Boyer & Petersen (B&P) lay out an evolutionarily grounded framework to produce concrete, testable predictions about economic phenomena. We commend this step forward, but suggest the framework requires more consideration of cultural contexts that provide necessary input for cognitive systems to operate on. We discuss the role of culture when examining both evolved cognitive systems and social exchange contexts.

Scientists often communicate using generic generalizations, which are unquantified generalizations such as ‘Americans overestimate social class mobility’ or ‘sound waves carry gravitational mass’. In this paper, I explain the role of such generic generalizations in science, based on a novel theory about their characteristic meaning. According to this theory, a scientific generalization of the form ‘Ks are F’ says that F is one property based on which category K qualifies as a scientific kind. Because what it takes to qualify as (...) a scientific kind varies depending on the discipline, what a generic sentence entails also varies. Based on this semantic theory, I discuss the benefits and drawbacks of using generic language in science. (shrink)

Are strangers sincere in their moral praise and criticism? Here we apply signaling theory to argue ceteris paribus moral criticism is more likely sincere than praise; the former tends to be a higher-fidelity signal (in Western societies). To offer an example: emotions are often self-validating as a signal because they're hard to fake. This epistemic insight matters: moral praise and criticism influence moral reputations, and affect whether others will cooperate with us. Though much of this applies to generic praise and (...) criticism too, moral philosophers should value sincere moral praise and moral criticism for several reasons: it (i) offers insight into how others actually view us as moral agents; (ii) offers feedback to help us improve our moral characters; and (iii) encourages some behaviors, and discourages others. And so as moral agents, we should care whether moral praise and moral criticism is sincere. (shrink)

This article argues that understanding human uniqueness requires recognizing that we are a cultural species whose evolution has been driven by the interaction among genes and culture for over a million years. Here, I review the basic argument, incorporate recent findings, and highlight ongoing efforts to apply this approach to more deeply understand both the universal aspects of our cognition as well as the variation across societies. This article will cover (1) the origins and evolution of our capacities for culture, (...) (2) examples of specialized mental abilities such as those related to mechanical causality, prestige, and cooperation, and (3) recent efforts to apprehend our capacities for abstraction. I close by discussing common canards that generate confusion in mapping what makes us human. (shrink)

Danaher (2016) has argued that increasing robotization can lead to retribution gaps: Situation in which the normative fact that nobody can be justly held responsible for a harmful outcome stands in conflict with our retributivist moral dispositions. In this paper, we report a cross-cultural empirical study based on Sparrow’s (2007) famous example of an autonomous weapon system committing a war crime, which was conducted with participants from the US, Japan and Germany. We find that (i) people manifest a considerable willingness (...) to hold autonomous systems morally responsible, (ii) partially exculpate human agents when interacting with such systems, and that more generally (iii) the possibility of normative responsibility gaps is indeed at odds with people’s pronounced retributivist inclinations. We discuss what these results mean for potential implications of the retribution gap and other positions in the responsibility gap literature. (shrink)

A specific soul of the times appears to require a survey of brain research as a study of the psyche and conduct as most settled definition. Two significant developments have emerged freely, one in the core of the American Mental Affiliation itself with Division 5 as of late renamed Quantitative and Subjective Techniques, remembering the General public for Subjective Request for Brain research and the Diary of Subjective Brain research and the other in the European custom with The Yokohama Proclamation (...) for a Brain research as the Study of Person. Both expect an open pluralistic move in the direction of the Mind as "perplexing, abstract, significant, and strange" "no act of request is precluded deduced; numerous objectives of request are delivered conceivable and different pathways might guarantee an arranged authenticity Following this contention, certain implied transcendentalism comprising of a dualistic cosmology with criticism from the regular logical strategy would be at the premise of the persevering dualism in brain research. It is perceived that the distinguishing proof of brain research as an inherent science was likely due more to its esteem than to its own intricacy as suggested by its review. The time has come to reconceive brain research as a human science (social, conduct), without a "complex". To do as such, an ontological inquiry ought to be raised concerning the spot of brain research in a pluralistic metaphysics, not dualistic or monistic. (shrink)

The object-oriented ontology group of philosophies, and certain strands of posthumanism, overlook important ethical and biological differences, which make a difference. These allied intellectual movements, which have at times found broad popular appeal, attempt to weird life as a rebellion to the forced melting of lifeforms through the artefacts of capitalist realism. They truck, however, in a recursive solipsism resulting in ontological flattening, overlooking that things only show up to us according to our attunement to them. Ecology and biology tend (...) to get lost in the celebration of “thingness,” which puts on par artifacts, trash, and living beings. Such abstractions fail to understand the political, ethical, and ontological implications of eliding the animate/nonanimate distinction, which from the opposite direction (of flattening) reproduce the same violences of historical colonialism (hierarchical humanism). I argue that ontological flattening entails epistemological narcissism, fails to take into account plural (interspecies) perspectives, and propose biosemiotics can address these shortcomings through becoming-with nonhuman knowledge. (shrink)

