Experimental demonstration of cultural attitudes to punishment?

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Category: Nicolas' Blog

Published on Tuesday, 06 October 2009 09:41

Written by Nicolas Baumard

In a pairwise interaction, an individual who uses costly punishment must pay a cost in order that the opponent incurs a cost. It has been argued that individuals will behave more cooperatively if they know that their opponent has the option of using costly punishment. We examined this hypothesis by conducting two repeated two-player Prisoner's Dilemma experiments, that differed in their payoffs associated to cooperation, with university students from Beijing as participants. In these experiments, the level of cooperation either stayed the same or actually decreased when compared with the control experiments in which costly punishment was not an option. We argue that this result is likely due to differences in cultural attitudes to cooperation and punishment based on similar experiments with university students from Boston that found cooperation did increase with costly punishment.

The study replicates an earlier finding in which the results were pretty clear: The more you punish your partner the more likely you are to end up with nothing... As Gandhi was said to put it, "an eye for an eye will make the world go blind"...

Read more: Experimental demonstration of cultural attitudes to punishment?

Nick Enfield reviews Atran and Medin's The Native Mind and the Construction of Nature

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Category: Nick Enfield's blog

Published on Monday, 05 October 2009 10:26

Written by Nick Enfield

(We have asked Nick Enfield to share with us and thus open to discussion his review of The Native Mind and the Cultural Construction of Nature by Scott Atran and Douglas Medin, [MIT Press, 2008] published in the TLS, September 18).

One success of twentieth century anthropology was to debunk the myth of primitive thought. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the sophisticated cognition of non-literate, ‘traditional' people than their knowledge and understanding of the biological world. Explorers and other intrepid travellers have known this for centuries, but it was in the 1950s that the wonder of indigenous peoples' knowledge of nature became a core interest of anthropological science. Harold Conklin's seminal Yale doctorate entitled ‘The relation of Hanunóo culture to the plant world' was based on extended fieldwork in the Philippines with a tribe of forest-dwelling traditional cultivators. Their knowledge of local plant life was not only vastly superior to the average modern European's, but their classification turned out to have significant similarities with what is known of biological taxonomy from modern science. A rich tradition of ethnobiological research on traditional cultures around the world has since discovered principles underlying some of humans' most fundamental cognitive capacities. Through this, we now know a good deal about how the human mind categorizes, organizes, and exploits large bodies of knowledge such as those encoded in biological taxonomy.

Why is the biological knowledge of traditional societies so remarkable to an educated westerner? The literature is littered with awestruck descriptions of the fieldworker's sense of wonder at what villagers know. Ask a traditional cultivator to name as many tree species as he can, and the list will go on and on and on, literally into the hundreds. And it is more than a mere list of names: he will also have a rich body of knowledge about the functions of different trees, and their ecological interrelations with other plants and animals. One might wonder how they do it, but the real question is: How is it that we can't do it? The average educated westerner knows as much about nature as a Hanunóo tribesman is likely to know about computer software. Atran and Medin's book opens with this unsettling fact. When the authors ask their US university students to name all the trees they know, these young people are at a loss. Here is the response of a Northwestern Honours student: Oak, pine, spruce, ... cherry ... (giggle) evergreen,... Christmas tree, is that a kind of tree? ... God what's the average here? Needless to say, it is not merely an inability to name the trees, but also to say anything sensible about their functions or ecological roles. Compare this to the richly annotated lists of up to 500 species readily elicited from members of the least technologically advanced and least formally educated small-scale traditional cultivator societies.

Read more: Nick Enfield reviews Atran and Medin's The Native Mind and the Construction of Nature

Gloria Origgi reviews Jon Elster's "Le désintéressement"

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Category: Gloria's blog

Published on Thursday, 01 October 2009 14:32

Written by Gloria Origgi

(Jon Elster has just published (in French) the first volume of a trilogy: Le désintéressement : Traité critique de l'homme économique Tome 1 (Paris, Le Seuil, 2009). We have asked Gloria Origgi to review it for us.)

In one of his perfect narratives, Heinrich Von Kleist tells the sad story of two secret lovers separated and condemned to death just before the earthquake that was to destroy
Santiago de Chile in 1647. Having miraculously survived, they enjoy for a few days the mercy of an enchanted social atmosphere. Their judges and executioners, transformed by the tragedy and the ensuing chaos, multiply gestures of altruism and generosity. The blissful mood persists for a short while, but soon the rules and norms of civil life are being reinstated and a Mass is celebrated during which the crime of the two poor lovers is denounced as the cause of all the evil. The lovers, unable to escape the fury of collective condemnation, are clubbed to death. The reciprocal altruism and the disinterested society that the cataclysm had spawned turns out to be ephemeral, unnatural, as if the ferocious end were a way to compensate for the uncanny sense of self that the people had experienced when acting in such a disinterested manner.

