In the last decade, extended altruism towards unrelated group members has been proposed to be a unique characteristic of human societies. Experimental studies on captive chimpanzees have shown, on the other hand, that they are limited in the ways they share or cooperate with others. Individuals are indifferent to the welfare of unrelated group members; they do not care about fairness, and so on (see my previous posts here and here). The behaviour of chimpanzees in the wild is quite selfish, even when some cooperation is involved. For instance, they build coalitions, but that's to climb the social ladder, or they give meat, but only so that they can get sex.

In the last issue of PLoS, however, Boesch, Bolé, Eckhardt and Boesch report 18 cases of adoption, a highly costly behavior, of orphaned youngsters by group members in Taï forest chimpanzees. Half of the orphans were adopted by males and remarkably only one of these proved to be the father. Such adoptions by adults can last for years and thus imply extensive care towards the orphans. These observations suggest that, under the appropriate socio-ecological conditions, chimpanzees do care for the welfare of unrelated group members.

Why are these chimpanzees so altruistic?

The aim of the post is to bring to the attention of experimentally minded anthropologists the work of Chip Heath and his collaborators. A professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Heath describes his research as examinining "why certain ideas - ranging from urban legends to folk medical cures, from Chicken Soup for the Soul stories to business strategy myths - survive and prosper in the social marketplace of ideas." Heath has a knack for fun psychology experiments that test broader concepts of cultural transmission. In chronological order, here are some examples from his recent publications--I'll bet that many of you will find stuff that is relevant to your own research or ideas for how to test your own hypotheses.

Shrine at Qixian Monastery, China (photo Harvey Whitehouse)

Over dinner the other evening, it struck me that religion is rather like ratatouille. People disagree about the ingredients of both but in fact there is no such thing as the one true recipe for either. The concepts ‘religion’ and ‘ratatouille’ are elastic and contested, and will almost certainly undergo further modification in the future. Foody fundamentalists tell us that real ratatouille is an Occitan dish originating in France but are divided into factions claiming descent from Provence (Provença ratatolha) and Nice (Niça ratatolha). According to Wikipedia (which apparently is rude to consult at the dinner table), there are four main kinds of ratatouille. Let us count the main types of religion.

Relativity of mental illness has enjoyed the favours of philosophers for decades (Michel Foucault, Ian Hacking and, more recently Geoffrey Llyod in his Cognitive Variations). It has lead to the development of the « new cross-cultural psychiatry », heralded by Kleinman in 1977. It  may become the best pop version of culture and cognition – as shown by the recent piece in the New York Times « The Americanization of mental illness », published on the 10th of january. The essay is adapted from Ethan Watters’ forthcoming book, Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche.

As with many fashionable ideas,  it is a bit difficult to isolate the arguments from the seductive examples. The thesis itself, as it appears in the paper, leaves room to different interpretations: « Mental illnesses are not discrete entities like the polio virus with their own natural histories….and have never been the same the world over (either in prevalence or in form) but are inevitably sparked and shaped by the ethos of particular times and places. » What is sparked and shaped by culture? The boundary between mental illness and mental health, the distinction between mental and physical illness, or the division between kinds of mental illnesses? Some examples in the article even suggest that cultural classifications of mental illnesses converge, but give different explanations of their origins, significance or treatments. Others stress the fact that what is spreading is basically a « symptom repertoire », i.e. knowledge of how to diagnose illnesses, rather than definitions of what is diagnosed.

Moreover, as nobody challenges the idea that different cultures have different views on health and medicine, which in their turn influence the treatments people are – or are not – offered, the revolutionary potential of the thesis can be a bit hard to see.  

But the paper highlights two more interesting, or disturbing points: first, that western categories of mental illnesses spread and contaminates the other cultures, and second, that this contagion is not for the best.

James Cameron's Avatar is about to become the most viewed film in history. While Cameron may deserve this success for his special effects and breathtaking landscapes, Pandora, the world he has created, may seem rather disappointing. It is situated several light-years away from Earth but it looks very much like our world: There are trees, and grass, as well as predators and preys, birds and monkeys and, above all, the aliens called the Na'vis are just like us, except for a blue skin and a long tail (they even have breasts for those who read Playboy for the articles). They also have language, rituals and so on! One may ask: Why such a lack of imagination? Why create a whole encyclopaedia if it is for re-inventing the Earth?

