Inducing religious thoughts increases prosocial behavior among strangers in anonymous contexts. These effects can be explained both by behavioral priming processes as well as by reputational mechanisms. We examine whether belief in moralizing supernatural agents supplies a case for what McKay & Dennett (M&D) call evolved misbelief, concluding that they might be more persuasively seen as an example of culturally evolved misbelief.

The standard theories of cooperation in humans, which depend on repeated interaction and reputation effects among self-regarding agents, are inadequate. Strong reciprocity, a predisposition to participate in costly cooperation and the punishment, fosters cooperation where self-regarding behaviors fail. The effectiveness of socially coordinated punishment depends on individual motivations to participate, which are based on strong reciprocity motives. The relative infrequency of high-cost punishment is a result of the ubiquity of strong reciprocity, not its absence.

(2013). Linking Science to Culture: Challenge to Psychologists. Social Epistemology: Vol. 27, Neoliberalism and STS in Japan, pp. 194-194. doi: 10.1080/02691728.2013.808448.

Personality and social development begins before birth in the communication among mother, child and environment, during sensitive periods when the child’s brain and body are plastic and epigenetically co-constructed. Triune ethics theory postulates three evolved, neurobiologically-based ethics fostered by early life experience. The security ethic is self-protective. The engagement ethic is relationally attuned. The imagination ethic can abstract from the present moment and imagine alternatives. Climates and cultures can foster one or another ethic. Ancestral environments were more conducive to moral (...) development. Individuals can adopt self-authorship of their moral character through the development of ethical expertise. Recommendations are made for research and policies that study and support optimal moral development. (shrink)

The fearful ape hypothesis proposes that heightened fearfulness in humans is adaptive. However, despite its attractive anthropocentric narrative, the evidence presented for greater fearfulness in humans versus other apes is not sufficient to support this claim. Conceptualization, context, and comparison are strongly lacking in Grossmann's proposal, but are key to understanding variation in the fear response among individuals and species.

Perhaps because groupishness comes so easily to humans, clear operational definitions of the phenomena and justifications for the claim that it is deep‐seated are lacking in much of the literature. Furthermore, the assertion of human groupishness glosses over several important questions including which behaviors, which social boundaries, and which evolutionary processes make us groupish. In this paper I use an evolutionary lens, and cross‐species and cross‐cultural comparative examples to clarify the bases on which such a claim of particular human groupishness (...) can be made. Specifically, if humans are particularly groupish, it is because we produce culturally‐structured social landscapes. This means the cognitive science of groupishness must incorporate the social science of the cultural evolution of group boundaries. (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)

People hold intuitive theories of the physical world, such as theories of matter, energy, and motion, in the sense that they have a coherent conceptual structure supporting a network of beliefs about the domain. It is not yet clear whether people can also be said to hold a shared intuitive theory of time. Yet, philosophical debates about the metaphysical nature of time often revolve around the idea that people hold one or more “common sense” assumptions about time: that there is (...) an objective “now”; that the past, present, and future are fundamentally different in nature; and that time passes or flows. We empirically explored the question of whether people indeed share some or all of these assumptions by asking adults to what extent they agreed with a set of brief statements about time. Across two analyses, subsets of people's beliefs about time were found consistently to covary in ways that suggested stable underlying conceptual dimensions related to aspects of the “common sense” assumptions described by philosophers. However, distinct subsets of participants showed three mutually incompatible profiles of response, the most frequent of which did not closely match all of philosophers’ claims about common sense time. These exploratory studies provide a useful starting point in attempts to characterize intuitive theories of time. (shrink)

