Author

Pascal Boyer

Is the moral-economic fallacy universal?

Details: Category: Pascal's blog; Published on Monday, 19 November 2012 21:32

If anyone remembers anything from Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (apart from the number of distinct operations required to make a pin, which greatly impressed me at the time), it is that famous sentence that describes human motives for trade:

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.

scrooge

Until recently, I thought this very simple point had become commonsense, at least in educated circles. But then, at a recent dinner in pleasant and civilized company, as I was reflecting how it is such a Good Thing that we have the likes of Samsung, Google and Apple battling it out and giving us ever better products, several people turned to me and said something like: “Poor lamb, are you really that naive? Do you really think they’re trying to make stuff for your benefit? Don’t you know all these people ever want is to make more profit?”

Let us call this the moral-economic fallacy, the notion that the moral tenor of motives for economic action (people want to have more for themselves, which seems both “natural” and not very virtuous) contaminates, so to speak, the effects of such economic action, which cannot really be positive if their are rooted in base motives.

The moral-economic fallacy seems widespread. In a recent draft paper, Amit Bhattacharjee and colleagues report that people intuitively associate profit and social harm. As they say, “otherwise identically-described organizations are seen as providing less value and doing more harm when described as “for-profit” rather than non- profit […] Study 4 demonstrates that people hold a zero-sum conception of profit”. The ever prolific Bryan Caplan posted an economist’s comment on these striking results.

Here I am more interested in the psychological makeup involved: What triggers this kind of belief? From an evolutionary cognitive standpoint, I can see two conflicting perspectives on the question.

Details: Category: Pascal's blog; Published on Monday, 18 June 2012 19:49

People do not love markets – there is a lot of evidence for that. Is it relevant that, well, to put it bluntly, people do not seem to understand much about market economics?

That is a common enough message from professional economists. It is put into sharper focus by Bryan Caplan in his book The myth of the rational voter. Caplan (among other important and interesting things) reports on systematic studies of voters’ knowledge of policies and their effects on economic processes. The take-home message is that people just don’t get it, and that their voting preferences are largely irrational.

Now, voter ignorance or irrationality would not be very bad, if it was completely random. If most voters chose policies randomly, the net result would be no strong aggregate preference for any policy. But Caplan shows that people’s irrationality about economic issues is not random at all. There is method in their madness. It consists in a series of “biases”, like the anti-foreign and anti-trade bias (i.e., “when foreign countries prosper we suffer”). If this is true, many “rational voter” models in political science are in serious trouble.

As usual when people describe folk-understandings as “irrational” or “biased”, we cognition and culture and evolution folks get a trifle impatient.

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

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.

Details: Category: Pascal's blog; Published on Friday, 12 August 2011 14:59

(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

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).

injection

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

Details: Category: Pascal's blog; Published on Thursday, 19 May 2011 13:36

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?

Details: Category: Pascal's blog; Published on Tuesday, 22 March 2011 09:15

birthers1 Those of you who deal with psychiatry know of the rare and tragic condition called Capgras delusion. In this condition, the patient ceases to recognize his or her spouse, father, mother, another familiar person or even a pet. The patient is quite certain that this person they interact with, although he or she looks, talks, feels and smells like the original, is not the genuine thing - and many patients actually believe that the original was replaced with a replica, substituted by aliens, etc. In psychiatry there is a standard and plausible interpretation of these delusions in terms of rationalization.

This is called the “two-stage” model, following which [a] the patient’s experience is extraordinary and [b] the delusion is an attempt to make sense of it. In this particular case, the model suggests that [a] the patient’s face-systems, upon seeing the person, deliver the appropriate interpretation (“this is my husband”) and activate the relevant person-file in memory, but fail to create the specific emotional signature previously associated with seeing that person; as a result, seeing the person creates an extremely unusual experience, which [b] the beliefs about aliens contribute to explain in a way that is almost rational. (Note that this interpretation is disputed however).

Now, what about Kenyans in the White House?

Among the many crazy social movements that make up the rich tapestry of fringe politics in America, the Birthers’ movement is probably the craziest...

Details: Category: Pascal's blog; Published on Monday, 21 February 2011 23:00

I do not know if many scholars of religion still believe in gods or spirits, but I know that a great many of them believe in the existence of religion itself - that is, believe that the term "religion" is a useful category, that there is such a thing as religion out there in the world, that the project of "explaining religion" is a valid scientific project. Naturally, many of the scholars in question will also say that religion is a many splendored thing, that there are vast differences among the varieties of religious belief and behavior. Yet they assume that, underlying the diversity, there is enough of a common set of phenomena that a "theory of religion" is needed if not already available.

One might think this unfortunate and obdurate tendency to believe in the scholarly equivalent of unicorns is chiefly confined to theologians or other marginal scholars. That is not the case. Indeed, quite a lot of people these days argue for a "scientific explanation of religion". In preparation for this they gather the best and most up-to-date scientific gear, from genetics and evolutionary biology to, inevitably, neuro-imaging.