Actually, I may be unfair with Cameron. After all, the convergences between the Earth and Pandora make sense from an evolutionary point of view. Indeed, there are good reasons to expect that life on others planets might evolve as it did on Earth. Everywhere in the universe, living beings would face similar evolutionary problems: They need energy, detectors, and computational systems. And everywhere in the universe, they will discover the same solutions exactly as, on Earth, the same tricks (enzymes, sex, eyes, etc.) have been discovered again and again by different species (see for instance Conway Morris's wonderful book about convergences; see also our old reader at alphapsy).

So far, so good for the biology (as for the physics, see here for the floating mountains!). Everywhere, life is likely to re-invent photosynthesis, sex or echolocation. But what about cognition and culture? Can we expect aliens to be so humanlike? I see no good reasons to be sceptical about the Na'vis' cognition.

High Culture: Da Vinci's Last Supper (as seen in The Da Vinci Code).

We cognitive anthropologists deal with “culture” in the broad sense of distributed mental representations widespread in a social group (and many of us don’t really believe that the terms “culture” or “cultural” pick up a natural kind of representations - but that will be the topic of another post). We do not usually have much time for “culture” in the elevated sense of high culture - the sense usually associated with the names of Matthew Arnold or TS Eliot, among others.

But we should pay some attention, perhaps. True, high culture does not occur in all human societies, it is a minority pursuit wherever it does, and there may be more important problems for cognitive anthropology to solve. But it is interesting nonetheless. Wherein lies the difference between the high and low registers? Is there any cultural variation in that difference? How does it translate in terms of cognitive processes?

We academics and other literate types are often misguided in our approach to this, as we compare the best examples of high culture with the worst of the low. This was recently and vividly brought to my attention by the request of a friend and colleague, that we both read something called The Da Vinci Code, which we would then discuss in various undergraduate classes on literature, myth and history. This turned out to be a Serious Mistake.

"It was 7:30 PM, December 4th, 2005. The second Sunday of advent, in Joshua Tree, California. Personal Chef Karin Winkler started to prepare dinner. While thinking about upcoming Christmas, she was peeling and cutting a potato. Everything appeared to be normal. When she was peeling and cutting the second potato in half, a miracle happened: the symbol of a perfectly shaped holy cross appeared on both halves of the potato."

I stumbled recently upon a picture of a cross potato, and in the course of searching for more information about it I found that there have been a number of these things.

Over the past few decades, there has been a lot of research published on 'psychological essentialism', which has been observed cross-culturally in young children. Essentialism is the tendency to think about animals, plants and social categories in terms of hidden 'essences'. The earliest experiments that indicated psychological essentialism in children were by Frank Keil (1989, Concepts, Kinds, and Cognitive Development, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA) who asked preschoolers what would happen if an animal was surgically altered to look like a member of another species. For example, would a raccoon that is surgically modified to look and smell like a skunk actually be a skunk? Young children believed that the creature would still be a raccoon. Three-year-olds and four-year-olds believe that also an apple seed, planted in a flowerpot would still grow out to be an apple tree, or that a cow raised by foster parent pigs would still exhibit normal bovine behavior (Gelman & Wellman, 1991. Insides and essences: Early understandings of the non-obvious. Cognition, 38, 213–244). What is more, children are even more essentialist than adults. For instance, Indian preschoolers believe a Brahmin child remains Brahmin, even when raised by untouchables; Five-year-olds believe that French babies brought up by English-speaking parents will grow up to speak French. Essentialism has been documented in several non-western cultures, indicating that this psychological tendency may be a stable part of human cognition (Gelman 2004, Psychological essentialism in children. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 8, 404–409).

This raises the question: Is essentialism restricted to humans, or does it also occur in other species? Obviously, the experimental procedures I just discussed all rely on language, so experimental design should be radically adapted to probe psychological essentialism in other animals. Yesterday, I was observing (in an unsystematic way) my cat's behavior (an adult male), and his behavior motivated me to think that essentialism may have its roots in the way animals make concepts.

