International Cognition and Culture Institute

Summer Institute on Bounded Rationality in Berlin

Details: Category: Events; Published on Saturday, 25 February 2012 10:43; Written by Dan Sperber

A Summer Institute on "Bounded Rationality 2012 – Foundations of an Interdisciplinary Decision Theory" Directed by Gerd Gigerenzer will take place from July 3 – 10, 2012 at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin.

The Summer Institute will provide a platform for genuinely interdisciplinary research, bringing together young scholars from psychology, biology, philosophy, economics, and other social sciences. Its focus will be on “decision making in the wild” – how cognition adapts to real-world decision-making environments. One of its aims is to provide participants a deeper understanding of the way humans come to grips with a fundamentally uncertain world, with an emphasis on applied contexts such as social interactions, medicine, justice, business, and politics. Graduate students and postdoctoral fellows from around the world are invited to apply by March 31, 2012. We will provide all participants with accommodation and stipends to cover part of their travel expenses. Details on the Summer Institute and the application process are available here .

What it is about women?

Details: Category: Pascal's blog; Published on Monday, 20 February 2012 20:14; Written by Pascal Boyer

A few weeks a go, a young girl was assaulted in the othodox Jewish community of Beit Shemesh near Jerusalem. Being from an orthodox family, the girl was dressed in what most people in Israel and the rest of the world would judge an inordinately puritanical fashion. Apparently, that was not enough for a group of enraged young men, who ganged up on her and terrorized her, spat at her, shouted in her face and called her a “whore” and other assorted insults. The main source of their righteous anger was her bare arms. She is eight years old.

modesty police

The incident did not pass unnoticed. Israel is probably one of the most secular places in the world.The extremism of the Haredis and other fanatics are a perennial concern and irritant to most Israelis. Thousands joined demonstrations in several towns to denounce this latest eruption of puritanical folly.

Obviously, this kind of incident is far from special to Israel. In most of the Muslim world, men routinely gang up on women who fail to dress according to their standard of Islamic modesty. Women are just as routinely beaten up or even sent to jail for real or imagined violations of some extravagant regulation on what they should wear, say or do. In the US, many of the religiously inspired “social conservatives” are also obsessed with women, forever trying to push back on the very limited legal acceptance of abortion, but also on the availability or funding of contraception and genetic counselling.

None of this is new to our readers. But it raises, again, the question, What is it about women? that is, what is it that triggers that kind of apparently irrational hatred? Obviously, the question really is about men and their ever so mysterious psychological makeup.

Learning word meanings at 6 months?

Details: Category: Publications; Published on Sunday, 19 February 2012 10:02; Written by Dan Sperber

Forthcoming in PNAS, an article by Elika Bergelson and Daniel Swingley arguing that "At 6–9 months, human infants know the meanings of many common nouns" with obvious implications for the study of cultural learning. The authors link their findings to the recent discovery of mindreading abilities in infants at the same early age (see for instance for instance Kovács, Téglás , and Endress, [2010] 'The social sense: Susceptibility to others’ beliefs in human infants and adults. Science 330:1830–1834)

Abstract: It is widely accepted that infants begin learning their native language not by learning words, but by discovering features of the speech signal: consonants, vowels, and combinations of these sounds. Learning to understand words, as opposed to just perceiving their sounds, is said to come later, between 9 and 15 mo of age, when infants develop a capacity for interpreting others’ goals and intentions. Here, we demonstrate that this consensus about the developmental sequence of human language learning is ﬂawed: in fact, infants already know the meanings of several common words from the age of 6 mo onward. We presented 6- to 9-mo-old infants with sets of pictures to view while their parent named a picture in each set. Over this entire age range, infants directed their gaze to the named pictures, indicating their understanding of spoken words. Because the words were not trained in the laboratory, the results show that even young infants learn ordinary words through daily experience with language. This surprising accomplishment indicates that, contrary to prevailing beliefs, either infants can already grasp the referential intentions of adults at 6 mo [the explanation the authors prefer] or infants can learn words before this ability emerges. The precocious discovery of word meanings suggests a perspective in which learning vocabulary and learning the sound structure of spoken language go hand in hand as language acquisition begins.

