ICCI Blog

Is the left hemisphere more Whorfian than the right one?

Details: 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:

Cultural Attraction among birds

Details: Category: Hugo Viciana's blog; Published on Tuesday, 19 May 2009 20:43; Written by Hugo Viciana

If we could rewind the tape of cultural history and play it again, would it look like it does today ? Well, this is exactly what Olga Feher and collaborators at the Ofer Tchernichovski lab have tried to find out about zebra finches songs. Their Nature article shows the results of two ingenious series of experiments in cultural transmission. Their work nicely illustrates the phenomenon of attraction in social learning dynamics- a phenomenon that may have more weight in the animal cultures than has been recognized until now. They also provide a rather precise quantification procedure for the study of a multigenerational cultural trait (song learning) under a controlled setting- certainly something that until now you can afford more easily with zebra finches than with human subjects.

The Art Instinct : Denis Dutton replies to Roberto Casati

Details: Category: Roberto's blog; Published on Monday, 11 May 2009 23:00; Written by Denis Dutton

(Editor's note) Denis Dutton is kind enough to reply at length to Roberto Casati's skeptical review of his book, The Art Instinct. The review has sparked a heated debate between Duttonites and Casatites on this blog.

Like most authors, I appreciate any thoughtful analysis of my work, and for me that includes Roberto Casati’s review of my book. I won’t take up all Casati’s provocative points, but just a few, and not in the order he presents them.

Intimidation

At the close of his remarks, Casati says that my “intimidating name-dropping occasionally gets tiresome – "the Iliad, the Cathedral at Chartres, Leonardo's Lady with an Ermine, Breughel's Hunters in the Snow, Hokusai's Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji" etc. The list he refers to here is in the book’s introduction, where I am describing my intention in the last chapter to discuss the what I take to be Clive Bell’s “cold white peaks of art,” the summits of artistic achievement. The list is therefore to give the reader examples of the what I regard as greatest art in history. It does not, as Casati claims, “go on and on,” but has four further items: Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” Schubert’s Winterreise, Van Gogh’s Starry Night, and Beethoven’s Sonata op. 111.

Where is the intimidation here? Most people are taught about the Iliad, or will have seen a movie based on it, will often know “Tintern Abbey,” if they have studied English poetry, will have seen that Breughel painting, will know something about Chartres, and will have seen “The Wave,” the most famous of all Japanese woodcuts, even if they don’t know that it forms part of Hokusai’s series. Yes, maybe Winterreise is a bit obscure, and a lot of people don’t know the Opus 111. I’m not sure about the Leonardo choice; I was avoiding the Mona Lisa, a great painting but also, alas, a cliché. Again: that list is intended to denote examples of the highest of high art, and yet be familiar enough that most readers will recognize a couple of items on it.

Casati continues: “If I want to learn something about the arts, I need to know what is it that makes Schubert's Winterreise a masterpiece, and it is not by enlisting it along other masterpieces and adding that “their nobility and grandeur ... flow from their ability to address deep human instincts” that we'll make progress in understanding.” But that is what is discussed in the last chapter, as promised in the introduction. And by the way, I stand by the phrase “nobility and grandeur.” If anyone finds such notions corny, or Victorian, or embarrassing, so be it.

Intimidation? Excuse me, but that is something that art theorists, especially those of a poststructuralist stripe, have been inflicting on readers for the last forty years or more – talking down to their audiences with obscure jargon and esoteric references.

Cumulative culture in the lab and chimpanzees

Details: Category: Helen De Cruz's blog; Published on Thursday, 07 May 2009 17:11; Written by Helen De Cruz

At the recent EHBEA conference held April 6-8 at Saint Andrews, I saw presentations by both Andrew Whiten (a primatologist who specializes on nonhuman cultural traditions, especially in chimpanzees) and Christine Caldwell (who examines cumulative cultural evolution in the lab). It was interesting to see the question of cumulative cultural evolution from these two very diverging perspectives.

It is now generally established that nonhuman animals, including chimpanzees, macaques and a variety of bird species, display a socially transmitted behaviors, which in humans are termed cultures. However, to date the evidence for cumulative cultural evolution in nonhumans remains sporadic. For example, in the case of nut-cracking chimpanzees in the Taï forest, there is little variation in how nuts are being processed, i.e., cracked by means of a hammer and anvil, and whereas some individuals have learned to use auxilliary stones to stabilize the anvil, this innovation has not spread to the entire population. The question is: why not?

a typical use of anvil to crack a nut from a Taï forest chimpanzee

Andrew Whiten recently co-authored a study in which chimpanzees were confronted with an optimal and cumulatively built technique for extracting honey from an artificial device. Whereas the individuals learned the simple 'dipping' technique with ease, they did not master the more complex 'probing' technique, which built on elements of the dipping technique they already mastered. The chimpanzees thus got 'stuck' at a simple but suboptimal technique, although control tests showed that the more difficult technique was not beyond their cognitive capacities. Why would this be? Whiten tentatively suggested in the paper that chimpanzees may be 'conservative', unwilling to try a new technique if the one they already knew was good enough.

Another line of reasoning, which has garnered much attention, is that of Tomasello.

The interpretive process

Details: Category: Brian's blog; Published on Wednesday, 06 May 2009 14:41; Written by Brian Malley

This is the third installment of a series of posts on a cognitive approach to interpretive traditions (Part One - Part Two).

One of the things people do with texts is read them. This is certainly not the only thing people do with texts, nor, I would argue, is it the primary thing people do with texts, but it is one of the more fundamental things, and even when texts are used for other purposes-such as when one saves a cash register receipt in case one might need to return a purchased item-these other actions are carried out with an eye to the possibility, at least, of someone reading the text.

Scholarly approaches to the reading and interpretation of texts tend to fall into one of two broad tendencies. The first is the classic model of literary interpretation wherein the reader uses clues from the text to form ideas about what the text says. This model of reading tends to envision the single reader in isolation with the text and to focus on the features of the text that guide-well, should guide-the reader to the author's intended interpretation. This model tends to be highly normative, and I do not think was ever really intended to be a description of how people actually read.