Let me elaborate. Since he was a young kitten, Leibniz, my cat, has been playing with balls of various sizes and in various materials. Ping pong balls, small rubber balls with bells, soft, fluffy balls, etc. Whenever he is presented with a ball and he is in a playful mood, he will gently tap the ball with his front paw. Occasionally, he sees a ball that is obviously too large to play with. Even then, he will try to tap the ball with his front paw (as he did a moment after the picture was taken) and gives up only after a few tries.

When we started this blog, we hoped that anthropologists among our readers would be willing to contribute 'pictures of the week', photos (or videos) that would illustrate in a suggestive manner a theme of cognition-and-culture relevance, but we had very little success and, sadly, we have all but given up. Here however is video not from an ethnographer but suggested by 3QuarksDaily and borrowed from YouTube that illustrates in a pleasant and timely manner how cultural items borrowed in another culture get transformed in the direction of a better integration to their novel environment.

Original creation by: Nupur. Music by: Amartya Rahut.

In some traditions there is an interesting gap betweeen what people think they are going to learn from the tradition and what actually ends up being transmitted. Recently I found a nice example of that while practicing Qi Gong.

In his classic Seventy-two arts of Shaolin (Zhong, 2004) Jin Jing Zhong describes the training method “Covering with a golden bell.”

This exercise is a hard one, it strengthens both outside (muscles, bones, sinews) and inside (the inner organs). It is the most important hard exercise out of all 72 Arts. This exercise is rather complicated and difficult. It is necessary to make a mallet of stuff and strike with it on the whole surface of the body, on the front and the back. At first you will feel some pain but after training for a long time feeling of pain will gradually disappear. At that time the mallet of stuff can be replaced with a wooden one. When you feel no pain from blows, the wooden mallet can be replaced with an iron one. Bring to perfection until you feel no pain from blows.

If you practise this method for two or three years, your breast and your back will become strong like stone or iron; it is of no importance whether the enemy punches or kicks, it will do no harm. Even a sword blow will not do any injury to a man who practises the skill of “Gold Bell.” Chest and back bones of that man become compacted like a single whole. It is necessary to use tinctures to cure bruises of muscles and bones after blows with mallets or falls (somersaults).

Similar in method and aim are two other special training methods, “Iron shirt” and “Iron bull.” All promise that, after several years of hard training, the devotee’s body will be invulnerable to normal blows and even to edged weapons such as swords and spears.

Now, if you are thinking, “bullshit,” then don’t worry, I am too. But hold on.

Olivier Morin and Sophie Claudel

Human argumentation is at the center of recent (and less recent) psychological work. We are learning a lot about our ability to argue. But the motivation behind human arguing is less well known. What makes us want to argue back at other people, even when we know they won't be convinced ? Internet Trolls know a few answers to that question. We are studying their culture from the inside.

"Just consider how terrible the day of your death will be. Others will go on speaking and you won't be able to argue back" - Ram Mohun Roy (HT: Hugo)

A few weeks ago, the web was all abuzz about with one of those stories people are so fond of discussing online. A Canadian woman, who couldn't work because of a depression, lost her sick-leave benefits over a few photographs that were displayed on Facebook. She was smiling on the photographs. The anecdote provoked widespread outrage and rekindled the endless debate over Internet privacy.

But the story in itself did not interest Steve that much. Where other people see a scandal, Steve sees an opportunity for fun. That night, he logged himself on a forum devoted to discussing the condition and problems of depressive people - one among a dozen medical forums where Steve, under a variety of aliases, is a regular. He quickly spotted the thread where the Facebook scandal was being discussed, licked his lips, and began typing something like this:

"It serves her right, if you ask me. You can't defraud insurance companies and think of yourself as a responsible person. It's not the victimless crime it appears to be. Depression is not a real disease anyways."

He clicked 'Send', and waited for the angry reactions to pour in.

This is the first of what I hope will be a regular, informal interview slot, in which I put 3 questions to people who are researching in areas that may be of interest to ICCI members and readers. We hope you enjoy hearing from them. I haven’t asked interviewees to commit to post-interview discussion, though I’m hopeful that we’ll interview many of our own members. Your reactions and comments are always welcome. Thanks in advance to our interviewees!