Tübingen summer school on “The Evolution of Morality”

Details: Category: Events; Published on Sunday, 19 February 2012 10:00; Written by Dan Sperber

The Forum Scientiarum of Tuebingen University organises a summer school on “The Evolution of Morality” (June 12th – 16th, 2012). Twenty graduate students and junior scientists from all over the world will have the opportunity to work on the question of the evolution of morality with Professor Frans de Waal and Professor Gerhard Ernst. Application deadline, March 30.

Topic: What kind of new perspectives and implications can be drawn from insights of the theory of evolution for the understanding of the morality of human beings? The summer school will focus on the evolutionary fundaments of morality presenting as lecturer the primatologist Frans de Waal. Spending much time watching the behavior of apes and monkeys, de Waal brings forward the argument that the core concept of morality has already been present in the pre-social tendencies of nonhuman primates. As a consequence he attacks what he calls the "Veneer Theory", which holds that human ethics and morality - established as a cultural innovation - would only be a thin crust masking our Hobbesian brutish nature.

Evolutionary, cognitive and anthropological issues in the study of morality

Details: Category: The Study of Cognition and Culture Today; Published on Thursday, 16 February 2012 09:33; Written by Dan Sperber

This lecture is part of the special series of lectures 'The Study of Cognition and Culture Today' supported by the LSE Annual Fund, organised by the department of anthropology of the LSE and the International Cognition and Culture Institute.

What's the point of talking to your child?

Details: Category: Alex's blog; Published on Saturday, 11 February 2012 15:30; Written by Alex Cristia

I would like to recruit ICCI readers to help me solve a mystery that has long puzzled me. I have met many linguists who know (or think they know) that:

1) There are cultures where children are not spoken to until they already talk fluently (1 or 2 years of age).

2) In some cultures, infants are spoken to in exactly the same way as adults are; that is, infant-directed speech = adult-directed speech.

It follows from (1) and (2) that infant-directed speech is a superfluous occurrence, and children can develop language perfectly well even if they are never addressed, or if they are talked to in run-of-the-mill sentences.

What are the sources of these firm linguistic beliefs? I've been able to trace some statements that could be interpreted as evidence for (2), but in each case there is some counterevidence or counterarguments to be found...

The origin of essentialist reasoning

Details: Category: The Study of Cognition and Culture Today; Published on Saturday, 04 February 2012 18:30; Written by Susan Gelman

Incredible! Listening to ‘When I’m 64’ makes you forget your age

Details: Category: Olivier's blog; Published on Monday, 30 January 2012 09:58; Written by Olivier Morin

As an illustration of the power of priming experiments to produce astonishing findings, a recent study shows that people tend to underestimate their age (but not their father’s) after listening to the Beatles’ song « When I’m 64 ». The study was published in Psychological Science.

"We asked 20 University of Pennsylvania undergraduates to listen to either “When I’m Sixty-Four” by The Beatles or “Kalimba.” Then, in an ostensibly unrelated task, they indicated their birth date (mm/dd/ yyyy) and their father’s age. We used father’s age to control for variation in baseline age across participants. An ANCOVA revealed the predicted effect: According to their birth dates, people were nearly a year-and-a-half younger after listening to “When I’m Sixty-Four” (adjusted M = 20.1 years) rather than to “Kalimba” (adjusted M = 21.5 years), F(1, 17) = 4.92, p = .040."

The effect is both statistically significant and fairly important: it really seems that the song induces a downward bias in a subject's estimation of his own age. Incredible? Maybe, but not more so than other priming studies. It has been shown, after all, that subjects primed with words related to old age walk more slowly than others (here); that infants are twice more likely to help an adult spontaneously after they have seen two puppets facing each other (rather than turning their back to each other) (here); that people are more generous when they are holding a cup of hot (versus iced) coffee (here). Strange as they are, those are widely cited results. Yet, the Beatles’ song experiment was not greeted with the same enthusiasm. Why was that?