According to Mary Midgley, philosophy is like plumbing: like the invisible entrails of an elaborate plumbing system, philosophical ideas respond to basic needs that are fundamental to human life. Melioristic projects in philosophy attempt to fix or reroute this plumbing. An obstacle to melioristic projects is that the sheer familiarity of the underlying philosophical ideas renders the plumbing invisible. Philosophical genealogies aim to overcome this by looking at the origins of our current concepts. We discuss philosophical concepts developed in Indigenous (...) cultures as a source of inspiration for melioristic genealogy. Examining the philosophical concepts of these communities is useful because it gives us a better idea of the range of ethical, political, and metaphysical approaches that exist in the world. Members of western societies do not get a clear view of this range, in part because living in large groups presents its own constraints and challenges, which limit philosophical options. We argue that features of Indigenous philosophies, such as egalitarianism and care for one's natural environment, are not inevitable byproducts of Native material conditions and lifestyles, but that they are deliberate forms of conceptual engineering. We propose that comparative philosophy is an integral part of the genealogical project. -/- . (shrink)

According to the popular Grounded Cognition Model (GCM), the sensory and motor features of concepts, including word meanings, are stored directly within neural systems for perception and action. More precisely, the core claim is that these concrete conceptual features reuse some of the same modality-specific representations that serve to categorize experiences involving the relevant kinds of objects and events. Research in semantic typology, however, has shown that word meanings vary significantly across the roughly 6500 languages in the world. I argue (...) that this crosslinguistic semantic diversity has significant yet previously unrecognized theoretical consequences for the GCM. In particular, to accommodate the typological data, the GCM must assume that the concrete features of word meanings are not merely stored within sensory/motor brain systems, but are represented there in ways that are, to a nontrivial degree, language-specific. Moreover, it must assume that these conceptual representations are also activated during the nonlinguistic processing of the relevant kinds of objects and events (e.g., during visual perception and action planning); otherwise, they would not really be grounded, which is to say, embedded inside sensory/motor systems. Crucially, however, such activations would constitute what is traditionally called linguistic relativity—that is, the influence of language-specific semantic structures on other forms of cognition. The overarching aim of this paper is to elaborate this argument more fully and explore its repercussions. To that end, I discuss in greater detail the key aspects of the GCM, the evidence for crosslinguistic semantic diversity, pertinent work on linguistic relativity, the central claim that the GCM entails linguistic relativity, some initial supporting results, and some important limitations and future directions. (shrink)

According to the so-called Classical Theory, concepts are mentally represented by individually necessary and jointly sufficient application conditions. One of the principal empirical objections against this view stems from evidence that people judge some instances of a concept to be more typical than others. In this paper we present and discuss four empirical studies that investigate the extent to which this ‘typicality effect’ holds for the concept of basic needs. Through multiple operationalizations of typicality, our studies yielded evidence for a (...) strong effect of this kind: Participants tended to recall the same core examples of the concept in a free-listing task. They judged some basic needs to be more typical than others. The items that were judged to be more typical were listed more frequently in the free-listing task. These items were listed earlier on in the free-listing task. Typical basic needs, as well as non needs, were classified faster than atypical basic needs in a reaction time study. These findings suggest that the concept of basic needs may have a non-classical structure. If so, the quest for a simple and robust intensional analysis of the concept may be futile. (shrink)

Many scientists routinely generalize from study samples to larger populations. It is commonly assumed that this cognitive process of scientific induction is a voluntary inference in which researchers assess the generalizability of their data and then draw conclusions accordingly. We challenge this view and argue for a novel account. The account describes scientific induction as involving by default a generalization bias that operates automatically and frequently leads researchers to unintentionally generalize their findings without sufficient evidence. The result is unwarranted, overgeneralized (...) conclusions. We support this account of scientific induction by integrating a range of disparate findings from across the cognitive sciences that have until now not been connected to research on the nature of scientific induction. The view that scientific induction involves by default a generalization bias calls for a revision of the current thinking about scientific induction and highlights an overlooked cause of the replication crisis in the sciences. Commonly proposed interventions to tackle scientific overgeneralizations that may feed into this crisis need to be supplemented with cognitive debiasing strategies against generalization bias to most effectively improve science. (shrink)

We do not all make choices, reason, interpret our experience, or respond to our environment in the same way. A recent surge of scientific interest has thrust these individual differences into the spotlight: researchers in cognitive psychology and neuroscience are now devoting increasing attention to cognitive variation. The philosophical dimensions of this research, however, have yet to be systematically explored. Here I make an initial foray by considering how cognitive variation is characterized. I present a central dilemma facing descriptions of (...) individual differences, discuss several distinctions used to categorize variation, and show that these distinctions require further elaboration. Finally, by canvassing several philosophical topics for which the characterization of cognitive variation may have significant implications, I argue that philosophers should take note of how and why our minds differ. (shrink)

