Social Norms and Cultural Dynamics
- Details
- Category: Call for Papers
- Published on Friday, 23 March 2012 11:06
The journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes has a Call for Papers for a Special Issue on "Social Norms and Cultural Dynamics". Guest Editors: Michael W. Morris (Columbia University), Ying-yi Hong (Nanyang Technological University), Chi-yue Chiu (Nanyang Technological University). Submission Deadline: December 30, 2012.
Why do the people in a group—a corporation, profession or nation—tend to behave in similar, characteristic ways? Why do they respond to situations and approach problems differently than do the people in other groups? Cultural differences are seen even between firms in same industry, between occupations that overlap, and between adjacent countries —groups that essentially share the same environment—so cultural patterns are not simply adaptations to different environments. Humans differ from other social animals in this tendency of groups to accumulate cultural patterns, and this may explain how we broke away from other primates in developing more complex social organization (Baumeister, 2005). To understand culture and its role in organizational behavior, researchers have grappled with two related problems at different levels of analysis. First, what psychological mechanism causes individuals to behave in culturally characteristic ways? Second, how do these processes keep a population behaving in a certain set of ways (even as the individuals in one generation are replaced by a new generation), or, in other cases, generate cultural change over time? The first problem—cultural influence—arises in traditional organizational behavior research examining the extent to which national, corporate, or occupational traditions constrain a person’s judgments, decisions, or behaviors (e.g. Earley, 1989). The second problem—cultural persistence and evolution—arises in research investigating how collective-level patterns reproduce themselves over time (e.g., Boyd & Richerson, 1985; Harrison & Carroll, 2006; Weick & Gilfillan, 1971).
The most studied psychological mechanism in cross-cultural research has been personal values (Harrison & Huntington, 2000; Hofstede, 1980; Hofstede et al., 1990). By this account, value-orientations, such as individualism or egalitarianism, are programmed by early socialization—formative experiences such as childrearing, schooling, or employee training. Once these values are inculcated, individuals, driven by their values, reproduced the culture’s characteristic patterns of behavior. Personal values operate cognitively like the self-concept, as chronically accessible, unwavering lenses that shape the person’s choices. This account has been critiqued for its reductionism—it portrays cultural patterns as emanating from each individual’s internalized value-orientation rather than as arising from their identifications with groups or their interactions with fellow group members. Further, empirical evidence suggests that very little cultural variation in behavior can be accounted for in terms of values (Oyserman & Coon, 2002).
An alternative account emphasizes the role of social norms in carrying cultural patterns. Whereas personal values are beliefs about one’s self, social norms are beliefs about other people. While the term is used variably in the social sciences, norms refer to what one’s fellows typically believe and do and expect of each other. Descriptive norms refer to what is—what prevails in the group; injunctive norms refer to what ought to be—what elicits approval in the group. Much research has highlighted how perceived norms affect workplace behaviors, such as absenteeism, conflict resolution, negotiation decisions, charitable giving, resource decisions, deference to authority, and so on (Bamberger& Biron, 2007; Fu et al., 2007; Kahneman, 1992; Miller, 1999; Pillutla & Chen, 1999; Savani, Morris & Naidu, 2011). Unlike ever-present values, perceived norms operate when contextually activated, when situational cues make them salient (Cialdini, Kallgren, & Reno, 1991). Further, compared to personal values, perceived norms are more malleable. They are assumptions that get updated as an actor observes or experiences new people and new situations. The cue-ability and malleability of norms may help answer some questions about culture that have eluded value-based accounts, such as:
- Why do people’s cultural affiliations shape their behavior so dramatically in some contexts but not at all in others? Why are some individuals from a culture more adherent to its characteristic patterns than are others?
- Why do some cultural patterns persist unchanged across many generations, whereas others shift dramatically within a generation?