Sterelny's 'The Evolved Apprentice'

Details: Category: Publications; Published on Sunday, 29 January 2012 10:15; Written by Dan Sperber

A new book by Kim Sterelny: The Evolved Apprentice: How Evolution Made Humans Unique (MIT Press 2012) : "Over the last three million years or so, our lineage has diverged sharply from those of our great ape relatives. Change has been rapid (in evolutionary terms) and pervasive. Morphology, life history, social life, sexual behavior, and foraging patterns have all shifted sharply away from other great apes. No other great ape lineage--including those of chimpanzees and gorillas--seems to have undergone such a profound transformation. In The Evolved Apprentice, Kim Sterelny argues that the divergence stems from the fact that humans gradually came to enrich the learning environment of the next generation. Humans came to cooperate in sharing information, and to cooperate ecologically and reproductively as well, and these changes initiated positive feedback loops that drove us further from other great apes.

Sterelny develops a new theory of the evolution of human cognition and human social life that emphasizes the gradual evolution of information sharing practices across generations and how information sharing transformed human minds and social lives. Sterelny proposes that humans developed a new form of ecological interaction with their environment, cooperative foraging, which led to positive feedback linking ecological cooperation, cultural learning, and environmental change. The ability to cope with the immense variety of human ancestral environments and social forms, he argues, depended not just on adapted minds but also on adapted developmental environments."

Are humans innately bad social scientists?

Details: Category: Nicolas' Blog; Published on Thursday, 26 January 2012 12:10; Written by Nicolas Baumard

I know, this sounds a bit extreme. How can the ability to do (bad) social science be influenced by our genes? Well, quite easily if you carefully read Robert Trivers’ last book (see reviews in NYT Nature, Science). Indeed, his book is about our innate tendency for self-deception. Here is the blurb:

Whether it’s in a cockpit at takeoff or the planning of an offensive war, a romantic relationship or a dispute at the office, there are many opportunities to lie and self-deceive—but deceit and self-deception carry the costs of being alienated from reality and can lead

In his bold new work, prominent biological theorist Robert Trivers unflinchingly argues that self-deception evolved in the service of deceit—the better to fool others. We do it for biological reasons—in order to help us survive and procreate. From viruses mimicking host behavior to humans misremembering (sometimes intentionally) the details of a quarrel, science has proven that the deceptive one can always outwit the masses.todisaster. So why does deception play such a prominent role in our everyday lives? In short, why do we deceive?

Among all the fascinating consequences of the evolution of self-deception – false memory, parents-offspring conflict, space disasters – one is of particular interest for us here at the ICCI. It is our innate propensity to do bad social science.

Twelve Lessons (Most of Which I Learned the Hard Way) for Evolutionary Psychologists

Details: Category: Daniel Fessler's blog; Published on Friday, 20 January 2012 12:34; Written by Dan Fessler

As an undergraduate, most of the professors in the Anthropology Department at my university practiced psychological anthropology, a subfield of sociocultural anthropology that combines theories from various branches of psychology with the study of culture. I decided that I was going to be a psychological anthropologist, and I continued on at the same university, with the same professors, for my graduate degrees. Although I was confident that, to understand human behavior, it was necessary to investigate the interaction of mind and culture, I nevertheless became increasingly dissatisfied with psychological anthropology, which lacks an overarching theory from which to derive hypotheses, and which often eschews hypothesis testing in favor of description and interpretation. Anthropologists usually emphasize the differences between people in different societies, yet, during my doctoral field research, I was impressed by the underlying universalities in human emotions. I began thinking more about human evolution, and, with guidance from several primatologists, I gradually began to invent my own version of evolutionary psychology. I was unaware that such a discipline was already emerging – indeed, many of my ‘new’ ideas had already been formulated more clearly by others. It was a revelation when I attended my first meeting of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, and discovered a whole field devoted to my area of interest.

Conference: Culture, Mind, and Brain: Emerging Concepts, Methods, Applications

Details: Category: Events; Published on Friday, 20 January 2012 10:44; Written by Nicolas Claidière

A conference on "Culture, Mind, and Brain: Emerging Concepts, Methods, Applications" at UCLA, October 19–20, 2012

Many lines of research on culture, mind, and brain can no longer be neatly separated. Some questions run together, thanks to our growing understanding of the genome, the biological roots of human sociality, and the mutual constitution of cultures and selves, as well as the complex interactions between the physical, cultural, and social environments underlying health and illness. The aim of this 2-day conference is to highlight emerging concepts, methodologies and applications in the study of culture, mind, and brain, with particular attention to: (1) cutting-edge neuroscience research that is successfully incorporating culture and the social world; (2) the context in which methods are used as well as the tacit assumptions that shape research questions; and (3) the kinds and quality of collaborations that can advance interdisciplinary research training.