The reaction to the classical model was a whole variety of reader-response theories that emphasize the active role of the reader in creating meaning. In some of these theories the text is almost entirely incidental. The anthropological versions of these theories have tended to emphasize discourse around texts, and to see reading as just a variety of social interaction. In these theories the text does nothing more than provide an occasion for interpretation, and the structure of the text is seldom discussed at all.

I've never been comfortable with either approach.

Cross-cultural variation in creationism

Details: Category: Helen De Cruz's blog; Published on Monday, 04 May 2009 17:09; Written by Helen De Cruz

There is substantial cultural variation in the prevalence of creationism, i.e., the view that the Bible (or other religious writings) provides a historically accurate account of how living things came into being. In some countries, like Iceland or Japan, the view that species arose through a gradual process that is characterized by random variation, selective retention and modification through descent, is almost universally accepted. By contrast, and to the chagrin of scientists and philosophers of science in the USA, only 40 - 50 % of US citizens accept evolutionary theory. In this respect, the USA only does slightly better than Turkey, which ranks lowest on the list of Miller et al.'s study in Science (2006, vol. 313). Where does this variability come from?

Success or Prestige? Hunters' cultural biases

Details: Category: Dan's blog; Published on Wednesday, 29 April 2009 23:00; Written by Dan Sperber

Rob Boyd and Pete Richerson have identified two biases, one based on success, the other on prestige, that might influence which individual is most imitated. If you were living in a foraging society, would you rather imitate prestigious hunters or successful ones? Successful ones, you say? It may not be so easy or so argue Kim Hill and Keith Kintigh in "Can Anthropologists Distinguish Good and Poor Hunters? Implications for Hunting Hypotheses, Sharing Conventions, and Cultural Transmission" by (in Current Anthropology Volume 50, Number 3, June 2009) available here.

Here is the Abstract:

Numerous articles examine the relationship between men's hunting skill and other important biological and social traits. We analyzed more than 14,000 hunter days during 27 years of monitoring the Ache of Paraguay by using resampling methods to demonstrate that large sample sizes are generally required in order to distinguish individual men by hunting skill. A small published study on !Kung hunters shows that large‐game hunters are even more difficult to distinguish by individual skill level. This is a serious problem because regressions using noisy hunting data as the independent variable systematically underestimate the association of hunting ability with other biosocial traits. The analysis suggests that some coresidents in many small‐scale societies will be unable to accurately distinguish hunters by skill level, possibly favoring groupwide meat‐sharing conventions and biased cultural transmission that emphasizes prestige rather than perceived hunting skill.

Book review : The Art Instinct, by Denis Dutton.

Details: Category: Roberto's blog; Published on Monday, 27 April 2009 08:16; Written by Roberto Casati

(Editor's note) It would be difficult not to notice the buzz around Denis Dutton's The Art Instinct, (see Nigel Warburton's review, Michael O'Donnell's, and Brian Morton's - and even the Colbert Report). It's always a pleasure to see an accessible and much advertised book written in a naturalistic perspective reach the many. However, it's in the nature of such books to stir controversy. We have asked philosopher Roberto Casati to read and comment Dutton's book, and we look forward to the discussion of his critical review.

Denis Dutton, The art instinct. Bloomsbury Press: 2009.

The importance of Denis Dutton's book lies in its frank endorsement of two very extreme and controversial theses. The theses are, first, that art is an adaptive cultural phenomenon, one that is rooted in an art instinct, and, second, that this rooting has not only, as one may expect, an explanatory import as to how artworks be or look like, but also normative import as to how artworks should be or look like.

The boldness of the two claims is pretty clear. Even if one agrees that the proper explanation of art must use Darwininan resources, one can aling oneself on milder positions, and consider artistic phenomena not the effects of adapatations but by-products or consequences of adaptations; one may even deny that the notion of an art instinct constitute a natural kind. And even if one agrees on Dutton's claim that an art instinct is indeed an adaptation, one can be more cautious in drawing normative consequences therefrom.

Let me confess a general sympathy for an evolutionary approach to culture in general and to art in particular. I take it for likely that if there is a prospect of naturalizing culture, this will be in the framework of a theory of evolution. However, there are many nuances to be discussed and options to be assessed. I think there are various reasons to resist both of the book's claims on the basis of evidence that contrasts with the evidence alleged in Dutton's book, or reinterprets the latter differently.

Dutton's evolutionary hypotheses

At several points in the book, Dutton endorses the strongest possible version of extremely controversial hypotheses, without much arguing.

Incest in France

Details: Category: Olivier's blog; Published on Friday, 24 April 2009 11:06; Written by Olivier Morin

The French used to be astoundingly tolerant of incest, but times are changing. Cover of the 1984 single Lemon Incest, a song featuring Serge Gainsbourg with his daughter Charlotte. Videoclip here.

Mutually consensual incest is a classic puzzle for moral psychologists : on the one hand, it harms neither the lovers nor society, on the other hand, most people think there is something seriously wrong about it. That's what Jonathan Haidt illustrates with a famous scenario of brother-sister incest, the story of Mark and Julie.

"Julie and Mark are brother and sister. They are traveling together in France on summer vacation from college. One night they are staying alone in a cabin near the beach. They decide that it would be interesting and fun if they tried making love. At the very least, it would be a new experience for each of them. Julie was already taking birth control pills, but Mark uses a condom too, just to be safe. They both enjoy making love, but they decide never to do it again. They keep that night as a special secret, which makes them feel even closer to each other."

Haidt famously found that most people strongly rejected Mark and Julie's behaviour, even though the scenario carefully forestalls any bad consequences that might result from it. But, unlike Haidt's subjects, the French authorities (on whose territory the scenario takes place) do not consider that Mark and Julie's behaviour deserves punishment. In Virginia where Jon Haidt teaches and (I guess) hired his subjects, incest is a Class One Misdemeanour, punishable by one year of jail (see here). In France (and in many other countries where brotherly cuddling is seen with a friendly eye, such as the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Belgium, Portugal, Turkey, Japan, Argentina and Brazil), Mark and Julie risk nothing. So far.

In March of this year, a group of right-wing deputies submitted a very strange proposition to outlaw incest when (at least) one of the participants is under legal age. The text stands good chances of being adopted.