Jon Elster's latest book (Le désintéressement, Paris, Seuil, 2009, 377 pp.), based on his Collège de France lectures in 2006-2007, discusses the very possibility of disinterested action. Is it possible for a human being to act in a truly disinterested manner? Do disinterested actions have a psychological unity or are they the mere product of circumstances? Is disinterestedness an individual or a collective phenomenon?

Read more: Gloria Origgi reviews Jon Elster's "Le désintéressement"

The Chameleon effect in Capuchin Monkeys

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Category: Nicolas Claidière's blog

Published on Thursday, 17 September 2009 15:26

Written by Nicolas Claidière

Imitation, as you probably know, has received considerable attention during the past 20 years or so because it was first argued that it was a uniquely human psychological mechanism that could partly explain the development of human material culture (see Whiten et al. 2004 for a review with historical perspective). In this long debate, imitation has come to acquire a technical definition: that of learning by observation a novel mean to reach a particular goal. While the discussion of whether non-human animals are able to imitate in this sense is still going on, a recent study by Annika Paukner, Stephen J. Suomi, Elisabetta Visalberghi and Pier F. Ferrari has challenged the human uniqueness of yet another form of imitation: the chameleon effect.

As its name indicate, the chameleon effect (dubbed after the Woody Allen movie Zelig, see movie below) refers to the "nonconscious mimicry of the postures, mannerisms, facial expressions, and other behaviors of one's interaction partners, such that one's behavior passively and unintentionally changes to match that of others in one's current social environment."(Chartrand & Bargh 1999) The chameleon effect is known to influence the social relationship between people: to smoothen relations, increase likeliness between individuals and increase empathic dispositions. But is the chameleon effect the consequence of a species typical disposition linked to our unique communicative abilities for instance, or is it shared with our close relatives and therefore linked to more general aspect of social behaviours?

Read more: The Chameleon effect in Capuchin Monkeys

The compromise effect or, cross-cultural psychology is messy

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Category: Hugo's blog

Published on Sunday, 06 September 2009 23:00

Written by Hugo Mercier

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 quest for Jesus

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Category: Brian's blog

Published on Sunday, 06 September 2009 19:46

Written by Brian Malley

One of my interests is the history of Christianity, particularly the first few centuries, when there were some interesting varieties of the religion—my religion—quite unlike anything we see today, or will probably ever see again. Figuring out what exactly happened back then is no easy task: scholars often make much of the tiniest shreds of verbal evidence and there is, unsurprisingly, a lot of guess work involved.

It is partly as a result of this that Christianity’s earliest period has become something of a Rorschach test, the evidence being sufficiently limited and ambiguous that scholarly “reconstructions” have often been three parts agenda-of-the-historian to one part evidence. Nowhere has this situation been worse than in the quest for the historical Jesus, the attempt to discern, behind Christian lore, what the historical Jesus of Nazareth actually said and did. So great is the rhetorical power of appeals to Jesus that all manner of philosophical and theological agendas have attempted to co-opt him for their causes, sometimes quite baldly. Sometimes this has involved reinterpreting Jesus as a kind of ideal, as in Rudolf Bultmann’s model of Jesus as an existential philosopher, but more often it has taken the form of dismissing Jesus as nothing more than whatever the “historian” thought would be most scandalous for Christian orthodoxy: Morton Smith thought that making Jesus a gay magician would do the trick best.

In recent years some sanity has returned to these discussions, most notably, in my opinion, in John Meier’s closely argued A marginal Jew (Yale Anchor Bible Reference Library). One of the things that Meier understands properly, and that sets his work apart from so much earlier work, is that much of what the historical Jesus said and did, while presumably relevant in his time, is irrelevant to the modern Christian believer (and similarly to the modern critic of Christianity). Meier summarizes it well in his discussion of Jesus’ teaching on divorce (Meier, IV:75):

Here we run up against the uncomfortable truth that must be faced again and again by any honest quester for the historical Jesus: relevance is the enemy of history. By this I mean that facile relevance, a rush to “What does this mean for us today?”—as though that were the only standard of truth—often hampers or distorts sober attempts to understand the past as past. To respect the past as past, as something different from our present, means to refuse to twist its arm until it yields up a desired lesson or norm for the present.

Meier (along with most other scholars at present) interprets the historical Jesus as a Jew engaged in the religious arguments of his day, and is able to shed light on some of the otherwise enigmatic statements found in the canonical Christian accounts of Jesus’ life.

Read more: The quest for Jesus

Pierre Jacob reviews 'Mothers and Others', by Sarah B. Hrdy

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Category: Pierre Jacob's blog

Published on Friday, 04 September 2009 13:07

Written by Pierre Jacob

Review of Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Mothers and Others, the Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding.
Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press (422 p.)

