PhD studentships in Cognitive Science at the Central European University (Budapest)

Details

Category: Jobs

Published on Saturday, 15 October 2011 15:01

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 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.

Read more: PhD studentships in Cognitive Science at the Central European University (Budapest)

Anthropological light on the mind-body problem

Details

Category: Publications

Published on Friday, 30 September 2011 15:59

Written by Dan Sperber

In the last issue of Cognitive Science (vol. 35, #7, Sept 2011), “Cross-Cultural Similarities and Differences in Person-Body Reasoning: Experimental Evidence From the United Kingdom and Brazilian Amazon”, an excellent article by Emma Cohen, Emily Burdett, Nicola Knight, Justin Barrett (available here).

The abstract begins: "We report the results of a cross-cultural investigation of person-body reasoning in the United Kingdom and northern Brazilian Amazon (Marajó Island). The study provides evidence that directly bears upon divergent theoretical claims in cognitive psychology and anthropology, respectively, on the cognitive origins and cross-cultural incidence of mind-body dualism. The article ends: "The cross-cultural study reported offers the first systematic, cross-cultural analysis of person-body reasoning across a broad range of capacities, provides firm evidential grounds for the refinement of theory and method in future cognitive psychological and anthropological research, and suggests numerous lines of potential further inquiry on the emergence and spread of patterns of recurrence and variation in mind-body dualism in particular, and person-body reasoning generally."

Why are human beings so interested in explaining misfortune?

Details

Category: Pascal's blog

Published on Friday, 12 August 2011 14:59

Written by Pascal Boyer

(Enter our super-competition and win a mega-prize!)

Some time ago, a lady in France had the pleasure of seeing her lottery ticket win the jackpot (several million euros), only to have her dream blown to smithereens by an untoward incident.  To establish that a claim is valid, the lottery is legally bound to bring together [a] the computer printout of the draw, [b] the winning ticket and [c] the computer readout from the place where the ticket was purchased. Unfortunately, that establishment (a bureau de tabac for you connoisseurs of things French) had burned down to a pile of ashes, cash registers and computers included, the day after the poor woman bought the ticket. The claim was denied.

A blow indeed, as her life so far had not quite been a rose petal path. She was unemployed, her husband an invalid with no pension, her equally unemployed son and daughter had both turned into alcoholic vagrants. We can certainly imagine her crying, Why?, Why me?

[Note that I am not sure this story is altogether accurate - I recount from memory]

Why think about misfortune?

Why do people the world over think about misfortune, and construct elaborate theories to explain it? Here surely is one of your massive, elephant-in-the-room quasi-universals of culture, crying out for explanation, and (as usual) thoroughly neglected by standard social sciences. In all human groups, it seems, people notice and remember cases of misfortune, tally them, detect regularities – and most important, try to explain misfortune.

Why?

Also, in most human groups, explanations of misfortune center on agents, imagined (gods, spirits) or real (relatives, enemies), that brought about the untoward events.

Again, why? Why do people do that?

To us evolutionarily minded folks, these universally available accounts of misfortune are puzzling, mostly because they are false. Nor are they just slightly off target – they are downright misguided. Bad things in the world happen for a variety of reasons, but superhuman agents are not among them. There are no witches making you sick, no bad spirits that make you trip up. Why would our evolved design for a mind include the propensity to focus on and ponder at length totally useless explanations? In evolutionary terms, this is all the more puzzling as such thoughts are not just futile but also potentially harmful. The time and energy spent thinking about mystical causes are wasted for a more productive use of one’s reason.

You may tell me that this is just as true of myriad other cultural phenomena, as people fill their heads with nonsense of no possible evolutionary value – and insert your favourite example here, religious beliefs, ethnic hatred, alternative medicine, etc. Well, you may be right – the culture-as-widespread-nonsense phenomenon is much larger than the present question. But saying that there are other problems of a similar nature does not solve this one – unless you assume there should be a unique solution for all domains of culture-as-nonsense, which I do not believe for a minute.

So let me proceed to the four questions we should address if we want to have a decent model of misfortune expanations.

Question 1. Why agents?

Why are agents so frequently recruited in the explanation of misfortune? There are several ways to account for untoward occurrences. One type of explanation is your common covering-law kind of generic causal statement, whereby ordinary impersonal causal processes are involved in producing a specific outcome. The bureau de tabac burned down betcause it was full of flammable stuff, and a small flame (perhaps a cigarette butt) started a fire. Another type is a kind of karmic accounting, where bad things are the outcome of some kind of fault. The place burned down because the lady (or her ancestors) had committed some moral violations in the past. The third model is that an agent was involved. Somehow a spirit or god decided to burn down that place. This latter, agency-based account is by far the most frequent. Why is that the case?