Institutions again - What is a primitive society?

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

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

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

The interpretand

Details: Category: Brian's blog; Published on Sunday, 05 April 2009 23:00; Written by Brian Malley

This is the second installment of a series of posts on a cognitive approach to interpretive traditions. The aim of this series is a general framework for the analysis of interpretive traditions.

When I began to study the use of the Bible at Creekside Baptist Church, I tried to proceed systematically, beginning with very basic questions. The most basic question, I thought, was surely, “What do they mean by the Bible?” After all, one can stroll into any bookstore in Ann Arbor, Michigan and find a dozen different Bibles on the shelves. Most are just different editions of a few different translations. At Creekside Baptist there were 23 different translations in use, and it was not uncommon that several different translations would be consulted when a difficult passage was under discussion. So people at Creekside Baptist were well aware that translations differed, but had no difficulty calling all of the mainstream Bibles and referring to any of them as the Bible or the word of the Lord. I will not recount here the trail of evidence that I followed, but in the end I concluded that the people of Creekside Baptist thought of the Bible as a text, but as no particular text. (By text I mean an ordered series of words rather than any of the bizarre and frequently incoherent notions sometimes invoked by philosophical and literary theories.) In short, there was no definition of the Bible, but rather a characterization that obviated the need for a definition in almost all contexts. In the case of evangelicalism in an American context, this absence of a definition actually facilitated interpretive discourse by making the Bible or whole sets of alternate readings that could be invoked as relevant.

For the purpose of the present discussion, however, the major point is that the interpretand of this tradition, the Bible, was not a simple object or a particular text, but should be understood as a concept. By this I do not mean merely that Bibles are conceptualized, which of course they are. What I mean is that the interpretand—the thing that interpretations point to by virtue of being interpretations of something—is a concept, with more and less direct connections to material things in the world.

In fact, the interpretand need not actually have the content attributed to it.

How I found glaring errors in Einstein's calculations

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

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

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

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

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

The future of human cooperation: Some minuscule evidence

Details: Category: Dan's blog; Published on Saturday, 28 March 2009 00:08; Written by Dan Sperber

I look at the table of content and some abstracts in several journals, and, last week, one abstract really caught my attention. Here is how it begins:

"Globalization magnifies the problems that affect all people and that require large-scale human cooperation, for example, the overharvesting of natural resources and human-induced global warming. However, what does globalization imply for the cooperation needed to address such global social dilemmas? Two competing hypotheses are offered. One hypothesis is that globalization prompts reactionary movements that reinforce parochial distinctions among people. Large-scale cooperation then focuses on favoring one's own ethnic, racial, or language group. The alternative hypothesis suggests that globalization strengthens cosmopolitan attitudes by weakening the relevance of ethnicity, locality, or nationhood as sources of identification. In essence, globalization, the increasing interconnectedness of people worldwide, broadens the group boundaries within which individuals perceive they belong. We test these hypotheses..."

Are humans getting better at living together, as one hopes, or are we heading towards a world of moral, political and material misery, as one may fear? This is indeed a major issue, and I would welcome any contribution to a better understanding of it. So I read the paper, "Globalization and human cooperation" by Nancy R. Buchan, Gianluca Grimalda Rick Wilson, Marilynn Brewer, Enrique Fatas, and Margaret Foddy (PNAS March 17, 2009 vol. 106 no. 11 4138-4142). The paper is available here.

Could an experiment really help us decide between an optimistic and a pessimistic view? Here is what the authors did.

An update on the Pirahã

Details: Category: Hugo's blog; Published on Sunday, 22 March 2009 20:31; Written by Hugo Mercier

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.

Piraha

10,000 Year Danger Marker?

Details: Category: Colin's blog; Published on Wednesday, 18 March 2009 23:00; Written by Colin Holbrook

alt

Here's a real-world puzzle for students of precautionary cognition.

The US Department of Energy's "Waste Isolation Pilot Plan" is a program to store nuclear waste in an area that will remain toxic to humans for at least 10,000 years. The planners need to place markers that will discourage vandalism and reliably convey danger for 400 generations.

The Edvard Munch aspect of the image above seems promising, but English text?

They also considered planting immense spikes to inspire awe as well as aversion:

alt

Ouch.

To explore some of the options the planners have considered, see here.

What would you propose?

Pictures of the week: Culture and Cognition in Cetaceans

Details: Category: Anik's blog; Published on Sunday, 15 March 2009 22:48; Written by Anik Boileau

At the Centre d'éducation et de recherche de Sept-Iles in Quebec, we study social interactions among cetaceans. Culture and cognition studies on cetaceans are quite recent compared with the extensive research conducted on other species. There are three reasons for this: 1) most research on cetacean behaviour adopts an "ecology validity" approach; 2) only captive cetaceans (mostly members of the Delphinidae family) can be part of controlled laboratory experiments; and 3) cetaceans spend most of their time underwater. whales_1

Photo 1. A pair of blue whales (Balaenoptera musculus) during mating season. The pairings show specific attributes related to the position of each animal during navigation; the female, who leads, will dictate the speed and the navigational direction of the pair. If the male speeds up a little, the female will slowdown bringing the male to reposition himself at a specific distance (unpublished data). During the surface navigation, an almost perfect coordination between the female and the male brings the pair to dive at exactly the same time. We are interested in the nature of the stimuli that makes this coordination possible.

Still, in recent years, long-term studies of cetaceans in the wild have brought to light some interesting behavioural patterns that are better explained as cultural phenomenon transmitted through stimulus enhacement. Some recent studies have investigated the social function of vocal communication in sperm whales (Physeter macrocephalus). Others have focused on the learning of feeding techniques in the bottlenose dolphins (Tursiosps truncates).

Our own research focuses, in part, on the cognitive development of finback whales (Balaenoptera physalus) and harbour porpoises (Phocoena phocoena).

Why are minimally counter-intuitive concepts special?