Simon Baron-Cohen is Professor of Developmental Psychopathology at the University of Cambridge, Fellow of Trinity College, and Director of the Autism Research Centre in Cambridge. He is widely known for his work on Theory of Mind, empathy, and autism. He has coordinated and consulted on a wide range of educational and health programmes, including the DVD series, The Transporters, created especially for children with autism. A host of publications, current projects, and prizes are listed on his webpage.

Three Questions

What finding from your recent research has most excited you?

My research into the link between foetal testosterone (FT) and empathy has been keeping me pretty excited for a number of years, in part because it's so counter-intuitive. When we think of empathy we imagine all sorts of social factors might be influences, such as the quality of parenting you received as a child or the stability of your early family environment. I don't doubt that experience counts for a lot, but it has been eye-opening for me to see that FT levels measured in the amniotic fluid in the womb correlate significantly with later empathy levels in the child [see here]. My excitement for this research topic is driven by trying to understand how this molecule - a sex steroid hormone - could be involved in empathy.

The obvious answer is that the hormone is affecting brain development, so it was with great excitement that we put the children (whose FT levels were known) into the MRI brain scanner.

This is the second post in a series of two installments by Pierre Jacob, dwelling on Gergely and Csibra's work on human communication. In Pierre's first post, we saw that these experiments show that, as suggested by relevance theory, human can detect communicative intentions quite early. Now Pierre turns to a second issue.

Natural pedagogy has also recently cast an interesting light onto the second question raised by Sperber and Wilson’s (1986) relevance approach to ostensive-inferential communication: to what extent is it distinctive of human cognition? Unlike great apes, domesticated dogs have co-evolved with humans for several thousand years. As a result and unlike great apes, they are widely believed to exhibit some understanding of human referential intentions expressed in communicative gestures, such as pointing (Hare and Tomasello, 2005). Range, Viranyi and Huber (2007) have adapted Gergely et al.’s (2002) paradigm to test the propensity of domestic dogs to engage in the selective imitation of a model’s behavior.

This study provides the first evidence of the fact that newborns sound production is influenced by the language of their parents. From previous studies we knew that newborns prefer to hear language to which they have been exposed prenatally (e.g. DeCasper, A.J., and Fifer, W.P. (1980). "Of human bonding: Newborns prefer their mothers’ voices". Science 208, 1174–1176) and we also knew that infant's babbling is heavily influenced by the language of their caregivers (see the work by Bénédicte de Boysson-Bardies, e.g. B de Boysson-Bardies, L Sagart, C Durand (1984). Discernible differences in the babbling of infants according to target language. Journal of Child Language). Yet, babbling only starts at around 7 month of age and by that time infants have already learned specific features their mother tongue, they can already categorize vowels for instance. So it is quite a surprise to see that newborn's cries can be influenced by their mother tongue.

I don’t believe any one of you would like to live in a room with a murdered man in the cupboard, however well preserved chemically – even with a sunflower growing out of the top of his head. - John Ruskin

Recently, Dan Sperber alerted us to ancedotal observations of grieving in non-human animals (see blog here - by the way, “anecdotal” is not derogatory here - our observations of grieving in humans are anecdotal too). Are the dead chimp’s compagnons as baffled and shaken by their friend and relative’s death as we would be?

We do not know.

In any case, bereavement in humans is difficult enough to describe and explain. This is an important topic for cognition and culture for many reasons - because it is of obvious interest to all human beings, because it is universal, because it is seemingly framed in such different ways in different places, and because the psychology is not well understood so far.

This used to be a topos for cultural anthropologists, who charted the many similarities in beliefs about death, and even more strikingly, the similarities in people’s ritualization of behaviour around death.

This is the first post in a series of two installments by Pierre Jacob, dwelling on Gergely and Csibra's work on human communication.

