International Cognition and Culture Institute

Do we use different tools to mindread a defendant and a goalkeeper?

Details: Category: Pierre Jacob's blog; Published on Tuesday, 24 July 2012 15:27; Written by Pierre Jacob

Previously on cognitionandculture — Last year, Pierre Jacob posted a critical review of the so-called two-systems model of mindreading, according to which humans use two distinct mental tools to understand the thoughts of others: one is fast and automatic, the other is slower, more reflective, and based on less immediate cues. This is a follow-up on his earlier post.

In a pair of experiments reported in a paper to appear shortly in Psychological Science, Jason Low and Joseph Watts used two distinct paradigms to investigate the human ability of 3-year-olds, 4-year-olds and adults to ascribe false beliefs to an agent. They take their findings to support the two-systems model of mindreading. On this model, while an efficient and inflexible system (system 1) enables a soccer player to score a goal by deceiving the goalkeeper in a split-second, a flexible but inefficient system (system 2) underlies a judge’s reflection over a defendant’s motivations and epistemic states over several days.

Low and Watts' identity task: Only the participant, not the agent, knows that the puppet that first moves into the right box and then into the left box is blue on one side and red on the other side. Which of the two boxes will the agent, who prefers blue over red things, look into?

Why don’t people like markets?

Details: Category: Pascal's blog; Published on Monday, 18 June 2012 19:49; Written by Pascal Boyer

People do not love markets – there is a lot of evidence for that. Is it relevant that, well, to put it bluntly, people do not seem to understand much about market economics?

That is a common enough message from professional economists. It is put into sharper focus by Bryan Caplan in his book The myth of the rational voter. Caplan (among other important and interesting things) reports on systematic studies of voters’ knowledge of policies and their effects on economic processes. The take-home message is that people just don’t get it, and that their voting preferences are largely irrational.

Now, voter ignorance or irrationality would not be very bad, if it was completely random. If most voters chose policies randomly, the net result would be no strong aggregate preference for any policy. But Caplan shows that people’s irrationality about economic issues is not random at all. There is method in their madness. It consists in a series of “biases”, like the anti-foreign and anti-trade bias (i.e., “when foreign countries prosper we suffer”). If this is true, many “rational voter” models in political science are in serious trouble.

As usual when people describe folk-understandings as “irrational” or “biased”, we cognition and culture and evolution folks get a trifle impatient.

PhD position in Social Psychology/Experimental Pragmatics

Details: Category: Jobs; Published on Thursday, 14 June 2012 16:22; Written by Mikhail Kissine

PhD 4-year job position Social Psychology/Experimental Pragmatics at the Univeristé Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium

Job description:

One PhD position is available within a joint project on pragmatics and social cognition, coordinated by Olivier Klein and Mikhail Kissine. The project will start on October 1^st 2012 and end in September 2016. The successful candidate is expected to develop and conduct experimental studies on the mechanisms of gullibility and epistemic vigilance in verbal communication. Net monthly salary starts around 1600 €. (Continued below the fold.)

Robin Dunbar vs. Pop Dunbar

Details: Category: Dunbar's number; Published on Wednesday, 06 June 2012 10:06; Written by Olivier Morin

This post is part of a Webinar, Debating Dunbar's Number.

Part 1 — Part 2 — Part 3

While reading the stimulating critique of Robin Dunbar's social brain hypothesis recently published by Jan de Ruiter and his colleagues, my first reaction was: "Straw man!". On second thoughts, it wasn't fair. The author that Jan de Ruiter and his colleagues criticize is sometimes a caricature of Robin Dunbar. Yet he resembles another important author — let us call him Pop Dunbar. Pop Dunbar stands for many things that have been said in Dunbar's name by the popular press. Robin Dunbar has often distanced himself from Pop Dunbar's ideas, but many of us got interested in his ideas through the Pop version. Pop Dunbar’s ideas are not trivially wrong, and, as Jan de Ruiter and colleagues note, his influence is enormous. For some people, Pop Dunbar holds the truth on what friendship should be.

So, in this post, I thought I would follow in the wake of Jan de Ruiter and colleagues, and explain what I find wrong with some ideas that I attribute to Pop Dunbar. While writing this text I realized that I often (though not always) seemed to find the real Dunbar on my side.