Question 2. Why “why me?” ?

This is another universal feature of misfortune models - they explain, not a generic set of causal processes that would account for the type of event that occurred, but the particular token that is being considered. Or, if you prefer less jargon, consider the most familiar example from classical anthropology. Among the Zande, when the roof of a mud granary collapses, everyone considers this must be a case of witchcraft – bad people are involved. In case you feel superior and smugly inform those benighted Zande that roofs collapse when their pillars are thoroughly gnawed by termites – well, they know that perfectly well, only that is irrelevant – witchcraft is mentioned not to explain why roofs collapse, but why that particular one collapsed at that particular time. I know viruses cause diseases, but wy did it have to happen to me? Why me? Why now?

Why do people ask such questions?  I hear you say, of course people want to know why it happened to them, of course that is universal – what could be more natural? Who cares what makes other rooftops collapse? Who cares what triggers diseases in other people? What people want to find out, of course, is the why of this particular roof collapse or disease, the one that affects them.

Now, where does all this of course stuff come from? What is so natural here? All this may seem natural to us… simply because we are human too, but that is all the more reason to try and explain it.

Question 3. Why this asymmetry between good and bad fortune?

This may be simpler to solve (indeed the solution may well be obvious) - still, this is one of the questions a good cognition and culture account should address. Most people in the world construct elaborate explanations for bad things while in many cases they are happy that good things just happen.

Question 4. Why are only some occurrences explained in agentive ways?

In the bad good old days of classical anthropology, people with a magical, primitive or prelogical mentality did everything the prelogical or magical way. They were peasants, barbarians, savages – in other words the unclubbable. But as Evans-Pritchard and many others pointed out, all these people also have causal explanations of the more sober, covering-law kind. True, witches will destroy your granary, but granaries cave in also because of termites. Indeed, in most human groups there is an explicit distinction between “simple” or “straightforward” misfortune, which requires not much explanation beyond a recognition of the generic causal processes involved, and those “special” occurrences that seem to cry out for an agentive, karmic or other explanation. During my fieldwork, I learned that Fang people in Cameroon considered some illnesses and assorted misfortune as “simple misfortune”, to be explained for instance in terms of (local models of) physiology, while others were “special”, recruiting the whole panoply of spirits and ancestors.

Why do people maintain both kinds of models? And more important, are there any recurrent differences in the kinds of events covered by these types of explanations?

My solution and our competition for a MEGA-PRIZE

I have found a marvellous solution to all these questions. Unfortunately, the space of this blog is too small to contain it. So I reserve its full publication for another occasion.

In the meantime, why not let a hundred flowers bloom and a thousand schools compete? This is why ICCI proudly opens a competition for the best evolution-compatible, human-cognition-driven, empirically testable explanatory model of these four features of human reflections on misfortune.

Competition regulations: 1. Only send contributions that would address and answer all four questions above. 2. The winner will receive a prize of US$42, offered by Pascal Boyer, in the form of a voucher for use in their favourite online bookshop. (I offer this precise sum because that’s the amount of a reviewer’s fee that I got and absolutely did not deserve). 3. Pascal Boyer is sole judge of all entries. His judgment is thoroughly subjective and may be swayed by friendship, reputation, good looks, bribes and neural misfirings. The judgment is final and unmotivated.

Epistemic vigilance... and epistemic recklessness

Details

Category: Pascal's blog

Published on Sunday, 07 August 2011 23:00

Written by Pascal Boyer

We have all enjoyed, if that is the right word, conversations with people who seem to have no great regard for the niceties of argument and evidence - people who tell you that homeopathy does work because it cured them of a common cold, in a few days… Or that the FBI (or other such agencies) deliberately created the AIDS virus (or crack cocaine) to destroy Africans (or black Americans)… In many cases, such epistemic lapses are context-specific - the same person who claims that homeopathy does work will insist on proper evidence when buying a dishwasher or deciding on a school for their children.

A recent book called Panic Virus by Seth Mnookin details the extraordinary story of the “vaccinations cause autism” meme. This started with some inconclusive but over-reported studies by a few marginal scientists, and soon ballooned up into a huge social movement, where thousands of distressed parents could exchange information, share their traumatic experience, and read or listen to many (some naive, some downright mendacious) “scientists” promoting wild theories (autism from vaccines, from the preservatives used in the vaccines, from radiation, from lack of vitamins, etc.) and often peddling expensive, untested and dangerous treatments (like painful testosterone injections).

As Mnookin relates, the movement soon acquired many characteristics of a cult...