The perceived support of supernatural agents has been historically, ethnographically, and theoretically linked with confidence in engaging in violent intergroup conflict. However, scant experimental investigations of such links have been reported to date, and the extant evidence derives largely from indirect laboratory methods of limited ecological validity. Here, we experimentally tested the hypothesis that perceived supernatural aid would heighten inclinations toward coalitional aggression using a realistic simulated coalitional combat paradigm: competitive team paintball. In a between-subjects design, US paintball players recruited (...) for the study were experimentally primed with thoughts of supernatural support using a guided visualization exercise analogous to prayer, or with a control visualization of a nature scene. The participants then competed in a team paintball battle game modeled after “Capture the Flag.” Immediately before and after the battle, participants completed surveys assessing confidence in their coalitional and personal battle performance. Participants assessed their coalition’s prospects of victory and performance more positively after visualizing supernatural aid. Participants primed with supernatural support also reported inflated assessments of their own performance. Importantly, however, covarying increases in assessments of their overall coalition’s performance accounted for the latter effect. This study provided support for the hypothesis that perceived supernatural support can heighten both prospective confidence in coalitional victory and retrospective confidence in the combat performance of one’s team, while highlighting the role of competitive play in evoking the coalitional psychology of intergroup conflict. These results accord with and extend convergent prior findings derived from laboratory paradigms far removed from the experience of combat. Accordingly, the field study approach utilized here shows promise as a method for investigating coalitional battle dynamics in a realistic, experientially immersive manner. (shrink)

According to most Evolutionary Psychologists, human moral attitudes are rooted in cognitive modules that evolved in the Stone Age to solve problems of social interaction. A crucial component of their view is that such cognitive modules remain unchanged since the Stone Age, and I question that here. I appeal to evolutionary rollback, the phenomenon where an organ becomes non-functional and eventually atrophies or disappears—e.g. cave-dwelling fish losing their eyes. I argue that even if cognitive modules evolved in the Stone Age (...) to solve problems of social interaction, conditions since then have favoured rollback of those modules. This is because there are institutions that solve those problems—e.g. legal systems. Moreover, evidence suggests that where external resources are available to perform cognitive tasks, humans often use them instead of internal ones. In arguing that Stone Age cognitive modules are unchanged, Evolutionary Psychologists say that evolutionary change is necessarily slow, and that there is high genetic similarity between human populations worldwide. I counter-argue that what is necessarily slow is the building-up of complex mechanisms. Undoing this can be much quicker. Moreover, rollback of cognitive mechanisms need not require any genetic change. Finally, I argue that cross-cultural similarity in some trait need not be rooted in genetic similarity. This is not intended as decisive evidence that rollback has occurred. To finish, I suggest ways we might decide whether moral attitudes are likely to be rooted in unchanged Stone Age modules, given that I have argued that cross-cultural similarity is not enough. (shrink)

The nature of emotion concepts and whether there are any that are universally “basic” remains controversial, as acknowledged in the article “Language and Emotion.” The suggestion that some emotions are embodied through a process of association between neural networks for bodily sensations and neural circuitry dedicated to linguistic metaphor is interesting, but speculative. However, it is a hypothesis that risks relegating speakers of languages that lack sophisticated metaphors to a lower level on some scale of linguistic evolution.

Foot , Hursthouse , and Thompson , along with other philosophers, have argued for a metaethical position, the natural goodness approach, that claims moral judgments are, or are on a par with, teleological claims made in the biological sciences. Specifically, an organism’s flourishing is characterized by how well they function as specified by the species to which they belong. In this essay, I first sketch the Neo-Aristotelian natural goodness approach. Second, I argue that critics who claim that this sort of (...) approach is inconsistent with evolutionary biology due to its species essentialism are incorrect. Third, I contend that combining the natural goodness account of natural-historical judgments with our best account of natural normativity, the selected effects theory of function, leads to implausible moral judgments. This is so if selected effects function are understood in terms of evolution by natural selection, but also if they are characterized in terms of cultural evolution. Thus, I conclude that proponents of the natural goodness approach must either embrace non-naturalistic vitalism or troubling moral revisionism. (shrink)

Although there might seem to be a natural continuity and interplay between the cognitive sciences and the social sciences, the integration of the two has, on the whole, been fraught with difficulties. In some areas the transition was relatively smooth. For instance, political psychology is now a well-recognized branch both of psychology and of political science. In economics, things have been more difficult, with the entrenched assumption of a perfectly rational homo economicus, but behavioral economics is now well recognized, and (...) one of the founders of the field, Daniel Kahneman, went on to win a Nobel Prize.Social and cognitive sciences have proven more difficult to bridge in anthropology and sociology. Most of the efforts have been pursued—and resisted—in anthropology (although, for sociology, see Clément and Kaufmann 2011). At first, scholars attempted to import the methods of evolutionary biology straight into the study of culture (Dawkins 1976; Lumsden and Wilson 1981). This prom .. (shrink)

