What it is about women?
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- Pascal Boyer
- Monday, 20 February 2012
- Blog Pascal's blog
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.
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.
What's the point of talking to your child?
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- Alex Cristia
- Saturday, 11 February 2012
- Blog Alex's blog
Incredible! Listening to ‘When I’m 64’ makes you forget your age
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- Olivier Morin
- Monday, 30 January 2012
- Blog Olivier's blog
As an illustration of the power of priming experiments to produce astonishing findings, a recent study shows that people tend to underestimate their age (but not their father’s) after listening to the Beatles’ song « When I’m 64 ». The study was published in Psychological Science.
"We asked 20 University of Pennsylvania undergraduates to listen to either “When I’m Sixty-Four” by The Beatles or “Kalimba.” Then, in an ostensibly unrelated task, they indicated their birth date (mm/dd/ yyyy) and their father’s age. We used father’s age to control for variation in baseline age across participants. An ANCOVA revealed the predicted effect: According to their birth dates, people were nearly a year-and-a-half younger after listening to “When I’m Sixty-Four” (adjusted M = 20.1 years) rather than to “Kalimba” (adjusted M = 21.5 years), F(1, 17) = 4.92, p = .040."
The effect is both statistically significant and fairly important: it really seems that the song induces a downward bias in a subject's estimation of his own age. Incredible? Maybe, but not more so than other priming studies. It has been shown, after all, that subjects primed with words related to old age walk more slowly than others (here); that infants are twice more likely to help an adult spontaneously after they have seen two puppets facing each other (rather than turning their back to each other) (here); that people are more generous when they are holding a cup of hot (versus iced) coffee (here). Strange as they are, those are widely cited results. Yet, the Beatles’ song experiment was not greeted with the same enthusiasm. Why was that?
Read more: Incredible! Listening to ‘When I’m 64’ makes you forget your age
Are humans innately bad social scientists?
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- Nicolas Baumard
- Thursday, 26 January 2012
- Blog Nicolas' Blog
I know, this sounds a bit extreme. How can the ability to do (bad) social science be influenced by our genes? Well, quite easily if you carefully read Robert Trivers’ last book (see reviews in NYT Nature, Science). Indeed, his book is about our innate tendency for self-deception. Here is the blurb:
Whether it’s in a cockpit at takeoff or the planning of an offensive war, a romantic relationship or a dispute at the office, there are many opportunities to lie and self-deceive—but deceit and self-deception carry the costs of being alienated from reality and can lead
In his bold new work, prominent biological theorist Robert Trivers unflinchingly argues that self-deception evolved in the service of deceit—the better to fool others. We do it for biological reasons—in order to help us survive and procreate. From viruses mimicking host behavior to humans misremembering (sometimes intentionally) the details of a quarrel, science has proven that the deceptive one can always outwit the masses.todisaster. So why does deception play such a prominent role in our everyday lives? In short, why do we deceive?
Among all the fascinating consequences of the evolution of self-deception – false memory, parents-offspring conflict, space disasters – one is of particular interest for us here at the ICCI. It is our innate propensity to do bad social science.
Twelve Lessons (Most of Which I Learned the Hard Way) for Evolutionary Psychologists
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- Dan Fessler
- Friday, 20 January 2012
- Blog Daniel Fessler's blog
As an undergraduate, most of the professors in the Anthropology Department at my university practiced psychological anthropology, a subfield of sociocultural anthropology that combines theories from various branches of psychology with the study of culture. I decided that I was going to be a psychological anthropologist, and I continued on at the same university, with the same professors, for my graduate degrees. Although I was confident that, to understand human behavior, it was necessary to investigate the interaction of mind and culture, I nevertheless became increasingly dissatisfied with psychological anthropology, which lacks an overarching theory from which to derive hypotheses, and which often eschews hypothesis testing in favor of description and interpretation. Anthropologists usually emphasize the differences between people in different societies, yet, during my doctoral field research, I was impressed by the underlying universalities in human emotions. I began thinking more about human evolution, and, with guidance from several primatologists, I gradually began to invent my own version of evolutionary psychology. I was unaware that such a discipline was already emerging – indeed, many of my ‘new’ ideas had already been formulated more clearly by others. It was a revelation when I attended my first meeting of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, and discovered a whole field devoted to my area of interest.
