohr and Einstein), physicists refused to ignore it, often bringing their field to a standstill until a resolution was found (i.e., consensus via debate, unlike your fanciful example of consensus without debate). I have long cherished Von Neumann's insight, and his remarkable paper on mathematicians. BTW, in my research, I too have found that consensus without conflict is indeed possible, except that none of the participants can agree on the result.

Von Neumann, J. (1961). The mathematician. Collected works, Pergamon.

Gullibility and pigheadedness

Hugo Mercier

Monday, 18 March 2013 07:02

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

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

A scientist's gullibility

Christophe Heintz

Sunday, 10 March 2013 14:19

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

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/10/magazine/the-professor-the-bikini-model-and-the-suitcase-full-of-trouble.html?_r=3&

People concur in saying that Frampton is unusually gullible.

This story of an incredibly gullible scientist (or so it seems) might also be relevant to your remark that the optimality of epistemic vigilance can only be measured in view of its fit to the milieu. An optimal epistemic vigilance would enable people to believe most of the true things they are told and to disbelieve most of the false things they are told (especially the costly one). The inconvincible sceptic as well as the gullible has less than optimal epistemic vigilance. The optimal vigilance fall in between, but its precise position depends on whether the environment is full of false claims or not. It would be interesting to know whether there are different cognitive developments of epistemic vigilance depending on the type of environment in which a child grows up. This could account for some variability across individuals.

As for scientists, they are supposed to instantiate high epistemic vigilance. So how can Frampton be at the same time so gullible and a good physicist? I see two non-exclusive possibilities:

(1) Frampton exercises epistemic vigilance, but only in the domain of physics. This can happen because the scientific environment fosters argumentative abilities. By contrast, Frampton did not wish or need to convince others that he was having a relation with a beautiful model. He did not need to find good reasons for his beliefs and did not wish to adress counter-arguments. Hugo Mercier pointed to me that this difference in the argumentative context could explain the fact that Newton, with so great achievements in physics, did so badly in chemistry/alchemy. There was in alchemy no need to convince others; it was a secret enterprise.

(2) Frampton does not exercise much epistemic vigilance, but does well in physics nonetheless because the process of checking the plausibility of claims is distributed to others. Only very selected information arrives to his creative mind. This is thanks to the process through which scientific information comes to be distributed---the review process for instance. In science, epistemic vigilance is distributed across individuals and institutionalised. In that context, some gullibility might be an advantage. The schoolgirl, in any case, does better by believing the apparently crazy things that her teacher says (e.g. sound is the vibration of matter). At the research level also, it can pay to believe improbable hypotheses; it means pursuing a high risk, high reward research programme.

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

Stefano Adamo

Friday, 08 March 2013 14:33

Thank you all for the very interesting discussion!

First, I would like to recommend a paper by Paul Rubin entitled “Folk Economics," where some of the views that have come out of the discussion are treated in an evolutionary framework.

In addition, I would like to mention that during my doctorate I have worked on the intellectual aversion for the market economy from a historical angle, studying the implications of the rhetorical phenomenon of the personification of money in the English literature of the early modern period. Comparing the economic views expressed by satyrical dramatists and pamphleteers to those of the economists of the time, aka the “early mercantilists,” I found out that the characterization of money as a supernatural force that takes hold of human behavior (a “visible god,” as Shakespeare called it) reveals a naive understanding on the part of the writers of the social and economic transformation taking place at the time. Most of them overlooked the economic implications of that transformation, and construed it merely as a process of corruption of traditional ethical values. This investigation led me to conclude that a promising line of research on the aversion for the market economy might consist in understanding how lay people make sense of complex economic ideas.

Let me give you a hint. When economists use such concepts as rationality, profit, cost, trade, competition, and so on, they are using words that embed a whole set of assumptions, a shared knowledge that defines the economic way of thinking. On the other hand, also common people are exposed to this jargon in their daily life: they often use the same words, but they arguably attach to it a different, non-technical meaning. How does that meaning form? Drawing on the culture and cognition research program, I have hypothesized that it forms according to the way people relate their own understanding on the word in question with real-world examples of which they have personal experience. More generally, our opinion on matters on which we have no special competence may emerge from the relation we establish between the delusively familiar ideas involved in them and our own interpretation of the small piece of world we see around us.

I have more fully developed this hypothesis here. I’ve recently also uploaded a draft here, in which I explore the topic of the aversion to the market using as a case study the Italian movies of the economic boom era. It turns out, that the Italian filmmakers, just as the English dramatists of a few centuries earlier, were quite wary of the capitalistic development of the country.

Why don’t people like markets? , Pascal Boyer

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

Radu Umbres

Thursday, 28 February 2013 00:39

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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