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, a Professor Emerita of Anthropology at the University of California-Davis, has just published a wonderful essay in evolutionary psychology, entitled Mothers and Others, the Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding. Her basic question is: what accounts for the unique human capacity to read other minds? Her basic answer is that humans are cooperative breeders, which means both that human infants have evolved a unique ability to engage grown ups into caring for them and also that human adults are wired in for extensive shared care and the provisioning of offspring by so-called “alloparents” (i.e. non-biological parents). The interplay between infants’ commitment to enlist caretakers and adults’ willingness to serve as caretakers is the evolutionary basis of the human ability for mindreading. The book is an impressive and sustained argument for why, unlike other apes, humans are cooperative breeders, based on evidence from genetics, endocrinology, the paleontology of fossil record, primatology, comparative and developmental psychology, anthropological research among extant hunter-gatherer societies, history and even sociology. In the process, she debunks a number of assumptions prevalent in either anthropology (e.g. the prevalence of patrilocal residence patterns and the organizing role of patrilineal inheritance in human gathering-and-hunting societies) or in evolutionary theorizing (e.g. the Hunting pact or Sex contract).

While human infants uniquely compete among one another for being cared for, human adults are uniquely wired for sharing both food and the care of offspring. Not only is food sharing virtually inexistent among Great Apes (chimpanzees, bonobos, orangutans and gorillas), but also the exclusive reliance on maternal care among other apes is non-negotiable: separation from its mother almost inevitably leads to the infant’s death. Trust in others’ benevolence is a unique feature of human cognition: a human mother would never engage in cooperative breeding and shared care of her offspring unless she trusted members of her group. As Hrdy emphasizes, young mothers’ inexperience and incompetence are important causes of infants’ deaths among primates. Hence, there is competition among potential young caretakers for holding newborns. Cooperative breeding helps explain the following puzzle: on the one hand, human infants are more helpless, take longer to mature, are larger and more costly to feed, than infants of other apes. On the other hand, human hunter-gatherer mothers reproduce almost twice as fast (every 3 to 4 years on average) as other apes (every 6 to 8 years on average) (p. 102). Shared care and provisioning of offspring critically helps support the high rate of human reproduction compared to that of other apes. In hunter-gatherer societies, shared care enables the mother both to gather food for herself and her progeny and to benefit from food gathered by members of her group.

In chapter 3, Hrdy’s shared care hypothesis leads her to a friendly critical assessment of the emphasis by classical attachment theorists on the mother’s continuous and exclusive care of, and contact with, her offspring.

Read more: Pierre Jacob reviews 'Mothers and Others', by Sarah B. Hrdy

Japanese smileys vs. Ekman faces

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Category: Olivier's blog

Published on Wednesday, 26 August 2009 23:00

Written by Olivier Morin

Some medias and the blogosphere (see here, here and here) are celebrating a new study published in Current Biology, allegedly showing that recognition of facial expressions is not universal. Psychological universalists and relativists never seem to get tired of chewing that old bone of contention.

There are two aspects to the study. The first is a very nice exploration (by means of eye-tracking) of the way Asians process facial expressions, replicating the earlier work of Masaki Yuki and colleagues three years ago (read what Karim wrote of it at the time). Japanese subjects tend to focus on the eyes instead of the mouth to decode emotions - as one could have guessed from looking at Japanese Smiley faces :        (^_^)     for 'happy',       (T_T)        for 'sad', and other such          (*_*)       ...

Yet the authors don't stop at that fascinating result, and go on to try and prove another point : that because of this difference in face-processing style, East Asian subjects and 'Caucasian' subjects are not equally good at recognizing some of Paul Ekman's supposedly universal facial displays of emotions, like disgust and fear. And indeed East Asian subjects are significantly likelier than Caucasians to misinterpret happy or fearful faces.

As Neuroskeptic points out in his excellent coverage of the experiment, the difference, though, is really tiny...

Read more: Japanese smileys vs. Ekman faces

How cultural is cultural epidemiology? 2- Cultural embedding

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Category: Christophe's blog

Published on Tuesday, 25 August 2009 16:47

Written by Christophe Heintz

This is the second part of Christophe's series of posts on what culture does to culture (the first post is here).

Most cultural phenomena are embedded in other cultural phenomena. For one thing, any cultural phenomenon takes place within a community that already has many traditions, cultural practices, rituals and beliefs of its own. The important point, however, is that the embedding cultural phenomena are likely to have some effects on the embedded cultural phenomenon and to partially determine its evolution and the content of its constitutive representations.  Religious beliefs can have effects on economic practices; economic practices can have effects on kinship relations; etc.

Let us call “cultural embedding” this aspect of cultural evolution.  Cultural embedding is certainly what motivated some cultural anthropologists to have a holistic view of culture: every aspect of one culture will be related, more or less directly, to other aspects of the same culture.