According to Csibra and Gergely’s (2009) so-called “natural pedagogical” approach to the psychological bases of human culture, human infants are innately predisposed to automatically interpret what Sperber and Wilson (1986) call an agent’s “ostensive” behavioral stimuli as cues that the agent intends to make manifest to the child some relevant novel information. Thus, the natural pedagogical approach takes for granted Sperber and Wilson’s (1986) relevance-based concept of “ostensive-inferential communicative behavior”, which is defined as a (behavioral) stimulus produced by an agent whereby she makes it manifest to her audience that she intends, by means of this stimulus, to make manifest (or more manifest) to her audience a set of assumptions. Sperber and Wilson (1986) draw a basic distinction between an agent’s informative intention (to make some assumptions manifest to her audience) and an agent’s communicative intention to make her informative intention manifest. So on relevance-theoretic grounds, a communicative intention is itself a second-order informative intention: it is the intention to make manifest one’s first-order intention. Arguably, for someone to entertain a communicative intention is to intend another to represent one’s own informative intention. If so, then entertaining a communicative intention requires the ability to form a third-order meta-representation. In which case, representing another’s communicative intention requires the ability to form a fourth-order meta-representation.

Two outstanding open empirical issues generated by Sperber and Wilson’s (1986) relevance framework are: (i) to what extent is it psychologically plausible to credit young human infants with the ability to interpret another’s ostensive-inferential communicative behavior and ascribe to an agent, in accordance with relevance theory, a communicative intention? (ii) To what extent is ostensive-inferential communicative behavior specific to human cognition? Arguably, Csibra and Gergely’s natural pedagogy theory offers interesting new empirical insights into these two questions.  In this post, I tackle the first question (that of communicative competence in infants). The second post will deal with the issue of human specificity.

Relativity in culinary matters and in taste is a big issue - our tastes (or distastes) for things are indeed shaped by what we are used to eat and see eaten, as well as other factors, genetics being one. Now they combine with less strictly sensorial aspects - and disgust for instance integrates, as Rozin pointed out, what he calls "cognitive aspects" such as the idea that substance X is contaminating. 

In his reply to Nicolas Baumard' post "Is a universal Michelin guide possible?", Jonathan Mair raises some interesting questions about "culinary relativism". The first idea is that there is no room for relativism once foods, ingredients and recipes circulate : " Relativism really requires sealed units (culture) within which everything is familiar and between which many things are completely unfamiliar. Most people are faced with a whole range of degrees of exposure to different unfamiliar foods"  The other has to do with possible differences in perceptions, revealed by linguistic differences : "As an English speaker I think of spicy things as being hot, obviously not the same hot as boiling water, but not altogether different either, and if something is too hot it burns no matter which kind of hot it is. I was surprised to find out this doesn't work in many languages - spicy things are itching or stinging in Spanish for example (possibly a bad translation, in any case, they're not hot and I don't think they burn). In Chinese there's also a completely different word for 'hot hot' (re, tang) and 'spicy hot' (la). But, in Mongolian (which was my fieldwork language) there is one word for both (haluun) just as there is in English."

Maybe I am missing something, but I don't see why relativism, either concerning sensation and perception, or concerning the more cultural aspects of food preparations and culinary principles, couldn't apply in groups that are "open" and when foods available more widely.

To what extent does the use of language involve a language-specific ability, to what extent is it subserved by a more general symbolic or semiotic system? This is an old and ongoing controversy to which an article pre-published online in PNAS on Nov. 18, 2009 (doi: 10.1073/pnas.0909197106) and freely available here, "Symbolic gestures and spoken language are processed by a common neural system" by Jiang Xu, Patrick J. Gannon, Karen Emmorey, Jason F. Smith, and Allen R. Braun, makes an interesting contribution. Their abstract:

"Symbolic gestures, such as pantomimes that signify actions (e.g., threading a needle) or emblems that facilitate social transactions (e.g., finger to lips indicating ‘‘be quiet''), play an important role in human communication. They are autonomous, can fully take the place of words, and function as complete utterances in their own right. The relationship between these gestures and spoken language remains unclear. We used functional MRI to investigate whether these two forms of communication are processed by the same system in the human brain. ... Results support a model in which bilateral modality-specific areas in superior and inferior temporal cortices extract salient features from vocal- auditory and gestural-visual stimuli respectively. However, both classes of stimuli activate a common, left-lateralized network of inferior frontal and posterior temporal regions in which symbolic gestures and spoken words may be mapped onto common, corresponding conceptual representations. We suggest that these anterior and posterior perisylvian areas, identified since the mid-19th century as the core of the brain's language system, are not in fact committed to language processing, but may function as a modality-independent semiotic system that plays a broader role in human communication, linking meaning with symbols whether these are words, gestures, images, sounds, or objects"

Examples of pantomime (top row, English gloss: unscrew jar)
and of emblem (bottom row. English gloss: I've got it!)