I applaud the use of such tools in general and deplore it all the more in this particularly futile pursuit. mvet3

Fang epic recitation - a matter of "religion"?

There really is no such thing as "religion". Most people who live in modern societies think that there is such a thing out there as "religion", meaning a kind of social and cognitive package that includes views about supernatural agency (gods and suchlike), notions of morality, particular rituals and sometimes particular experiences, as well as membership in a particular community of believers and the constitution of specific organizations (castes of prests, churches, etc.). All this, as I said, is thought to be a "package", where each element makes sense in relation to the others, given a coherent and explicit doctrine. Indeed, this is the way most major "religions" – Islam, Hinduism for instance – are presented to us, the way their institutional personnel, many scholars and most believers think about them.

Details: Category: Pascal's blog; Published on Wednesday, 02 February 2011 07:52

Everyone likes to bash Homo œconomicus - not one stone was left uncast at the poor chap. Now, don't get me wrong, I enjoy a good stoning just as much as the next religious fanatic, but this may be a case in which we executed the right fellow for the wrong reasons.

ScroogeFirst Most people argued that Homo oeconomicus (henceforth HE), as described in economics textbooks, was way too smart for his own good. He had complete information and all the computing power required to hold that information; he also had the cognitive capacities to derive valid inferences from all that information, to ignore all trivial or irrelevant inferences, and was able to do all that instantaneously; he was dealing with scarcity but these tremendous computational feats were essentially free.

This was clearly pushing it. To peg him down a notch, many people pointed out that actual economic agents are rather more limited. They do not have full rationality but some form of "bounded rationality". They are swayed by biases and heuristics in situations of uncertainty. Behavioral economics suggested that in many cases they simply ignore their own interest and are motivated by norms of fairness and moral sentiments (although this last point may be misleading, see comments by Nicolas Baumard).

This is all wrong, wrong, wrong. The problem with HE is not that he is too smart - but that he lacks smart instincts. It is not that he is super-human, but that he is infra-cognitive. To explain economic behaviour, we need a model of human beings that is more sophisticated than HE, not less.

It would take a whole book or series of books and articles to justify this - and I expect that these books are being written as we speak, as these are fairly simple points - but here are two illustrations, admittedly far from standard market processes, but clearly relevant to economic theory.

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

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

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

LIncolnWoman2

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

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

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

Details: Category: Pascal's blog; Published on Thursday, 14 January 2010 09:02

High Culture: Da Vinci's Last Supper (as seen in The Da Vinci Code).

We cognitive anthropologists deal with “culture” in the broad sense of distributed mental representations widespread in a social group (and many of us don’t really believe that the terms “culture” or “cultural” pick up a natural kind of representations - but that will be the topic of another post). We do not usually have much time for “culture” in the elevated sense of high culture - the sense usually associated with the names of Matthew Arnold or TS Eliot, among others.

But we should pay some attention, perhaps. True, high culture does not occur in all human societies, it is a minority pursuit wherever it does, and there may be more important problems for cognitive anthropology to solve. But it is interesting nonetheless. Wherein lies the difference between the high and low registers? Is there any cultural variation in that difference? How does it translate in terms of cognitive processes?

We academics and other literate types are often misguided in our approach to this, as we compare the best examples of high culture with the worst of the low. This was recently and vividly brought to my attention by the request of a friend and colleague, that we both read something called The Da Vinci Code, which we would then discuss in various undergraduate classes on literature, myth and history. This turned out to be a Serious Mistake.

Details: Category: The Study of Cognition and Culture Today; Published on Saturday, 09 January 2010 10:07

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.

You can download the PDF presentation of the lecture to watch together with the following video and you can also download the audio of the presentation (.mp3).

Death, where is thy sting ?

Details: Category: Pascal's blog; Published on Monday, 30 November 2009 23:00

I don’t believe any one of you would like to live in a room with a murdered man in the cupboard, however well preserved chemically – even with a sunflower growing out of the top of his head. - John Ruskin

Recently, Dan Sperber alerted us to ancedotal observations of grieving in non-human animals (see blog here - by the way, “anecdotal” is not derogatory here - our observations of grieving in humans are anecdotal too). Are the dead chimp’s compagnons as baffled and shaken by their friend and relative’s death as we would be?

We do not know.

In any case, bereavement in humans is difficult enough to describe and explain. This is an important topic for cognition and culture for many reasons - because it is of obvious interest to all human beings, because it is universal, because it is seemingly framed in such different ways in different places, and because the psychology is not well understood so far.

Abraham crying Sara - Chagall

This used to be a topos for cultural anthropologists, who charted the many similarities in beliefs about death, and even more strikingly, the similarities in people’s ritualization of behaviour around death.