We respond to the central concerns raised by our commentators to our book, The Epistemological Spectrum. Casullo believes that our account of what we term “low-grade a priori” justification provides important clarification of a kind of philosophical reflection. However he objects to calling such reflection a priori. We explain what we think is at stake. Along the way, we comment on his idea of that there may be an epistemic payoff to making a distinction between assumptions and presumptions. In the (...) book, we argued that an epistemically important form of nonaccidental reliability can be understood as a matter of processes being “transglobally reliable under modulational control.” Graham recommends another form of nonaccidental reliability, one rooted in evolutionary etiology. We explain why we think that the reliability of perceptual processes is best understood as turning of the kinds of modulational control that we highlight. We clarify how this approach represents a kind of reasonable epistemic patience—modulational control takes time, as it must turn on agents generating information about their own capacities and foibles. Lyons raises interesting questions regarding how (what we term) morphological content possessed by the agent can do the work that we set for it. We argue that it is necessary in order for agents to accommodate the background information that is relevant to many central problems of belief formation. We clarify how it can be expected to work. (shrink)

Beller, Bender, and Medin argue that a reconciliation between anthropology and cognitive science seems unlikely. We disagree. In our view, Beller et al.’s view of the scope of what anthropology can offer cognitive science is too narrow. In focusing on anthropology’s role in elucidating cultural particulars, they downplay the fact that anthropology can reveal both variation and universals in human cognition, and is in a unique position to do so relative to the other subfields of cognitive science. Indeed, without cross-cultural (...) research, the universality of any aspect of human cognition cannot truly be established. Therefore, if the goal of cognitive science is to understand the cognitive capacities of our species as a whole, then it cannot do without anthropology. We briefly review a growing body of anthropological work aimed at answering questions about human cognition and offer suggestions for future work. (shrink)

This conclusion of the debate on anthropology’s role in cognitive science provides some clarifications and an overview of emergent themes. It also lists, as cases of good practice, some examples of productive cross-disciplinary collaboration that evince a forward momentum in the relationship between anthropology and the other cognitive sciences.

The historical background of the contrasting traditions of experimental and discursive social psychologies is outlined, and two illustrative experimental and discursive studies are described in detail and critically scrutinised. Among the major weaknesses of the experimental approach is an increasing tendency towards an a-social computer-mediated procedure and a decontextualised setting. While experimental methods and results are clearly set out, the discursive research presents only small and highly selected fragments of masses of data. Hence the actual ways in which findings are (...) arrived at remain largely obscure. Experimental, and to a lesser extent discursive social psychology, make implicit and unjustified claims for universality. The scientific pretensions of mainstream social psychology texts are also questioned in a brief discussion of the implications of these critiques for social psychology at large. (shrink)

Philosophical preoccupation with the hard problem of self-consciousness often takes human becoming for granted. In archaeology, the opposite is the norm. The emphasis is on when and how we became human while the problem of self (how did the ability to think about one’s own self come about? ) is largely neglected. This article suggest that those two aspects of human becoming cannot be meaningfully disentangled: humans are both persons and members of a species. I argue that people are STRANGE. (...) I use the acronym STRANGE to describe the Situated TRANsactional and GEnerative process by which the human species (nature) and the human self (culture) become co-constituted in the lived space of material engagement. I propose that to study this middle space of self-becoming a synergy of enactive and situated perspectives from philosophy and archaeology is needed. Drawing on material engagement theory I sketch out my vision of what this synergy entails based on the notions of self-bounding, enactive in/dividuation, and the situated person perspective. I use the archaeological examples of stone knapping (toolmaking) and early body ornamentation to substantiate some of the main issues and methodological challenges. (shrink)