Pop Dunbar's theory says that, in primates, brain size forbids any individual from having more than a certain amount of friends. Because of this limit, primate societies, including ours, cannot go beyond a certain size. This pop theory is simple, powerful, fascinating — and probably inaccurate.

Are we sure we can groom beyond Dunbar's number?

Details: Category: Dunbar's number; Published on Monday, 04 June 2012 09:32; Written by Guillaume Dezecache

This post is part of a Webinar, Debating Dunbar's Number.

Part 1 — Part 2 — Part 3

When I heard about Kanai et al.'s paper [1] announcing a correlation between grey matter density in several brain areas and online social network size, I immediately updated my Facebook status, and touted the size of my brain in the eyes of my 500 friends. Well, Kanai et al.’s findings were not at all about its size; they were limited to very specific parts of it. Yet I must admit that I maliciously took advantage of the ignorance of some of my mates. Their reactions to my childish post were various: some of them made fun of me, some pretended to be impressed. There was inevitably a bunch of them to criticize the findings as well as my own 'interpretation' of the results. Eventually, there were also a significant number of people who threatened my concept of 'friendship'. After all, how could I have 500 real friends when, as everybody knows, one can only maintain about 150 social bonds? Even Britney Spears knows that. Rumor has it that she chose to join the social network Path where the number of interactants is limited to 150. Why 150? Path’s cofounder Dave Morin justifies this limit by quoting Robin Dunbar's work on the social brain hypothesis: this is our 'social ceiling'. One cannot maintain approximatively more than 150 trusted relationships.

Here is the rationale behind this claim.

A debate on Robin Dunbar's social brain hypothesis

Details: Category: Dunbar's number; Published on Monday, 04 June 2012 09:24; Written by Olivier Morin

This post is part of a Webinar, Debating Dunbar's Number.

Part 1 — Part 2 — Part 3

Some months ago, an article by Jan de Ruiter, Gavin Weston and Stephen Lyon appeared in American Anthropologist. The paper's target is Robin Dunbar's Social brain hypothesis. The hypothesis comes in many varieties; one might sum it up as the view that our cognitive capacities keep the amount of friends we can have under a fixed threshold, and constrain the size of primate societies. (This summary is inadequate in many ways, as I hope this debate will show.)

Dunbar's hypothesis is one of the most popular piece of cognitive anthropology out there. It is also one of the most criticized in anthropological circles. Our site wouldn't be true to its vocation if it did not invite all the protagonists to an open debate.

This week, Jan de Ruiter and his coauthors, as well as Robin Dunbar, will react on two posts, one defending the social brain hypothesis (posted today), the other defending the critics (to appear wednesday). Everyone from the ICCI community is welcomed to chime in.

Link to Jan de Ruiter et al.'s article.

Link to Robin Dunbar, 'The social brain hypothesis' (1998).

Dual process theories of language and thinking

Details: Category: Publications; Published on Sunday, 03 June 2012 12:57; Written by Dan Sperber

A special Issue of Mind and Society (vol 11 (1) June 2012) on “Dual process theories of language and thinking”

"There has been increasing interest in recent years in dual process theories of human thought. This special issue of Mind and Society reflects this interest, some criticisms of these theories, and the major topics that have been discussed and debated as a result. There is the basic topic of how the postulated dual processes should be defined in the first place. Do these processes have essential defining features that can be distinguished from less central correlates?... There are questions about how these dual processes work and interact. What do dual process theories tell us about different modes of thought and insight in problem solving? One topic that could throw light on these questions is creative thinking.... There is the much studied but unsettled question of the relation between dual processes and human rationality, whether epistemic or practical... And how do the two processes interact with feelings and emotions? There are also questions about how dual process theories are related to the new probabilistic paradigm in the psychology of reasoning. ... These are some of the important questions addressed in this special issue by leading researchers on human thought."

Here is the table of contents:

3rd Budapest CEU Conference on Cognitive Development

Details: Category: Call for Papers; Published on Thursday, 31 May 2012 01:05; Written by Gergely Csibra

The CEU Budapest Conference on Cognitive Development, organised by the Cognitive Development Center, is the only annual European conference focusing on cognitive development. The Third BCCCD will take place January 10-12, 2013. Invited speakers: Stanislas Dehaene (Collège de France) and Laurie Santos (Yale University). Invited symposium on 'Bayesian modeling of cognitive development' (Organizer: Noah Goodman - Stanford University). Submissions for symposium proposals and poster are welcome in all related topics and areas.