This article provides an account of intuitions: Affectivism. Affectivism states that intuitions are emotional experiences. The article proceeds as follows: first, the features that intuitions are typically taken to have are introduced. Then some issues with extant theories are outlined. After that, emotional experiences and their central features are brought into view. This is followed by a comparison of intuitions and emotional experiences, yielding the result that emotional experiences fit and elucidate the feature profile of intuitions. Finally, it is specified (...) what kind of emotional experiences intuitions are: intuitions are typically mild emotional experiences that belong to the subclass of epistemic feelings. (shrink)

The target article raises important questions about the applicability of experimental social psychology research on topics with policy implications. This commentary focuses on the importance of attending to a variety of factors to improve ecological validity as well as considering the ultimate factors shaping behavior and the role of natural categories in the stability of stereotypes and their influence.

In 2017, the blockade of Qatar Gulf states caused a plethora of effects on the country. This paper sought to examine the resulting threat effects of this blockade in terms of lowered self-esteem and well-being, and the potential buffering effects of an overarching identity. Using self-report questionnaire data from Qatari secondary school students, multiple moderated mediation models investigated the predictive effects of youngsters’ perceived threat, via self-esteem, on their well-being, and the mitigating roles herein of, respectively, national, Gulf region, and (...) Arab identity. Perceived threat was indeed related to lower well-being via lower self-esteem, and this relationship was equally strong for those low and high in social identity. In terms of the three facets of identity, the overarching Gulf identity seems the most predictive, and it even buffers the negative relationship between threat and reduced self-esteem. (shrink)

Parental reading to young children is well-established as being positively associated with child cognitive development, particularly their language development. Research indicates that a particular, “intersubjective,” form of using books with children, “Dialogic Book-sharing”, is especially beneficial to infants and pre-school aged children, particularly when using picture books. The work on DBS to date has paid little attention to the theoretical and empirical underpinnings of the approach. Here, we address the question of what processes taking place during DBS confer benefits to (...) child development, and why these processes are beneficial. In a novel integration of evidence, ranging from non-human primate communication through iconic gestures and pointing, archaeological data on Pre-hominid and early human art, to experimental and naturalistic studies of infant attention, cognitive processing, and language, we argue that DBS entails core characteristics that make it a privileged intersubjective space for the promotion of child cognitive and language development. This analysis, together with the findings of DBS intervention studies, provides a powerful intellectual basis for the wide-scale promotion of DBS, especially in disadvantaged populations. (shrink)

In this paper, Knetsch's exchange paradigm is analyzed from the perspective of pragmatics and social norms. In this paradigm the participant, at the beginning of the experiment, receives an object from the experimenter and at the end, the same experimenter offers to exchange the received object for an equivalent object. The observed refusal to exchange is called the endowment effect. We argue that this effect comes from an implicature made by the participant about the experimenter's own expectations. The participant perceives (...) the received item as a gift, or as a present, from the experimenter that cannot be exchanged as stipulated by the social norms of western politeness common to both the experimenter and the participant. This implicature, however, should not be produced by participants from Kanak culture for whom the perceived gift of a good will be interpreted as a first act of exchange based on gift and counter-gift. This exchange is a natural, frequent, balanced, and indispensable act for all Kanak social bonds whether private or public. Kanak people also know the French social norms that they apply in their interactions with French people living in New Caledonia. In our experiment, we show that when the exchange paradigm takes place in a French context, with a French experimenter and in French, the Kanak participant is subject to the endowment effect in the same way as a French participant. On the other hand, when the paradigm is carried out in a Kanak context, with a Kanak experimenter and in the vernacular language, or in a Kanak context that approaches the ceremonial of the custom, the endowment effect is no longer observed. The same number of Kanak participants accept or refuse to exchange the endowed item. These results, in addition to providing a new explanation for the endowment effect, highlight the great flexibility of decisions according to social-cultural context. (shrink)

Pretense is generally thought to constitutively involve imagination. We argue that this is a mistake. Although pretense often involves imagination, it need not; nor is it a kind of imagination. The core nature of pretense is closer to imitation than it is to imagination, and likely shares some of its motivation with the former. Three main strands of argument are presented. One is from the best explanation of cross‐cultural data. Another is from task‐analysis of instances of pretend play. And the (...) third concerns the different ways in which pretense (especially childhood pretense) and imagination impact one's evaluative/affective systems. (shrink)