How humans choose their mates is a central feature of adult life and an area of considerable disagreement among relationship researchers. However, few studies have examined mate choice (instead of mate preferences) around the world, and fewer still have considered data from online dating services. Using data from more than 1.8 million online daters from 24 countries, we examined the role of sex and resource-acquisition ability (as indicated by level of education and income) in mate choice using multilevel modeling. We (...) then attempted to understand country-level variance by examining factors such as gender equality and the operational sex ratio. In every nation, a person’s resource-acquisition ability was positively associated with the amount of attention they received from other site members. There was a marked sex difference in this effect; resource-acquisition ability improved the attention received by men almost 2.5 times that of women. This sex difference was in every country, admittedly with some variance between nations. Several country-level traits moderated the effects of resource-acquisition ability, and in the case of unemployment this moderating role differed by sex. Overall, country-level effects were more consistent with evolutionary explanations than sociocultural ones. The results suggest a robust effect of resource-acquisition ability on real-life mate choice that transcends international boundaries and is reliably stronger for men than women. Cross-cultural variance in the role of resource-acquisition ability appears sensitive to local competition and gender equality at the country level. (shrink)

It is widely held that intuitive dualism—an implicit default mode of thought that takes minds to be separable from bodies and capable of independent existence—is a human universal. Among the findings taken to support universal intuitive dualism is a pattern of evidence in which “psychological” traits (knowledge, desires) are judged more likely to continue after death than bodily or “biological” traits (perceptual, physiological, and bodily states). Here, we present cross-cultural evidence from six study populations, including non-Western societies with diverse belief (...) systems, that shows that while this pattern exists, the overall pattern of responses nonetheless does not support intuitive dualism in afterlife beliefs. Most responses of most participants across all cultures tested were not dualist. While our sample is in no way intended to capture the full range of human societies and afterlife beliefs, it captures a far broader range of cultures than in any prior study, and thus puts the case for afterlife beliefs as evidence for universal intuitive dualism to a strong test. Based on these findings, we suggest that while dualist thinking is a possible mode of thought enabled by evolved human psychology, such thinking does not constitute a default mode of thought. Rather, our data support what we will call intuitive materialism—the view that the underlying intuitive systems for reasoning about minds and death produce as a default judgment that mental states cease to exist with bodily death. (shrink)

There is a longstanding debate in philosophy concerning the relationship between intention and intentional action. According to the Single Phenomenon View, while one need not intend to A in order to A intentionally, one nevertheless needs to have an A-relevant intention. This view has recently come under criticism by those who think that one can A intentionally without any relevant intention at all. On this view, neither distal nor proximal intentions are necessary for intentional action. In this paper we present (...) the results of two studies that explore folk ascriptions of proximal intentions and intentional actions in garden-variety, non-moral cases. Our findings suggest a very tight relationship between the two. We argue that the results from these two studies cohere with the Single Phenomenon View and give theorists who reject this view on conceptual grounds reason to worry. (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)

Concealed fecundity and extended female sexual receptivity have evolved in some primates, including humans, conferring advantages both within primarily monogamous relationships and from extrapair liaisons. As humans evolved the intellectual capacity for decision-making, women became capable of altering their own fertility. In some circumstances, they may choose to ameliorate risks and responsibilities associated with pregnancy by reducing sexual motivation near the perceived most fecund time of their menstrual cycle. But three findings—a general inability of women to accurately recognize their own (...) intervals of fecundity, high variability in ovulation timing, and unconscious transmission and reception of cues associated with fecundity—constitute a physiological and behavioral syndrome that can be considered self-deception. In this study, I develop a descriptive model to determine implications of the hypothesis that these features of female and male physiology and behavior have been shaped by natural selection in response to female decision-making. My analysis shows that consensus motivation for coitus between partners influences both the importance of variable ovulation date and the probability of conception, under the influence of self-deception. It also identifies priorities for future empirical work. (shrink)

Top-tier management journals are advocating for greater relevance from management research to Grand Challenges such as poverty alleviation. However, many scholars struggle to identify linkages between the practical undertaking of poverty alleviation and theory development opportunities in the management literature. Responding to this call, we develop and outline a framework for theorizing from an increasingly common business-based poverty alleviation approach known as ‘market orchestration.’ Core to this framework are a set of contextual difference that contrast with the Western environment in (...) which most management theorizing has taken place. These contextual differences—at the micro, meso, and macro levels—challenge the implicit assumptions underpinning much of the management literature. As a result, a substantial opportunity exists to identify new predictors, contingencies, explanations, and outcomes that can significantly inform theory. Equally important, by focusing on the contextual differences and the challenges they create, management scholars can provide practical guidance to organizations engaged in market orchestration efforts. (shrink)

InCognitive Gadgets, Heyes seeks to unite evolutionary psychology with cultural evolutionary theory. Although we applaud this unifying effort, we find it falls short of considering how culture itself evolves to produce indigenous psychologies fitted to particular environments. We focus on mentalizing and autobiographical memory as examples of how socialization practices embedded within culture build cognitive adaptations.