Cultural epidemiology on promiscuous causality

For cultural epidemiology, cultural phenomena result from social cognitive causal chains that go from mental processes to social interactions (e.g. communication, imitation, the production of artefacts) to mental processes again. Some of these chains involve many members of a community, last through time and eventually have the effect of stabilising the distribution of cultural items in that community.

Read more: How cultural is cultural epidemiology? 2- Cultural embedding

How much of a difference does culture make ?

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Category: Olivier's blog

Published on Monday, 24 August 2009 16:06

Written by Olivier Morin

In my latest post, I mentioned a very nice study that looked at differences in face-processing between East Asians and Westerners. Though it made a couple of fascinating points, the study also claimed that Asian culture strongly hindered Asians from understanding Western emotions. In fact, their statistically significant result was much too weak to warrant that conclusion. A recent pamphlet has been looking, among other things, at what makes scientists confound the statistical significance of an effect with its importance. The debate over the significance of significance has precedents in cross-cultural psychology.

I just finished Stephen Ziliak and Deirdre McCloskey's vital pamphlet, The cult of statistical significance: how the standard error is costing us jobs, justice, and lives. These two economic historians did an excellent job of convincing me that everyone in the human sciences (medicine included) should heed their advice and read the book. It's quite a nice read, too - except when the authors let the gossip and the anecdotes run loose, which makes you feel like you're squeezed at a conference buffet between two economy professors talking shop and lambasting some unknown colleague. Anyway, the book's message, old and banal as it can be in certain circles, is a crucial one.

It is about null-hypothesis significance testing. Before you stop reading, please remember that it is the tool you use in order to prove reviewers that your data are worth publishing. It is the mandatory p < 0.05 threshold over which there is no publishable truth. It has become the de facto golden standard of scientific validity.

This kind of significance testing has been under attack for many years in various fields, including psychology.

Read more: How much of a difference does culture make ?

Meaning in sounds?

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Category: Simon's blog

Published on Sunday, 23 August 2009 08:27

Written by Simon Barthelme

Random chance had me dig up a really nice experiment published by Dan Slobin in 1968. Slobin went to look for evidence of cross-cultural "phonemic symbolism". Phonemic symbolism is the idea that the pairing of meanings with sounds is not completely arbitrary. In some cases that is fairly obvious, as in the case of onomatopea, where the sound of the word echoes the type of sound it designates: the words "bang" or a "boom" for example. There are also cases of near-onomatopea, such as the verbs "to grunt" or "to grumble". But what of less obvious cases? Is there anything that makes "low" and "high", or "smooth" and "sharp" good words for the concepts they designate, simply from what they sound like?

Read more: Meaning in sounds?

Linguistic Epidemiology – Part 1, Units of analysis

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Category: Nick Enfield's blog

Published on Wednesday, 19 August 2009 13:19

Written by Enfield

In his insightful post ‘Is language a replicator?’ (June 1, 2009), Nicolas Claidière usefully critiques a recent review article by Mark Pagel on evolutionary approaches to language change (Nature Reviews Genetics Vol. 10, June 2009). Pagel’s paper (and Nicolas’s critique) raises a range of issues, but here I only want to emphasise a really important point that Nicolas makes, namely that Pagel – and pretty much everyone involved in the kind of work he reviews, I might add – is often vague or ambiguous as to the unit of analysis in language change. Are we talking about the historical evolution of elements of languages such as words? Or whole languages at the historical community level? Or languages as integrated systems in individuals’ minds? I recently addressed this issue in an article ‘Transmission Biases in Linguistic Epidemiology’ in the online Journal of Language Contact (THEMA 2 2008:299-310; freely accessible at: http://www.jlcjournal.org/). The problem Nicolas identifies is laid out in section 3 of the paper, as follows (feel free to replace the term ‘variant’ with element, item, character, or equivalent, as you prefer):

The units of transmission: variants, not languages

There is no type of single event through which ‘a language’ as an entire structured system is socially transmitted. It is only through exposure to fragments of language, one chunk at a time, that we are able to build descriptions of whole language systems, either in learning languages (e.g., as children or as second-language learners) or in documenting them (e.g., as grammarians).

Read more: Linguistic Epidemiology – Part 1, Units of analysis

Scylla and Charybdis

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Category: Brian's blog

Published on Thursday, 06 August 2009 13:42

Written by Brian Malley

Some of the most enduring kinds of cultural traditions have been interpretive in nature. My research has focused on the interaction of cognition and culture surrounding the Christian Bible, but in this series I am explore a broader general model of interpretive traditions. This is the fifth and final post in the series: interested readers may find the rest of the posts here.