Nobody doubts that culture plays a decisive role in understanding human forms of life. But it is unclear how this decisive role should be integrated into a comprehensive explanatory model of human behaviour that brings together naturalistic and social-scientific perspectives. Cultural difference, cultural learning, cultural determination do not mix well with the factors that are normally given full explanatory value in the more naturalistic approaches to the study of human behaviour. My purpose in this paper is to alert to some (...) of the theoretical vulnerabilities or concerns that the cross-cultural study of mind and behaviour might entail. I classify these theoretical concerns into three, loosely defined, categories: epistemological, ontological and ethical. The first have to do with what in anthropology was once labelled as ‘butterfly collecting’. What kind of supplementary, or additional, general theoretical knowledge do we produce when we add to the research different, particularistic, culturally determined, ways of knowing? Ontological concerns refer to the underlying reality that those ways of knowing are meant to disclose. If there are so many ways of knowing the world, where is the reality to be known? Ethical concerns are those entailed in the forms of ‘othering’ that unqualified cross-cultural research is likely to produce in research participants. (shrink)

Prior research found correlations between reflection test performance and philosophical tendencies among laypeople. In two large studies (total N = 1299)—one pre-registered—many of these correlations were replicated in a sample that included both laypeople and philosophers. For example, reflection test performance predicted preferring atheism over theism and instrumental harm over harm avoidance on the trolley problem. However, most reflection-philosophy correlations were undetected when controlling for other factors such as numeracy, preferences for open-minded thinking, personality, philosophical training, age, and gender. Nonetheless, (...) some correlations between reflection and philosophical views survived this multivariate analysis and were only partially confounded with either education or self-reported reasoning preferences. Unreflective thinking still predicted believing in God whereas reflective thinking still predicted believing that (a) proper names like ‘Santa’ do not necessarily refer to entities that actually exist and (b) science does reveal the fundamental nature of the world. So some robust relationships between reflection and philosophical tendencies were detected even among philosophers, and yet there was clearly more to the link between reflection and philosophy. To this end, demographic and metaphilosophical hypotheses are considered. (shrink)

Human behavior and thought often exhibit a familiar pattern of within group similarity and between group difference. Many of these patterns are attributed to cultural differences. For much of the history of its investigation into behavior and thought, however, cognitive science has been disproportionately focused on uncovering and explaining the more universal features of human minds—or the universal features of minds in general. -/- This entry charts out the ways in which this has changed over recent decades. It sketches the (...) motivation behind the cultural turn in cognitive science, and situates some of its central findings with respect to the questions that animate it and the debates that it has inspired. Woven throughout the entry are examples of how the cognitive science of culture, and especially its elevated concern with different forms of diversity and variation, continues to influence and be influenced by philosophers. -/- One cluster of philosophical work falls within the traditional subject matter of philosophy of science, in this case of the cognitive and social sciences. Philosophers have analyzed and assessed the methods and evidence central to the scientific study of cognition and culture, and have offered conceptual scrutiny, clarification, and synthesis. Research in a second vein sees philosophers themselves contributing more directly to cognitive scientific projects, (co)constructing theories, helping build computational models, even gathering empirical data. A third kind of work is naturalistic philosophy or philosophy of nature, wherein philosophers seek to use results from the cognitive science of culture to inform or transform debates over long-standing philosophical questions, including questions about the nature of philosophy and philosophical methodology itself. (shrink)

We present three experiments that explore the robustness of the _authentic-apparent effect_—the finding that participants are less likely to attribute knowledge to the protagonist in apparent- than in authentic-evidence Gettier cases. The results go some way towards suggesting that the effect is robust to assessments of the justificatory status of the protagonist’s belief. However, not all of the results are consistent with an effect invariant across two demographic contexts: American and Indian nationalities.

After introducing the new field of cultural evolution, we review a growing body of empirical evidence suggesting that culture shapes what people attend to, perceive and remember as well as how they think, feel and reason. Focusing on perception, spatial navigation, mentalizing, thinking styles, reasoning (epistemic norms) and language, we discuss not only important variation in these domains, but emphasize that most researchers (including philosophers) and research participants are psychologically peculiar within a global and historical context. This rising tide of (...) evidence recommends caution in relying on one’s intuitions or even in generalizing from reliable psychological findings to the species, Homo sapiens. Our evolutionary approach suggests that humans have evolved a suite of reliably developing cognitive abilities that adapt our minds, information-processing abilities and emotions ontogenetically to the diverse culturally-constructed worlds we confront. (shrink)

The religiosity of academics has been studied for over a decade. With few exceptions, this research has been conducted on American “elite” scientists, and data from non-Western countries is lacking. Drawing from psychological and sociological literature, the present exploratory study investigates the religiosity of Turkish academics and their perceptions on the relationship between religion and science, and associated variables such as interpretation of the Quran, and belief in evolution and creationism. Moreover, we address criticism directed at previous research by probing (...) for different God concepts among believing academics. Although cultural differences can be identified, the results generally support the idea that academics are less religious with 54% identifying as “less religious” or “not religious,” compared to 24.2% self-identifying as “religious” or “extremely religious.”. (shrink)