The authors distinguish different types of meaningful gestures. With good reasons, they focus on gestures that are neither linguistic, like in sign language, nor peri-linguistic like gesticulations accompanying speech. As in the two examples illustrated above, they look at what they call 'pantomimes' and 'emblems'. These cause similar patten of brain activation as their linguistic glosses.

I am not competent enough to interpret brain imagery evidence, let alone criticise it. Still, I would like to raise two issues.

Zoe Chance and Michael Norton have a delightful book chapter on the very creative ways in which people justify their questionable decisions. They report an experiment in which male participants were given a choice between subscriptions to two sport magazines. One covered more sports while the other had more featured articles. More interestingly, it was also mentioned that one of the magazines had a swimsuit edition (cf. figure : it should be noted that I only browsed through covers of swimsuit editions in order to find an illustration for this post). Want to take a guess at which magazine the participants preferred?

Boys being boys, they tended to pick the one with the advertized swimsuit edition, irrespective of its other features. This would hardly make the headlines (it's the reason there are swimsuit editions in the first place). More to the point, people felt compelled to justify their choice in a way that would be more acceptable than "I want to look at hot girls in bikini"...

The paper is well worth a read because it also provides a concise summary of the experiments documenting the many ways in which people justify their morally dubious decisions.

Pierre Jacob recently discussed Sarah Hrdy's book Mothers and Others in which she argues that humans, like New World monkeys but unlike other apes, are cooperative breeders. As Pierre summarizes, cooperative breeding implies that newborns and youngsters have evolved the capacity to engage adults in caring for them and that adults have evolved the capacity to share the care of their offspring. Adults are therefore naturally attracted toward newborns, who eventually solicit their attention, and inexperienced mothers compete for newborns with other adults, including the mother, to gain more experience in parental care. The following video, just filmed by Mark Bowler at the Living Links Center in Edinburgh (where I am now pursuing my research) nicely illustrates Hrdy's description of alloparental care.

Margaret Mead, Franz Boas and Claude Lévi-Strauss on a Portuguese stampIn Memory of Claude Lévi-StraussIn Memory of Claude Lévi-Strauss

In Memory of Claude Lévi-Strauss.

Claude Lévi-Strauss, arguably the world's most famous and influential anthropologist, died on October 30 at the age of 100. This is a lasting memory of my first encounter with him.

In 1974, when I was a graduate student in anthropology at Columbia University, I wanted to organize a discussion of universals with people whose ideas I wished to know more about than I thought I could get from their writings. At the time, I was working for Margaret Mead as one of her assistants at the American Museum of Natural History, so I asked her how I might go about getting my wish. She said "talk to these people and see if they'll meet." So I went to see Noam Chomsky in Cambridge, Jean Piaget in Geneva, and Jacques Monod in Paris, and they agreed; but I wondered if Levi-Strauss would because he seemed so aloof . Margaret licked her lips and laughed: "Well, that's his look, aloof and frail, but he's more playful than he lets on and he'll outlive me by thirty years if a day. Just tell him I sent you."

I ran from La Bastille to the College de France on Rue des Ecoles and up the steps to knock on his door. He opened it, saw the sweat running down my face and, asked rather coldly: "Monsieur, que'est-ce que je peux faire pour vous?" I said I was an anthropology student from America and had a bunch of questions for him. He was gracious but distant and said, "Ask two."

Recently I came across a quotation that expressed, with wonderful clarity, something that I kind of half-knew but had not articulated so well to myself.  The historian John P. Meier, in the course of an argument about the historical Jesus of Nazareth, made the following generalization (Meier 1991, IV:279):

Despite the theoretical purpose of addressing and confuting one’s adversaries outside, most religious apologetics and polemics are directed inward.  Their real function is to give a sense of assurance and reinforcement to the group producing the polemics.  Most apologetics and polemics are thus an attempt to shore up group solidarity and conviction within a community that feels insecure and under attack.  The a priori conviction of such polemics is simple and unshakeable: “We are right and they are wrong, and now we will think up some reasons to prove that they are wrong.”

