Bourgeois Dignity: what doesn't explain the industrial revolution
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- Hugo Mercier
- Sunday, 12 December 2010
- Blog Hugo's blog
Deirdre McCloskey is a very unorthodox economist. Even though she did a lot of classical work on the history of the industrial revolution in England, she is best known for her critical examination of the 'rhetoric' of economics. A good example of her attacks can be found in her latest book on that issue (The Cult of Statistical Significance, with Stephen Ziliak), in which she criticizes the slippery use of 'significance' in statistics (see this post). But McCloskey has now engaged in an even larger enterprise: explaining the unprecedented economic growth observed over the last two centuries. The ambition of the project is reflected in the sheer volume of the treatment: six books, one published in 2006 (The Bourgeois Virtues), one that just came out (Bourgeois Dignity – that is briefly reviewed here), one available in draft form (The Bourgeois Revaluation), and three more that should appear over the next few years. McCloskey's main these is that the period of growth we have experienced was due to a shift in the rhetoric about bourgeois values.
Read more: Bourgeois Dignity: what doesn't explain the industrial revolution
Where good ideas come from
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- Hugo Mercier
- Sunday, 21 November 2010
- Blog Hugo's blog
Following up on the news of a few days earlier about the role of different network structures in the spread of new ideas, it's worth mentioning the new Steven Johnson book on a related topic: Where good ideas come from. Johnson sets out to dispel the myth of the lone inventor whose main motivation would be the financial benefits derived from her creativity. Instead, he suggests that most inventions are the result of a kind of undirected cooperation -- not a group of people purposively pursuing an idea, but several groups working on slightly different things that add up to a significant discovery in the end. Moreover, profit seems to be a motive only in a minority of case, despite the 'progress' made in copyright and patent law over the course of the 20th century.
Paul Rozin on what psychologists should study
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- Hugo Mercier
- Wednesday, 28 July 2010
- Blog Hugo's blog
Paul Rozin, one of the founding fathers of cognition-and-culture studies, is a psychologist with a rich set of interests. Even though he’s often known for his work on food, and disgust in particular (cockroach in your drink anyone?), the list of his current projects alone would make many a psychological career look narrowly focused. However, this post will not dwell on the value of having such diverse interests, but on the value for psychology of adopting a richer set of methodologies. 
In an insightful series of articles (see below), Rozin highlights some of the shortcomings of modern psychology (while his focus is primarily on social psychology, his remarks apply equally well to most of cognitive psychology). One of these shortcomings is the failure to sufficiently take into account—and study—cultural variability. Even the bulk of cross-cultural psychology only compares undergrads across countries (usually a ‘Western’ sample and an ‘Eastern’ sample). But Rozin draws our attention to the even less forgivable paucity of data regarding presumably less stark cultural variations along ethnic, religious, political or social lines. Understandably, for most Western researchers, a trip to Shanghai or Kyoto to carry out an experiment will be more attractive than one to, say, inner-city Detroit (I plead guilty here). But there also seems to be a publication bias: cross-cultural psychology journals are likely to publish more easily a comparative study of Chinese and American undergraduates rather than one comparing, say, blue and white collar workers in Philadelphia (coda: a publication bias nearly automatically translates into a grant bias which further compounds the problem). But I will not belabor this point, as the lack of cultural variability in the samples of psychologists has already been discussed on this blog.
Communication, punishment and common pool resources
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- Hugo Mercier
- Sunday, 06 June 2010
- Blog Hugo's blog
Economic games have been discussed several times on this blog. Their extreme simplicity makes them attractive tools for an experimental approach, but it also makes them all too perfect examples of lack of naturalness and ecological validity. Still many would argue that, together with formal modelling, these games have permitted important theoretical advances and demonstrated for instance that punishment of defectors plays a crucial role in explaining human cooperation. But is it really so? How reliable are the insights gained from simple games such as the ultimatum of the common good games, when in real life, the dilemma people are faced with are much more complex, both in terms of the range of choices available, and the dynamics of interaction over time? Elinor Ostrom, the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics (which we hailed at the time), is uniquely well placed to understand the complexity of the dilemma that people face when they have to solve real common goods problems, having studied many such dilemmas in real life herself. She has been developing new ways to test experimentally participants’ reactions when faced with dilemma that offer more complex problems than most experiments so far, while maintaining an adequate degree of control. The results from one of these experimental studies have recently been published in an article in Science (328: 613-617): "Lab Experiments for the Study of Social-Ecological Systems" by Marco A. Janssen, Robert Holahan, Allen Lee, Elinor Ostrom. They put in perspective the more standard approaches and strongly suggest rethinking some of their conclusions.