Tasks, tools, and techniques that we perform, use, and acquire, define the elements of expertise which we value as the hallmarks of goal-driven behavior. Somehow, the creation of tools enables us to define new tasks, or is it that the envisioning of new tasks drives us to invent new tools? Or maybe it is that new tools engender new techniques which then result in new tasks? This jumble of issues will be explored and discussed in this diverse collection of papers. (...) Individually, few of the papers are related to each other by topic or by techniques of analysis. Collectively, all focus on tasks performed using tools and discuss the techniques of tool use which enable differences in performance and expertise across individuals, societies, and (even) species. -/- . (shrink)

While the existence of human cognitive and behavioral diversity is now widely recognized, it is not yet well established how to explain this diversity. In particular, it is still unclear how to determine whether any given instance of human cognitive and behavioral diversity is due to a common psychology that is merely “triggered” differently in different bio-cultural environments, or whether it is due to deeply and fundamentally different psychologies. This paper suggests that, to answer this question, we need to employ (...) subtle theoretical considerations of theory choice—especially the consideration of the complexity-weighted differential predictive successes of the two accounts. To make this clearer, the paper develops a novel analysis of the observed differences in human sharing dispositions. (shrink)

Conceptual engineers have recently turned to the notion of conceptual functions to do a variety of explanatory work. Functions are supposed to explain what speakers are debating about in metalinguistic negotiations, to capture when two concepts are about the same thing, and to help guide our normative inquiries into which concepts we should use. In this paper, I argue that this recent “functional turn” should be deflated. Contra most interpreters, we should not try to use a substantive notion of conceptual (...) functions to handle various problems for conceptual engineering. The primary accounts of function appealed to by conceptual engineers, namely etiological and system functions, are not suited to handle many of the problems functions are supposed to handle, and it’s dubious whether any other account of function would do better. Instead of trying to use substantive functions to solve theoretical problems, we should deflate those problems themselves by focusing only on what matters to us, as speakers or theorists, in a given inquiry. (shrink)

Harmony as a basic value is neglected in internationally influential philosophical discussions about rights, power, and other facets of public policy; it is not prominent in articles that appear in widely read journals or in books published by presses with a global reach. Of particular interest, political philosophers and policy makers remain ignorant of the similarities and differences between various harmony-oriented approaches to institutional choice from around the world. In this chapter, I begin to rectify these deficiencies by critically discussing (...) the way harmony has figured into political philosophies from three major traditions in the Global South, namely, African ubuntu, East Asian Confucianism, and South American buen vivir. I point out that, although harmony is at the core of all three political philosophies, it is conceived in different ways, entailing incompatible prescriptions about things such as who should make laws and which sorts of beings have rights against the state. Such contrasting views call for rigorous cross-cultural dialogue amongst theorists of harmony, beyond mounting challenges to more individualist approaches that have been salient in modern Western political thought. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Fine examination of our accumulated cultural knowledge is especially helpful in studying the emotions, which are only tangentially accessible to experimental manipulation. Here I use the six properties of emotions that Elster has summarized to suggest how they show a need for changes in the science of motivation. The apparent adaptive purpose of emotions lies in their action tendencies – what they add to the cold calculation of advantage. Subjectively they stand out by their intrusiveness, the duration of which (...) often has a half-life. Emotions each have a valence, which suggests that they are not only motivating but also motivated, an implication that requires re-examination of how negativity works. Emotions are also experienced as ‘triggered’, but are so malleable that triggering cannot mean a simple conditioned reflexiveness. Emotions are not only triggered – or motivated – by beliefs, but motivate beliefs in turn, and can be fed back on themselves in a ‘wildfire’ phenomenon. These feedback effects are further evidence against emotions being reflexive. With regard to the three great revolutions, I argue that enthusiasm differs from romantic love only in its object, and urgency comes from the dysphoria of using response suppression for self-control. I can add nothing further to Elster’s masterful history. (shrink)

Ethical work climate, introduced by Bart Victor and John Cullen, plays a central role in the business ethics literature due to its influence on employee’s ethical decision-making. Yet, the often-used framework is limited as a descriptive and prescriptive model because it lacks a normative focus and does not allow for organizations guided by universal ethical principles. We revisit Victor and Cullen’s original conceptualization of ethical climate and propose a reformulation of the ethical criteria to be conceptually consistent with Kohlberg’s theory (...) of cognitive moral development and to accommodate principled climates. We also describe how the locus of analysis dimension can be simplified to allow for a more parsimonious and potentially more valid theory. In doing so, we eliminate redundancy noted in the original model and clarify normative preference among the ethical climate types. We discuss implications for research, teaching, and practice. (shrink)