International Conference on Thinking 2012 London

Details: Category: Events; Published on Friday, 20 January 2012 10:06; Written by Mike Oaksford

The 7th International Conference on Thinking will take place on the 4^th to 6^th July 2012 at Birkbeck College and University College London focusing on the most recent research on thinking from psychological, cognitive science and cognitive neuroscience perspectives. To submit papers, posters, or symposia proposals and to register please go to http://www.ict2012.bbk.ac.uk/. Deadline for submission: 31 March 2012.

Early social cognition in three cultural contexts

Details: Category: Publications; Published on Monday, 16 January 2012 23:05; Written by Dan Sperber

Coming out of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Department of Developmental and Comparative Psychology An important comparative study on Early social cognition in three cultural contexts by T. Callaghan, H. Moll, H. Rakoczy, F. Warneken, U. Liszkowski, T. Behne, & M. Tomasello, published in 2011 (Monograph of the Society for Research in Child Development, 76(2), 1-142) and available here.

Abstract: The influence of culture on cognitive development is well established for school age and older children. But almost nothing is known about how different parenting and socialization practices in different cultures affect infants’ and young children’s earliest emerging cognitive and social-cognitive skills. In the current monograph, we report a series of eight studies in which we systematically assessed the social-cognitive skills of 1- to 3-year-old children in three diverse cultural settings. One group of children was from a Western, middle-class cultural setting in rural Canada and the other two groups were from traditional, small-scale cultural settings in rural Peru and India.

In a first group of studies, we assessed 1-year-old children’s most basic social-cognitive skills for understanding the intentions and attention of others: imitation, helping, gaze following, and communicative pointing. Children’s performance in these tasks was mostly similar across cultural settings. In a second group of studies, we assessed 1-year-old children’s skills in participating in interactive episodes of collaboration and joint attention. Again in these studies the general finding was one of cross-cultural similarity. In a final pair of studies, we assessed 2- to 3-year-old children’s skills within two symbolic systems (pretense and pictorial). Here we found that the Canadian children who had much more experience with such symbols showed skills at an earlier age.

Our overall conclusion is that young children in all cultural settings get sufficient amounts of the right kinds of social experience to develop their most basic social-cognitive skills for interacting with others and participating in culture at around the same age. In contrast, children’s acquisition of more culturally specific skills for use in practices involving artifacts and symbols is more dependent on specific learning experiences.

Why are the faces of primates so dramatically different from one another?

Details: Category: Publications; Published on Sunday, 15 January 2012 23:38; Written by Dan Sperber

UCLA biologists working as "evolutionary detectives" studied the faces of 129 adult male primates from Central and South America, and they offer some answers in research published online Jan. 11, in Proceedings of the Royal Society B and available here. The faces they studied evolved over at least 24 million years, they report.

"If you look at New World primates, you're immediately struck by the rich diversity of faces," said Michael Alfaro, a UCLA associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and the senior author of the study. "You see bright red faces, moustaches, hair tufts and much more. There are unanswered questions about how faces evolve and what factors explain the evolution of facial features. We're very visually oriented, and we get a lot of information from the face."
Some of the primate species studied are solitary, while others live in groups that can include dozens or even hundreds of others.
"We found very strong support for the idea that as species live in larger groups, their faces become more simple, more plain," said lead author Sharlene Santana, a UCLA postdoctoral scholar in ecology and evolutionary biology and a postdoctoral fellow with UCLA's Institute for Society and Genetics. "We think that is related to their ability to communicate using facial expressions. A face that is more plain could allow the primate to convey expressions more easily.
"Humans have pretty bare faces, which may allow us to see facial expressions more easily than if, for example, we had many colors in our faces."