Details: Category: Afzal's blog; Published on Wednesday, 11 March 2009 18:25; Written by Afzal Upal

For me, it was love at first sight. As soon as I saw Pascal Boyer's Religion Explained at the new-books-shelf of a suburban Maryland Barnes & Nobles on a rainy Saturday morning in 2001, I was smitten. My wife complained that I became physically incapable of looking away from the pages of the book until I finished it 12 hours later! For the first time in my life, I found an explanation of a religious phenomenon that sounded something like science and it was based on cognitive science (the area of my graduate training)! I was utterly fascinated by the twin notions that (1) most of the religious concepts around the world are minimally counterintuitive, and (2) that minimally counter-intuitive concepts are more memorable than other types of concepts. However, it also left me with a nagging question that was to haunt me for months and become the primary driver of my research for the next few years. What I wondered was why do we have a memory architecture that preferentially processes minimally counter-intuitive concepts? What evolutionary benefits could an agent gain by filling its head up with knowledge of non-existent entities and events such as a flying cow?

How Grandma stopped worrying, and started to love cognitive anthropology

Details: Category: Olivier's blog; Published on Tuesday, 10 March 2009 15:16; Written by Olivier Morin

In the latest Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a paper by Dimitrios Kapogiannis et al. proposes "an integrative cognitive neuroscience framework for understanding the cognitive and neural foundations of religious belief." The Independent comments the study in the following way: "A belief in God is deeply embedded in the human brain, which is programmed for religious experiences (...) The researchers said their findings support the idea that the brain has evolved to be sensitive to any form of belief that improves the chances of survival, which could explain why a belief in God and the supernatural became so widespread in human evolutionary history.".

These last few years, it's become more and more difficult to tell my old folks about the kind of work that I do. Like Nicola, I often get the question: What exactly is that topic you're working on? And the answer: "cognitive anthropology", seldom satisfies anyone. Results have been scarce and progress uneven. Recently, my grandmother enquired, in a way that was slightly more earnest than usual, when it was that I would finally "get my exams" and find a proper job.

But I regain confidence every time I hear that a major anthropological problem has been solved by Neuroscientists using fMRI brain scans. Today, such a thing happened, and I feel that for once, I will have something to say next time we meet at the kitchen table. It will be something like this:

Interpretive traditions

Details: Category: Brian's blog; Published on Sunday, 08 March 2009 23:00; Written by Brian Malley

My principle contribution to the Cognitive Science of Religion has been an ethnography of an interpretive tradition, How the Bible Works, in which I developed a cognitively informed model of evangelical Christians' use of the Bible. As extraordinary and fascinating as the Biblicist tradition is, I have always wanted to explore interpretive traditions more broadly, in terms of cognitive theory. So I am seizing my chance. This is the first installment of a series of posts on a cognitive approach to interpretive traditions.

I grew up in a fundamentalist Christian environment. The church my family attended, Calvary Bible Church in Kalamazoo, Michigan, was formed in 1929 as part of the initial wave of fundamentalist churches. One of the things that defines Christian fundamentalists is their belief that the Bible is the word of God, that it is a verbal revelation (not merely a verbal rendition of a revelation) from God, and as such is completely true and authoritative. A considerable amount of intellectual effort in my youth was spent working out the implications of this doctrine, and, ironically, it was ultimately my search for a consistent interpretation of it that drove me from fundamentalism. Anyway, by the time I got around to deciding on a topic for my doctoral thesis, it had become clear to me that neither fundamentalists nor the scholars who studied them really understood what was happening when fundamentalists and evangelicals interacted with the Bible and with each other around the Bible. I knew I didn't understand it either, so I decided to take a crack at the problem.

alt

Calvary Bible Church, today.

In Bad Taste: Evidence for the Oral Origins of Moral Disgust

Details: Category: Nicolas' Blog; Published on Thursday, 05 March 2009 23:00; Written by Nicolas Baumard

The last issue of Science reports a fascinating piece of research on the facial display of disgust among participants whom have been treated unfairly in an economic game. Here is the abstract:

In common parlance, moral transgressions “leave a bad taste in the mouth.” This metaphor implies a link between moral disgust and more primitive forms of disgust related to toxicity and disease, yet convincing evidence for this relationship is still lacking. We tested directly the primitive oral origins of moral disgust by searching for similarity in the facial motor activity evoked by gustatory distaste (elicited by unpleasant tastes), basic disgust (elicited by photographs of contaminants), and moral disgust (elicited by unfair treatment in an economic game). We found that all three states evoked activation of the levator labii muscle region of the face, characteristic of an oral-nasal rejection response. These results suggest that immorality elicits the same disgust as disease vectors and bad tastes.

Following anthropologist Richard Schweder, psychologist Jonathan Haidt has proposed that some of our moral judgments (about incest, purity, or chastity) come from our “sense of disgust”. Do these results argue in favour of such a theory of morality ?

moraldisgust

What is an institution, that people may participate in it?

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

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

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

Cross-cultural differences in risk taking

Details: Category: Hugo's blog; Published on Thursday, 26 February 2009 22:00; Written by Hugo Mercier

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).

Paleolithic art: awesome — but not religious

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

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

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

paleolithicart

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

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

How persistent are intuitive (erroneous) beliefs?

Details: Category: Helen De Cruz's blog; Published on Sunday, 22 February 2009 23:00; Written by Helen De Cruz

My motivation for posting this blog is simple: I am wondering whether it is possible for humans to ever truly internalize counterintuitive scientific principles like evolutionary theory or Newtonian (let alone Einsteinian) physics.

According to developmental psychologists like Elizabeth Spelke or Susan Carey, and cognitive anthropologists like Pascal Boyer and Dan Sperber, humans are endowed with inference mechanisms that enable them to acquire knowledge of the world (these inference mechanisms are known by several terms, such as core knowledge, conceptual modules or intuitive ontologies). Sometimes these inference mechanisms are at odds with scientific principles. A well-studied example is impetus physics, the view that inanimate objects, in order to be propelled, have to be laden with a force (impetus) by an agent or another object in order to be set in motion. This impetus physics yields a lot of imprecise predictions: for example, over 50% of adults believe that a ball, being launched by a sling, will continue in a curvilinear path, or that a ball dropped by a running person will fall straight down instead of describing a parabolic path. Newtonian physics, in contrast, predicts a parabolic path, a prediction only consistently made by people with a college training in physics (see McCloskey's 1983 review in Scientific American to get an idea).