Is kinship back?

Details: Category: Dan's blog; Published on Sunday, 27 May 2012 11:36; Written by Dan Sperber

In the last issue of Science (25 May, 2012), a plea by Stephen Levinson for the study of kinship terminology, and an article by Charles Kemp and Terry Regier making a novel contribution to that study.

Charles Kemp talks about his and Regier's research

Levinson writes: "In 1860, Lewis Henry Morgan heard an Iowa man on a Nebraska reservation describe a small boy as “uncle.” Fascinated, he embarked on lifelong research into the kinship systems of the world’s cultures, which culminated in a typology of kin categories. Work on kinship categories ﬂourished for a hundred years, but then became unfashionable. Yet, kinship is crucial to the transmission of human genes, culture, mores, and assets. Recent studies have begun to reinvigorate the study of kinship categories. … Kinship is a fertile domain in which to ask a question at the heart of the cognitive sciences: Why do humans have the conceptual categories they do? … There are more than 6000 languages, each with a different system of kin classiﬁcation, at least in detail. … What constrains this exuberant diversity of systems?"

In their article entitled "Kinship categories across languages reﬂect general communicative principles" (available here), Kemp and Regier argue:

Social learning in humans and nonhuman animals

Details: Category: Publications; Published on Friday, 25 May 2012 14:45; Written by Dan Sperber

An interesting issue of the Journal of Comparative Psychology (2012, Volume 126, Issue 2) on social learning in humans and nonhuman animals. From the intro: "The past decade has seen a resurgent, concerted interest in social learning research comparing human and nonhuman animals. In this special issue, we present a synthesis of work that consolidates what is currently known and provides a platform for future research. … We include both new empirical studies and novel theoretical proposals describing work with both human children and adults and a range of nonhuman animals." For the ToC,

The Smartphone Psychology Manifesto

Details: Category: Publications; Published on Sunday, 20 May 2012 19:53; Written by Dan Sperber

In Perspectives on Psychological Science (May 2012 vol. 7), Geoffrey Miller publishes a "Smartphone Psychology Manifesto" (available here) with methodological suggestions for the use of smartphones in psychological research that could indeed have a huge impact on the study of cognition and culture.

Abstract: "By 2025, when most of today’s psychology undergraduates will be in their mid-30s, more than 5 billion people on our planet will be using ultra-broadband, sensor-rich smartphones far beyond the abilities of today’s iPhones, Androids, and Blackberries. Although smartphones were not designed for psychological research, they can collect vast amounts of ecologically valid data, easily and quickly, from large global samples. If participants download the right “psych apps,” smartphones can record where they are, what they are doing, and what they can see and hear and can run interactive surveys, tests, and experiments through touch screens and wireless connections to nearby screens, headsets, biosensors, and other peripherals. This article reviews previous behavioral research using mobile electronic devices, outlines what smartphones can do now and will be able to do in the near future, explains how a smartphone study could work practically given current technology (e.g., in studying ovulatory cycle effects on women’s sexuality [suggestions of possible cognition-and-culture topics welcome - ICCI]), discusses some limitations and challenges of smartphone research, and compares smartphones to other research methods. Smartphone research will require new skills in app development and data analysis and will raise tough new ethical issues, but smartphones could transform psychology even more profoundly than PCs and brain imaging did."

Science Magazine's special issue on Human Conflict

Details: Category: Publications; Published on Friday, 18 May 2012 16:43; Written by Dan Sperber

This May 18, Science has a special issue on human conflict, of evolutionary, cognitive and cultural relevance, with contributions from Scott Atran, Christopher Boehm, Samuel Bowles, Frans de Waal, and many others. From the introduction:

“In this special issue on human conflict, we consider the deep evolutionary roots of violent confrontation. We trace the trajectory of violence and war throughout history, exploring racism, ethnic conflicts, the rise of terrorism, and the possible future of armed conflicts. We also consider our innate capacity to mediate conflict and our ability to achieve—and live in—peace.
Competition and conflict both among and within species, for food or a place to live or a mate, are implicit in the process of evolution and thus intrinsic to our biology. But like many other animals, we are also social beings, and, like them, we have evolved behaviors to avoid the detrimental effects of excessive intraspecies violence. These include ritual singing or fighting displays, acts of submission or conciliation, and simple spatial avoidance seen in diverse species as birds, ants, and our primate relatives.