Although norms have the potential to shed light on these dynamic aspects of culture, norm-based accounts of cultural influence and evolution remain complex and under-studied. To influence an individual’s thinking, a norm first has to be learned, either induced from everyday observations or imposed by authorities. Next, it has to be cognitively activated by cues in the situation. Even then, whether it is used to guide behavior depends on the person’s motivational dispositions and states. However, research is just beginning to delineate the variety of motives that impel people to use their knowledge of norms to guide their behavior. Traditionally, sociologists have theorized that people follow norms to avoid sanctions, yet norms may provide repertoires as well as restrictions, resources as well as constraints. A wider range of motives, which may correspond to different ways of using one’s knowledge of norms, are worth investigating for a fuller understanding.
Further, a fuller understanding of the role of norms in cultural influence and, ultimately, cultural evolution requires focusing more widely than a single actor. Norms are maintained in an actor’s interactions with other people and in public representations such as discourses, texts, and institutional rules (Sperber, 1996). For example, a person heading to a formal dinner without wearing shoes might be discouraged by disapproving glances from dining companions, stares from strangers, and a recitation of restaurant policy from the maître de. However, this collusion of many actors to maintain social norms is not inviolate, as cultures sometimes change dramatically within a generation. These changes can also be accounted for in terms of norm-based processes.
Recent research has yielded many insights about these individual- and collective-level dynamics; however, they are scattered across the literatures of organizational behavior, psychology, sociology, economics and political science, and needs better integration (Hechter & Opp, 2001).
This special issue aims to bring together research on social norms as carriers of culture for the audience of organizational behavior and decision making researchers. We invite papers from management and other disciplines to advance the understanding of cultural norms, including but not limited to the following issues:
- Norm Acquisition, Activation and Updating
How do people acquire knowledge of the norms associated with their cultural groups? Does everyday communication lead people to make assumptions about descriptive norms, whether accurate or inaccurate (Lyons & Kashima, 2003)? Can descriptive and injunctive norms be inferred from vicarious observation of one’s fellows? Can they be conditioned by the experience of positive and negative outcomes that follow one’s behaviors, including both intrinsic reactions and social sanctions? Can beliefs about norms be imposed by authorities? What aspects of situations, such as cultural symbols or types of people, activate cultural norms (Fu et al., 2007; Liu, Friedman, & Hong, 2012; Savani, Morris & Naidu, 2011)? What are the cognitive, emotional, and neural correlates of norm use (Jacobson, Mortensen & Cialdini, 2011; Mason, Dyer & Norton, 2009)? How can leaders shift perceived norms or increase norm enforcement in order to manage behavior?
- Norm Motivations and Enforcement Mechanisms
Norm activation does not necessarily entail norm compliance. For instance, passing a speed limit sign may activate the rule in one’s head without inducing one to slow down. Do people develop personal attitudes that are aligned with culturally characteristic behaviors simply as a function of enacting those behaviors, or does the normative nature of the behavior inhibit self-attribution (Bem, 1972)? Recent studies have identified dispositional and situational characteristics that generally affect whether people follow salient norms, regardless of the content of the norm. Individuals dispositionally high in Need for Cognitive Closure crave consensus, and thus rely on descriptive norms while making judgments (Fu et al., 2007). The state of ego-depletion (depleted willpower) amplifies the force of salient descriptive norms, yet dampens the force of salient injunctive norms (Jacobson et al., 2011). What motives drive people to invert norms in creative ways, or join counter-cultures opposed to the mainstream culture?When are norms enforced by others through ex ante threats, promises, and pressures, as well as ex post sanctions for norm violation? Sanctions range from emotional signs (what is “approved of” versus “frowned upon”) to economic sanctions (extending or withdrawing exchange opportunities). What kinds of norms rely on each type of sanction? Given that sanctions are often costly for these enforcers, do other audiences reward enforcers for upholding the standards? Are people with different motivations differentially sensitive to norm enforcers? Are people for whom the costs of noncompliance are lower more likely to become activists and other norm violators, or are they people for whom the benefits of noncompliance are higher? How do motives and norm enforcement behaviors differ as a function whether the culture is tight versus loose with regard to norm violation (Gelfand et al., 2011)?