However, an ingenious experimental procedure by Kohhenikov and Hegarty (2001), Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 8) shows that even expert physicists are guided by the intuitive impetus physics under some conditions.

Do economic games tell us something about real behaviours?

Details: Category: Nicolas' Blog; Published on Monday, 16 February 2009 22:00; Written by Nicolas Baumard

The last issue of Current Anthropology reports a research conducted by Polly Wiessner among the Ju/'hoan Bushmen of the Kalahari. Like a recent article by Gurven (see our previous post), this research calls into question the relevance of economic games. Here is the abstract:

Experimental games - the dictator game and the ultimatum game - were played out among the Ju/'hoan Bushmen of the Kalahari. Subsequently, the experimenter tracked what the players did with the money earned in the games to see how it was used in "games of everyday life." Players were stingy and did not punish in experimental games and were generous and did punish in "games of life." The fact that the conditions of anonymity of the games removed cultural institutions and emotions governing sharing and reciprocity lead Ju/'hoansi to reassess risks and beneﬁts and play more selﬁshly. The ﬁndings underline the importance of cultural institutions such as sharing, reciprocity, and social sanctions (costly punishment) to provide the structure for other-regarding behavior to be expressed and to be rendered beneﬁcial for the participants.

Note that a less "cultural" view is possible. Indeed, Wiessner emphasizes the role of culture and institutions (such as Xaro, a formal gift exchange partnerships). However, from an evolutionary and cognitive point of view, one could note that people lack the most basic cues to behave morally: They interact with an unknown person, they don't know whether they are going to interact with her again, if she is trustworthy, they do not know anything about her situation (is she hungry? ill? wealthy?), etc. In other words, from an evolutionary and cognitive point of view, the participants' moral sense may think that it is not at all a situation when one has a duty to share.

Beta-blocker erases fear response related to bad memories

Details: Category: Dimitris Xygalatas' blog; Published on Monday, 16 February 2009 19:00; Written by Dimitris Xygalatas

In the cult movie “The Matrix”, Morpheus offers Neo a choice between 2 pills: Take the red pill, and you got yourself enough trouble to make a whole film trilogy. Take the blue pill, and forget we ever had this conversation”. Scientists at the University of Amsterdam think there might actually be something similar to the blue pill.

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Animal studies have shown that memories involving fear can change when recalled, a process referred to as reconsolidation. In this study, published on the online edition of Nature Neuroscience,[1] Merel Kindt, Marieke Soeter and Bram Vervliet tried to disrupt the reactivation of fear memories in human subjects by administering propranolol pills (a beta-blocker normally used in the treatment of high blood pressure).

The study involved 60 volunteers, who first learned to associate spiders with fear by receiving mild electric shocks whenever pictures of spiders were shown to them. 24 hours later, subjects were randomly split into 2 groups. One group received the propranolol pills, the other a placebo. Then, they were shown the pictures of the spiders again, and their fear response was measured, based on their startle reflex as a reaction to a loud noise. Results showed that the startle response was significantly lower in the experimental group compared to the placebo group. The same effect was measured another 24 hours later, without any further administration of the drug. Thus, the administration of the drug before getting subjects to recall fear memories, erased the behavioural expression of the fear 24 hours later and prevented the return of the fear.

Face value

Details: Category: Ophelia's blog; Published on Thursday, 12 February 2009 23:00; Written by Ophelia Deroy

As Dan was noticing last time, the ability to recognize individuals on the basis of faces (and voices) is quite fascinating. The ability to « read » unfamiliar faces is no less interesting, albeit quite independant : prosopagnosics with impairments in perception of facial identity, as well as the rest of us, make judgments about faces being aggressive or friendly (see Todorov 2008 here).

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Alphonse "Neotenic" Capone (1899-1947)

These are intriguing inferences – if only because they are often not very accurate ! Still, they are strong, very quick (as little as 100 ms exposure is enough, as shown for instance here) but they can also be very discriminative, and lead to quite subtle judgements...

Culture and Perception, part II: The Muller-Lyer illusion

Details: Category: Simon's blog; Published on Sunday, 08 February 2009 23:00; Written by Simon Barthelme

Another post from our holiday collection of oldies but goodies.

The first post in the series dealt with Nisbett's findings on different patterns of attention in Asian and Western cultures, and I talked a bit about how certain differences are more likely a priori than others. I mentioned that we cannot expect people to differ too much in being able to perceive, e.g., orientation, because it's difficult to imagine a functional visual system with orientation sensitivity. There are no visual environments without orientation. On the other hand, there is some variation between visual environments along other lines, and it would not be completely surprising to find that it causes differences in certain aspects of people's visual perception. An obvious example is in the perception of faces: in some Western environments people relatively rarely encounter Asian faces and in some Asian environments it's the opposite. There is a well-documented handicap in Europeans in the identification of Asian faces, and vice-versa (it's called the "other race" effect, holds for other populations, and is possibly the single greatest source of racist jokes). It's an interesting topic, but I won't discuss in today's post, saving it for some other time. Instead, I will deal with less obvious sources of variation: depth clues.

Most readers have probably seen the Müller-Lyer illusion. It's a Psych 101 staple that dates back to 1889. Michael Bach has a page devoted to it on his (fantastic) website, here. Here the illusion is in its standard version:

I'm counting on the reader perceiving the figure with the outward-pointing arrow as longer. I probably won't kill the suspense by revealing that the two segments are actually of the same length, that's what makes it an illusion.

Is resonance the cement of society?

Details: Category: Nicolas' Blog; Published on Thursday, 05 February 2009 23:00; Written by Nicolas Baumard

Human social life heavily relies on our ability to understand other people's beliefs, intentions, actions and sensations. One way to explain this ability has been to posit a capacity for empathy. Empathy is often characterized as the ability to "put oneself into another's shoes", or in some way experience the outlook or emotions of another being within oneself. This idea has been supported by many recent brain imaging studies (the kind debated here last month) that have shown overlapping activation patterns when subjects feel their own emotions and observe similar emotions in others. The theory of ‘‘embodied simulation'' postulates that such overlap reﬂects an automatic resonance to others' affective states, allowing implicit affect sharing and empathy (Gallese et al., 2004; Gallese, 2007; Keysers and Gazzola, 2006). Thus, according to the theory of "embodied dimulation", resonance seems to be the "cement of society" (to use Hume 's famous expression) : the mechanism that enables human interaction, sympathy and morality.