the Journal of Cognition and Culture: a new issue

Details: Category: Publications; Published on Monday, 07 May 2012 18:16; Written by Dan Sperber

The new issue (vol 12, 1-2) of the Journal of Cognition and Culture is out. For the table of content and abstracts:

2 postdocs at UBC in evolution, cognition and culture

Details: Category: Jobs; Published on Thursday, 03 May 2012 14:02; Written by Dan Sperber

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.

Lectureship in Cognition and Culture at Belfast

Details: Category: Jobs; Published on Tuesday, 24 April 2012 10:44; Written by Dan Sperber

A position of Lecturer is open in the School of History and Anthropology at Queen's University, Belfast, to "teach and supervise at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, to participate in the research activities of the Institute of Cognition and Culture, to undertake research in line with the School’s research strategy, and to contribute to the School’s administration and outreach activities." Deadline: May 21, 2012. Details here.

The social motivation theory of autism

Details: Category: Publications; Published on Saturday, 21 April 2012 14:23; Written by Dan Sperber

Just out in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, "The social motivation theory of autism," an article (available here) by Coralie Chevallier, Gregor Kohls, Vanessa Troiani, Edward S Brodkin, and Robert T Schultz that challenges the dominant explanation of autism in terms of a Theory-of-Mind deficit. Given the role that the case of autism plays in our understanding of human sociality, this is of high cognition-and-culture relevance.

The first paragraph of the article: "Over the past three decades, a number of theories have been put forward to account for the pervasive social impairments found in Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). Among the various attempts, the idea of a core deﬁcit in social cognition (theory of mind, or ToM, in particular) has become one of the most prominent accounts of ASD. Concomitantly, the impact of motivational factors on the development of social skills and social cognition has received little attention. Recently, however, social motivation has emerged as a promising research domain at the intersection of social psychology, behavioral economics, social neuroscience and evolutionary biology. In this review, we integrate these diverse strands of research and defend the idea that social motivation is a powerful force guiding human behavior and that disruption of social motivational mechanisms may constitute a primary deﬁcit in autism. In this framework, motivational deﬁcits are thought to have downstream effects on the development of social cognition, and deﬁcits in social cognition are therefore construed as a consequence, rather than a cause, of disrupted social interest."

The concluding remarks: "The social world summons our attention like no other domain: social signals are prioritized by attention, interactions are intrinsically rewarding, and social maintaining permeates interpersonal behaviors. Social motivation is subserved by dedicated biological mechanisms and can be seen as an evolutionary adaptation to humans’ highly collaborative environment: by enhancing attention to social information, by rewarding social interactions, and by promoting the desire to effectively maintain social bonds, social motivation smoothes relationships, promotes coordination and ultimately fosters collaboration. In ASD, by contrast, there appears to be an overall decrease in the attentional weight assigned to social information. Diminished social orienting, social reward and social maintaining are all found in autism and can account for a range of behaviors, including cascading effects on the development of mature social cognitive skills. These deﬁcits appear to be rooted in biological disruptions of the orbitofrontal–striatal–amygdala circuitry, as well as in dysregulation of certain neuropeptides and neurotransmitters. ASD can thus be seen as an extreme case of early-onset diminished social motivation and provides a powerful model for understanding humans’ intrinsic drive to seek acceptance and avoid rejection."

Do infants understand social dominance relations?

Details: Category: Publications; Published on Thursday, 19 April 2012 17:54; Written by Dan Sperber

Forthcoming in PNAS, a groundbreaking article by Olivier Mascaro and Gergely Csibra investigating the "Representation of stable social dominance relations by human infants" (available here).