A good social-scientific description this is not, but I think it is a sound observation nonetheless.

Hilary Evans and Robert Bartholomew have compiled and "Encyclopedia of Extraordinary Social Behavior". This is quite an impressive endeavour that can be used for scholarly purposes (it is well referenced) and for fun (because people do weird things sometimes). The articles I've read so far have been on the skeptical side (e.g. on the mass hysterias or the Dutch tulip bubble), and so it seems that the this book avoids the dangerous pitfall of using these examples lightly to demonstrate the 'madness of crowds' (or people in general).

An illustration of dancing mania (found here).

Outbreak! The Encyclopedia of Extraordinary Social Behavior by Hilary Evans, Robert E. Bartholomew, Anomalist Books (2009)

It has long been debated which aspects of music perception are universal and which are specific to a specific musical culture. A recent paper, "Universal Recognition of Three Basic Emotions in Music" by T. Fritz, S. Jentschke, N. Gosselin, D. Sammler, I. Peretz, R. Turner, A. Friederici, S. Koelsch in Current Biology, Volume 19, Issue 7, Pages 573-576 - freely available here) reports a cross-cultural study with participants from the Mafa tribe in Northern Cameroon and participants, each group being ignorant of the musical tradition of the other (here is an example of Mafa music). Results show that the Mafas recognized happy, sad, and scared/fearful Western music excerpts above chance, suggesting that the expression of these basic emotions in Western music can be recognized universally.

"The Mafa flutes consist of two functional components, a resonance body made out of forged iron and a mouthpiece crafted from a mixture of clay and wax. The flute is an open tube which is blown like a bottle, and has a small hole at its bottom end with which the degree to which the tube is opened or closed can be controlled. The depicted set of Mafa flutes is ‘‘refined'' with a rubber band."

The recognition of emotional expressions conveyed by the music of other cultures had been experimentally investigated only in three previous studies. These studies aimed at indentifying cues that transcend cultural boundaries, and the authors made an effort to include listeners with little prior exposure to the music presented (e.g., Westerners listening to Hindustani music).

Proper names are a standard topic of anthropological research, focusing on the variety of naming systems across cultures and on the role of names in social relationships and verbal interactions (for a recent collection, see The Anthropology of names and naming, edited by Gabriele vom Bruck and Barbara Bodenhorn; Cambridge UP 2006). Proper names are also a standard topic in philosophy of language, where their contribution to the meaning of the utterances in which they occur raises a number of challenging issues. A major philosophical approach to proper names is that proposed by Saul Kripke in Naming and Necessity (1980) where he suggested that when a proper name, say "Plato", is effectively used, it succeeds in referring to the name-bearer via a causal chain that relates, through often countless acts of communication, the present use to the initial naming of Plato. With the role it gives to cultural transmission, this "causal theory of reference" (extended to natural kinds name by Hilary Putnam) can be seen as a properly anthropological theory. It has rarely however been fleshed out or discussed by anthropologists (Atran Cognitive Foundations of Natural History: Towards an Anthropology of Science,1990, pp 64-71, is one interesting exception), nor have philosophers paid much attention to the anthropology of proper names. As for the psychology of proper names, it has remained until recently an underdeveloped topic.

The last issue of Mind and language, Volume 24 Issue 4 (September 2009), with five papers on proper names, is particularly welcome in this context. It helps bridge the gap between philosophy and psychology. I hope it will inspire someone to work further on bridging the gap with anthropology. Read on for the abstracts.