Read more: Twelve Lessons (Most of Which I Learned the Hard Way) for Evolutionary Psychologists
Blogs from ICCI contributors
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- Olivier Morin
- Wednesday, 11 January 2012
- Blog Olivier's blog
ICCI contributors also blog elsewhere. I am happy to recommend two new blogs: Hugo Mercier's Social by Design on Psychology Today is devoted to popularizing his and Sperber's argumentative theory of reasoning. It will teach you the truth about gulliblity (trust me). Simon Barthelmé's Dahtah will enchant statisticians, pop-psychology debunkers, and anyone who is tired of the Mismeasure of Man. One excellent post laments the use that is being made of cognitive science to blame the problems of the poor on bad decision-making.
Why are some languages more regular than others?
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- Dan Sperber
- Sunday, 01 January 2012
- Blog Dan's blog
Many years ago, I did anthropological fieldwork among the Dorze of Southern Ethiopia. Since no grammar of the Dorze language was available, I had to find out what were its basic morphological and syntactic rules. The good news was that once I had identified a rule, I could apply it across the board: there were hardly any exceptions. From this point of view, Dorze stood in sharp contrast with Amharic, the dominant language of then imperial Ethiopia. Amharic (like English) is a language with many irregularities. Dorze regularity was found not only at the morphological level, but also at the phonological level. The many words that had been borrowed from Amharic into Dorze had all, except for the most recent ones, acquired fully-regular dorze phonology.
Why are some languages quite regular and others not? I remember posing the question to the historical linguist Robert Hertzron, whom I met at the time in Addis Ababa. It is, he suggested, because, in the process of language acquisition, children tend spontaneously to over-regularize. They apply any rule they have acquired to all possible instances (in English, for instance, they may over-generalize the ordinary rule for past tense and say “he goed” instead of “he went”). In societies where adults correct children, these mistaken regularization are suppressed and irregularities are maintained; in societies where adults leave children alone in this respect, irregularities are less stable, and the language tends to be more regular. Gary Marcus et al. in their monograph on “Overregularization in language acquisition” (1992) quote Jill de Villiers half-joking: "Leave children alone and they'd tidy up the English language."
The scope-severity paradox
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- Anikó Sebestény
- Sunday, 30 October 2011
- Blog Anikó's blog
Do criminals deserve a less severe punishment if they harmed more people ?
Most people would almost certainly answer "no". Of course: punishment should be sensitive to the severity of the crime. That's what we usually think.
Yet in a compelling paper published in Social Psychological and Personality Science in August 2010, Loran F. Nordgren and Mary-Hunter Morris McDonnell found that increasing the number of people victimized by a crime actually decreases the perceived severity of that crime and leads people to recommend less punishment.
The scope-severity paradox presented in the article is indeed astonishing. The paper is also exemplary in how beautifully it combines lab experiments and analysis of real-world data.
Atheist clergymen and belief in belief
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- Helen De Cruz
- Saturday, 22 October 2011
- Blog Helen De Cruz's blog
A while ago, Dan Sperber blogged about research by Daniel Dennett and Linda LaScola on atheist clergymen. Their paper, which is available in open access here, provides a fascinating qualitative study on atheist clergymen from various denominations, all of whom were anonymousmy interviewed about their doubts and loss of religious belief. If found out they risked losing their job at the very least, and being expelled from the religious community that had been their home for so long. Yet, many of them expressed moral qualms about not coming out: was their silence a form of hypocricy, or was it all for the best?
Could Christian atheism rekindle an interest in religion?
"I’m where I am because I need the job still. If I had an alternative, a comfortable paying job, something I was interested in doing, and a move that wouldn’t destroy my family, that’s where I’d go. Because I do feel kind of hypocritical." (Dennett & Lascola 2010, p. 137)
An epidemiology-of-representations solution to a WWII shipwreck mystery
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- Dan Sperber
- Sunday, 16 October 2011
- Blog Dan's blog
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The Australian Cruiser HAMS Sidney
After a shameful lull in the activities of the ICCI (Sorry, folks!), we need something sensational – something, say, like Urbain Le Verrier’s famous conjecture that there had to be a yet unknown planet and his calculation of the location of Neptune that led to its actual sighting in 1846. Well, my story is not quite as sensational but I hope it will kick start a return to ICCI full speed. It involves two psychologists, John Dunn and Kim Kirsner, using cognitive and mathematical analyses of old testimonies to locate a German and an Australian warship that, in 1941, had been engaged in a firefight somewhere off the west coast of Australia and had both sunk. While none of the 645 men onboard the Australian HMAS Sydney survived, 317 sailors from the German cruiser Kormoran did, were picked up by the Australian navy, and interrogated. About 70 of them gave some indications of the location of the event. The locations they indicated however were spread out over hundreds of miles. Even assuming that the prisoners were not trying to deceive their captors, their testimonies seemed impossible to exploit.