Abstract: What are the origins of humans’ capacity to represent social relations? We approached this question by studying human infants’ understanding of social dominance as a stable relation. We presented infants with interactions between animated agents in conflict situations. Studies 1 and 2 targeted expectations of stability of social dominance. They revealed that 15-mo-olds (and, to a lesser extent, 12-mo-olds) expect an asymmetric relationship between two agents to remain stable from one conflict to another. To do so, infants need to infer that one of the agents (the dominant) will consistently prevail when her goals conflict with those of the other (the subordinate). Study 3 and 4 targeted the format of infants’ representation of social dominance. In these studies, we found that 12- and 15-mo-olds did not extend their expectations of dominance to unobserved relationships, even when they could have been established by transitive inference. These results suggest that infants' expectation of stability originates from their representation of social dominance as a relationship between two agents rather than as an individual property. Infants’ demonstrated understanding of social dominance reflects the cognitive underpinning of humans’ capacity to represent social relations, which may be evolutionarily ancient, and may be shared with nonhuman species.

Tamar Gendler's online course on human nature

Details: Category: Publications; Published on Friday, 13 April 2012 17:08; Written by Dan Sperber

If you want a well taught, well produced free online course on basic classical issues in the philosophy of human nature, here is this Open Yale course by Tamar Gendler:

The course on Philosophy and the Science of Human Nature pairs central texts from Western philosophical tradition (including works by Plato, Aristotle, Epictetus, Hobbes, Kant, Mill, Rawls, and Nozick) with recent findings in cognitive science and related fields. The course is structured around three intertwined sets of topics: Happiness and Flourishing; Morality and Justice; and Political Legitimacy and Social Structures.

Tool use, gesture and the evolution of language

Details: Category: Publications; Published on Tuesday, 10 April 2012 13:12; Written by Dan Sperber

A special issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B entitled "From action to language: comparative perspective on primate tool use, gesture and the evolution of human language" edited by James Steele, Pier Francesco Ferrari and Leonardo Fogassi: "The papers in this Special Issue examine tool use and manual gestures in primates as a window on the evolution of the human capacity for language. Neurophysiological research has supported the hypothesis of a close association between some aspects of human action organization and of language representation, in both phonology and semantics. Tool use provides an excellent experimental context to investigate analogies between action organization and linguistic syntax. Contributors report and contextualize experimental evidence from monkeys, great apes, humans and fossil hominins, and consider the nature and the extent of overlaps between the neural representations of tool use, manual gestures and linguistic processes." For the table of contents,

UCLA Conference on culture,mind, and brain:

Details: Category: Events; Published on Tuesday, 10 April 2012 13:11; Written by Dan Sperber

An Interdisciplinary Conference on "Culture, Mind, and Brain: Emerging Concepts, Methods, Applications" will take place on October 19–20, 2012 at UCLA with the support of the International Cultural Neuroscience Consortium (ICNC)

Description: Many lines of research on culture, mind, and brain can no longer be neatly separated. Some questions run together, thanks to our growing understanding of the genome, the biological roots of human sociality, and the mutual constitution of cultures and selves, as well as the complex interactions between the physical, cultural, and social environments underlying health and illness. The aim of this 2-day conference is to highlight emerging concepts, methodologies and applications in the study of culture, mind, and brain, with particular attention to: (1) cutting-edge neuroscience research that is successfully incorporating culture and the social world; (2) the context in which methods are used as well as the tacit assumptions that shape research questions; and (3) the kinds and quality of collaborations that can advance interdisciplinary research training. The conference is designed to appeal to a wide academic audience of biologists, neuroscientists, psychologists, anthropologists, sociologists, epidemiologists, and those in related fields interested in learning about cutting-edge interdisciplinary research at the intersection of culture, mind, and brain.

What explains foxhole theism?

Details: Category: Helen De Cruz's blog; Published on Wednesday, 04 April 2012 10:38; Written by Helen De Cruz

The well-known dictum that there are no atheists in foxholes (the source of this phrase is uncertain) is false. After all, there is even a military organization for atheists, the Military Association of Atheists & Freethinkers. Having read several the testimonies from these military men and women, I was struck by the extent to which (Christian) religiosity (regular prayer, semi-compulsory meetings with chaplains) is an ingrained part of military practice, and how tough this must be for atheists. As one MAAF member put it: "I was there for most of these prayers thinking, 'Religion is why we are in this war [Iraq] in the first place, haven't you guys figured that out yet?"