A screen shot of the experimental environment of the study of Janssen et al. The green star-shaped figures are resource tokens; the circles are avatars of the participants (yellow is participant’s own avatar; blue represents other participants).
Read more: Communication, punishment and common pool resources
The social rationality of footballers
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- Hugo Mercier
- Saturday, 27 March 2010
- Blog Hugo's blog
Are footballers rational? It all depends on what their goals are (no pun intended). We will not be talking here about behavior outside the field, as it's not entirely clear what norms of rationality one should use in this case (as George Best put it: "I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars. The rest I just squandered."). However, when playing, footballers seem to have a very clear incentive: winning the game. After all, the indecent salaries of many professional footballers depend on their team winning as many games as possible. Nowhere is the situation as clear-cut as in penalty kicks. The kicker must put the ball into the nets while the goalkeeper must stop him from achieving his goal, period. Surely, the combination of huge stakes and intensive training should produce optimal behavior on both sides of a penalty kick. This is what Michael Bar-Eli and his colleagues have tried to find out in research reported here.
After having watched hundreds of games (or hundreds of penalty kicks at least), the team was able to compute what was the best strategy, both for the goalkeeper and for the kicker. Let's start with the goalkeeper. He has basically three choices: staying where he is, in the center, or diving to the left or to the right. In the sample of penalty kicks analyzed, his chances of stopping the ball were one out of three if he stayed put (very good odds indeed!), and below 15% if he chose to dive right or left. Is this how goalkeepers behave? Not at all. Even though the best bet is to stay in the center, the goalkeepers only did that in 6% of the penalty kicks. How is such an apparently irrational behavior to be explained?
Can you tell who will win the election in another society just by looking at the faces of the candidates?
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- Hugo Mercier
- Monday, 22 February 2010
- Blog Hugo's blog
Our face tells a lot about us. Well, at least this is what other people seem to think: having seen our face for a few seconds-or even a few milliseconds-they will think that we are more or less attractive - unsurprisingly - but also competent, dominant or trustworthy (e.g. Todorov et al., 2008). And people seem to act on the basis of these evaluations: such inferences will influence judge's verdicts (Zebrowitz & McDonald, 1991) and employers' decisions (Collins & Zebrowitz, 1995). They also seem to play a role in the way we vote. In a series of studies, Alexander Todorov and his colleagues have shown that the evaluations of politicians' faces, even after an exposure as short as one tenth of a second, can often predict their electoral success: those who were rated higher on competence tended to win more races (Willis and Todorov, 2006, available here).
Do such evaluations vary across cultures? This is the subject of a new paper by Nicholas Rule, and Nalini Ambady from Tufts, Reginald B. Adams from Penn State, and Hiroki Ozono, Satoshi Nakashima, Sakiko Yoshikawa, and Motoki Watabe from Kyoto University. They set out to find if people from different societies would pass similar judgments on the faces of people belonging to other groups (Rule et al., 2010, available here).
Who would you vote for? (OK, Palpatin didn't look like that when he was elected...)
Experimental epidemiology: The work of Chip Heath
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- Hugo Mercier
- Monday, 01 February 2010
- Blog Hugo's blog
The aim of the post is to bring to the attention of experimentally minded anthropologists the work of Chip Heath and his collaborators. A professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Heath describes his research as examinining "why certain ideas - ranging from urban legends to folk medical cures, from Chicken Soup for the Soul stories to business strategy myths - survive and prosper in the social marketplace of ideas." Heath has a knack for fun psychology experiments that test broader concepts of cultural transmission. In chronological order, here are some examples from his recent publications--I'll bet that many of you will find stuff that is relevant to your own research or ideas for how to test your own hypotheses.