Read more: An epidemiology-of-representations solution to a WWII shipwreck mystery
Why are human beings so interested in explaining misfortune?
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- Pascal Boyer
- Friday, 12 August 2011
- Blog Pascal's blog
(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
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- Pascal Boyer
- Sunday, 07 August 2011
- Blog Pascal's blog
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
Snipe hunters of preys with low epistemic vigilance
- Details
- Radu Umbres
- Saturday, 02 July 2011
- Blog Radu Umbres' blog
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
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- Nicolas Baumard
- Friday, 24 June 2011
- Blog Nicolas' Blog
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.
Adam Smith (1723-1790) on mirror neurons and empathy
- Details
- Nicolas Baumard
- Thursday, 23 June 2011
- Blog Nicolas' Blog
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
- Nicolas Baumard
- Wednesday, 22 June 2011
- Blog Nicolas' Blog
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
- Nicolas Baumard
- Tuesday, 21 June 2011
- Blog Nicolas' Blog
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
- Nicolas Baumard
- Monday, 20 June 2011
- Blog Nicolas' Blog
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
- Nicolas Baumard
- Sunday, 19 June 2011
- Blog Nicolas' Blog
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.
Fast lemons and intuitive beliefs
- Details
- Ophelia Deroy
- Monday, 06 June 2011
- Blog Ophelia's blog
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?
Offensive inanity in the name of evolutionary psychology
- Details
- ICCI Team
- Friday, 03 June 2011
- Blog ICCI blog
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
- Helen De Cruz
- Tuesday, 24 May 2011
- Blog Helen De Cruz's blog
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''.
Do people ever engage in “magical thinking” ?
- Details
- Pascal Boyer
- Thursday, 19 May 2011
- Blog Pascal's blog
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?
David Hume, the anthropologist, born May 7, 1711
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- Dan Sperber
- Friday, 06 May 2011
- Blog Dan's blog
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.
Belief ascription in infants and children: the puzzle
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- Pierre Jacob
- Tuesday, 19 April 2011
- Blog Pierre Jacob's blog
In several recent papers on mindreading and belief-ascription, Ian Apperly and his colleagues have reported evidence suggesting that the process whereby human adults ascribe false beliefs to others is not automatic. They have further argued that efficiency and flexibility make competing and inconsistent demands on the ability of human adults to reason about others’ beliefs. To solve this tension, they have argued for the view that there are two (not one) systems of belief-ascription: an efficient but inflexible system, shared by human infants and adults, underlies the ascription of belief-like states and a flexible but inefficient system (only present in adults) underlies the ascription of genuine beliefs. If Apperly and his colleagues are right, then this two-systems model might help solve a fundamental puzzle in the developmental psychological study of belief-ascription in human children. Are they?
Read more: Belief ascription in infants and children: the puzzle
What the judge ate for breakfast
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- Dan Sperber
- Wednesday, 13 April 2011
- Blog Dan's blog
How do people make decision? One view is that they arrive at their decisions by reasoning, using as premises their beliefs and desires. Another view is that people’s beliefs, desires, and decisions are largely determined by internalized cultural patterns. Particularly relevant to both approaches are judicial decisions, since judges are supposed to make decisions that apply cultural patterns, viz. laws, to specific cases. How much are their decisions really a matter of reasoning? How much are they quasi-automatic applications of internalized patterns? Or do yet other factors, that are neither a matter of rational choice nor a matter of internalized patterns, affect judicial decisions?