Read more: Epistemic vigilance... and epistemic recklessness

Uncovering and Punishing Unconscious Bias

Details

Category: Decision-making for a social world

Published on Sunday, 07 August 2011 09:38

Written by Hugo Mercier

Uncovering and Punishing Unconscious Bias (paper here)

Philip E. Tetlock, Gregory Mitchell and L. Jason Anastasopoulos

Recent technological advances in psychology hold out the promise of detecting unconscious biases before they cause harm.  Advocates of the technology may fail to appreciate its many potential uses and costs.  We present experimental results demonstrating the ideological filters through which this new technology and its potential uses are evaluated:  (1) liberals supported use of the technology to detect unconscious racism among company managers but not to detect unconscious anti-Americanism among applicants to security jobs; conservatives showed the reverse pattern; (2) few participants of any ideology supported punishing individuals for unconscious bias, but liberals and conservatives supported punishing organizations that failed to use the technology to root out each group’s prioritized societal harm; (3) concerns about scientific bias and Type I and II errors mediated perceptions of misuse potential and willingness to punish organizations; (4) political “extremists” were more likely than “moderates” to reconsider support for the technology when confronted with a less palatable alternative use they had not considered.

Google Effects on Memory

Details

Category: Publications

Published on Friday, 05 August 2011 09:29

Written by Nicolas Claidière

A new article entitled "Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips" by Sparrow, Liu & Wegner should be of interest to scholars interested in the effect of culture on cognition. It documents the effect of having access to online ressources of information on the way in which people look for answers (Exp. 1), remember things (Exp. 2), remember where to find information (Exp. 3) and whether they are more likely to memorize where to find some information rather than the information itself (Exp. 4).

Abstract: "The advent of the Internet, with sophisticated algorithmic search engines, has made accessing information as easy as lifting a finger. No longer do we have to make costly efforts to find the things we want. We can “Google” the old classmate, find articles online, or look up the actor who was on the tip of our tongue. The results of four studies suggest that when faced with difficult questions, people are primed to think about computers and that when people expect to have future access to information, they have lower rates of recall of the information itself and enhanced recall instead for where to access it. The Internet has become a primary form of external or transactive memory, where information is stored collectively outside ourselves."

Social influences on self-control

Details

Category: Decision-making for a social world

Published on Wednesday, 03 August 2011 08:06

Written by Hugo Mercier

Social influences on "self"-control (paper here)

Joe Kable, University of Pennsylvania

As Duckworth and Kern (2011) note, currently over 1% of the abstracts in PsycInfo are indexed by “self-control” or one its synonyms. As part of this widespread interest, cognitive and neural scientists are debating the psychological mechanisms of self-control (Ainslie, 1975; Metcalfe & Mischel, 1999; Muraven & Baumeister, 2000), and the implementation of these mechanisms in the brain (Figner, et al., 2010; Hare, Camerer, & Rangel, 2009; Hare, Malmaud, & Rangel, 2011; Kable & Glimcher, 2007, 2010; McClure, Ericson, Laibson, Loewenstein, & Cohen, 2007; McClure, Laibson, Loewenstein, & Cohen, 2004). These efforts, however, currently proceed without much agreement on a theoretical or operational definition regarding what constitutes “self-control” (Duckworth & Kern, 2011). Definitions have been offered, of course, but one gets the sense that many investigators are content defining self-control in much the same manner that American courts define pornography – “I know it when I see it” (Jacobellis vs Ohio, 1964). Just as our intuitions regarding physics can be mistaken, so too can our intuitions regarding psychology (Stanovich, 1985). This essay argues that an over-reliance on “intuitive psychics” is hindering efforts to identify the cognitive and neural processes involved in self-control. Specifically, current theories tend to underemphasize or ignore completely a factor of critical importance – the social world. Yet, “self-control” is a concept that only emerges at the level of the person in society: it is the social world that defines what is and is not a self-control problem. This realization has important implications for people interested in cognitive and neural mechanisms: it suggests that self-control is unlikely to be a single process; that the computation of social norms is an understudied process that is likely critical for self-controlled behavior; and that interventions that target the social context to increase the influence of norms may prove the strongest way to increase self-controlled behavior.

Generosity as a by-product of selection for reciprocity

Details

Category: Publications

Published on Wednesday, 27 July 2011 09:01

Written by Nicolas Claidière

A new article entitled "Evolution of direct reciprocity under uncertainty can explain human generosity in one-shot encounters" by Andrew W. Deltona, Max M. Krasnowa, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby (Published online in PNAS, 25 July 2011) suggests that 'generosity', the fact that we are willing to incur costs to provide anonymous others with benefits, is a necessary byproduct of an adaptation for reciprocity.