Sergeant York

Cognitive scientists of religion do not deny that people can remain atheist in the face of mortal danger. But there is a steady stream of literature indicating that, although one can be an explicit atheist in such cases, priming people with mortality-salient stimuli seems to increase implicit religiosity. For instance, Tracy et al. (2011) found that reminding people of their mortality increases their propensity to accept creationist accounts and to reject evolutionary theory. This result was obtained regardless of the participants’ religion (or lack thereof), religiosity, educational background, or preexisting attitude toward evolution. Jong et al. (accepted manuscript) showed that although mortality primes do not increase people's explicit religious convictions, they do increase implicit measures of religiosity. I will refer to this phenomenon as Implicit Foxhole Theism (IFT).

The theoretical framework in the literature to explain IFT is terror management theory (TMT). Accordingly, people cope with their awareness of death by investing in some kind of immortality. Religious beliefs, which cross-culturally, but not universally, have a literal form of immortality in their package deals, play a salient role in this.

Admittedly, not all religions paint a rosy picture of the afterlife.

Nick Enfield reviews Hurford's The Origins of Grammar

Details: Category: Publications; Published on Saturday, 31 March 2012 19:27; Written by Dan Sperber

Hurford In the Times Literary Supplement, Nick Enfield reviews James R. Hurford's new book The Origins of Grammar, Oxford UP, 2011 (a sequel to The Origins of Meaning, Oxford UP, 2007):

"If you could travel back to a time around the dawn of humankind, and if you encountered a people there whose only form of language was a list of one-word interjections like Yuck, Wow, Oops, Hey!, No, and Huh?, would you say that these people were of a different species, not quite human? Would they be like today’s apes that simply don’t have it in them to fully acquire a modern human language? Or would they be the same as us only less well equipped for communication, like the eighteenth-century man who is every bit human but happens not to have been born in a world with telephones? If the latter were true, then language would be more technology than biology, more something we build than something that grows. It’s clear that the earliest humans did not possess language as we know it. The question is whether this was because language as we know it hadn’t yet been invented.

In James R. Hurford’s towering account of our species’ path from being once without language to now being emphatically with it, he proposes that just such a monophrase language of the Yuck/Wow variety was an important early human achievement. And, Hurford argues, while our earliest forms of language had no grammatical rules by which words were combined to form sentences, they were far from primitive call systems."

More here

Fluctuations in Word Use from Word Birth to Word Death

Details: Category: Publications; Published on Friday, 23 March 2012 11:08; Written by Dan Sperber

A team of mathematicians and phycisists, Alexander M. Petersen, Joel Tenenbaum, Shlomo Havlin, and H. Eugene Stanley, studied the "Statistical Laws Governing Fluctuations in Word Use from Word Birth to Word Death" by analysing the dynamic properties of 10⁷words recorded in English, Spanish and Hebrew over the period 1800–2008. (The paper is published by Arxiv.org.)

xray

We quote at length from the concluding Discussion:

"... words are competing actors in a system of ﬁnite resources. Just as business ﬁrms compete for market share, words demonstrate the same growth statistics because they are competing for the use of the writer/speaker and for the attention of the corresponding reader/listener . A prime example of ﬁtness mediated evolutionary competition is the case of irregular and regular verb use in English. By analyzing the regularization rate of irregular verbs through the history of the English language, Lieberman et al. show that the irregular verbs that are used more frequently are less likely to be overcome by their regular verb counterparts. Speciﬁcally, they ﬁnd that the irregular verb death rate scales as the inverse square root of the word’s relative use. A study of word diffusion across IndoEuropean languages shows similar frequency-dependence of word replacement rates."

Social Norms and Cultural Dynamics

Details: Category: Call for Papers; Published on Friday, 23 March 2012 11:06; Written by Dan Sperber

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).

Emotion in Eastern and Western Music

Details: Category: Publications; Published on Tuesday, 20 March 2012 22:24; Written by Dan Sperber

Just out in PLoSOne, an article on musical cognition entitled "Expression of Emotion in Eastern and Western Music Mirrors Vocalization" by Daniel Liu Bowling, Janani Sundararajan, Shui'er Han, Dale Purves (all from the Purves-lab at Duke).

Abstract: In Western music, the major mode is typically used to convey excited, happy, bright or martial emotions, whereas the minor mode typically conveys subdued, sad or dark emotions. Recent studies indicate that the differences between these modes parallel differences between the prosodic and spectral characteristics of voiced speech sounds uttered in corresponding emotional states. Here we ask whether tonality and emotion are similarly linked in an Eastern musical tradition. The results show that the tonal relationships used to express positive/excited and negative/subdued emotions in classical South Indian music are much the same as those used in Western music. Moreover, tonal variations in the prosody of English and Tamil speech uttered in different emotional states are parallel to the tonal trends in music. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that the association between musical tonality and emotion is based on universal vocal characteristics of different affective states.