Psychological science is maturing and therefore transitioning from explorative to theory-driven research. While explorative research seeks to find something “new,” theory-driven research seeks to elaborate on already known and hence predictable effects. A consequence of these differences is that the quality of explorative and theory-driven research needs to be judged by distinct criterions that optimally support their respective development. Especially, theory-driven research needs to be judged by its methodological rigor. A focus on innovativeness, which is typical for explorative research, will (...) instead incentivize bad research practices (e.g., imprecise theorizing, ignoring previous research, parallel theories). To support the advancement of psychology, we must drop the innovation requirement for theory-driven research and instead require the strongest methods, which are marked by high internal and external validity. Precise theorizing needs to substitute novelty. Theories are advanced by requiring explicit, testable assumptions, and an explicit preference for one theory over another. These explicit and potentially wrong assumptions should not be silenced within the peer-review process, but instead be scrutinized in new publications. Importantly, these changes in scientific conduct need to be supported by senior researchers, especially, in their roles as editors, reviewers, and in the hiring process. An important obstacle to further theory-driven research is to measure scientific merit using researchers’ number of publications, which favors theoretically shallow and imprecise writing. Additionally, it makes publications the central target of scientific misconduct even though they are the main source of information for the scientific community and the public. To advance the field, researchers should be judged by their contribution to the scientific community (e.g., exchange with and support of colleagues, and mentoring). Another step to advance psychology is to clearly differentiate between measurement model and theory, and not to overgeneralize based on few stimuli, incidences, or studies. We will use ideas from the theory of science to underline the changes necessary within the field of psychology to overcome this existential replication crisis. (shrink)

Humans are poorer at identifying smells and communicating about them, compared to other sensory domains. They also cannot easily organize odor sensations in a general conceptual space, where geometric distance could represent how similar or different all odors are. These two generalities are more or less accepted by psychologists, and they are often seen as connected: If there is no conceptual space for odors, then olfactory identification should indeed be poor. We propose here an important revision to this conclusion: We (...) believe that the claim that there is no odor space is true only if by odor space, one means a conceptual space representing all possible odor sensations, in the paradigmatic sense used for instance for color. However, in a less paradigmatic sense, local conceptual spaces representing a given subset of odors do exist. Thus the absence of a global odor space does not warrant the conclusion that there is no olfactory conceptual map at all. Here we show how a localist account provides a new interpretation of experts and cross‐cultural categorization studies: Rather than being exceptions to the poor olfactory identification and communication usually seen elsewhere, experts and cross‐cultural categorization are here taken to corroborate the existence of local conceptual spaces. (shrink)

Upholding cooperative norms via punishment is of central importance in organizations. But what effect does punishing have on the reputation of the punisher? Although previous research shows third parties can garner reputational benefits for punishing transgressors who violate social norms, we proposed that such reputational benefits can vary based on the perceived motive for the punishment. In Studies 1 and 2, we found that individuals who endorsed a consequentialist (versus deontological) motive for punishing were seen as more trustworthy. In Study (...) 3, the results showed that when pitted against one another, a person who endorsed a consequentialist (versus deontological) motive for punishing was chosen more often as a partner in a Trust Game. In Study 4, we found that a manager who expressed a consequentialist reason for punishing an employee was seen as having less psychopathic tendencies, and this related to the manager being perceived as more trustworthy and a superior cooperation partner. Using a recall methodology, Study 5 results showed that employees who perceived their managers as having more consequentialist (versus deontological) motives for punishing also perceived their managers as being less psychopathic and more trustworthy. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed. (shrink)

When scientists or science reporters communicate research results to the public, this often involves ethical and epistemic risks. One such risk arises when scientific claims cause cognitive or behavioural changes in the audience that contribute to the self-fulfilment of these claims. I argue that the ethical and epistemic problems that such self-fulfilment effects may pose are much broader and more common than hitherto appreciated. Moreover, these problems are often due to a specific psychological phenomenon that has been neglected in the (...) research on science communication: many people tend to conform to ‘descriptive norms’, that is, norms capturing (perceptions of) what others commonly do, think, or feel. Because of this tendency, science communication may frequently produce significant social harm. I contend that scientists have a responsibility to assess the risk of this potential harm and consider adopting strategies to mitigate it. I introduce one such strategy and argue that its implementation is independently well motivated by the fact that it helps improve scientific accuracy. (shrink)

This article describes the development and teaching of a course on global engineering ethics in Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China. It outlines course objectives, methods, and contents, and instructor experience and plans for future development. This is done with the goal of helping educators to plan standalone courses and/or integrated modules on global engineering and technology ethics, which address challenges arising from the increasingly cross-cultural and international environments of contemporary technology and engineering practice. These efforts are motivated by the global (...) environments of engineering, as well as recent research in empirical moral psychology. Although this course was developed and taught in China, as a course on global engineering ethics taught to students from throughout the world, its approach could be beneficial elsewhere. (shrink)