Abstract: Are humans too generous? The discovery that subjects choose to incur costs to allocate benefits to others in anonymous, one-shot economic games has posed an unsolved challenge to models of economic and evolutionary rationality. Using agent-based simulations, we show that such generosity is the necessary byproduct of selection on decision systems for regulating dyadic reciprocity under conditions of uncertainty. In deciding whether to engage in dyadic reciprocity, these systems must balance (i) the costs of mistaking a one-shot interaction for a repeated interaction (hence, risking a single chance of being exploited) with (ii) the far greater costs of mistaking a repeated interaction for a one-shot interaction (thereby precluding benefits from multiple future cooperative interactions). This asymmetry builds organisms naturally selected to cooperate even when exposed to cues that they are in one-shot interactions.

Polemics on Evolutionary Psychology

Details

Category: Publications

Published on Saturday, 23 July 2011 12:04

Written by Dan Sperber

In PLoS Biology (July 19, 2011) a polemical article entitled “Darwin in Mind: New Opportunities for Evolutionary Psychology” by Johan J. Bolhuis, Gillian R. Brown, Robert C. Richardson, and Kevin N. Laland criticising ‘Santa Barbara’ (i.e., Cosmides and Tooby’s) approach (that many here at the ICCI favour).

Abstract: Evolutionary Psychology (EP) views the human mind as organized into many modules, each underpinned by psychological adaptations designed to solve problems faced by our Pleistocene ancestors. We argue that the key tenets of the established EP paradigm require modification in the light of recent findings from a number of disciplines, including human genetics, evolutionary biology, cognitive neuroscience, developmental psychology, and paleoecology. For instance, many human genes have been subject to recent selective sweeps; humans play an active, constructive role in co-directing their own development and evolution; and experimental evidence often favours a general process, rather than a modular account, of cognition. A redefined EP could use the theoretical insights of modern evolutionary biology as a rich source of hypotheses concerning the human mind, and could exploit novel methods from a variety of adjacent research fields.

This has already elicited critical comments from John Hawks. and from Rob Kurzban here. More should come.

Framing, defaults, trust

Details

Category: Decision-making for a social world

Published on Monday, 18 July 2011 07:26

Written by Hugo Mercier

Framing Effects, Default Effects, and Trust (paper here)

Craig R. M. McKenzie (UC San Diego), Michael J. Liersch (New York University), Shlomi Sher (UC San Diego)

Framing effects and default effects are often seen as examples of inconsistent preferences and are usually explained in purely intrapersonal cognitive terms.  We argue that these effects can be explained in rational, social terms, at least in part.  First, frames and defaults are usually generated by another social entity (e.g., a speaker, a policymaker).  Second, speakers and policymakers tend to select frames and defaults in ways that convey choice-relevant information to decision makers (e.g., listeners).  As a result, when listeners respond "inconsistently" to different frames and defaults, it need not indicate inconsistent preferences.  In line with this social approach, we show that framing and default effects are decreased (and default effects might even reverse) when the source of a frame or default is distrusted.  Viewing framing and default effects from a social, rational perspective leads to a deeper understanding of these phenomena and suggests novel predictions about when they will and will not occur outside the laboratory.

The Knowledge Commons: Research and Innovation in an Unequal World

Details

Category: Call for Papers

Published on Friday, 08 July 2011 22:33

Written by Dan Sperber

The St Antony's International Review (a peer-reviewed, academic journal established by graduate members of St Antony's College at the University of Oxford) is publishing a 'Call for Papers':

"The problem of common-pool management is an ancient and enduring question in public policy and governance. ...Yet much of the literature concerning the problems and benefits of common-pool systems does not obviously apply to the knowledge commons. Knowledge is distinct from limited resources like pastures in several regards. First, knowledge is composed of individuals’ cognitions, rather than material objects. Second, while pastures might be depleted by overgrazing, the knowledge commons seems to be threatened by what Paul David calls “over-fencing”: if key bodies of knowledge are closed off, then it is difficult to innovate. Third, knowledge exchange and innovation are arguably crucial for economic growth. Finally, a lack of knowledge about oneself and one’s environment deprives one of an essential human virtue: the ability to act as a knower"

Abstracts due July 30, 2011, Papers due November 18, 2011. More here

Modularity and decision making

Details

Category: Decision-making for a social world

Published on Monday, 04 July 2011 14:30

Written by Hugo Mercier

Modularity & Decision Making (paper here)

Robert Kurzban University of Pennsylvania & Chapman University

Mechanisms that are useful are often specialized because of the efficiency gains that derive from specialization. This principle is in evidence in the domain of tools, artificial computational devices, and across the natural biological world. Some have argued that human decision making is similarly the result of a substantial number of functionally specialized, or “modular” systems, brought to bear on particular decision making tasks. Which system is recruited for a given decision making task depends on the cues available to the decision maker. A number of research programs have advanced using these ideas, but the approach remains controversial.