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.

Outside Western, predominantly secular‐liberal environments, norms restricting bodily and sexual conduct are widespread. Moralization in the so‐called purity domain has been treated as evidence that some putative violations are victimless. However, respondents themselves disagree: They often report that private yet indecent acts incur self‐harm, or harm to one's family and the wider community—a result which we replicate in Study 1. We then distinguish two cognitive processes that could generate a link between harmfulness and immorality, and recreate them in Studies 2 (...) and 3: Colombian and British participants were randomly assigned to either reflect (decide whether acts are harmful and reconsider their initial moral judgments) or rationalize (decide whether acts are immoral and reconsider their initial harmfulness beliefs). In both countries, reflection promoted opposition to unjust, but not impure, behavior. Additionally, in both countries, ruminating on the moral status of impure acts elevated beliefs in the acts' harmfulness. We conclude by suggesting that rationalization aggravates, while reflection mitigates, intergroup disagreement regarding putative violations of purity and decency. (shrink)

In Search of Lost Culture: From Neuroimaging via Critical Neuroscience to Cultural Neuroscience – and back to Critique. The availability of new technologies for visualizing brain activity generated great expectations to identify the centers responsible for human action and behavior and to “reduce” all mental processes to neuronal states. Some scientists even called society to adapt to the new insights from brain research by giving up outdated concepts of autonomy and free will. This project spurred harsh critiques from philosophy, sociology, (...) and cultural studies, diagnosing the rise of a new phrenology. A critical neuroscience group took up these criticisms and pledged for a more nuanced reflection about the political, historical and ethical contexts and implications of current neuroscience and argued for an integration of societal concerns into the research agenda – rather similar to the agenda for responsible research of the EU. With the development of more sophisticated visualization strategies, new sub‐disciplines emerged, integrating sociocultural aspects into neuroimaging. Social and cultural neuroscience replaced overstated reductionist claims without leaving the overarching naturalist epistemology, but extending the ontological realm. New research objects such as empathy, religion or ‘Western’ vs. ‘East‐Asian’ attitudes of thinking started to populate the research domain. Especially cultural neuroscience was widely celebrated as new scientific bridge across the nature‐culture gulf. A closer look, however, reveals that this claim and the popular success of cultural neuroscience are based on a decisive lack of conceptual clarity. ‘Culture’ functions as fuzzy denominator for a broad range of social phenomena with unknown links to neurophysiological processes but visualized as brain states. Instead of implementing more reflexive forms of research, cultural neuroscience stabilizes problematic stereotypes and racist attitudes by an expansion of neuro‐culture. In light of this deflation of interdisciplinary cooperation a more radical critique of this ideology seems in place. (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)

The ratio of index- and ring-finger lengths is thought to be related to prenatal androgen exposure, and in many, though not all, populations, men have a lower average digit ratio than do women. In many studies an inverse relationship has been observed, among both men and women, between 2D:4D ratio and measures of athletic ability. It has been further suggested that, in hunter-gatherer populations, 2D:4D ratio might also be negatively correlated with hunting ability, itself assumed to be contingent on athleticism. (...) This hypothesis has been tested using endurance running performance among runners from a Western, educated, and industrialized population as a proximate measure of hunting ability. However, it has not previously been tested among actual hunter-gatherers using more ecologically valid measures of hunting ability and success. The current study addresses this question among Tanzanian Hadza hunter-gatherers. I employ a novel method of assessing hunting reputation that, unlike previous methods, allows granular distinctions to be made between hunters at all levels of perceived ability. I find no statistically significant relationship between digit ratio and either hunting reputation or two important hunting skills. I confirm that Hadza men have higher mean 2D:4D ratios than men in many Western populations. I discuss the notion that 2D:4D ratio may be the consequence of an allometric scaling relationship between relative and absolute finger lengths. Although it is difficult to draw clear conclusions from these results, the current study provides no support for the theorized relationship between 2D:4D ratio and hunting skill. (shrink)