More here

Anthropology of this Century online

Details: Category: Publications; Published on Sunday, 15 January 2012 23:15; Written by Dan Sperber

The new online journal Anthropology of this Century edited by Charles Stafford. "publishes reviews of recent works in anthropology and related disciplines, as well as occasional feature articles." While not uniquely focused on cognition-and-culture themes, is quite open to them. In the just published 3rd issue, for instance:

• Rita Astuti: "Some after dinner thoughts on Theory of Mind"
• Maurice Bloch: "The hard problem: Soul dust: the magic of consciousness By Nicholas Humphrey"

Blogs from ICCI contributors

Details: Category: Olivier's blog; Published on Wednesday, 11 January 2012 16:07; Written by Olivier Morin

ICCI contributors also blog elsewhere. I am happy to recommend two new blogs: Hugo Mercier's Social by Design on Psychology Today is devoted to popularizing his and Sperber's argumentative theory of reasoning. It will teach you the truth about gulliblity (trust me). Simon Barthelmé's Dahtah will enchant statisticians, pop-psychology debunkers, and anyone who is tired of the Mismeasure of Man. One excellent post laments the use that is being made of cognitive science to blame the problems of the poor on bad decision-making.

Flavor network and the principles of food pairing

Details: Category: Publications; Published on Tuesday, 10 January 2012 19:29; Written by a

In the online and open access Scientific Reports of Nature, a fascinating paper on "Flavor network and the principles of food pairing" by Yong-Yeol Ahn, Sebastian E. Ahnert, James P. Bagrow and & Albert-László Barabási

^{The backbone of the flavor network. Each node denotes an ingredient, the node color indicates food category, and node size reflects the ingredient prevalence in recipes. Two ingredients are connected if they share a significant number of flavor compounds, link thickness representing the number of shared compounds between the two ingredients. (Full size image (162 KB)}

"The cultural diversity of culinary practice, as illustrated by the variety of regional cuisines, raises the question of whether there are any general patterns that determine the ingredient combinations used in food today or principles that transcend individual tastes and recipes. We introduce a flavor network that captures the flavor compounds shared by culinary ingredients. Western cuisines show a tendency to use ingredient pairs that share many flavor compounds, supporting the so-called food pairing hypothesis. By contrast, East Asian cuisines tend to avoid compound sharing ingredients. Given the increasing availability of information on food preparation, our data-driven investigation opens new avenues towards a systematic understanding of culinary practice.

More here

Summer School "Images: Content, recognition, classification"

Details: Category: Events; Published on Sunday, 08 January 2012 16:23; Written by Dan Sperber

A CNRS Summer School on : "Images: Content, recognition, classification", Paris, July 1-5, 2012. Organization: Roberto Casati, Institut Nicod, CNRS-ENS-EHESS, Anouk Barberousse, Université de Lille 1, Alberto Voltolini, Università degli Studi di Torino. Deadline for applications: Feb 10, 2012.

How do we interpret images’ content? How do we tell images from other visual media? What can images represent? What ontology better describes their content? How do humans and machines recognize and classify images? Images are universal instruments of representation and communication. In many intellectually complex activities (the execution of plans and projects, the identification of people and places, navigation, data collection, medical diagnoses) the use of images is essential. Their interpretation requires little teaching (as opposed to, say, that of written language). But at the same time images are inherently ambiguous, and their interpretation may pose difficult problems. This is particularly evident now that countless images are available in online archives. Their content is often made explicit by annotations (captions, tags, place and time stamps). Software for automatic image interpretation has developed at an impressive rate in recent years, but some problems remain hard to tackle, especially when moving from the identification of instances of objects (tokens) or the recognition of simple categories (plants, vehicles) to attempts to work with more complex categories. Ontological/philosophical issues interface here with widening knowledge about cognitive processes and technological development.

Attributing Mind to Groups vs. Group Members

Details: Category: Publications; Published on Friday, 06 January 2012 17:44; Written by Dan Sperber

Forthcoming in Psychological Science, an interesting social cognition article by Adam Waytz and Liane Young entitled "The Group-Member Mind Trade-Off: Attributing Mind to Groups Versus Group Members" available here.

Abstract: People attribute minds to other individuals and make inferences about those individuals’ mental states to explain and predict their behavior. Little is known, however, about whether people also attribute minds to groups and believe that collectives, companies, and corporations can think, have intentions, and make plans. Even less is known about the consequences of these attributions for both groups and group members. We investigated the attribution of mind and responsibility to groups and group members, and we demonstrated that people make a trade-off: The more a group is attributed a group mind, the less members of that group are attributed individual minds. Groups that are judged to have more group mind are also judged to be more cohesive and responsible for their collective actions. These findings have important implications for how people perceive the minds of groups and group members, and for how attributions of mind influence attributions of responsibility to groups and group members.

