Despite the fact that common sense taxes emotions with irrationality, philosophers have, by and large, celebrated their functionality. They are credited with motivating, steadying, shaping or harmonizing our dispositions to act, and with policing norms of social behaviour. It's time to restore emotion's bad rep. To this end, I shall argue that we should expect that some of the “norms” enforced by emotions will be unevenly distributed among the members of our species, and may be dysfunctional at the individual, social, (...) moral, or even species levels. I”ll adduce three considerations in support of that pessimistic view: The fallacy of adaptive fixation, the moral randomness of group selection, and the lack of fit between “natural norms” set up by evolution and those moral and social norms we would like philosophy to justify. (shrink)

I propose that the relationship between moral and violent behavior is overlooked in current philosophical, epistemological, and cognitive studies. To the aim of clarifying the complex dynamics of this interplay, I will describe, adopting an evolutionary perspective, the concepts of coalition enforcement, cognitive moral niche, and of what I call moral bubbles. Showing the interesting relationships between these three basic concepts, I will explain the role of morality in causing and justifying violence. The main theoretical merit of the concept of (...) coalition enforcement is that it permits the naturalization of morality that is the only conceptual means to unveil, in a naturalized way, the status of violence beyond the constraints generated by the so-called moral bubbles that prevent agents from seeing the potential violence generated by their own moral acts. (shrink)

In this paper, we will re-elaborate the notions of filter bubble and of echo chamber by considering human cognitive systems’ limitations in everyday interactions and how they experience digital technologies. Researchers who applied the concept of filter bubble and echo chambers in empirical investigations see them as forms of algorithmically-caused systems that seclude the users of digital technologies from viewpoints and opinions that oppose theirs. However, a significant majority of empirical research has shown that users do find and interact with (...) opposing views. Furthermore, we argue that the notion of filter bubble overestimates the social impact of digital technologies in explaining social and political developments without considering the not-only-technological circumstances of online behavior and interaction. This provides us with motivation to reconsider this notion’s validity and re-elaborate it in light of existing epistemological theories that deal with the discomfort people experience when dealing with what they do not know. Therefore, we will survey a series of philosophical reflections regarding the epistemic limitations of human cognitive systems. In particular, we will discuss how knowledge and mere belief are phenomenologically indistinguishable and how people’s experience of having their beliefs challenged is cause of epistemic discomfort. We will then go on to argue, in contrast with Pariser’s assumptions, that digital media users might tend to conform to their held viewpoints because of the “immediate” way they experience opposing viewpoints. Since online people experience others and their viewpoints as material features of digital environments, we maintain that this modality of confronting oneself with contrasting opinions prompts users to reinforce their preexisting beliefs and attitudes. (shrink)

Veissière and collaborators ground their account of culture and social norms in the free-energy principle, which postulates that the utility of an outcome is equivalent to its probability. This equivalence would mean that their account entails that complying with social norms has always adaptive value. But, this is false, because many social norms are obviously maladaptive.

There is an ambition to conceive of the human being as a composite of perceptual and desiderative faculties belonging to a causal order and a rational faculty belonging to a normative order. The problem is that this conception is unstable: If we locate the perceptual/desiderative faculties in a causal order, no room is left for the rational faculty. Consequently, to conceive the human being in full, one must alternate between two different points of view. In this paper, I argue that (...) the solution is to reevaluate how we think about causes and norms: To say something is determined by causes is not just to locate it within a causal order but is more fundamentally to exclude it from our evaluative practices. Further, to say something is constrained by norms is not just to identify a set of evaluative practices but is more fundamentally to include it in our evaluative practices. (shrink)

This paper describes a cross-cultural research project on the relation between how people conceptualize nature and how they act in it. Mental models of nature differ dramatically among and within populations living in the same area and engaged in more or less the same activities. This has novel implications for environmental decision making and management, including dealing with commons problems. Our research also offers a distinct perspective on models of culture, and a unified approach to the study of culture and (...) cognition. We argue that cultural transmission and formation does not consist primarily in shared rules or norms, but in complex distributions of causally-connected representations across minds in interaction with the environment. The cultural stability and diversity of these representations often derives from rich, biologically-prepared mental mechanisms that limit variation to readily transmissible psychological forms. This framework addresses a series of methodological issues, such as the limitations of conceiving culture to be a well-defined system or bounded entity, an independent variable, or an internalized component of minds. (shrink)

Uncertainty exerts powerful influences on life history decisions. This has been demonstrated in experiments on nonhumans and in mathematical models. Studies of human populations are suggestive of the effects of uncertainty, but they rely on measures of environmental stress. In this paper, we derive a new measure of uncertainty, upsilon (υ), for use in non-experimental studies. We estimate its association with reproductive behaviors in a longitudinal panel sample of adolescents in the United States. Results show upsilon’s internal structure is consistent (...) with theoretical models of uncertainty. Its associations with reproductive outcomes are also consistent with theoretical predictions. Upsilon seems to have its largest effect on the timing of fertility—increasing the odds of early fertility by a factor of 7, net of the effects of control variables. We discuss our findings for the association between υ and the timing of reproductive effort as well as our future research on υ. (shrink)

Current explanatory frameworks for social norms pay little attention to why and how brains might carry out computational functions that generate norm compliance behavior. This paper expands on existing literature by laying out the beginnings of a neurocomputational framework for social norms and social cognition, which can be the basis for advancing our understanding of the nature and mechanisms of social norms. Two neurocomputational building blocks are identified that might constitute the core of the mechanism of norm compliance. They consist (...) of Bayesian and reinforcement learning systems. It is sketched why and how the concerted activity of these systems can generate norm compliance by minimization of three specific kinds of prediction-errors. (shrink)

This paper begins with the hypothesis that Mikea, participants in a mixed foraging–fishing–farming–herding economy of southwestern Madagascar, may attempt to reduce interannual variance in food supply caused by unpredictable rainfall by following a simple rule-of-thumb: Practice an even mix of activities that covary positively with rainfall and activities that covary negatively with rainfall. Results from a historical matrix participatory exercise confirm that Mikea perceive that foraging and farming outcomes covary positively or negatively with rainfall. This paper further considers whether Mikea (...) learn about covariation through personal observation and memory recall (individual learning) or through socially transmitted ethnotheory (social learning). Dual inheritance theory models by Boyd and Richerson (1988) predict that individual learning is more effective in spatially and temporally variable environments such as the Mikea Forest. In contrast, the psychological literature suggests that individuals judge covariation poorly when memory of past events is required, unless they share a socially learned theory that a covariation should exist (Nisbett and Ross 1980). Results suggest that Mikea rely heavily on shared ethnotheory when judging covariation, but individuals continually strive to improve their judgment through individual observation. (shrink)