2 postdocs at UBC in evolution, cognition and culture
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- Category: Jobs
- Published on Thursday, 03 May 2012 14:02
Joe Henrich informs us: The Centre for Human Evolution, Cognition and Culture (HECC) at the University of British Columbia will be hiring 5 post-doctoral researchers as part of a large, international, collaboration among psychologists, neuroscientists, anthropologists, historians, and biologists on the evolution of religion. Below is a call for applications for two of these positions. The first is for a historian to spearhead a systematic and comparative study of religion and prosociality (from the historical record). This person will work with Prof. Ted Slingerland. The second is for comparative ethnographic and experimental studies among living populations across the globe (on religion, ritual and prosociality). This person will work with Prof. Ara Norenzayan and me. We are open to anthropologists, psychologists and economists, among others. If possible, we'd like to have this person in place by September 2012 (or at least by Dec). We know that right now is a bad time to search for post-docs to start this fall. For this reason, we would like to consider applicants that can finish their PhD in the fall (perhaps earlier than anticipated) and come immediately to Vancouver.
Call for Postdocs (2012-2013)
UBC-SFU Cultural Evolution of Religion Research Consortium (CERC)
It will soon be officially announced that UBC-SFU’s Centre for the Study of Human Evolution, Cognition and Culture (HECC; http://www.hecc.ubc.ca/) has been awarded a 6-year grant to explore the cultural evolutionary foundations of religion and morality (see grant summary below), establishing a new research network, “The Cultural Evolution of Religion Research Consortium” (CERC). In addition to establishing a new interdisciplinary program in Religious Studies at UBC, the grant will fund five new postdocs working at the intersection of cognitive science and religion, and at the center of a large international network of historians, cognitive scientists and anthropologists.
Two of the postdoc positions for Year 1 must be filled immediately; these positions are for one year (September 2012-August 2013), but are potentially renewable for an additional 2-year slot, subject to an advertised and competitive search.
The precise salary level is still being formulated, but will be in the neighborhood of CAD 45,000/year, with access to low-cost room and board in comfortable quarters on campus available.
Historical-Textual Postdoc This component of the larger project will focus on testing various evolutionary hypotheses about the impacts of religious beliefs and practices on sociality and morality using qualitative and quantitative analysis of historical texts from a variety of religious traditions. Candidates for this post will work under the supervision of Prof. Edward Slingerland at the University of British Columbia. Candidates should have substantive expertise in a religious textual tradition, as well as at least some knowledge of the literature in the cognitive science / evolution of religion. Religious Studies Ph.D.s preferred, but others will be considered, and Ph.D.s must be in hand by September 2012. Intellectual fit with the grant activities is the main desideratum, but demonstrated management ability is a plus.
Responsibilities will include helping to manage the grant’s historical-textual team (included visits to partner institutions in Asia, Europe and North America), engaging in grant-relevant analysis of historical texts, and helping to design and implement a new, interdisciplinary program in Religious Studies at UBC.
Experimental-Ethnographic Postdoc This component of the larger project will focus on testing various evolutionary hypotheses about the impacts of different religious beliefs and practices on sociality and morality. This postdoc will be supervised by Professsors Norenzayan and Henrich at the University of British Columbia; Ph.D. in hand by September strongly preferred. The post-doc's responsibilities will center on developing and successfully deploying a battery of experimental and ethnographic measures across a diverse set of human societies by an interdisciplinary and international team of researchers. The position includes both substantial scientific and managerial responsibilities. International travel is required. The following skills are desirable assets: experience in the use of both experimental and ethnographic tools, field work (especially in small-scale societies), statistical skills, proficiency in languages, and team-leadership. The position is open to all fields in the behavioral and social sciences, though psychologists, behavioral economists, and scientifically-oriented anthropologist may be particularly well-suited. Commitments may range from 1 to 3 years, depending on the individuals' experience, training, and background.
Application Procedure Interested applicants should contact CERC’s administrative assistant, Adam Barnett ( This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. ), to acquire a full copy of the grant application, and familiarize themselves with its general structure. Applications should consist of a 2-3 page cover letter, relating the applicant’s training to the responsibilities of the grant, as well as a full CV, and should be received by May 30, 2012, sent directly to Mr. Barnett. Depending upon the number and nature of applications, Skype interviews may be arranged for June 2012.
Summary of Grant Focus and Activities
“The Evolution of Religion and Morality”
Religion in some form exists in every society, is one of the defining features of our species, and is also at the center of many contemporary social and political conflicts. From tensions between religious rights and the values of civil society in Canada to controversies over abortion, polygamy, interfaith relations and the teaching of evolution, not a day goes by without religion making international headlines. Despite its ubiquity and centrality to human affairs, however, religion remains, from an academic perspective, one of the least studied and most poorly understood aspects of human behavior. We know much more about the structure of the Shakespearean sonnet, or the intricacies of the human digestive system, than we do about why a person would be willing to die on behalf of a deity, or abandon a life of comfort to become a charity worker dedicated to the poor.
The proposed project (focused on Insight, but with substantial Connection elements) is founded on the conviction that effectively answering the question of what religion is, and why it plays such a ubiquitous role in human existence, requires going beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries, including the line that still divides the humanities and the natural sciences. Our grant proposes to, over 6 years, establish the institutional framework for an interdisciplinary, international partnered research network, with UBC-SFU’s Centre for the Study of Human Evolution, Cognition and Culture (HECC) at its nexus, dedicated to exploring the evolution of religion and morality. The partnered research network will bring together theorists of religion, philosophers, historians, linguists, anthropologists, psychologists, economists, biologists, and mathematicians to generate hypotheses concerning the evolutionary origins of religion and morality, and test them with a variety of methods, including textual interpretation, qualitative historical analysis, quantification of historical data, ethnographic observation, controlled laboratory experiments and mathematical modeling. Our goal is to not only provide novel insights, but also produce results that meet the highest standards of scientific and humanistic inquiry, and that have immediate applications to contemporary political and social issues.
The creation of this research-driven centre would be accompanied by the formation of a new, permanent Program for the Study of Religion at UBC, an undergraduate and graduate training and research program with an unprecedented interdisciplinary character. Including as well a proposed partnership between UBC-SFU, McGill and the University of Toronto, this grant would not only help to establish Canada as a global leader in a crucial field of inquiry, but also create a powerful synergy combining world-class research, HQP training, undergraduate education and public outreach. It would also fundamentally alter the international landscape of the field of religious studies in a manner that simultaneously strengthens and highlights Canadian research expertise and student training, and have important implications for contemporary Canadian and global society. Most generally, it would serve as a model for innovative partnerships that bridge scientific and humanistic training and research, and thereby help to encourage similar interdisciplinary collaborations in the future.
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.