Comparative thanatologists study the responses to the dead and the dying in nonhuman animals. Despite the wide variety of thanatological behaviours that have been documented in several different species, comparative thanatologists assume that the concept of death is very difficult to acquire and will be a rare cognitive feat once we move past the human species. In this paper, we argue that this assumption is based on two forms of anthropocentrism: an intellectual anthropocentrism, which leads to an over-intellectualisation of the (...) CoD, and an emotional anthropocentrism, which yields an excessive focus on grief as a reaction to death. Contrary to what these two forms of anthropocentrism suggest, we argue that the CoD requires relatively little cognitive complexity and that it can emerge independently from mourning behaviour. Moreover, if we turn towards the natural world, we can see that the minimal cognitive requirements for a CoD are in fact met by many nonhuman species and there are multiple learning pathways and opportunities for animals in the wild to develop a CoD. This allows us to conclude that the CoD will be relatively easy to acquire and, so, we can expect it to be fairly common in nature. (shrink)

Gender differences in dishonesty and mistrust have been reported across cultures and linked to stereotypes about females being more trustworthy and trusting. Here we focus on fundamental issues of trust-based communication that may be affected by gender: the decisions whether to honestly deliver private information and whether to trust that this delivered information is honest. Using laboratory experiments that model trust-based strategic communication and response, we examined the relationship between gender, gender stereotypes, and gender discriminative lies and challenges. Drawing from (...) a student sample, we presented males and females with incentivized stereotype elicitation tasks that reveal their expectations of lies and challenges from each gender, followed by a series of strategic communication interactions within and between genders. Before interacting, both genders stereotyped females as more trustworthy and more trusting than males, in accord with cross-cultural gender differences. In best response to these stereotypes, both genders discriminately accepted or challenged messages based on the sender’s gender. However, we find no differences between males’ and females’ overall rates of lies and challenges. After learning the results of their strategic interactions, males and females revised their stereotypes about lies and challenges expected of each gender; these stereotype revisions resulted in greater predictive accuracy and less disparate gender discrimination. This suggests an important facultative feature of human trust-based communication and gender stereotyping: while the delivery and trust of private information is informed by gender stereotypes, these stereotypes are recalibrated with experience. (shrink)

The incorporation of neural-based technologies into psychiatry offers novel means to use neural data in patient assessment and clinical diagnosis. However, an over-optimistic technologisation of neuroscientifically-informed psychiatry risks the conflation of technological and psychological norms. Neurotechnologies promise fast, efficient, broad psychiatric insights not readily available through conventional observation of patients. Recording and processing brain signals provides information from ‘beneath the skull’ that can be interpreted as an account of neural processing and that can provide a basis to evaluate general behaviour (...) and functioning. But it ought not to be forgotten that the use of such technologies is part of a human practice of neuroscience informed psychiatry. This paper notes some challenges in the integration of neural technologies into psychiatry and suggests vigilance particularly in respect to normative challenges. In this way, psychiatry can avoid a drift toward reductive technological approaches, while nonetheless benefitting from promising advances in neuroscience and technology. (shrink)

The claim that common sense regards free will and moral responsibility as compatible with determinism has played a central role in both analytic and experimental philosophy. In this paper, we show that evidence in favor of this “natural compatibilism” is undermined by the role that indeterministic metaphysical views play in how people construe deterministic scenarios. To demonstrate this, we re-examine two classic studies that have been used to support natural compatibilism. We find that although people give apparently compatibilist responses, this (...) is largely explained by the fact that people import an indeterministic metaphysics into deterministic scenarios when making judgments about freedom and responsibility. We conclude that judgments based on these scenarios are not reliable evidence for natural compatibilism. (shrink)

More than 1.2 million people are killed annually in road crashes all over the world, and still it seems that philosophers and, perhaps more importantly, professional ethicists have not devoted thought to the many moral issues that road traffic was bound to create. This article tries to understand why road ethics is all but ignored by philosophers and ethicists, and makes a plea for a change. By exploring ethically the traffic safety problem of speeding it will be shown that ethical (...) analysis is not only appropriate but mandatory. (shrink)

Awareness and concern about climate change are widespread. But rates of pro-environmental behaviour are low. This is partly due to the way in which pro-environmental behaviour is framed—as a sacrifice or burden that individuals bear for the planet and future generations. This framing elicits well-known cognitive biases, discouraging what we should be encouraging. We should abandon the self-sacrifice framing, and instead frame pro-environmental behaviour as intrinsically desirable. There is a large body of evidence that, around the world, people who are (...) living more environmentally lifestyles are happier than those not doing so. This is the message we should be spreading. (shrink)

A pluralistic approach to folk psychology must countenance the evaluative, regulatory, predictive, and explanatory roles played by attributions of intelligence in social practices across cultures. Building off of the work of the psychologist Robert Sternberg and the philosophers Gilbert Ryle and Daniel Dennett, I argue that a relativistic interpretivism best accounts for the many varieties of intelligence that emerge from folk discourse. To be intelligent is to be comparatively good at solving intellectual problems that an interpreter deems worth solving.