Why are some languages more regular than others?

Details: Category: Dan's blog; Published on Sunday, 01 January 2012 23:37; Written by Dan Sperber

Many years ago, I did anthropological fieldwork among the Dorze of Southern Ethiopia. Since no grammar of the Dorze language was available, I had to find out what were its basic morphological and syntactic rules. The good news was that once I had identified a rule, I could apply it across the board: there were hardly any exceptions. From this point of view, Dorze stood in sharp contrast with Amharic, the dominant language of then imperial Ethiopia. Amharic (like English) is a language with many irregularities. Dorze regularity was found not only at the morphological level, but also at the phonological level. The many words that had been borrowed from Amharic into Dorze had all, except for the most recent ones, acquired fully-regular dorze phonology.

Why are some languages quite regular and others not? I remember posing the question to the historical linguist Robert Hertzron, whom I met at the time in Addis Ababa. It is, he suggested, because, in the process of language acquisition, children tend spontaneously to over-regularize. They apply any rule they have acquired to all possible instances (in English, for instance, they may over-generalize the ordinary rule for past tense and say “he goed” instead of “he went”). In societies where adults correct children, these mistaken regularization are suppressed and irregularities are maintained; in societies where adults leave children alone in this respect, irregularities are less stable, and the language tends to be more regular. Gary Marcus et al. in their monograph on “Overregularization in language acquisition” (1992) quote Jill de Villiers half-joking: "Leave children alone and they'd tidy up the English language."

Conference on Social Cognition, Engagement and the Second-Person Perspective

Details: Category: Call for Papers; Published on Thursday, 29 December 2011 14:28; Written by Dan Sperber

Interdisciplinary Conference, University of Cologne (Germany), May 25-27, 2012 on Social Cognition, Engagement and the Second-Person Perspective. Deadline for poster submission: March 1st, 2012

What are the psychological processes and neural mechanisms enabling social cognition? How might social cognition be modulated depending on whether one is actively engaged in social interaction with someone or merely observing others interact? What is the impact of this distinction for research methodologies in social psychology and social neuroscience as well as for our understanding of conditions like autism? In particular, this conference brings together experts from various fields to promote the prospects of a second-person approach for future research into the foundations of social cognition.

Summer Course on "Problems of the Self", CEU, Budapest, June 25-July 5, 2012

Details: Category: Events; Published on Tuesday, 27 December 2011 13:20; Written by Dan Sperber

Summer Course on "Problems of the Self", CEU, Budapest, June 25-July 5, 2012. Application deadline: February 15, 2012

Brief Course Description:
The course aims to present the state of the art in research on the self from philosophy, psychology, cognitive neuroscience, sociology, and cognitive anthropology. Themes revolve around the nature of the self, as revealed through self-consciousness, body perception, action and joint action, and its embedding in society and culture. Historical and developmental perspectives provide other angles on the self. The course presents a unique opportunity for interdisciplinary discussion on the self from multiple perspectives. It is directed at advanced graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and junior faculty working in philosophy, psychology, cognitive neuroscience and cognate disciplines.

Middle childhood: Evolutionary and cross-cultural perspectives

Details: Category: Publications; Published on Tuesday, 27 December 2011 13:00; Written by Dan Sperber

An interesting special issue of Human Nature (22/3, Sept. 2011) on middle childhood:

From Benjamin C. Campbell’s Introduction:

“Middle childhood is recognized by developmental psychologists as a distinct developmental stage between early childhood and adolescence, defined by increasing cognitive development, emotional regulation, and relative social independence. Adults have increasing expectations of children during middle childhood, as reflected in Sheldon’s White’s (1996) description of this stage as “the age of reason and responsibility.” Developmentally, the onset of middle childhood is defined by Piaget’s (1963) “5 to 7 transition,” with the end marked by the onset of puberty... “In this special issue we examine middle childhood in both evolutionary and cross-cultural perspectives to understand its origins, physiological correlates, and ecological and cultural variability."