A recent study by Danzinger and colleagues (here is a gated version) challenges this theory by looking at a unique population - individuals with congenital insensitivity to pain. Contrary to what the theory of resonance would have predicted:

nicopost

"Patients with the rare syndrome of congenital insensitivity to pain cannot rely on ‘‘mirror matching'' (i.e., resonance) mechanisms to understand the pain of others. Nevertheless, they showed normal fMRI responses to observed pain in anterior mid-cingulate cortex and anterior insula, two key regions of the so-called ‘‘shared circuits'' for self and other pain."

Is resonance really the cement of society, or do we understand others' interests with the help of more high-level and abstract cognitive process?

What about cognition and society?

Details: Category: Nicolas' Blog; Published on Wednesday, 04 February 2009 23:00; Written by Nicolas Baumard

When people talk about the relationships between cognitive science and the social sciences, they usually think of religion, art, information transmission, etc. They don't think of another cluster of topics such as family, race, justice, crime, institutions, hierarchy, coalitions, reputation, trust, and so on. In other words, they think to cognition and culture, but not to cognition and society. From an administrative point of view, they have anthropology in mind, but not sociology.

However, many a phenomenon in cognitive sciences would be relevant for sociology, and would benefit from sociology’s litterature: social categorization, emotions, moral cognition, reputation management, planning, etc. So far, the domain of cognition and society seems to be quite empty (but see Elster’s recent book). Relevant blogs are even rarer (Kanazawa’s blog seems to be an exception, talking about happiness, hierarchy, crimes, and, well, mostly about sex…).

Does anyone have an explanation for such a difference between anthropology and sociology? Do you know any good blog about cognition and society?

Astounding! Readers use their imagination when reading

Details: Category: Olivier's blog; Published on Tuesday, 03 February 2009 23:00; Written by Olivier Morin

La-Lectrice-Soumise

Everyday, in spite of the critics, neuroimaging keeps on producing vast increases in our understanding of culture. This week, for example, Boing Boing and Physorg enthusiastically comment on an fMRI study "forthcoming in Psychological Science" (though not yet online on the journal's website). The study discovered that "readers build vivid mental simulations of narrative situations".

For those unacquainted with the subtleties of Neuroscience, the authors explain: "Readers use perceptual and motor representations in the process of comprehending narrated activity, and these representations are dynamically updated at points where relevant aspects of the situation are changing. Readers understand a story by simulating the events in the story world and updating their simulation when features of that world change."

In other words, when you read the following sentence:

"It was a dark and stormy night"

You actually think of a night that is dark and stormy. You build, so to speak, a mental picture of it. And that image is in your head - in your brain. But there's more.

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Page 7 of 10

Is this more than illegal tipping, and if so, how?

Dan Sperber

Thursday, 23 May 2013 16:52

Tips (to waiters, taxis, etc) are paid (1) because of precedent: if they are customarily given, it is more of a decision not to give rather than to give - with precedents producing an anchoring effect, being stingy in tipping may have reputational costs, and so on (2) because it is a normal part of the income for some professions so tipping may be a moral thing to do (3) because these are professions where typically people can treat customers etc. more or less well, so that a tip may be a sensible investment.

In the medical case nicely described by Denis, there is the added fact that such tipping is illegal. Any other important difference? We may feel that doctors should treat all patients equally well, but then we should object to private medecine or surgery, and so on when it can fix its prices and offer better services to patients who can pay more. My guess is that even people who don't object might still see tipping doctors are immoral.

The general point is this: this case might be best approached within a discussion of tipping in general, a discussion very well worth having from avariety of points of view: cultural, economic, rational choice, reputation, and so on.

Anyhow Denis, get well soon!

The 'gratitude trap' where Hungarian patients keep falling , Denis Tatone

The envelope that makes the Romanian medical system go around

Radu Umbres

Tuesday, 21 May 2013 21:45

Denis, your story strikes a Romanian chord. The situation around here is even worse, from what I can tell. But it is quite a fascinating question, with different answers from different points of view.

For an economist, it is a matter of price formation. In the state system, Romanian doctors are paid a fixed (and miserable) wage, largely unrelated to quality or effort. The incentive to pocket bribes is huge, and patients know it so well. In the private sector (with transparent and varied prices for medical services), bribes are almost unheard of. Also, there is a more or less efficient market for bribes. Patients find out how much a doctor expects, usually from past patients, or from other doctors. Surgeons receive more than GPs, professors more than debutants, etc.

But I think there is something more about "medical envelopes", from a cognitive point of view. First of all, there is a vast asymmetry of competence between doctors and patients, which gives the former a large freedom of action. Is this pill better, or another one? Surgery or not? Home treatment or hospitalisation? To make things worse, the post-hoc reckoning is not very helpful, since most decisions may be medically justified, but you might also end up dead. The patient is at the mercy of the practitioner since she does not know what choices are better. The best way to make sure one gets the proper treatment is to insure the benevolence of the doctor, and a bribe is the simplest path to gain the doctor's amity.

Second, there is something special about this particular social exchange: the patient is dealing in an ultimate value - her health. Something everyone in Romania says is that there is no price too high to be healthy. (Paradoxically, giving up smoking somehow does not make the list - self-hint-hint-nudge-nudge). If people would risk not bribing a policeman to avoid a fine, they are extremely unlikely to jeopardise their health in this manner. One cannot afford to stick to abstract principles (like discouraging corruption) when her life is at stake.

Finally, there is something like a Maussian gift in the affair: one passes a fat envelope even without the explicit mention of an economic exchange. It is not that the surgeon would not operate without being bribed - the patient just shows gratitude without visible economic reckoning. Of course, under the veil of generosity stands the solid self-interest of the patient. The fat envelope is meant to make sure that no scalpel is lost in her belly. But no-one says it out loud. It's a "I know that you know that I know etc" which makes sure that the transaction is smooth and polite.