Read more: Experimental epidemiology: The work of Chip Heath
“I read Playboy for the articles”
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- Hugo Mercier
- Sunday, 15 November 2009
- Blog Hugo's blog
Zoe Chance and Michael Norton have a delightful book chapter on the very creative ways in which people justify their questionable decisions. They report an experiment in which male participants were given a choice between subscriptions to two sport magazines. One covered more sports while the other had more featured articles. More interestingly, it was also mentioned that one of the magazines had a swimsuit edition (cf. figure : it should be noted that I only browsed through covers of swimsuit editions in order to find an illustration for this post). Want to take a guess at which magazine the participants preferred?
Boys being boys, they tended to pick the one with the advertized swimsuit edition, irrespective of its other features. This would hardly make the headlines (it's the reason there are swimsuit editions in the first place). More to the point, people felt compelled to justify their choice in a way that would be more acceptable than "I want to look at hot girls in bikini"...
As a result, when asked how much they valued the features of the two magazines, they tended to say that the feature on which the magazine with the swimsuit edition was stronger was the most important feature-whichever that feature was.The paper is well worth a read because it also provides a concise summary of the experiments documenting the many ways in which people justify their morally dubious decisions.
Outbreak!
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- Hugo Mercier
- Tuesday, 27 October 2009
- Blog Hugo's blog
Hilary Evans and Robert Bartholomew have compiled and "Encyclopedia of Extraordinary Social Behavior". This is quite an impressive endeavour that can be used for scholarly purposes (it is well referenced) and for fun (because people do weird things sometimes). The articles I've read so far have been on the skeptical side (e.g. on the mass hysterias or the Dutch tulip bubble), and so it seems that the this book avoids the dangerous pitfall of using these examples lightly to demonstrate the 'madness of crowds' (or people in general).
An illustration of dancing mania (found here).
Outbreak! The Encyclopedia of Extraordinary Social Behavior by Hilary Evans, Robert E. Bartholomew, Anomalist Books (2009)
The compromise effect or, cross-cultural psychology is messy
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- Hugo Mercier
- Sunday, 06 September 2009
- Blog Hugo's blog
Among the many ‘irrational' effects unearthed by decision making researchers, one has been the focus of a relative wealth of cross-cultural work: the compromise effect. Strictly speaking, the compromise effect stems for an unwarranted shift towards an option when it becomes a compromise option. Imagine you have a choice between two computers that differ significantly only on two attributes:
Computer A. RAM: 3 GB; Hard Drive: 100 GB
Computer B. RAM: 2 GB; Hard Drive: 200 GB
Now imagine that a third computer is added:
Computer C. RAM: 1 GB; Hard Drive: 300 GB
It has been observed that people tend to choose computer B more often when computer C is added (Simonson, 1989). The explanation is that computer B becomes the compromise option, and that choosing the compromise option can be favored for at least two reasons: it might be easier to justify and it might be less likely to be criticized.
Does McCain look like a better candidate in the bottom picture?
One could then formulate a rather straightforward prediction regarding cross-cultural differences. It has been surmised that Easterners show a general preference for options that will not offend anyone and that will preserve social harmony, options that form a "middle-way" (Peng & Nisbett, 1999). Easterners should then favor compromise options,
Read more: The compromise effect or, cross-cultural psychology is messy
The Evolution of God?
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- Hugo Mercier
- Thursday, 09 July 2009
- Blog Hugo's blog
: The Evolution of God
. His main goal is to argue that as religious creeds change though time, they tend to be increasingly inclusive in their moral scope, either that the circle of believer expands or that a greater number of people are deemed worthy of the same moral rules than that used towards other believers. In Non-Zero, Wright was already making a similar, but more general (and maybe more convincing), claim that humans have found more and more ways to interact with their neighbors in a mutually beneficial fashion (non-zero sum games), something that will play an important role in the expansion of the moral circle.Despite his universalistic claims Wright mostly draws from the history of the Abrahamic religions. After a few chapters devoted to the religions of hunter-gatherers and chiefdoms, he focuses on the classical historical sequence: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. There barely is a word, here or there, about Confucianism, Buddhism or even Hinduism. This therefore begs the question of the generalizability of any trend he might have convincingly argued for based on the religions of the Book. This might be even more problematic because he ties in (although this may not be explicit) the evolution towards greater moral inclusiveness with the evolution of monotheism. It would then be easy to draw the conclusion that religions that did not go all the way towards monotheism are somewhat less advanced morally (again, he might very well be reluctant to draw such a conclusion, I am merely pointing out that it is tempting to draw it from his mode of exposition).