Details: Category: Pascal's blog; Published on Saturday, 11 April 2009 07:20

That is the rather provocative question that Richard Posner asked in a 1980 article that I only recently discovered - and I think should be on the reading list of a decent cognitive anthropology course, as the issues are certainly relevant to understanding the cognitive underpinnings of institutions. The term “primitive” may of course deter some from reading on - but that would be a pity, as nothing in Posner’s analysis hinges on the denizens of that kind of human group being less sophisticated than those of agrarian-state and industrial varieties. “Primitive” here means that some crucial elements of large-scale social organization, like economic, judicial and state institutions, are just not there in many small-scale societies. Understanding social life under such conditions is crucial for an anthropology of institutions.

Social organization and the cost of information
Small-scale human groups share some structural features that anyone who ever took an anthropology course will recognize - as these communities are the mainstay of the classical anthropological literature. Posner lists them as the following:
“Weak government, ascription of rights and duties on the basis of family membership, gift-giving as a fundamental mode of exchange, strict liability for injuries, emphasis on generosity and honor as high ethical norms”
What is the origin of this particular, highly recurrent bundle of features?

Details: Category: Pascal's blog; Published on Wednesday, 01 April 2009 08:17

Call me radical, call me a maverick. Rather than slavishly swallowing the scientific orthodoxy from establishment textbooks, I decided to go back to the original papers. I have identified several embarassing errors of mathematics and physical reasoning in Einstein’s original 1905 paper on the “Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies”, the alleged beginning of “special relativity”, one of the main tenets of standard modern physics (despite its manifest absurdity). Once Einstein’s errors are corrected, we can establish a new foundation for physics that is consistent with commonsense experience, and does not require fancy mathematical tricks. Not surprisingly, I have been thwarted in all my attempts to publish these findings in scientific journals, which is why I have decided to post them on the Internet.

Or rather, I have not, but I know lots of people who have. For some time now, I have been an avid reader and collector of webpages created by crackpot physicists, those marginal self-styled scientists whose foundational, generally revolutionary work is sadly ignored by most established scientists. These are the great heroes, at least in their own eyes, of alternative science. In pre-Internet ages, these people routinely sent sheaves of notes and articles to established physicists and mathematicians, warning them that the papers contained proofs of Goldbach’s conjecture or Fermat’s theorem, or revolutionary models of gravitation and the atom. Scientists would just as routinely consign all this brilliant stuff to the wastepaper basket.

But then a miracle happened - CERN and DARPA created the Internet… and crackpots now all have their webpages! The whole world can benefit from exposure to alternative science.

Not all nuts are good crackpots
There is of course a practically infinite amount of drivel on the net. Only serious crackpots are interesting - and relevant to your common cognitive anthropologist. In my informal ethnography I have ignored many sources of Internet nonsense that are of no relevance to important epistemological questions. I have no time for religious fanatics, for people who find proof of the Bible/Qur’an in particle physics/Fermat’s theorem (or vice-versa), or for New Age crystals, waves, mental energy, spiritual forces, auras, quantum consicousness and hidden dimensions of being. No, the really interesting crackpots are the ones trying to really, seriously do science, because their productions and their failures tells us important things about science itself.

Details: Category: Pascal's blog; Published on Tuesday, 03 March 2009 08:30

In a recent post, Christophe Heintz told us about “institutions that make us smart”. The posting was of great interest by itself, and got us thinking about institutions - our field still has its work cut out if we want to make sense of institutions.

We have all sorts of interesting tools and theories in cognitive anthropology (as that should be the name of our field - see discussion here), but precious little to say about institutions. That is, to put it mildly, rather unfortunate as many social phenomena seem to depend on the interaction between people and their institutions. Cognitive anthropology should be the place to understand why and how people are compelled by institutional arrangements such as money, marriage, law courts, schools and markets. So far, we cannot say we have made great progress in that direction.

Details: Category: Pascal's blog; Published on Monday, 23 February 2009 23:00

This would seem to be the conclusion from Dale Guthrie’s massive The Nature of Paleolithic Art, perhaps the most comprehensive and rigorous study to date of cave paintings and other Stone Age artefacts. Guthrie’s no-nonsense, scientifically rigorous study shatters our most cherished and deeply entrenched beliefs about rock art, demonstrating for instance that most of it was not terribly good, that it was probably not very important to Paleolithic people and to top it off that these awesomne paintings had less to do with metaphysics than with testosterone-fuelled young men’s feverish imaginations.

Gone are the “hunting magic”, “shamanistic revelations”, “fertility cults” and other flights of interpretive fancy that litter most classical discussions of rock art, not to mention more bizarre interpretations in terms of phallic magic or drug-induced ecstasy. Once discarded these fantasies, one can glimpse something much more interesting in cave paintings, to do with youth, sex, hunting and danger.

paleolithicart

On the left: what we generally see of European Paleolithic art - the best samples, to be found in all coffee-table books. Average rock art (on the right)… is often rather average.

Guthrie, a paleozoologist specialized in Arctic mammals (see a National Geographic news item on his work here), also has two hobbies that happen to be crucial in the study of rock art: he is a skilled draughtsman and an experienced big-game hunter.

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?

Nav view search

Navigation

Search

Latest blog posts

Related Sites

Author

Pascal Boyer

Additional information

Latest comments