PhD studentships in Cognitive Science at the CEU, Budapest

Details: Category: Jobs; Published on Sunday, 04 December 2011 21:42; Written by Dan Sperber

PhD studentships are available for the doctoral program in Cognitive Science at Central European University (CEU), Budapest, Hungary. Application deadline: 25 January 2012.

The Department of Cognitive Science at CEU invites applications for doctoral student positions starting in September 2012. This is a research-based training program in human cognition with social cognition and learning as core themes. Research topics include cooperation, communication, social learning, cultural transmission, embodied cognition, joint action, developmental social cognition, strategic decision-making, problem solving, visual cognition, sensory and statistical learning, visual psychophysics, computational neuroscience, and social cognitive neuroscience. Students will follow courses in cognitive psychology, philosophy of mind, cognitive anthropology, computational cognition and linguistics, and will receive practical research training in the laboratories of the members of this new department.

Summer school on Theories of Communication in Riga (July 2012)

Details: Category: Events; Published on Thursday, 01 December 2011 22:40; Written by Dan Sperber

There will be an International Summer School at the University of Latvia, Riga, 8-18 July 2012, on the theme: Theories of Communication. What linguistic knowledge and interpretive mechanisms are required to explain the phenomena of inferential communication? Should we favour an explanation rooted in Relevance Theory? And what insight can a pragmatic approach give us into the evolution of human communication? These and other questions will be the focus of the 2012 edition of the International Summer School in Cognitive Sciences and Semantics. Among the topics explored will be the following: (i) information structure, (ii) temporal reference, (iii) indirect speech acts, (iv) non-literal uses of language, in particular, metaphor and related tropes, including hyperbole, simile, sarcasm and irony, (v) hinting, (vi) the nature of word meaning, (vii) cooperation and antagonism in conversation, (viii) slurs, and (ix) the idea of a dynamic lexicon.

Invited organizers: Ernie Lepore (Rutgers University, US) & Dan Sperber (Central European University, Budapest, H, & CNRS, Paris, FR). Faculty: Elisabeth Camp (University of Pennsylvania, US), Robyn Carston (University College London, UK), Ivona Kucerova (McMaster University, Canada), Ernie Lepore (Rutgers University, US), Peter Ludlow (Northwestern University, US), Dan Sperber (Central European University, Budapest, H, & CNRS, Paris, FR), Matthew Stone (Rutgers University, US), Deirdre Wilson (University College London, UK).

3-year DPhil studentship in anthropology at Oxford to study ritual

Details: Category: Jobs; Published on Wednesday, 30 November 2011 22:19; Written by Nicolas Claidière

Applications are invited for an ESRC-funded 3-year DPhil studentship based in the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography to begin in October 2012. The student will be supervised by Professor Harvey Whitehouse (Oxford) and Dr Quentin Atkinson (University of Auckland).

This studentship examines the broad question: what is the relationship between ritual and social organization in the human past? The aim will be to build on recent research suggesting that the intensity of emotional (especially dysphoric) arousal experienced by ritual participants correlates inversely with frequency of performance (Atkinson and Whitehouse, 2010). Whereas low-frequency/high arousal ("imagistic") rituals are associated with small, localized, and intensely cohesive communities, high-frequency/low-arousal ("doctrinal") rituals are found in large-scale, fast-spreading, and diffusely cohesive communities (Whitehouse,1995, 2000, 2004). Temporal and spatial distributions of data may also be used to evaluate predictions generated under a range of models of cultural transmission and evolution (Richerson and Boyd, 2005; Henrich, 2009; Pagel, Atkinson, and Meade, 2007; Turchin, 2009). By matching model predictions to observed data under a variety of simulated conditions this DPhil project will seek to identify likely drivers of the cultural shifts as well as to test the performance of competing models of ritual transmission.

The scope-severity paradox

Details: Category: Anikó's blog; Published on Sunday, 30 October 2011 14:42; Written by Anikó Sebestény

jpg law justice 003 Do criminals deserve a less severe punishment if they harmed more people ?

Most people would almost certainly answer "no". Of course: punishment should be sensitive to the severity of the crime. That's what we usually think.