In this post I would like to step back from an examination of the micro-processes of interpretation and consider instead the broad, long-term dynamics of interpretive traditions. I have suggested that interpretive traditions face a fundamental dilemma: in order to maintain a coherent social organization, there must be some limit on permissible interpretations; but too tight a limit on permissible interpretations results in stagnation, boredom, and irrelevance. The historical trajectory of interpretive traditions is thus akin to Odysseus’ path between Scylla and Charybdis, Scylla representing the chaos that results from unconstrained production and consumption of representations and Charybdis representing the collapse of an organization when it has become so fixed that people lose interest. If one wishes to put it in information-theoretic terms: too much freedom of interpretation is the equivalent of a chaotic system, in which knowing one interpretation offers no value for understanding others; too little freedom of interpretation is the equivalent of a system with an extremely low information content.

In broad strokes, this dynamic may be seen in the evolution of Protestantism. The Anabaptists took the principle of sola scriptura—the idea that the Bible alone is authoritative—to its logical conclusion, and their communities underwent near constant schism in part because of the resulting interpretive chaos. Lutherans and Calvinists achieved relatively more stable communities in part by regarding the interpretations of particular individuals as authoritative, and thus constraining the interpretive freedom within their communities.

Another, and I think more common, way of striking this balance is to fix the representations that are regarded as formal doctrine or the text that is regarded as scripture, but to maintain flexibility in the ways in which the relevance of those doctrines or that scripture is established. Thus, in the church I studied ethnographically, the text of the Bible was mainly regarded as a fixed entity, but the application of the scriptural text was a site of constant innovation.

Institutions need both fixed representations and novel representations to remain organized and retain people’s attention. Interpretive traditions, where the interpretand is fixed, face a special challenge in this regard. That they are able to resolve it successfully, most of the time, is a testament to the immense skill of our species as information managers.

Murder in Saint Andrews

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Category: Nicolas Claidière's blog

Published on Monday, 03 August 2009 23:00

Written by Nicolas Claidière

Last week I was enjoying a very pleasant evening in St Andrews. The sky was clear, the last rays of sun were warming the beach, the sound of the sea was pleasanty resting my exhausted mind. On my way back from the beach I crossed a small car park and while I was peacefully enjoying this last moment of tranquility before returning to the center of the city, my visual detection module got activated by an unusual object. Automatically, and whithout my conscious awareness and consent, my attention got focused on an unexpected thing. Rapidly a close look at it revealed that I was examining the remains of a dead body. As this thought occured to me, my sherlock holmes module spring into action... who was he/she? why did he/she died here? what was the cause of the death?

To make this more concrete, I shot a picture of the crime scene.

Read more: Murder in Saint Andrews

How cultural is cultural epidemiology? The case of enculturation

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Category: Christophe's blog

Published on Wednesday, 29 July 2009 07:41

Written by Christophe Heintz

When discussing about cultural epidemiology with informed colleagues, I often come to think that they tend to underplay the extent to which cultural epidemiological accounts can integrate enculturation and other cultural phenomena that are generative of culture.

Here is a key claim of cultural epidemiology: understanding, learning and memorising what others communicate or transmit are micro-cognitive processes at the basis of cultural phenomena, and these cognitive processes are strongly constrained by the properties of the mind. Cultural epidemiologists have especially worked on specifying the consequences of universal properties of the mind for culture: naive theories and the memorisation of religious beliefs for instance; or face recognition and the success of masks as cultural artefacts. However, what is understood, learned and memorised is also dependent on those properties of the mind caused by previous enculturation. This is nearly a truism: one can learn better to read if one already knows the alphabet, one processes differently a sentence in French if one knows the language that if one does not, and, more controversially, and can more easily learn how to build a canoe, if one already knows what each part is made for. True, most of the time these things are learned in concert - but transmitted information is nonetheless processed sequentially, and the order of the elements in the sequence is sure to matter.

This has at least the following consequences:

Read more: How cultural is cultural epidemiology? The case of enculturation

A role for dyslexia in language evolution?

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Category: Nicolas Claidière's blog

Published on Friday, 17 July 2009 11:48

Written by Nicolas Claidière

In a new paper Gabrieli highlight the recent results of cognitive neuroscience research on dyslexia and its potentdiial consequences for the treatment of dyslexic children through educative measures.

What Gabrieli show is that dyslexia, an impairement in reading abilities linked to difficulties in phonological processing, can be detected very early on by brain imaging techniques and treated in some cases with specific training in reading during the beginning of learning. If left undetected and untreated, dyslexia can cause prolonged difficulties in reading abilities and decrease motivation to read.

Dyslexia and its orthographic consequences could be of great interest for cognition-and-culture oriented scientists because orthographic errors generated by dyslexia or other processes produce linguistic variation at the origin of language evolution.

Read more: A role for dyslexia in language evolution?