Snipe hunters of preys with low epistemic vigilance

Details

Category: Radu Umbres' blog

Published on Saturday, 02 July 2011 15:11

Written by Radu Umbres

What weapon would you use to hunt a dahu? Where would you start looking for a Volkswagen Beetle radiator hose? Does elbow grease come in cans or tubes? You shouldn’t even begin thinking about these questions because they are just introductions into elaborate hoaxes. Dahus are fictional deers said to be adapted to the terrain of the Alps by having the feet on mountain side shorter than the feet on the valley side. The Beetle has an air-cooled engine and does not have a radiator. Elbow grease is a metaphor for strenuous manual labour. What makes these ficticious items successful cultural replicators? How can we explain the occurrence of “snipe hunt” in so many different social settings across the world?

During my fieldwork in a Romanian village, I spent some time as an apprentice in a construction team.When one of our workmates accidentally broke a wooden plank, he was sent by the master builder to search for an “acacia electrode” to weld it back into one piece. One evening during after-work drinks, the team managed to convince a young villager that his skills as swimmer were needed early next morning, when the team was to build a dam on one of Romania’s largest rivers. These practices are part of a cross-cultural set of practical jokes called the fool’s errand or the snipe hunt.

Read more: Snipe hunters of preys with low epistemic vigilance

Mèng Zǐ (372 – 289 BCE) on the moral organ

Details

Category: Nicolas' Blog

Published on Friday, 24 June 2011 23:00

Written by Nicolas Baumard

This post is part of a series on the 'history of social sciences'.

Monday  Tuesday Wednesday  Thursday  Friday  Saturday

So far, in this mini-series on the (possibility of a) history of social sciences, I have only discussed the work of a philosopher that is relatively close to us, in terms of space and time. However, I believe that the same story can be told for far more distant philosophers.

Consider, again, the idea of a moral module, advocated by contemporary psychologists. Elsewhere, I have argued that this idea is not totally new and that Scottish philosophers had come up with a similar idea in response to a similar problem (how to account for our innate, universal, unconscious and specific thoughts about right and wrong?) But this idea of a moral organ can be found much earlier, on another continent, Asia, during a different era, the third century before CE, in the work of Mèng Zǐ, usually known in the West as Mencius.

Read more: Mèng Zǐ (372 – 289 BCE) on the moral organ

Adam Smith (1723-1790) on mirror neurons and empathy

Details

Category: Nicolas' Blog

Published on Thursday, 23 June 2011 23:00

Written by Nicolas Baumard

This post is part of a series on the 'history of human sciences'.

Monday  Tuesday Wednesday  Thursday  Friday  Saturday

OK, I admit. Adam Smith never talked about mirror neurons. So why am I bringing this topic up? Because Smith actually did, in a way, tackle the debate about mirror neurons and empathy.

What is this debate? In recent years, empathy, understood as the capacity to recognize and, to some extent, share feelings (such as sadness or happiness) that are being experienced by another sentient being, has received more and more interest. In particular, the study of the neural underpinnings of empathy has received increased interest following a Behavioral and Brain Sciences target article published by Stephanie Preston and Frans de Waal, following the discovery of mirror neurons in monkeys that fire both when the creature watches another creature perform an action as well as when they perform it themselves. In their paper, they (as well as others like Gallese) argued that perception of the object's state automatically activates neural representations, and that this activation automatically primes or generates the associated autonomic and somatic responses, unless inhibited.

But what does any of this have to do with Adam Smith? Like modern psychologists and anthropologists, Smith thought that our capacity to experience feelings about the feelings of others was the basis of social life. In fact, his Theory of Moral Sentiments starts with these words:

"How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it. Of this kind is pity or compassion, the emotion which we feel for the misery of others, when we either see it, or are made to conceive it in a very lively manner. That we often derive sorrow from the sorrow of others, is a matter of fact too obvious to require any instances to prove it."

And for those who are tempted to doubt the connection between Smith's view of sympathy and its modern counterpart, he immediately adds that it is automatic:

"As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation. Though our brother is upon the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers. They never did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person, and it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations."

So does this mean that we should see Smith as the 'big ancestor' of the modern mirror neuron theory? Not so fast. Actually, my point is that Adam Smith had anticipated some of the weaknesses of the mirror neuron theory.

Read more: Adam Smith (1723-1790) on mirror neurons and empathy

Smith (1723-1790) on innateness and cultural variability

Details

Category: Nicolas' Blog

Published on Wednesday, 22 June 2011 23:00

Written by Nicolas Baumard

This post is part of a series on the 'history of social sciences'.