Yet in a compelling paper published in Social Psychological and Personality Science in August 2010, Loran F. Nordgren and Mary-Hunter Morris McDonnell found that increasing the number of people victimized by a crime actually decreases the perceived severity of that crime and leads people to recommend less punishment.

The scope-severity paradox presented in the article is indeed astonishing. The paper is also exemplary in how beautifully it combines lab experiments and analysis of real-world data.

EHBEA Conference 2012

Details: Category: Events; Published on Friday, 28 October 2011 16:28; Written by Jamie Tehrani

A message from Jamie Tehrani:

This year's European Human Behaviour and Evolution Association Conference is being hosted by Durham University on 25-28th March 2012. On behalf of the local organising committee I would like to warmly invite members of the Institute to come along and consider giving a talk. The deadline for the submission of abstracts for presentations is 25th November 2011. Further details about the conference, deadlines and registration can be found on the website: http://www.dur.ac.uk/jeremy.kendal/EHBEA2012/Welcome.html

Atheist clergymen and belief in belief

Details: Category: Helen De Cruz's blog; Published on Saturday, 22 October 2011 10:14; Written by Helen De Cruz

A while ago, Dan Sperber blogged about research by Daniel Dennett and Linda LaScola on atheist clergymen. Their paper, which is available in open access here, provides a fascinating qualitative study on atheist clergymen from various denominations, all of whom were anonymousmy interviewed about their doubts and loss of religious belief. If found out they risked losing their job at the very least, and being expelled from the religious community that had been their home for so long. Yet, many of them expressed moral qualms about not coming out: was their silence a form of hypocricy, or was it all for the best?

Empty church

Could Christian atheism rekindle an interest in religion?

"I’m where I am because I need the job still. If I had an alternative, a comfortable paying job, something I was interested in doing, and a move that wouldn’t destroy my family, that’s where I’d go. Because I do feel kind of hypocritical." (Dennett & Lascola 2010, p. 137)

Theoretical Interventions in the Anthropology of Mathematics

Details: Category: Call for Papers; Published on Saturday, 22 October 2011 09:51; Written by Dan Sperber

We are seeking abstracts for a session entitled "Theoretical Interventions in the Anthropology of Mathematics" (Panel Organizers: Stephen Chrisomalis and Samar Zebian) to be held at the Society for Anthropological Sciences 8th Annual Meeting in Las Vegas, Nevada, February 22-25, 2012. Deadline for abstract: November 20, 2011.

A considerable body of important research bears directly on the relationship between mathematics and aspects of language, cognition, and culture. However, disciplinary trends in anthropology and linguistics have insufficiently integrated this important work into basic theories of human behavior, cognition, and cultural variability. We are seeking papers on any aspect of mathematics, numeracy, or number systems that clarifies and expands the theoretical contribution of the social-scientific study of mathematics beyond its current purview. We particularly are interested in papers that bridge the various human sciences including cognitive science, anthropology, linguistics, psychology, history, and/or philosophy.

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The condescension factor

Denis Tatone

Sunday, 19 May 2013 14:40

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

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

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

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

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

The firefighters calendar

Guillaume Dezecache

Saturday, 18 May 2013 17:08

Thanks for this brilliant post, Denis!

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

Not Quite So Simple

Grazzi Yoon

Monday, 01 April 2013 22:08

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why do mathematicians always agree? , Christophe Heintz

The Logical Basis of Kinship Terminologies

Dwight Read

Saturday, 30 March 2013 08:17

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is kinship back? , Dan Sperber

Reclaiming Kinship

Saturday, 30 March 2013 05:55

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

mathematicians do disagree! significantly so

William (Bill) Lawless

Friday, 29 March 2013 18:14

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

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

Gullibility and pigheadedness

Hugo Mercier

Monday, 18 March 2013 07:02

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

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

A scientist's gullibility

Christophe Heintz

Sunday, 10 March 2013 14:19

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

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

People concur in saying that Frampton is unusually gullible.

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

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

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

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

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

Stefano Adamo

Friday, 08 March 2013 14:33

Thank you all for the very interesting discussion!

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

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

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

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

Why don’t people like markets? , Pascal Boyer

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

Radu Umbres

Thursday, 28 February 2013 00:39

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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