Simian Oeconomicus

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Category: Nicolas' Blog

Published on Friday, 10 July 2009 10:21

Written by Nicolas Baumard

Previous studies showed that primates pay more when commodities become scarcer: subordinates groomed dominants longer before being tolerated at food sites in periods of shortage; females groomed mothers longer before obtaining permission to handle their infants when there were fewer newborns and males groomed fertile females longer before obtaining their compliance when fewer such females were present.

Freteau et al. have demonstrated experimentally how supply and demand determine the value of food providers:

Read more: Simian Oeconomicus

The Evolution of God?

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Category: Hugo's blog

Published on Thursday, 09 July 2009 23:16

Written by Hugo Mercier

Robert Wright has written a new book, much in the tradition of his previous, and famous, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny : 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.

Read more: The Evolution of God?

Why you should rank your friends (but not tell them)

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Category: Ophelia's blog

Published on Thursday, 09 July 2009 10:00

Written by Ophelia Deroy

Like me, you must sometimes receive these « rank your friends » messages through your social network. It starts by saying how high you have been ranked in someone’s best friends list, and thereby invites you to return the compliment. It seems like crude ranking and mere reciprocity. But notice, it is limited to the positive side. Be itby conflict-avoidance or some electronic politeness, you are not informed that you are Paola’s 74th best friend, nor that Peter really thinks that George is a much better friend than you.

Raffaello: Self-Portrait with friend (Musée du Louvre)

Recent research by Peter DeScioli and Robert Kurzban (download the paper here), from University of Pennsylvania, tests and confirms these tendencies, while trying to make sense of them. Participants in the experiments are asked to rank their closest friends in a number of ways. These « friendship rankings » turn out to be most strongly correlated with individuals' own perceived rank among their partners' other friends, more than for example, the benefits they receive from the friendship, the number of secrets shared or how long the friendship has been ongoing. I have a strong interest in ranking practices, but what this mostly illuminates is what friendship means.

Read more: Why you should rank your friends (but not tell them)

In praise of neuroscience (for once)

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Category: Nicolas' Blog

Published on Wednesday, 01 July 2009 14:16

Written by Nicolas Baumard

Here, at ICCI, we are used to being skeptical about the contributions of neurosciences to the understanding of culture (see the posts on reading and religion, or Mixing Memories's post on colour categorisation). Indeed, very often, neuroscientific studies of cultural phenomena do not do more than replicating psychological experiments and showing that cultural phenomena involve the brain (in case you were thinking that people use their stomach to think of the novel they are reading, now you have good evidences that actually they use their brain...).

This skepticism does not mean that the neurosciences are irrelevant for anthropology. Far from it.

For instance, people find it doubtful that culture could be shaped by innate cognitive dispositions. They notice that cultural objects such as mathematics or writing systems are recent, variable, and acquired by learning. No selective pressure could have shaped the human brain to facilitate reading or high-level mathematics. From this valid premise, several authors have jumped to the conclusion that the cultural competence of the human species must have arisen from the novel emergence of a vastly flexible domain-general learning capacity. This hypothesis, indeed, lies at the heart of the ‘‘standard social sciences model'' (Tooby and Cosmides 1992) or the "blank slate model" (Pinker, 2002). Homo sapiens would therefore no longer owe its main dispositions to its biological architecture. Thanks to its plasticity, the human brain, more than that of any other animal species, would be capable of absorbing essentially any form of culture. It would be meaningless to investigate the cognitive constraints on culture.

However, parts of the human cortex are specialized for some cultural domains such as reading and arithmetic. Representations of letter strings and of numbers occupy reproducible locations within large-scale macromaps, respectively in the left occipito-temporal and bilateral intraparietal cortex. Furthermore, recent fMRI studies reveal a systematic architecture within these areas. Take the case of reading.

Read more: In praise of neuroscience (for once)

Inverse correlation between norms and behaviour?

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Category: Dan's blog

Published on Sunday, 28 June 2009 08:43

Written by Dan Sperber

We know, of course, that people don't strictly abide by the norms they publicly express: the flesh is weak, and so on, but, from an anthropological point of view, it would be surprising to see a complete disconnect between norms and behaviour. Even more surprising would be to see a reverse correlation, that is to have people who insist, "don't do A!" (for instance, don't commit adultery) do A more often than other people who have no strong objection to A. This, however, is exactly what is happening with American conservatives, according to Charles M. Blow (a New York Times's columnist with a blog about all things statistical and their visual expressions) who published on June 27 an op-ed with a fascinating chart (reproduced below) to prove it.

Read more: Inverse correlation between norms and behaviour?