Even more problematic is his argument that this religious march towards greater moral inclusiveness can be taken as evidence for the presence of an actual God, or at least some kind of higher purpose.
Cross-cultural differences in argumentation
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- Hugo Mercier
- Tuesday, 02 June 2009
- Blog Hugo's blog
Richard Nisbett and his collaborators have carried out an extensive program of experimental cross-cultural psychology, mostly aimed at establishing differences between the ways of thinking of Easterners and Westerners. Some of the differences they have studied pertain to the domain of argumentation: Easterners are supposed not to be really bothered by contradiction (making arguing tricky) and to frown upon the debates and discussions that threaten social harmony. These claims are based partly on a survey of the anthropological, sociological and historical literature, partly on some experimental results. I have attempted to reinterpret some of these data in order to show that the situation is somewhat more complicated than could be thought at first (for more detail, see my submitted paper). Recent scholarship shows that the ancient Chinese were in fact skilled arguers, and that debates and dissension were rife during both Chinese and Japanese history. The experimental data is also open to weaker reinterpretations, highlighting the commonalities between Eastern and Western style of thoughts, as well as the extreme context-dependency of cognitive mechanisms.
Han Fei, the Chinese Cicero Cicero, the Roman Han Fei
An update on the Pirahã
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- Hugo Mercier
- Sunday, 22 March 2009
- Blog Hugo's blog
The Pirahã are a tribe of Amazonian Indian who have become famous among linguists and psychologists because it has been claimed that they lack a number system (not even a word for one), recursion, and color words (and they seem to be a very happy people despite the absence of Louis Vuitton shops, something I dare not believe).
Dan Everett, an ex-missionary/linguist/anthropologist, is one of the few people to speak their language, and he is responsible for most of the provocative claims about the Pirahã (see for instance this paper in Current Anthropology). A few months back, he published an autobiographical description of life among the Pirahã, accompanied by a popular science account of his discoveries: Don't Sleep There Are Snakes.
Cross-cultural differences in risk taking
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- Hugo Mercier
- Thursday, 26 February 2009
- Blog Hugo's blog
The study of our way of dealing with risky situations (situations that involve potential losses) is one of the cornerstones of the judgment and decision making literature. It is generally taken for granted that the psychological mechanisms underlying our reactions towards risk are universal. As a result, only few cross-cultural studies have been carried out on this topic. One of the exceptions is a nice set of studies by Weber and Hsee comparing the attitudes towards risk of American and Chinese participants (mostly). Though they are not very recent (late 90's), I'm reporting these studies because they illustrate several interesting points.
The first finding is that PRC (Chinese) participants are more risk seeking than American participants (Weber & Hsee, 1998).
The Wisdom of Whores
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- Hugo Mercier
- Monday, 08 December 2008
- Blog Hugo's blog
I realize it may be a bit late, but I'm just discovering the wonderful 'The Wisdom of Whores’ by Elizabeth Pisani (and this is her blog). She's an epidemiologist working on AIDS and the book is full of information on the virus, the way it spreads and the way it is being dealt with. It's (surprisingly given the topic) a very fun read as well as a very informative one and I warmly recommend it. Moreover, it is of relevance to cultural epidemiologists.Cutting and breaking across languages
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- Hugo Mercier
- Wednesday, 03 December 2008
- Blog Hugo's blog
A nice cross-cultural (or cross-linguistic) study appeared in the last Cognition. Asifa Majid, James Boster, and Melissa Bowerman have studied the variations in the use of words for "cutting and breaking" actions across 28 (very) different languages. The principle of the experiment is quite straightforward. Participants are shown video-clips of different actions that they have to describe. It is then possible to study the different verbs and constructions that are used, and to observe the categories into which actions are thus grouped. This allowed the researchers to show that despite a great variety of verbal constructions, some deep commonalities can be found in the underlying categorizations. The abstract and some short comments below the fold.