Policing friendships. Lessons from the equine world

Details: Category: Denis Tatone's blog; Published on Thursday, 15 March 2012 12:00; Written by Denis Tatone

Imagine two young chimpanzees. One is swaggering, stood on two feet, his coat all puffed up, frantically waving his arms. The other, few meters away, is hooting loudly while beating his hands on the bark of a dead mango tree. They’re both ready to charge. Yet, their postures give away much of their fears for the imminent clash. Suddenly, the second chimp stops his dramatic display. Time for reluctance is over. They both rush against each other in a rather clumsy dogtrot. At first, it’s a dust-up, but soon it becomes a chase paced by high-pitched screams. The first chimp tries to flee away from his opponent, without success. There’s no way to slow down the chase. Every time the first chimp tries to whimper submissively toward the rival, the drummer knocks him down. Not even his desperate resort to biting seems to stop the second chimp. Sucked into the fight, neither of the two chimps notices the big female approaching. Only when her furious scream smothers the frightened chimp’s shrieks, they finally see her. The intervention is quick and resolute. She brings herself close to the aggressor, a bulging lip face greeting him. The drummer, still frenzied from the brawl, barely manages to restrain himself. She stomps the ground twice, glancing at her son, now back on his knuckles. The rival retreats. Fight’s over.

Despite my dramatic rendition of the events, the interpretation is definitely straightforward. Two chimps started a fight, the shrieks of the weaker animal alerted the mother, who was probably chewing on some fruits nearby, until she decided to intervene and bring the conflict to an abrupt halt. The reasons for her behavior are easy to guess.

The Psychosemantics of Free Riding

Details: Category: Publications; Published on Sunday, 11 March 2012 17:37; Written by Dan Sperber

Forthcoming in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and available here, "The Psychosemantics of Free Riding: Dissecting the Architecture of a Moral Concept" by Andrew W. Delton, Leda Cosmides, Marvin Guemo, Theresa E. Robertson, and John Tooby. It illustrates the progress that has been made both theoretically and methodologically in the line of research opened by Leda Cosmides' 1989 “The logic of social exchange: Has natural selection shaped how humans reason?” .

Abstract: For collective action to evolve and be maintained by selection, the mind must be equipped with mechanisms designed to identify free riders—individuals who do not contribute to a collective project but still benefit from it. Once identified, free riders must be either punished or excluded from future collective actions. But what criteria does the mind use to categorize someone as a free rider? An evolutionary analysis suggests that failure to contribute is not sufficient. Failure to contribute can occur by intention or accident, but the adaptive threat is posed by those who are motivated to benefit themselves at the expense of cooperators.

The Social Evolution Forum

Details: Category: Initiatives; Published on Friday, 09 March 2012 16:58; Written by Olivier Morin

Peter Turchin (co-author of Secular Cycles) and Michael Hochberg recently launched the Social Evolution Forum, a web platform dedicated to naturalistic thinking about institutions.

From the site's presentation:

The Social Evolution Forum has three dimensions. First, it is a virtual seminar, that is, a website dedicated to promoting the presentation and discussion of the most novel and important questions in social evolution theory. Second, it houses a blog dedicated to an informal discussion of current topics in social evolution, as well as policy implications of social evolution research (this blog is currently authored by Peter Turchin, but we expect that other authors will be joining in on the fun). And third, although fundamentally a communication network, the SEF also provides the foundations for inter- and pluri-disciplinary – and, ultimately, trans-disciplinary – collaboration. This takes the form of adverts to workshops and conferences, international funding opportunities, and the posting or publication of interim reports for specialists and for the broader community interested in social evolution.

Spatial cognition, culture and epistemological frameworks

Details: Category: The Study of Cognition and Culture Today; Published on Thursday, 01 March 2012 18:45; Written by Norbert Ross

This lecture is part of the special series of lectures 'The Study of Cognition and Culture Today' supported by the LSE Annual Fund, organised by the department of anthropology of the LSE and the International Cognition and Culture Institute.