Developmental psychologists identify propensities for social engagement in human infants that are less evident in other apes; Sarah Hrdy links these social propensities to novel features of human childrearing. Unlike other ape mothers, humans can bear a new baby before the previous child is independent because they have help. This help alters maternal trade-offs and so imposes new selection pressures on infants and young children to actively engage their caretakers’ attention and commitment. Such distinctive childrearing is part of our grandmothering (...) life history. While consequences for other cooperative activities must surely follow, the novel rearing environments set up by helpful grandmothering can explain why natural selection escalated preferences and motivations for interactivity in our lineage in the first place, and why, unlike other aspects of infant development, social sensitivities are not delayed in humans compared with genus Pan. (shrink)

The target article misunderstands the research program it criticizes. The work of Boyd, Richerson, Fehr, Gintis, Bowles and their collaborators has long included the theoretical and empirical study of models both with andwithoutdiffuse costly punishment. In triaging the situation, we aim to (1) clarify the theoretical landscape, (2) highlight key points of agreement, and (3) suggest a more productive line of debate.

Mind perception is the essence of moral judgment. Broadly, moral standing is linked to perceptions of mind, with moral responsibility tied to perceived agency, and moral rights tied to perceived experience. More specifically, moral judgments are based on a fundamental template of two perceived minds—an intentional agent and a suffering patient. This dyadic template grows out of the universal power of harm, and serves as a cognitive working model through which even atypical moral events are understood. Thus, all instances of (...) immorality are perceived to involve both blameworthy agents (i.e., acts) and suffering victims (i.e., consequences). Because moral cognition simultaneously concerns acts and consequences, theories which focus primarily on acts (i.e., deontology) or consequences (i.e., utilitarianism) do not accurately describe moral cognition. Indeed, the phenomenon of dyadic completion suggests that deontological and utilitarian concerns are not only simultaneously active, but also typically compatible and reinforcing: wrong acts have harmful consequences, and harmful consequences stem from wrong acts. The cognitive fusion of acts with consequences suggests that normative conflicts between deontology and utilitarianism are not reflected in everyday moral judgment. This in turn suggests that empirical conclusions drawn from moral dilemmas that pit utilitarianism against deontology—i.e., trolley problems—give an skewed account of moral cognition. (shrink)

The theory and methods of cultural psychology begin with the assumption that psychological processes are socioculturally and historically grounded. As such, they offer a new approach for understanding the diversity of human functioning because they (a) question the presumed neutrality of the majority group perspective; (b) take the target’s point-of-view (i.e., what it means to be a person in a particular context); (c) assume that there is more than one viable way of being a competent or effective person; and (d) (...) provide a road map for understanding and reducing social inequities. As illustrated in this essay, a cultural psychological approach provides a bridge between anthropology and the cognitive sciences, and in so doing it offers an alternative set of explanations and interventions for group differences. (shrink)

Anthropology and the other cognitive science (CS) subdisciplines currently maintain a troubled relationship. With a debate in topiCS we aim at exploring the prospects for improving this relationship, and our introduction is intended as a catalyst for this debate. In order to encourage a frank sharing of perspectives, our comments will be deliberately provocative. Several challenges for a successful rapprochement are identified, encompassing the diverging paths that CS and anthropology have taken in the past, the degree of compatibility between (1) (...) CS and (2) anthropology with regard to methodology and (3) research strategies, (4) the importance of anthropology for CS, and (5) the need for disciplinary diversity. Given this set of challenges, a reconciliation seems unlikely to follow on the heels of good intentions alone. (shrink)

Humans have attained an unparalleled level of sophistication when engaging in collaborative and cooperative activities. Remarkably, the skills and motivation to engage in complex forms of collaboration and cooperation seem to emerge early on during infancy and childhood. In this paper, I extensively review the literature on the evolution and development of human cooperation, emphasizing important aspects of inter-cultural variation in collaborative and cooperative behaviour. This will not only allow us to confront the different evolutionary scenarios in which cooperation may (...) have emerged, but will especially provide the reader with a first orientation in the abundant literature on human cooperation. (shrink)