A cutting event NOT used in the study
(and misleadingly described as a 'scratch' by its victim).
(You can enjoy the video here)
Cold and warm relationships: A universal metaphor?
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- Hugo Mercier
- Thursday, 06 November 2008
- Blog Hugo's blog
The first, by Zhong and Leonardelly, shows that feelings of social exclusion can literally make you feel cold, while the second, by Williams and Bargh, shows that feelings of warmth make you like people and be nice to them (well, slightly more so). Below are the abstracts and some questions to our fellow anthropologists. (You can find an ungated version of the first paper here).
Read more: Cold and warm relationships: A universal metaphor?
The natural order of events
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- Hugo Mercier
- Tuesday, 23 September 2008
- Blog Hugo's blog
An interesting paper in the last PNAS. Susan Goldin-Meadow and her colleagues have demonstrated that speakers from very different language groups all process the order of events in a similar way in non-linguistic tasks. A point against the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
The abstract says it all:
gestural languages. The findings provide evidence for a natural order that we impose on events when describing and reconstructing them nonverbally and exploit when constructing language anew."
The spontaneous expression of pride and shame
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- Hugo Mercier
- Wednesday, 13 August 2008
- Blog Hugo's blog
The present research examined whether the recognizable nonverbal expressions associated with pride and shame may be biologically innate behavioral responses to success and failure. Specifically, we tested whether sighted, blind, and congenitally blind individuals across cultures spontaneously display pride and shame behaviors in response to the same success and failure situations—victory and defeat at the Olympic or Paralympic Games. Results showed that sighted, blind, and congenitally blind individuals from >30 nations displayed the behaviors associated with the prototypical pride expression in response to success. Sighted, blind, and congenitally blind individuals from most cultures also displayed behaviors associated with shame in response to failure. However, culture moderated the shame response among sighted athletes: it was less pronounced among individuals from highly individualistic, self-expression-valuing cultures, primarily in North America and West Eurasia. Given that congenitally blind individuals across cultures showed the shame response to failure, findings overall are consistent with the suggestion that the behavioral expressions associated with both shame and pride are likely to be innate, but the shame display may be intentionally inhibited by some sighted individuals in accordance with cultural norms.
From a paper in the early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (here is an open version).
Jessica L. Tracy and David Matsumoto
The spontaneous expression of pride and shame: Evidence for biologically innate nonverbal displays
PNAS doi:10.1073/pnas.0802686105
(HT: Mind Hacks)
Cumulative cultural evolution in the lab
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- Hugo Mercier
- Thursday, 07 August 2008
- Blog Hugo's blog
Simon Kirby, Hannah Cornish, and Kenny Smith
Cumulative cultural evolution in the laboratory: An experimental approach to the origins of structure in human language. PNAS 2008 105:10681-10686
Culture and the Brain
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- Hugo Mercier
- Tuesday, 22 July 2008
- Blog Hugo's blog
In the last Nature Reviews Neuroscience, a paper reviewing the work showing cultural differences in brain activation. I'm afraid there's no non-gated version, but here's the abstract:
Our brains and minds are shaped by our experiences, which mainly occur in the context of the culture in which we develop and live. Although psychologists have provided abundant evidence for diversity of human cognition and behaviour across cultures, the question of whether the neural correlates of human cognition are also culture-dependent is often not considered by neuroscientists. However, recent transcultural neuroimaging studies have demonstrated that one’s cultural background can influence the neural activity that underlies both high- and low-level cognitive functions. The findings provide a novel approach by which to distinguish culture-sensitive from culture-invariant neural mechanisms of human cognition.
Another possible alternative explanation for IFT
What's wrong with "intentional stance"?
Possible alternative explanation for IFT
Crushing a dispute with a smile (ahem, a bared-teeth display)
Impartial intervention, or pragmatic intervention?
Not fairness, not mutual interest ... cognitive dissonance maybe
A couple of references
Emotions as regulators of social behavior
Women are not allowed by social group to own their bodies
"Rigtheous" women and "promiscuous" men