David Graeber interviewed on Debt: the first 5000 years

Details: Category: Events; Published on Sunday, 26 February 2012 00:00; Written by Olivier Morin

David Greaber, the anarchist anthropologist, talks about his important book, Debt: The First 5000 years (Melville House, 2011):

A new "Journal for the Cognitive Science of Religion"

Details: Category: Publications; Published on Saturday, 25 February 2012 15:44; Written by Dan Sperber

The new "Journal for the Cognitive Science of Religion" is the official journal of the International Association for the Cognitive Science of Religion (founded in 2006).

Blurb: "The cognitive science of religion is a burgeoning field that finds itself in the center of cross-disciplinary research. Cognition is understood in a variety of ways from bottom-up to top-down models and theories. New insights into cognition, culture and religion are being discovered, new ways of doing research are being established and new methodologies and technologies are being used in the cognitive science of religion. The number of scholars and scientists working in this exciting field are expanding exponentially, and the journal provides a cutting-edge publication channel for this field."

Editors: Pascal Boyer, University of Washington in St. Louis; Armin W. Geertz, Aarhus University; Luther H. Martin, University of Vermont.

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The envelope that makes the Romanian medical system go around

Radu Umbres

Tuesday, 21 May 2013 21:45

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The condescension factor

Denis Tatone

Sunday, 19 May 2013 14:40

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

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

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

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

The firefighters calendar

Guillaume Dezecache

Saturday, 18 May 2013 17:08

Thanks for this brilliant post, Denis!

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

Not Quite So Simple

Grazzi Yoon

Monday, 01 April 2013 22:08

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why do mathematicians always agree? , Christophe Heintz

The Logical Basis of Kinship Terminologies

Dwight Read

Saturday, 30 March 2013 08:17

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is kinship back? , Dan Sperber

Reclaiming Kinship

Saturday, 30 March 2013 05:55

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

mathematicians do disagree! significantly so

William (Bill) Lawless

Friday, 29 March 2013 18:14

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

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

Gullibility and pigheadedness

Hugo Mercier

Monday, 18 March 2013 07:02

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

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

A scientist's gullibility

Christophe Heintz

Sunday, 10 March 2013 14:19

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

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

People concur in saying that Frampton is unusually gullible.

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

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

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

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

Looking at how people understand complex economic ideas may give us a clue

Stefano Adamo

Friday, 08 March 2013 14:33

Thank you all for the very interesting discussion!

First, I would like to recommend a paper by Paul Rubin entitled “Folk Economics," where some of the views that have come out of the discussion are treated in an evolutionary framework.

In addition, I would like to mention that during my doctorate I have worked on the intellectual aversion for the market economy from a historical angle, studying the implications of the rhetorical phenomenon of the personification of money in the English literature of the early modern period. Comparing the economic views expressed by satyrical dramatists and pamphleteers to those of the economists of the time, aka the “early mercantilists,” I found out that the characterization of money as a supernatural force that takes hold of human behavior (a “visible god,” as Shakespeare called it) reveals a naive understanding on the part of the writers of the social and economic transformation taking place at the time. Most of them overlooked the economic implications of that transformation, and construed it merely as a process of corruption of traditional ethical values. This investigation led me to conclude that a promising line of research on the aversion for the market economy might consist in understanding how lay people make sense of complex economic ideas.

Let me give you a hint. When economists use such concepts as rationality, profit, cost, trade, competition, and so on, they are using words that embed a whole set of assumptions, a shared knowledge that defines the economic way of thinking. On the other hand, also common people are exposed to this jargon in their daily life: they often use the same words, but they arguably attach to it a different, non-technical meaning. How does that meaning form? Drawing on the culture and cognition research program, I have hypothesized that it forms according to the way people relate their own understanding on the word in question with real-world examples of which they have personal experience. More generally, our opinion on matters on which we have no special competence may emerge from the relation we establish between the delusively familiar ideas involved in them and our own interpretation of the small piece of world we see around us.

I have more fully developed this hypothesis here. I’ve recently also uploaded a draft here, in which I explore the topic of the aversion to the market using as a case study the Italian movies of the economic boom era. It turns out, that the Italian filmmakers, just as the English dramatists of a few centuries earlier, were quite wary of the capitalistic development of the country.

Why don’t people like markets? , Pascal Boyer

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