Abstract: A crucially important aspect of human cooperation is the ability to negotiate to cooperative outcomes when interests over resources conflict. Although chimpanzees and other social species may negotiate conflicting interests regarding travel direction or activity timing, very little is known about their ability to negotiate conflicting preferences over food. In the current study, we presented pairs of chimpanzees with a choice between two cooperative tasks-one with equal payoffs (e.g., 5-5) and one with unequal payoffs (higher and lower than in the equal option, e.g., 10-1). This created a conflict of interests between partners with failure to work together on the same cooperative task resulting in no payoff for either partner. The chimpanzee pairs cooperated successfully in as many as 78-94% of the trials across experiments. Even though dominant chimpanzees preferred the unequal option (as they would obtain the largest payoff), subordinate chimpanzees were able to get their way (the equal option) in 22-56% of trials across conditions. Various analyses showed that subjects were both strategic and also cognizant of the strategies used by their partners. These results demonstrate that one of our two closest primate relatives, the chimpanzee, can settle conflicts of interest over resources in mutually satisfying ways-even without the social norms of equity, planned strategies of reciprocity, and the complex communication characteristic of human negotiation.

Importantly, there are also big differences between humans and chimpanzees.

I have never quite understood why there is a Nobel Prize just in economics. Why a prize basically on financial relationships? Why not a prize for the human sciences as whole instead? After all, there is a prize in biology, and no prize in marine biology, or a prize in physics and no prize in physics of condensed matters (what about a prize in "Peace in Middle-East" or "Literature in prose"? Anyway, it is not really a Nobel Prize). Be that as it may, if there had been a Prize just in anthropology rather than in just in economics, I would still have nominated Elinor Ostrom, (the 2009 Noble Prize in Economics).

First, Ostrom's work is both theoretically and empirically grounded. It is theoretically grounded because her enquiry started from the problem of collective action discovered by the rational choice theory. There are situations where everyone stands to benefit from the contribution of others and even more so if they do not contribute themselves (see Garrett Hardin's famous article on the tragedy of the commons in Science 13 December 1968: Vol. 162. no. 3859, pp. 1243 - 1248). Her work is also empirically grounded for Elinor Ostrom has started her work from the observation that, despite the apparent paradox, people do solve problems of collective actions. She has studied literally thousands of examples all over the world: Forests, fisheries, oil fields, grazing lands, irrigation systems, and so on. She came with a great book, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, that highlighted the important features of successful institutions (deliberation, punishment, cheater detection, etc.).

Her work is also of importance for a second reason. Today, issues of collective actions have become a central problem in evolutionary anthropology. There are supposed to present the greatest challenge to evolutionary theories of human cooperation. There are studied experimentally in public good games. Ostrom's work reminds us that humans do not need cooperative tendencies to solve tragedies of commons and build successful institutions. They only need to talk, to organize themselves, and to find the adequate solution for their particular problem. I am not saying (as in rational choice theory) that humans are selfish. Far from it. I do think that they are truly cooperative. I am only suggesting that public goods games, problems of collective action and large scale cooperation (villages, tribes, churches, etc.) may not need a general evolutionary solution to be explained and that evolutionary theories should focus rather on small scale cooperative interactions.

Preparing for a lecture on homeostatic mechanisms, I came across a surprising phenomenon, g tum-mo heat meditation, that raises an interesting question about human enculturability. Homeostatic mechanisms are those that maintain our bodies (or our lives) in a state of balance between two (or potentially more) extremes that might be fatal. Insofar as some of our homeostatic mechanisms are controlled by the central nervous system and involve behavior, they fall within the purview of psychology, and I treat the body temperature, thirst, and hunger regulation cycles in my Introduction to Psychology class. The phenomenon that surprised me pertains to the first of these systems.

A Buddhist monk has his vital signs measured as he prepares to enter an advanced state of meditation in Normandy, France. During meditation, the monk's body is said to produce enough heat to dry cold, wet sheets put over his shoulders in a frigid room (Photo courtesy of Herbert Benson).

Body temperature regulation is quintessentially cognitive in nature. We have heat sensors distributed throughout our bodies. The heat sensors in the body's periphery-let's use the feet as an example-are a suite of neurons, each of which has a slightly different temperature at which it slows its activity. By detecting which neurons are normally active and which have slowed, the central nervous system can tell the temperature of the feet. The effectors for changing temperature are also located in the extremities: control of little hairs, blood vessel constriction, and shivering are all local. Despite the fact that both the detectors and effectors are local, the detectors do not communicate directly with the effectors: instead, they send their signals all the way up to a center in the brain, and then the brain sends the signal all the way back down to the effectors in the feet. It is cognitive in nature in that the whole thing is an information detection and communication system, and it is so automatic that it is often called a reflex.