Monday  Tuesday Wednesday  Thursday  Friday  Saturday

One of the debates that haunts the social sciences is the debate about what is innate and what is acquired, what is universal and what is variable, or what belongs to nature and what belongs to culture. This debate has become central in the last decades thanks to the advances of the cognitive sciences and of evolutionary theories. By providing a new way to describe the unconscious and deep structure of the mind and their emergence during human history, these disciplines have made the debate over nature and nurture inevitable.

For this reason, you might think that the current debate is brand new and that it represents a new page in the history of social sciences. Certainly it is new, but maybe not so new.

Read more: Smith (1723-1790) on innateness and cultural variability

Adam Smith (1723-1790) on ultimate and proximate causes in psychology

Details

Category: Nicolas' Blog

Published on Tuesday, 21 June 2011 23:00

Written by Nicolas Baumard

This post is part of a series on the 'history of social sciences'.

Monday  Tuesday  Wednesday  Thursday  Friday Saturday

Darwin's theory of evolution allows us to draw a distinction between ultimate causes—the evolutionary pressures that led to the selection of a particular psychological disposition—and the proximate causes—the psychological mechanisms that cause individuals to behave in a certain way. As the authors of a recent article put it "ultimate explanations are concerned with why a behavior exists, and proximate explanations are concerned with how it works."

At first sight, it seems like it should be impossible to get at that distinction without the theory of evolution, which appeared almost a century after Adam Smith lived and wrote. How, then, could Smith be said to talk about ultimate and proximate causes?

Read more: Adam Smith (1723-1790) on ultimate and proximate causes in psychology

Adam Smith (1723 – 1790) on intuitive and reflective processes

Details

Category: Nicolas' Blog

Published on Monday, 20 June 2011 23:00

Written by Nicolas Baumard

This post is part of a series on the 'history of social sciences'.

Monday  Tuesday  Wednesday  Thursday  Friday  Saturday

Yesterday, I suggested that there was a history of social sciences to be told. A history that would talk about the problems scientists faced and about their solutions. It would use our present knowledge to better understand the knowledge of the past.

One of the reasons why it often seems impossible to write such a history is that we have the impression that the philosophers of the past, with their very different backgrounds, very different preoccupations, and very different ways of proving their points, are completely alien to contemporary science. As a response to this skepticism, I would like to take the example of the distinction between intuitive and reflective judgement, a distinction that we have often discussed here.

"Intuitive beliefs are experienced as plain knowledge of fact without attention and generally without awareness of reasons to hold them to be facts. Reflective beliefs are held for reasons that are mentally entertained. These reasons can be of two kinds: the authority of the source of the belief, or the sense that their content is such that it would be incoherent not to accept them." (more here)

At first, this distinction seems highly modern since it requires the concept of intuition and modularity to be understood. However, it is fascinating to see that it is already visible in the work of some ealier philosophers, as in Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments.

Read more: Adam Smith (1723 – 1790) on intuitive and reflective processes

History of social sciences week!

Details

Category: Nicolas' Blog

Published on Sunday, 19 June 2011 23:00

Written by Nicolas Baumard

I’m a big fan of books on the history of science. I like to find out about the whole story: how things got started in Ancient Greece with people disputing traditional views, how it continued during the Renaissance with scientists starting to test their theories experimentally, and on into the explosion of knowledge in the twentieth century. I also like the well-known characters and the charming (and often imaginary) vignettes about them: Galileo and the tower of Pisa, Newton and the apple, Mendel and the peas.

I like the settings, the Agora, the Sorbonne, the Royal Society. I like the twists and turns of the plot (Galileo forced to retract his theory or Darwin discovering that Wallace is about to publish the theory he had worked on secretly for twenty years).

Picture: The trial of Galileo by Joseph-Nicolas Robert-Fleury

I like the detours through Arabic and Chinese science (and always regret their neglected role). And of course, I like the history of science itself, how problems are discovered (why do organs seem to have a function?), hypothesis proposed along the way (the heritability of acquired characteristics for instance) and explanations found (natural selection)–what Steven Pinker calls the "blissful click, the satisfying aha!, of seeing a puzzling phenomenon explained."

I like all these things, but one thing always disappoints me. It is the absence of social sciences.

Read more: History of social sciences week!

Fast lemons and intuitive beliefs

Details

Category: Ophelia's blog

Published on Monday, 06 June 2011 17:00

Written by Ophelia Deroy

Is a lemon fast or slow?

Which one is brighter: the sound of a violin or the sound of a trombone? 

Got the answer?