Evolutionary psychology under attack

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Category: Dan's blog

Published on Tuesday, 23 June 2009 15:34

Written by Dan Sperber

The article in Newsweek, with the telltale title "Why Do We Rape, Kill and Sleep Around? The fault, dear Darwin, lies not in our ancestors, but in ourselves" is a pathetic misrepresentation of evolutionary psychology, mentioning only work on mate choice and reproduction, giving pride of place to Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer's book on rape, and presenting the controversial claim that human rape is an adaptation as a central dogma of evolutionary psychology as a whole when not even Palmer agrees with it. Cultural diversity is presented as proving evolutionary psychologists wrong, as if, somehow, they had been unaware of it and had had nothing to contribute to its study. Behavioural ecology is represented as diametrically opposed to evolutionary psychology. And so forth. I assume that most readers of this blog are familiar enough with evolutionary psychology not to be misled by such poor reporting (or else Cosmides and Tooby's "Evolutionary psychology: A primer" is still a good place to start) .

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In memoriam: Nicola Knight

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Category: Dan's blog

Published on Friday, 12 June 2009 12:35

Written by Dan Sperber

We mourn Nicola Knight who died this Tuesday, June 9, at the age of 33, from a heart attack. He was an active member of this Institute, a friend, a colleague, and a former student of many of us. The day before his death, he sent a new post for this blog, which we publish below.

Nicola was a lecturer and a post-doctoral researcher at the Centre for Anthropology and Mind and the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology, University of Oxford. He held a BSc in Social Anthropology from LSE, an MSc in Human evolution and behaviour from UCL, and a dual PhD in Anthropology and Psychology from the University of Michigan. He had been visiting researcher at the Institut Jean Nicod in Paris and at the Centre for philosophy of natural and social science, LSE. He had published important articles on normativity, on religion, and on the epistemology of anthropology in the Journal of Cognition and Culture, Cognitive Science, the JRAI, and in several edited volumes. We all felt he would be a major contributor to the development of research in the area of cognition and culture in the years to come.

Our thoughts are with his wife, Maria Doglioli, and his family.

How to bother a pigeon

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Category: Nicola's blog

Published on Tuesday, 09 June 2009 11:17

Written by Nicola Knight

Let me give an illustration of the kind of behaviour I am thinking of. At the bottom of the garden is a large tree. Among the species that occasionally rest on their branches are wood pigeons (similar the common city pigeon, but displaying fewer deformities thanks to a diet that does not entirely consist of cigarette ends). I talk about pigeons not because they are interesting in some relevant respect, but simply because they are fairly heavy birds. The relevance of this fact will become apparent soon.

I have repeatedly observed the following behaviour. One individual, 'A' in the (rather crude - sorry) picture below, is resting on a branch.

After a while, another individual, 'B', lands on the same branch but further away from the trunk. I don't know whether pigeons' folk physics include principles of leverage, but what inevitably happens is that upon B's landing the branch flexes and A loses balance and starts wildly flapping its wings in an attempt to regain it. Pigeon B does not appear to have chosen the branch in order to interact with A. On no occasion have I seen A expressing its displeasure to B through aggressive displays, although I am no expert in this field and may be missing important behavioural cues; for argument's sake, let us assume that A does not remonstrate.

My question is: what does A make of B's behaviour?

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Anthropology in crisis - what, still?

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Category: Harvey Whitehouse's blog

Published on Sunday, 07 June 2009 20:50

Written by Harvey Whitehouse

Fifteen years ago, Anna Grimshaw and Keith Hart declared that "anthropology has been in crisis for as long as anyone can remember" (here). Has anything really changed? Today, anthropology remains a discipline riddled with rival paradigms, ferocious disputes, and fleeting fashions. Few basic principles of theory and method are agreed upon and even the general nature of anthropological knowledge is continually being contested. Cumulative theory building is rare and difficult to sustain. Why?

Perhaps part of the answer is that humans are not naturally adept at reasoning about complex social morphology. As our societies have grown in size and complexity, we have witnessed the emergence of a vast plethora of specialized offices and corporate groups based on a broad range of sorting principles: kinship, descent, rank, caste, ethnicity, nationality, and so on. Categories of office, coalition, and class are no more than idealized models of how the social world is organized, rather than precise descriptions of how it operates on the ground but they provide robust schemas for individual behaviour, cumulatively instantiating patterns that people reciprocally interpret in terms of those schemas. These schemas, however, are a relatively modern and potentially dispensable accretion to human thinking, too recent in our evolutionary history to have led to specialized cognitive skills for reasoning about social complexity. The same could not be said of human reasoning in many other domains.

As part of our evolutionary endowment, we possess dedicated intuitive machinery for reasoning about physical properties (such as solidity and gravity), biological properties (such as essentialized differences between natural kinds), and psychological properties (such as a capacity to empathize with suffering). Our intuitive physics, intuitive biology, and intuitive psychology may have to be substantially revised in light of the discoveries ofscientific physics/ biology/ psychology but our intuitions often also deliver useful reference points and pedagogic tools. For instance, while our intuitions about the discreteness and stability of natural kind taxonomies are inconsistent with the diachronic character of evolutionary processes, nevertheless they provide a convenient on-the-hoof framework within which to conceptualize speciation.