To end with a personal anecdote: I was (and to some extent I still am) very wary of giving out envelopes to doctors. A little bit of moral prudishness, a little bit of fear (what if he feels insulted?), a bit of monetary unsaviness. Those who are more competent in these matters reassured me: "just put the envelope on his desk - he knows what to do next" After all, he is the expert, and I am not.

The condescension factor

Denis Tatone

Sunday, 19 May 2013 14:40

This is a comment wrote by Eva Zemandl on Facebook about the article above. I'm copy-pasting it here with her permission.

"Very well-rounded analysis. A few thoughts. First, I am glad you mentioned nurses in your comment* because in the article you discount this, perhaps unintentionally. I remember my aunt consistently bribing the nurses when my uncle was recovering from a stroke for several months in the hospital. Also, I've had many conversations with my family here in Hungary about this, trying to understand the rationale behind this irrational system (I'm originally from the US). I think both motivations could be at play here. I got the impression that, in addition to the bribe, people are still very sensitive to the "wage supplement" aspect. That is, most people I've talked to find the wages of doctors and other health care providers rather deplorable. Even if GMs are a considerable expense for my working class family members, they seems to use the wage supplement as a way to render this dysfunctional reality more palatable somehow. I also think there is a third factor at work here - but I think it's linked to the others. I've witnessed situations where doctors behave very condescendingly toward patients or their families, despite a hefty bribe of some 20,000 HUF. Part of that harks back to the days of the socialist regime - when the power of public authorities was unquestioned. As one of my Hungarian friends likes to say about health clinics here: "they just want to make you feel like they still have power over you." When my aunt and I went to visit my cousin in critical care last year, the doctor didn't want to give us the time of day. We didn't give her a tip, but we kept pressing her for answers. I said to her, "is it a virus or a bacteria?" The doctor looked at me like a deer in headlights. I think she was surprised I even knew the difference. She opened up quite a lot to us after that and we never gave her a tip. Finally- and I'll get off my soapbox - private insurance systems are not necessarily more transparent. The US being a case in point. There is a great (surprisingly) 28-pg TIME article about this, "The bitter pill: why medical bills are killing us." I'm sue you'd find it relevant. Anyway, thanks so much for posting this!!"

*This is the comment by me which Eva refers to:

"I should have also added that, in fact, there is GM directed to nurses when they are perceived as the primary caretakers. Usually this is the case for families having elderly parents in retirement houses."

The firefighters calendar

Guillaume Dezecache

Saturday, 18 May 2013 17:08

Thanks for this brilliant post, Denis!

That GM thing reminds me of a funny routine that happens in France: around the end of the year, firemen and mailmen knock at your door to sell (ugly) calendars. Folk wisdom holds that if you don't buy the calendar, firemen will not rush if there is a fire in your house. Similarly, mailmen will be more likely to lose important mail you receive. What is striking is that this belief seems to carry on though it makes complete non-sense. I bet the situation is a bit different as for GM: the physician obviously remembers you and s/he is more likely to act benevolently towards you with a bit of extra money...

Not Quite So Simple

Grazzi Yoon

Monday, 01 April 2013 22:08

Azzouni certainly has the bona fides to weigh in on this. But it seems to me that the pure sociology of it isn't quite so simple.

Take Wiles' first proof of Taniyama-Shimura. It had an error, but it took concerted efforts by extreme experts to locate it. But that's not the end of the story. It turns out that he and Richard Taylor were able to ascertain that piecing together two parts of the theory that didn't quite seem to work on their own was in fact enough to 'patch' the proof together (Wiles himself says as much).

So, Yes, the original proof was wrong. To a much lesser extent, Perelman didn't fill in all the blanks in his landmark proof of Poincare, leading to a (minor scandal) where two other mathematicians claimed to give the "first" proof based on the "ideas of" Perelman and Hamilton.

The question is this: if someone had done the patching of Wiles' proof for him, would THEY be the prover? How large does the hole have to be? When an error is found, who gets to decide whether it is trivial, whether it wrecks the proof entirely, and who will be the one credited with the insight that makes the whole thing work?

These are not trivial matters, and the issue isn't apportioning credit, but deciding what an error truly is. Typos don't count. Proving incorrect results certainly do. But what about "generally correct" ideas that eventually lead to a proof? How loose do those ideas have to be?

I don't think there's ANY argument about when large, demonstrable errors have been found in published proofs. But there are many other cases -- like de Branges' purported proof of the Riemann Hypothesis -- that fall through these neat cracks.

Why do mathematicians always agree? , Christophe Heintz

The Logical Basis of Kinship Terminologies

Dwight Read

Saturday, 30 March 2013 08:17

In respect to kinship terminologies, Levinson's question, "What constrains this exuberant diversity of systems?", is not answered by Kemp and Regier's analysis for one simple reason: Terminologies have a structure and logic, like grammars for language, that determine the possible range of kinship terminologies. Kemp and Regier assume any partition of the space of genealogical relations is a potential terminology and then show that existing terminologies occupy only a small portion of this space due, they assert, to a tradeoff between simplicity and usefulness. This would be like saying a sentence can be any subset of all possible vocabulary words, then asserting that the realized languages have sentences that are a tradeoff between simplicity and usefulness, but ignoring the fact that the simplicity and usefulness of sentences is created through the grammar of the language that constrains what are admissible sentences. The same is true for kinship terminologies, and the answer to Levinson's question has already been made by showing that kinship terminologies have a generative structure that determines the corpus of kinship terms, starting from the primary kin terms of a terminology, along with kinship concepts that are expressed in the terminology (such as reciprocity of kin terms), and the kinship structural properties embedded in a particular terminology (Read 1984, 2001, 2007, 2009; Read and Behrens 1990; Leaf and Read 2012, among others). For example, the difference giving rise to the fundamental division of terminologies into descriptive versus classificatory (bifurcate merging) terminologies derives from two different ways that sibling relations are conceptualized in different societies: (1) a sibling is the child of my parent other than myself (descriptive terminologies) or (2) siblings are those persons who have parents in common (classificatory terminologies) (Bennardo and Read 2007; Read, Fischer and Leaf 2013). Trying to understand kinship terminologies (and hence kinship systems) without first working out the generative logic of a terminology is like trying to understand languages without working out the grammar of a language. Extensive work has already been published on the generative logic of kinship terminologies and this work makes evident what constrains the variability in kinship terminologies that Levinson asks about.