Without any apparent reason, you believe that lemons are fast and violins sound brighter than trombones. These beliefs happen to be shared by most humans, from an early age and cross-culturally. Now, where on earth did we get them from? Most of the earlier studies conducted since Edward Sapir focused on “sound symbolism”, i.e. the associations between sounds and meanings, but not directly on the associations between sensory dimensions – like brightness, pitch, size, etc. Even if you don't know anything about french names for birds, I could ask you whether you think that a pipit is a small or a big bird – and you would, without any apparent reason, judge that it must be a small one. It's certainly because, as a large majority of humans across cultures and linguistic groups, you think that the sound /i/ is smaller and brighter than the sound /a/, diminutive words, or names of small birds and fishes are much more likely to contain  /i/ than /a/. 

Rules have exceptions: Which is faster — a mallard or a kiwi?

Believing in things that don't really make sense and without any apparent reason seems, in that respect, not specific to the religious and spiritual domain. But are beliefs in the fastness of lemons, and in bright violins, of the same kind as beliefs in the Holy Trinity or in the spirits of the trees?

Read more: Fast lemons and intuitive beliefs

Judgments and decisions based on attempts to disambiguate the given information

Details

Category: Decision-making for a social world

Published on Monday, 06 June 2011 09:19

Written by Hugo Mercier

Eric Igou 

Judgments and decisions based on attempts to disambiguate the given information: Effects of decision frames, non-diagnostic information, and information order (you can find the paper here)

The author presents evidence for the impact of conversational rules (Grice, 1975) on judgment and decision making. In accordance with social cognitive approaches that examine how conversational rules affect information processing (e.g., Higgins, 1981; Schwarz, 1994, 1996), it is argued that these inherently social rules guide important meta-cognitive inference on whether and how information should be used in forming judgments and making decisions. The author reviews the influence of conversational rules on framing effects, the dilution effect, and order effects in decision making and persuasion. Implications for cognitive 'biases' in and outside of the lab are discussed.

Offensive inanity in the name of evolutionary psychology

Details

Category: ICCI blog

Published on Friday, 03 June 2011 10:50

Written by ICCI Team

Satoshi Kanazawa has caused a scandal by publishing a blog post (later withdrawn) claiming, with specious evidence, that black women were less attractive than others (and black men were more attractive). His Psychology Today blog has just been closed down. Readers of the hell-raising post will realize that this does not look like the work of a scientist willing to challenge political prejudice in the name of truth. The author obviously relishes provocation, and he was willing to relax the standards of scientific proof to create a stir. Which he did.

As a result, evolutionary psychology as a whole is once more under attack in the media and at the LSE (where Kanazawa is a reader in the management department).

Read more: Offensive inanity in the name of evolutionary psychology

Theology and cognitive science

Details

Category: Helen De Cruz's blog

Published on Tuesday, 24 May 2011 23:00

Written by Helen De Cruz

In the next academic year, I will be a research follow at the University of Oxford on a project that examines the implications of cognitive science of religion for theology (see here for a summary of the project).

The Holy Trinity by Masaccio, 1425

Traditionally, cognitive scientists have argued for a large cognitive divide between folk religion and theology. Folk religious beliefs are considered to be cognitively natural, whereas theology is chock-full of concepts that are difficult to represent. Pascal Boyer has termed the tendency of laypeople to distort official theological doctrines to reflect more intuitive modes of reasoning ''the tragedy of the theologian''.

Read more: Theology and cognitive science

The cost of collaboration

Details

Category: Decision-making for a social world

Published on Sunday, 22 May 2011 13:49

Written by Hugo Mercier

The cost of collaboration: Why joint decision-making exacerbates rejection of outside information (article here)

Julia Minson and Jennifer Mueller

Existing research asserts that specific group characteristics cause members to disregard outside information which leads to diminished performance. In the present study we demonstrate that the very process of making a judgment collaboratively rather than individually contributes to such myopic disregard of external viewpoints. Dyad members exposed to the numerical judgments made by another dyad gave significantly less weight to those judgments than did individuals exposed to the judgments of another individual. The difference in the willingness to use peer input shown by individuals versus dyads was fully mediated by the greater confidence that the dyad members reported in the accuracy of their estimates. Consequently, although dyad members made more accurate initial estimates than individuals, they were less able to benefit from peer input.

Do people ever engage in “magical thinking” ?

Details

Category: Pascal's blog

Published on Thursday, 19 May 2011 13:36

Written by Pascal Boyer

Would you enjoy your cocktail less, if it came in a glass labelled “vomit”?

One solid result of cognitive psychology, or so it would seem, is that most people, regardless of education, opinion or personality, can be induced to think in magical terms given the appropriate stimuli and conditions. People will be reluctant to don a sweater if told that it used to belong to Adolf Hitler. They resist drinking from a glass of water in which an experimenter has briefly dunked a plastic cockroach. There is a great variety of such effects, initially demonstrated by Paul Rozin and Carol Nemeroff and replicated by many others, including Paul Harris in developmental studies.