In an article forthcoming in PNAS, “Extraneous factors in judicial decisions” (available here), Shai Danziger, Jonathan Levav, and Liora Avnaim-Pesso present evidence highly relevant to answering this question. They begin:
“Does the outcome of legal cases depend solely on laws and facts? Legal formalism holds that judges apply legal reasons to the facts of a case in a rational, mechanical, and deliberative manner. An alternative view of the law — encapsulated in the highly influential 20th century legal realist movement — is rooted in the observation of US Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes that “ the life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience ”. Realists argue that the rational application of legal reasons does not sufficiently explain judicial decisions and that psychological, political, and social factors influence rulings as well. The realist view is commonly caricaturized by the trope that justice is “what the judge ate for breakfast ”. We empirically test this caricature in the context of sequences of parole decisions made by experienced judges…”
Well, here are the striking results:
If "Religion is natural", what about atheism?
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- Helen De Cruz
- Monday, 04 April 2011
- Blog Helen De Cruz's blog
In 'cognition and culture' circles, it is almost a matter of common wisdom, it seems, to claim that religious belief is natural, whereas atheism, physicalism and other forms of unbelief are unnatural (see for example this paper by Robert McCauley). Sociologist Rodney Stark has announced the death of secularism, and the thesis that religious belief is gradually making way for an age of reason, originally proposed by the architects of the Enlightenment, has been laid to rest as a case of wishful thinking and of old-fashioned cultural evolutionism. Religion is a panhuman cultural phenomenon, which can be materially attested in the form of burials and representations of supernatural agents since least 50 000 years ago. Cognitive scientists of religion argue that religious beliefs are natural: modes of reasoning that are characteristic of religious belief appear spontaneously in young children, without explicit instruction. Examples include an intuitive mind/body dualism (the fact that we have different inference systems about minds and bodies, proposed by Paul Bloom); intuitive afterlife beliefs (the intuition that minds continue to exist after the physical death of the person, due to Jesse Bering) and intuitive creationism (understanding the world in teleological terms and as a product of intentional design, proposed by Deborah Kelemen).
However, the persistence and relatively wide cultural spread of atheism and other forms of unbelief may present a challenge to this received picture of the naturalness of religion. In many secular nations, the number of people who denote themselves as without religious affiliation is on the rise. A recent mathematical model published online on ArXiv indicates that, if current trends continue, religion will soon go extinct in several of these nations. Of course, being without religious affiliation does not always equate with unbelief, but it does seem to suggest a trend of decreased religiosity.
Last year, in a special issue of Religion, Justin Barrett argued that atheism does not defeat the "naturalness of religion" thesis...
Pointing among the Yucatec Maya. A reply to Emmanuel Dupoux
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- Olivier Le Guen
- Tuesday, 29 March 2011
- Blog Olivier Le Guen's blog
(This
was originally posted as a comment but it seem to us so interesting and relevant that we have asked Olivier Le Guen to revise it into a blog post)
In a recent post, Emmanuel Dupoux asked:
“- Is human pointing avoidance uniform across cultures? Could anyone point to cross-cultural studies, or ask their informants about what are the pointing taboos in their cultures?
- Could it be that pointing avoidance is linked to the fact that in a communicative situation, the target of pointing is reduced to the status of an object, and it may be considered inappropriate or rude to reduce, even implicitly, humans to mere objects? Or is pointing avoidance linked to embarrassment or fear to being brought into the focus of attention?”
I work with Yucatec Maya speakers in Quintana Roo (Mexico) among whom here is a term for pointing, túuch’ub from the verb tuch’ ‘raise over (one’s hand).’ There pointing to people is unproblematic. I don’t think the considerations Emmanuel Dupoux mentioned are involved. Two factors are relevant here, as far as I can tell: (1) conception of space and place/person reference and (2) linguistic features of the pronominal system in Yucatec Maya.
Read more: Pointing among the Yucatec Maya. A reply to Emmanuel Dupoux
False choice: Is the underrepresentation of women in science by choice or by discrimination?
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- Davie Yoon
- Friday, 25 March 2011
- Blog Davie Yoon's blog
This post is about Ceci and William’s PNAS article, Understanding current causes of women’s underrepresentation in science, which has spawned a particular kind of narrative -- one that has been around for a while, but which now bears the imprint of evidence. This narrative is captured in a recent headline from ScienceDaily: "Choices -- not discrimination -- determine success for women scientists, experts argue." The implication is that if only women would stop complaining about their feelings of “isolation, dissatisfaction and discrimination” (p. 3160), we could pay attention to important problems that are real and not imaginary.