- Diffusion within and across Groups
How does an idea become normative? How does a belief or behavior spread from one individual to others and ultimately become consensual, descriptively normative? Research on rumors and storytelling suggests that it depends on aspects of the idea’s content, such as its memorability and congruence with pre-existing beliefs and practices, which make it appealing to adopt and transmit (Sperber, 1996; Heath, 1996). Also context matters: Is the belief or behavioral variant modeled by an individual who is prestigious, successful, or similar to oneself? Variants perceived as prevalent in the population will be adopted out of conformity motives, and those perceived as infrequent, out of anticonformity motives (Henrich & McElreath, 2003). When differing norms prevail within a population, what determines whether individuals adopt the patterns of the elite, the majority, or similar others?Do injunctive norms arise, as sociologists hold, when collective action is needed in the face of social dilemmas? If so, how do we explain moralized norms that appear dysfunctional for the individual and the group (Kitts, 2003)? To what extent do norms emerge out of interactions? What is the role of dyadic and triadic interactions, as well as of more complex social network structures? In the case of diffusion of a practice across populations, how do these social learning and social network mechanisms combine with institutional and political factors (Weber & Dacin, 2011)?
- Persistence and Change
What features of norms make them more likely to persist across generations? In classic laboratory paradigms, the arbitrariness (Weick & Gilfillan, 1971) and institutionalization (Zucker, 1991) of norms have been shown to matter. Can such constructs help in understanding real cultural norms?Social change operates in nonlinear ways. In cases such as the Czech Velvet Revolution or the Arab Spring, long periods of cultural stasis are punctuated by dramatic shifts. This may reflect that some of the same mechanisms that contribute to persistence figure in cultural change. When there is a supply of activists who violate a norm, this creates the opportunity for an authority to play the role of a norm entrepreneur who stops enforcing the traditional norm. While norm entrepreneurs, such as a police officer who stops imposing a curfew, may lose the esteem of some audiences, they may be embraced by, opinion leaders such as journalists. More actors will adopt the new behavior seeing that activists go unpunished and that authorities approve. Are there tipping points at which the force of conformity suddenly tilts in favor of the new behavior rather than the old? The psychology of norms, in this way, can create cascades in what behaviors and beliefs are adopted. A norm analysis of cultural change calls attention to the attributes and needs of people in the activist, norm entrepreneur, and opinion leader roles. What kinds of people are drawn to each role in the process? Does change depend more on the supply of activists or the demand for them on the part of norm entrepreneurs and opinion leaders (Hechter & Opp, 2001)?
This list of topics is suggestive, not comprehensive. We are open to multiple perspectives on identifying new areas for enhancing the understanding the role of norms in cultural processes (both within and between cultures), and especially welcome interdisciplinary analyses. Priority will be given to empirical papers.
Submissions
Instructions for preparing manuscripts are provided at the journal website:
http://www.elsevier.com/locate/obhdp/authorinstructions
Manuscripts should be submitted on-line at the following page: http://ees.elsevier.com/obhdp/
The deadline for submission is December 30, 2012. Submissions will be accepted beginning December 1, 2012.
Questions about the special issue can be directed to any of the guest co-editors: Michael Morris ( This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. ), Ying-yi Hong ( This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. ), Chi-yue Chiu ( This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. ), or the Editor of OBHDP Xiao-Ping Chen ( This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. ).
References
Bamberger, P., & Biron, M. (2007). Group norms and excessive absenteeism: The role of peer referent others. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 103, 179–196.
Baumeister, R.F. (2005). The cultural animal: Human nature, meaning, and social life. New York: Oxford University Press.
Bem, D. J. (1972). Self-perception theory. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 6, pp. 1–62), New York: Academic Press.