Hume maintains that the boundaries of morality are widely drawn in everyday life. We routinely blame characters for traits that we find disgusting, on this account, as well as those which we perceive as being harmful. Contemporary moral psychology provides further evidence that human beings have a natural tendency to moralize traits that produce feelings of repugnance. But recent work also demonstrates a significant amount of individual variation in our sensitivities to disgust. We have sufficient reason to bracket this emotion, (...) therefore, when adopting the general point of view: if we allow idiosyncratic affective responses to shape our fully considered moral judgments, we could no longer reasonably expect spectators with different sensitivities to agree with us. (shrink)

Numbers are concepts whose content, structure, and organization are influenced by the material forms used to represent and manipulate them. Indeed, as argued here, it is the inclusion of multiple forms (distributed objects, fingers, single- and two-dimensional forms like pebbles and abaci, and written notations) that is the mechanism of numerical elaboration. Further, variety in employed forms explains at least part of the synchronic and diachronic variability that exists between and within cultural number systems. Material forms also impart characteristics like (...) linearity that may persist in the form of knowledge and behaviors, ultimately yielding numerical concepts that are irreducible to and functionally independent of any particular form. Material devices used to represent and manipulate numbers also interact with language in ways that reinforce or contrast different aspects of numerical cognition. Not only does this interaction potentially explain some of the unique aspects of numerical language, it suggests that the two are complementary but ultimately distinct means of accessing numerical intuitions and insights. The potential inclusion of materiality in contemporary research in numerical cognition is advocated, both for its explanatory power, as well as its influence on psychological, behavioral, and linguistic aspects of numerical cognition. (shrink)

The characterization of early token-based accounting using a concrete concept of number, later numerical notations an abstract one, has become well entrenched in the literature. After reviewing its history and assumptions, this article challenges the abstract–concrete distinction, presenting an alternative view of change in Ancient Near Eastern number concepts, wherein numbers are abstract from their inception and materially bound when most elaborated. The alternative draws on the chronological sequence of material counting technologies used in the Ancient Near East—fingers, tallies, tokens, (...) and numerical notations—as reconstructed through archaeological and textual evidence and as interpreted through Material Engagement Theory, an extended-mind framework in which materiality plays an active role (Malafouris 2013). (shrink)

This research employs the Bayesian network modeling approach, and the Markov chain Monte Carlo technique, to learn about the role of lies and violence in teachings of major religions, using a unique dataset extracted from long-standing Vietnamese folktales. The results indicate that, although lying and violent acts augur negative consequences for those who commit them, their associations with core religious values diverge in the final outcome for the folktale characters. Lying that serves a religious mission of either Confucianism or Taoism (...) (but not Buddhism) brings a positive outcome to a character (βT_and_Lie_O= 2.23; βC_and_Lie_O= 1.47; βT_and_Lie_O= 2.23). A violent act committed to serving Buddhist missions results in a happy ending for the committer (βB_and_Viol_O= 2.55). What is highlighted here is a glaring double standard in the interpretation and practice of the three teachings: the very virtuous outcomes being preached, whether that be compassion and meditation in Buddhism, societal order in Confucianism, or natural harmony in Taoism, appear to accommodate two universal vices—violence in Buddhism and lying in the latter two. These findings contribute to a host of studies aimed at making sense of contradictory human behaviors, adding the role of religious teachings in addition to cognition in belief maintenance and motivated reasoning in discounting counterargument. (shrink)

The aim of our introduction is to present the reader with key concepts and paradigms that have been rigorously developed to empirically investigate the dynamics and outcomes of conversational remembering in cognitive research.

Our goal in this paper is to articulate a novel account of the ordinary concept ART. At the core of our account is the idea that a puzzle surrounding our thought and talk about art is best understood as just one instance of a far broader phenomenon. In particular, we claim that one can make progress on this puzzle by drawing on research from cognitive science on dual character concepts. Thus, we suggest that the very same sort of phenomenon that (...) is associated with ART can also be found in a broad class of other dual character concepts, including SCIENTIST, CHRISTIAN, GANGSTER, and many others. Instead of focusing narrowly on the case of ART, we try to offer a more general account of these concepts and the puzzles to which they give rise. Then, drawing on the general theory, we introduce a series of hypotheses about art concepts, and put those hypotheses to the test in three experimental studies. (shrink)