This was salutary news for cultural anthropologists, who suspected that there was something deeply wrong with the notion that magical thinking was a prerogative of the Other, either quasi-naked people with bones through their noses, or less exotic peasants and barbarians with “pre-logical” mentality. So – we now know that we all are that Other, so to speak.

But does magical thinking actually exist? Do the experiments actually show it in action?

Read more: Do people ever engage in “magical thinking” ?

New issue of the Journal of Cognition and Culture

Details

Category: Publications

Published on Tuesday, 17 May 2011 05:35

Written by Dan Sperber

A new and excellent issue (11, 1-2) of the Journal of Cognition and Culture. For the Table of Contents,

Read more: New issue of the Journal of Cognition and Culture

Exploiting the wisdom of others

Details

Category: Decision-making for a social world

Published on Sunday, 08 May 2011 23:00

Written by Hugo Mercier

Exploiting the wisdom of others: A bumpy road to better decision making (article here).

Ilan Yaniv and Shoham Choshen-Hillel

While decision makers often consult other people’s opinions to improve their decisions, they fail to do so optimally. One main obstacle to incorporating others’ opinions efficiently is one’s own opinion. We theorize that decision makers could improve their performance by suspending their own judgment. In one study, participants used others’ opinions to estimate uncertain quantities (the caloric value of foods). In the full-view condition, participants could form independent estimates prior to receiving others’ opinions, while participants in the blindfold condition could not form prior opinions. We obtained an intriguing blindfold effect such that the blindfolded participants provided more accurate estimates than did the full-view participants. Several policy-capturing measures indicated that the advantage of the blindfolded participants was due to their unbiased weighting of others’ opinions. The full-view participants, in contrast, adhered to their prior opinion and thus failed to exploit the information contained in others’ opinions. The results from these two conditions document different modes of processing and consequences for accuracy.

David Hume, the anthropologist, born May 7, 1711

Details

Category: Dan's blog

Published on Friday, 06 May 2011 23:00

Written by Dan Sperber

David Hume, described in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy as "the most important philosopher ever to write in English," was born 300 years ago. All anthropologists should celebrate one of the greatest Founding Fathers of the discipline (but will they?), and we at the Cognition and Culture Institute are particularly inclined to do so since Hume commonly sought to explain human ideas, practices and institutions by articulating psychological and sociological considerations. I propose to our members and readers to contribute to this commemoration by selecting quotes from Hume of particular cognition-and-culture relevance and adding them to this post as comments. I begin with a longish quote from his section “On miracles” in the Enquiry on Human Understanding, which is relevant to what is now called 'social epistemology' and in particular to the study of epistemic vigilance and of course to the study of religious beliefs. Before this, just a little anecdote that should ring a bell for many young scholars who pay a serious career price for going against orthodoxies. In 1744, Hume, who had already published his Treatise of Human Nature and a collection of moral and political essays, applied for the ‘Chair of Pneumatics and Moral Philosophy’ at the University of Edinburgh. However, the position was given to one William Cleghorn because of Hume's unorthodox views on religion.

Hume: 'On Miracles'

“A wise man… proportions his belief to the evidence.

Read more: David Hume, the anthropologist, born May 7, 1711

Patrick Suppes Prize for Nancy Nersessian

Details

Category: Events

Published on Wednesday, 04 May 2011 14:19

Written by Christophe Heintz

Nancy Nersessian has been awarded the inaugural Patrick Suppes Prize for Philosophy of Science. This award to Nancy Nersessian is a nice recognition of what can be done with interdisciplinary approaches taking into account both cognition and culture. Indeed, her work consists in describing "the cognitive and cultural mechanisms that lead up to scientific innovation, both theoretical and experimental."

In her book, Creating Scientific Concepts, Nancy Nersessian provides detailed analyses of model based reasoning, which she shows to be at the heart of conceptual change. He work includes both very detailed analyses of individual scientists' cognitive processes and a specification of the role of the social, cultural and material environments. For instance, she has been illustrating with case studies the theory of distributed cognition, and enriching it with new ideas and concepts. Her methodology includes mainly cognitive history and cognitive ethnography.

A new online journal of reviews in anthropology

Details

Category: Publications

Published on Monday, 02 May 2011 19:47

Written by Dan Sperber

ANTHROPOLOGY OF THIS CENTURY is a new free online journal "that publishes reviews of recent works in anthropology and related disciplines, as well as occasional feature articles". Judging from the first issue (see in particular the reviews by Charles Stafford, the Editor, and James Laidlaw, and the feature piece by Maurice Bloch), anthropological issues of cognition and culture relevance are welcome.

For the Table of contents,

Read more: A new online journal of reviews in anthropology