Problems arise, however, when some of our intuitively grounded ontological commitments also serve as markers of identity.

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Attribution

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Category: Brian's blog

Published on Wednesday, 03 June 2009 13:11

Written by Brian Malley

Some of the most enduring kinds of cultural traditions have been interpretive in nature.  My research has focused on the interaction of cognition and culture surrounding the Christian Bible, but in this series I am explore a broader general model of interpretive traditions.  This is the fourth post in the series: interested readers may find the rest of the posts in "Brian's blog."

Recently I have been reading about Shaolin traditions of kungfu, chigung, and meditation, and I have repeatedly encountered the claim that Buddhist meditators centuries ago intuited the structure of the universe as it has been revealed by modern cosmology and quantum mechanics.  These sorts of claims are not uncommon in scriptural traditions, and it is easy to find similar Muslim or Christian claims that their scriptures anticipated modern scientific discoveries and technological achievements.  Of course, such claims are plausible principally to people who already subscribe to tradition, and outsiders looking at the same text are seldom impressed.

There are a couple of different processes involved in this phenomenon, but the critical one for my present purpose is the attribution of a representation to an interpretand, in this case, a religious text.

As I define it, an interpretation is a mental representation of the form [interpretand] says/means/teaches [interpretive representation].  This relationship says/means/teaches I call attribution, because it involves the attribution of a concept or statement or impression to the interpretand.  (My use of interpretation is unusual in that it includes the attribution as part of an interpretation along with the interpretive representation.)  In this post I will attempt to circumscribe and, to some degree, characterize the relationship of attribution, and to point out what I think is significant about it.

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Cross-cultural differences in argumentation

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Category: Hugo's blog

Published on Tuesday, 02 June 2009 23:00

Written by Hugo Mercier

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

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Is language a replicator?

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Category: Nicolas Claidière's blog

Published on Sunday, 31 May 2009 23:00

Written by Nicolas Claidière

In a recent review Mark Pagel argues that language is a culturally transmitted replicator (Pagel, 2009).

Pagel starts by offering a useful update on phylogenetic methods and then uses a comparison between genetics and language phylogenetic trees to reveal similarities between cultural and biological evolution. He argues that borrowing and corruption, which could in principle be very important in the case of languages and make phylogenetic reconstruction difficult if not impossible, are, in fact, very limited. Pagel notes: "If languages are not the ‘closed shop’ to outside influences that we have come to expect of eukaryotic organisms with sequestered germ lines, the strength of descent with modification in language trees shows that the cultural processes of language teaching and learning that transmit language from one generation to the next can have a surprisingly high fidelity and can show resistance to outside effects." To put it briefly, phylogenetic trees show, or so it is claimed, that languages are faithfully reproduced from one generation to the next.

Figure 1: The phylogenetic tree of Indo-European languages, based on the Swadesh list of 200 words.

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Truth among the...

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Category: Dan's blog

Published on Saturday, 30 May 2009 23:30

Written by Dan Sperber

(Ten year ago or so, Maurice Bloch and I started discussing a basic issue in folk-epistemic, the variety of notions of truth across cultures, and we ran several workshops in Paris with psychologists, historians, and anthropologists on the theme. I would like to revive the discussion, maybe in the form of an online workshop, but first, let me raise the issue on this blog.)

Do considerations of "truth" play a role in human intellectual and social practices in all cultures? Are diverse notions of truth involved both across and within cultures? Are implicit notions of truth involved, and, if so, how do they relate to explicit notions? In which cultural practices and domains of discourse is a notion of truth invoked? Are there institutions and social positions which entertain a privileged relationship with "truth"?

There is a rich philosophical, philological, and historical literature relevant to the issue and concerning literate, and more specifically, scholarly traditions (Ancient Greece, Buddhism, judicial practices, modern science - to mention just two examples, Marcel Détienne's The Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece, and Steven Shapin's A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England) . Anthropological literature hardly ever directly addesses the issue (Pascal Boyer's Tradition as Truth and Communication: A Cognitive Description of Traditional Discourse being a notable exception), even if it often contains relevant data collected from a different perspective.

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Is the left hemisphere more Whorfian than the right one?

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Category: Dan's blog

Published on Thursday, 21 May 2009 13:30

Written by Dan Sperber

In the May 19, 2009 issue of PNAS, an article by Wai Ting Siok, Paul Kay, William S. Y. Wang, Alice H. D. Chana, Lin Chen, Kang-Kwong Luk and Li Hai Tan shows that "Language regions of brain are operative in color perception" (article freely available here). It is nice to see how far we are, in this classical area of anthropological debate, from the old nature/nurture all-or-nothing: It turns out the left hemisphere is more Whorfian than the right one!

Here is the abstract: 

Read more: Is the left hemisphere more Whorfian than the right one?