Three online mouse cursor-tracking experiments investigated predictive sentence processing at speed. Participants viewed visual arrays with objects like a bike and kite while hearing predictive sentences like, “What the man will ride, which is shown on this page, is the bike,” or non-predictive sentences like, “What the man will spot, which is shown on this page, is the bike.” Based on the selectional restrictions of “ride” (i.e., vs. “spot”), participants made mouse cursor movements to the bike before hearing the noun (...) “bike.” Compellingly, this effect was observed at speech rates of ∼3 (Experiment 1), ∼6 (Experiment 2), and ∼9 (Experiment 3) syllables/s. While prior research suggests striking limits on prediction, these results highlight temporal dynamics that may impact comprehenders’ ability to preactivate information when hearing impressively rapid speech. Implications for theories of sentence processing are discussed. (shrink)

Z propozycją rekalibracji etyki i zastąpienia jej neuroetyką wystąpiła Patricia S. Churchland. Churchland twierdzi, że im bardziej rozumiemy szczegóły funkcjonowania naszego systemu nerwowego, tym bardziej jesteśmy przekonani co do tego, że przyjmowane przez nas standardy moralnego działania są uwarunkowane neurobiologicznie. Od roku 2002 termin „neuroetyka” funkcjonuje jako nazwa nowej subdyscypliny etyki. Wymienia się w niej dwa zasadnicze działy: etykę neuronauki i neuronaukę etyki. Pierwszy dotyczy zasadniczo moralnych problemów związanych z zastosowaniem osiągnięć neuronauk, przedmiotem drugiego: neuronauki etyki, jest wpływ, jaki wiedza (...) z zakresu neuronauk ma na nasze rozumienie etyki. Artykuł jest krytyczną prezentacją nowej subdyscypliny etycznej i próbą pokazania, że jakkolwiek neurobiologiczne procesy mają wpływ na nasze działanie, to nie decydują o jego moralnym wymiarze. (shrink)

Is fertility relevant to evolutionary analyses conducted in modern industrial societies? This question has been the subject of a highly contentious debate, beginning in the late 1980s and continuing to this day. Researchers in both evolutionary and social sciences have argued that the measurement of fitness-related traits (e.g., fertility) offers little insight into evolutionary processes, on the grounds that modern industrial environments differ so greatly from those of our ancestral past that our behavior can no longer be expected to be (...) adaptive. In contrast, we argue that fertility measurements in industrial society are essential for a complete evolutionary analysis: in particular, such data can provide evidence for any putative adaptive mismatch between ancestral environments and those of the present day, and they can provide insight into the selection pressures currently operating on contemporary populations. Having made this positive case, we then go on to discuss some challenges of fertility-related analyses among industrialized populations, particularly those that involve large-scale databases. These include “researcher degrees of freedom” (i.e., the choices made about which variables to analyze and how) and the different biases that may exist in such data. Despite these concerns, large datasets from multiple populations represent an excellent opportunity to test evolutionary hypotheses in great detail, enriching the evolutionary understanding of human behavior. (shrink)

In this article, incoherent results of the associations between subjective well-being and economic status at multiple social levels are shown. Although individual-level positive associations are shown within developed countries, national-level associations disappear among developed countries. Group/area-level associations, meanwhile, do exist within Japanese societies. From these inconsistent phenomena, a sociocultural unit is proposed, within which well-being of people is collectively shared based on mutual reciprocity. The simple addition of social scientific results themselves cannot reconstruct the whole range of phenomena. Humanities could (...) be considered as the glue, which adds sociocultural meanings to the generalized scientific results. (shrink)

It has been argued that people in areas with high pathogen loads will be more likely to avoid outsiders, to be biased in favor of in-groups, and to hold collectivist and conformist values. Cross-national studies have supported these predictions. In this paper we provide new pathogen codes for the 186 cultures of the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample and use them, together with existing pathogen and ethnographic data, to try to replicate these cross-national findings. In support of the theory, we found that (...) cultures in high pathogen areas were more likely to socialize children toward collectivist values (obedience rather than self-reliance). There was some evidence that pathogens were associated with reduced adult dispersal. However, we found no evidence of an association between pathogens and our measures of group bias (in-group loyalty and xenophobia) or intergroup contact. (shrink)