References

Bennardo, G. and D. Read 2007. Cognition, Algebra, and Culture in the Tongan Kinship Terminology. Journal of Cognition and Culture 7: 49-88.

Leaf, M. and D. Read. (2012) Human Thought and Social Organization: Anthropology on a New Plane. Lanham: Lexington Press

Read, D. l984. An algebraic account of the American kinship terminology. Current Anthropology 25: 4l7-440

Read, D. 2001 What is Kinship? In The Cultural Analysis of Kinship: The Legacy of David Schneider and Its Implications for Anthropological Relativism, R. Feinberg and M. Ottenheimer eds. University of Illinois Press, Urbana. Pp. 78-117.

Read, D. 2007. Kinship Theory: A Paradigm Shift. Ethnology 46(4):329-364

Read, D. 2009. Another Look at Kinship: Reasons Why a Paradigm Shift is Needed. Algebra Rodtsva 12:42-69.

Read, D. and C. Behrens. 1990. KAES: An expert system for the algebraic analysis of kinship terminologies. J. of Quantitative Anthropology 2:353-393.

Read, D., Fischer, M. and M. Leaf. 2013. What are kinship terminologies, and why do we care? A computational approach to analyzing symbolic domains. Social Science Computer Review 31(1): 16-44.

Is kinship back? , Dan Sperber

Reclaiming Kinship

Saturday, 30 March 2013 05:55

Yes, kinship is back -- or more accurately, it is reclaiming its original vigor. Haven't you heard of the Kinship Circle? For each of the past three years, and as part of this year's annual meeting of the Amerian Anthropological Association as well, we have had highly successful sessions on kinship. The sessions have been integrated with the themes of each of the meetings. We have had an international group of scholars from Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, England, France, Germany, Italy, Qatar and the United States, presenting a wide range of papers, ranging from more "classic" questions about kinship systems to current research that is challenging some of our theoretical ideas about what constitutes kinship. The papers from the first two sessions will be published shortly.
Dwight Read
Fadwa El Guindi

mathematicians do disagree! significantly so

William (Bill) Lawless

Friday, 29 March 2013 18:14

Dear learned scholar of mathematicians, I disagree with your premise that mathematicians do not disagree, and, being wonderful souls, are easily converted to consensus. No less a scholar, intellectual and role model than Von Neumann (1961), the founder of game theory, argued against your premise. In fact, he bemoaned that unlike physicists, mathematicians who don't agree behave in an unsocial manner by striking out in new directions, leaving their conflicts unresolved. In his article, the first in his collected works, Von Neumann wished that mathematicians disagreed as physicists did. Whenever conflict arose between two physicists (e.g., Bohr and Einstein), physicists refused to ignore it, often bringing their field to a standstill until a resolution was found (i.e., consensus via debate, unlike your fanciful example of consensus without debate). I have long cherished Von Neumann's insight, and his remarkable paper on mathematicians. BTW, in my research, I too have found that consensus without conflict is indeed possible, except that none of the participants can agree on the result.

Von Neumann, J. (1961). The mathematician. Collected works, Pergamon.

Gullibility and pigheadedness

Hugo Mercier

Monday, 18 March 2013 07:02

Thanks Radu and Christophe for a great post and a great exchange. Just a quick note to point out that the professor mentioned in the story is also described as rarely paying attention to the opinions of others. People had told him he was walking into a trap and he dismissed their advice. As in most other cases, the problem is not really sheer gullibility, but poor discrimination in who to trust, including a large part of refusing to be influenced by some communicated information.

Why do scammers persist in saying they are from Nigeria? , Radu Umbres

A scientist's gullibility

Christophe Heintz

Sunday, 10 March 2013 14:19

Your hypothesis, Radu, that scam targets personality traits more than they exploit the situations has a corroborating story just out in the news (brought to my attention by Denis Tatone): Paul Frampton, a great physicist, has fallen victim of scam, mistakenly thinking that he was corresponding with a young beautiful model and eventually ending up in jail for transporting 2kg of cocaine.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/10/magazine/the-professor-the-bikini-model-and-the-suitcase-full-of-trouble.html?_r=3&

People concur in saying that Frampton is unusually gullible.

This story of an incredibly gullible scientist (or so it seems) might also be relevant to your remark that the optimality of epistemic vigilance can only be measured in view of its fit to the milieu. An optimal epistemic vigilance would enable people to believe most of the true things they are told and to disbelieve most of the false things they are told (especially the costly one). The inconvincible sceptic as well as the gullible has less than optimal epistemic vigilance. The optimal vigilance fall in between, but its precise position depends on whether the environment is full of false claims or not. It would be interesting to know whether there are different cognitive developments of epistemic vigilance depending on the type of environment in which a child grows up. This could account for some variability across individuals.

As for scientists, they are supposed to instantiate high epistemic vigilance. So how can Frampton be at the same time so gullible and a good physicist? I see two non-exclusive possibilities:

(1) Frampton exercises epistemic vigilance, but only in the domain of physics. This can happen because the scientific environment fosters argumentative abilities. By contrast, Frampton did not wish or need to convince others that he was having a relation with a beautiful model. He did not need to find good reasons for his beliefs and did not wish to adress counter-arguments. Hugo Mercier pointed to me that this difference in the argumentative context could explain the fact that Newton, with so great achievements in physics, did so badly in chemistry/alchemy. There was in alchemy no need to convince others; it was a secret enterprise.

(2) Frampton does not exercise much epistemic vigilance, but does well in physics nonetheless because the process of checking the plausibility of claims is distributed to others. Only very selected information arrives to his creative mind. This is thanks to the process through which scientific information comes to be distributed---the review process for instance. In science, epistemic vigilance is distributed across individuals and institutionalised. In that context, some gullibility might be an advantage. The schoolgirl, in any case, does better by believing the apparently crazy things that her teacher says (e.g. sound is the vibration of matter). At the research level also, it can pay to believe improbable hypotheses; it means pursuing a high risk, high reward research programme.

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