Ceci & Williams 2011, mostly in their own words
Ceci & William’s goal is to find out whether there is currently sex discrimination in three important areas: (1) manuscript reviewing, (2) grant reviewing, and (3) interviewing/hiring. “Current” means within the last 20 years. They make a strong case that while such discrimination may have taken place in the past, there is no evidence of discrimination against women in current large, carefully analyzed studies of real world reviewing and hiring data. On p.3161, Ceci & Williams conclude that “past strategies to remediate women’s underrepresentation can be viewed as a success story; however, continuing to advocate strategies successful in the past to combat shortages of women in math-based fields today mistakes the current causes of women’s underrepresentation.”
Still, it is true that men come out ahead of women in these three areas even in the last 20 years. Ceci & Williams point out, however, that these differences go away if you control for institution, teaching load, funding, and research assistance. “A key issue", they say, "separable from sex discrimination, is why women occupy positions providing fewer resources and what can be done about this situation. Some of these choices are freely made; others are constrained and should be changed.” And (in the supplementary text) “When women PhD recipients choose not to apply for tenure-track posts, their refusal represents a choice, one that many of their male and many of their female colleagues do not make.”
Some grounds for skepticism
Here are just a few of many reasons to be skeptical of Ceci & Williams' claim that they have definitely debunked the existence of sex discrimination in grant/manuscript reviewing, and interviewing/hiring...
Birthers, Obama, and conflicting intuitions
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- Pascal Boyer
- Tuesday, 22 March 2011
- Blog Pascal's blog
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...
Cultural relativism: Another victim of Arab revolutions?
- Details
- Nicolas Baumard
- Tuesday, 08 March 2011
- Blog Nicolas' Blog
As we are watching the fall of dictators and the wind of liberty sweeping in the Arab world, we may not have noticed another victim of this “springtime of Arab people”, namely the individualistic/collectivistic divide. In psychology, many scientists have adopted a kind of culturalism according to which the reason people behave differently across culture because of the “culture” in which they have grown up: People are raised in a particular culture and they come to adopt the particular attitudes and beliefs of their parents, teachers and elders. This explains why people behave differently in different places. For instance, psychologists have often emphasized that some cultures are more individualistic while others are more collectivist and other similar dichotomies have been put forward: sociocentric vs. egocentric, independent vs. interdependent, bounded vs. unbounded.
Tahrir Square, February 10, 2011
Whatever the terms, the central idea in the individualistic framework is that the person is an autonomous agent, whereas the central idea in the collectivist framework is that the group is an interconnected and interdependent network of relationships. In the former, personal goals are primary; in the latter, shared goals are primary.
As Turiel (who is critical of this approach) puts it:
“A core feature of individualistic cultures (usually western ones) is that the highest value is accorded to the person as detached from others and as independent from the social order. People are therefore oriented to self-reliance, independence, and resistance to social pressure for conformity and obedience to authority. By contrast, collectivistic cultures (usually non western ones) are oriented to traditions, duty, obedience to authority, interdependence and social harmony; hierarchy, status and role distinction predominate.”
In fact, it has been argued that this culturalistic dichotomy works pretty well: Westerners are individualistic and that explains why free market and democracy flourishes in the West, whereas the rest of the world is more collectivistic, supporting things like “Asian values” and “Muslim ethos”.
Well, but then, what about Tunisia and Egypt? How to explain their transformation overnight? How could collectivistic people possibly embrace such individualistic ideas as freedom and human rights? How can they rebel against traditional norms?
Read more: Cultural relativism: Another victim of Arab revolutions?
More Articles...
- What is anthropology about?
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- Children as scientists
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- Learning suicide in Sri Lanka, part II: suicide as separation
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- Denis Dutton (1944-2010)
- The evolutionary and cognitive basis of the cultural success of garbage trucks among western toddlers
- "Neurobabble" vs Real Science
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- Where good ideas come from
- Video games as applied anthropology
- Picture of the week: The colors of the Web
- Learning suicide in Sri Lanka
- Picture of the week: West African Masquerade by Phyllis Galembo
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Patriarchy is also supported by women
Religion and Demography
Patriarchy as a common good
It's all about fairness!
A range of method to police morality
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And what about motherese?
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