Boyd, R. and P. J. Richerson. (1985). Culture and the Evolutionary Process, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Cialdini, R. B., Kallgren, C. A., & Reno, R. R. (1991). A focus theory of normative conduct: A theoretical refinement and reevaluation of the role of norms in human behavior. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 24, 201-234.
Earley, P. C. (1989). Social loafing and collectivism: A comparison of United States and People's Republic of China. Administrative Science Quarterly, 34, 565-581.
Fu, H-y., Morris, M. W. Lee, S-l ., Chao, M., Chiu, C-y., Hong, Y-y. (2007). Epistemic motives and cultural conformity: Need for closure, culture, and context as determinants of conflict judgments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92(2),191-207.
Gelfand, M. J., Raver, J. L., Nishii, L., Leslie, L. M., Lun, J., et al. (2011). Differences between tight and loose cultures: A 33-nation study. Science, 332, 1100-1104.
Jacobson, R. P., Mortensen, C. R., & Cialdini, R. B. (2011). Bodies obliged and unbound: Differentiated response tendencies for injunctive and descriptive social norms. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 100, 433-448.
Harrison, J. R. Carroll, G. R. (2006). Culture and demography in organizations. Princeton,
NJ Princeton University Press.
Harrison, L. E. & Huntington, S. P. (2000). Culture matters: How values shape human progress. New York: Basic Books.
Heath, Chip (1996). Do people prefer to pass along good news or bad news? Valence and relevance of news as a predictor of transmission propensity. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 68, 79-94.
Hechter, M. & Opp, K-D. (2001). Social norms. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
Henrich, J. & R. McElreath. (2003). The evolution of cultural evolution. Evolutionary Anthropology, 12, 123-135.
Hofstede, G. (1980). Culture's consequences: International differences in work-related values. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.
Hofstede, G., Neuyen, B., Ohayv, D. D., & Sanders, G. (1990). Measuring organizational cultures: A qualitative and quantitative study across twenty cases. Administrative Science Quarterly, 35, 286-316.
Kahneman, D. (1992). Reference points, anchors, norms, and mixed feelings. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 51, 296–312.
Kitts, James A. (2003). Egocentric Bias or Information Management? Selective Disclosure and the Social Roots of Norm Misperception. Social Psychology Quarterly 66, 222-237.
Liu, W., Friedman, R., Hong, Y.-Y. (2012). Culture and accountability in negotiation: Recognizing the importance of in-group relations, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 117, 221-234.
Lyons, A., & Kashima, Y. (2003). How are stereotypes maintained through communication? The influence of stereotype sharedness. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85, 989–1005.
Mason M., Dyer, R., & Norton, M. (2009). Neural mechanisms of social influence. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 110, 152–159.
Miller, D. T. (1999). The norm of self-interest. American Psychologist, 54, 1053–1060.
Pillutla, M. M. & Chen, X.-P. (1999). Social Norms and Cooperation in Social Dilemmas: The Effects of Context and Feedback. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 78, 81-103.
Savani, K., Morris, M. W., Naidu, N. V. R. (2011). Deference in Indians’ decision making: Introjected goals or injunctive norms? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. DOI: 10.1037/a0026415.
Sperber, D. (1996). Explaining culture: A naturalistic approach. Oxford, England: Blackwell.
Weber, K. and Dacin, M. T. (2011). The Cultural Construction of Organizational Life: Introduction to the Special Issue. Organization Science, 22, 287-298.
Weick, K. E., & Gilfillan, D. P. 1971. Fate of arbitrary traditions in a laboratory microculture. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 17: 179-191.
Zucker, L. G. (1991). The role of institutionalization in cultural persistence. In W. W. Powell & P. J. DiMaggio (Eds.), The new institutionalism in organizational analysis, pp. 83-107. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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!
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.
"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."
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...
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.
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.
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
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.
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.