One promising way to investigate the genealogy of norms is by considering not the origin of norms, but rather, what makes certain norms more likely to prevail. Emotional responses, I maintain, constitute one important set of mechanisms that affects the cultural viability of norms. To corroborate this, I exploit historical evidence indicating that 16th century etiquette norms prohibiting disgusting actions were much more likely to survive than other 16th century etiquette norms. This case suggests more broadly that work on cultural (...) evolution should pay greater attention to the role of emotion systems in cultural transmission. (shrink)

The Civilizing Process stands out as Norbert Elias' greatest work, tracing the 'civilizing' of manners and personality in Western Europe since the Middle Ages, and showing how this was related to the formation of states and the monopolization of power within them. It comprises the two volumes originally published in English as The History of Manners and State Formation and Civilization, now, in a single volume, the book is restored to its original format and made available world-wide to a new (...) generation of readers.In this new edition, the original text is extensively revised, corrected, and updated. The Revised Edition reveals anew and afresh the greatness of Elias' masterpiece. (shrink)

For a century and a half, the artists and intellectuals of Europe have scorned the bourgeoisie. And for a millennium and a half, the philosophers and theologians of Europe have scorned the marketplace. The bourgeois life, capitalism, Mencken’s “booboisie” and David Brooks’s “bobos”—all have been, and still are, framed as being responsible for everything from financial to moral poverty, world wars, and spiritual desuetude. Countering these centuries of assumptions and unexamined thinking is Deirdre McCloskey’s _The Bourgeois Virtues_, a magnum opus (...) that offers a radical view: capitalism is good for us. McCloskey’s sweeping, charming, and even humorous survey of ethical thought and economic realities—from Plato to Barbara Ehrenreich—overturns every assumption we have about being bourgeois. Can you be virtuous and bourgeois? Do markets improve ethics? Has capitalism made us better as well as richer? Yes, yes, and yes, argues McCloskey, who takes on centuries of capitalism’s critics with her erudition and sheer scope of knowledge. Applying a new tradition of “virtue ethics” to our lives in modern economies, she affirms American capitalism without ignoring its faults and celebrates the bourgeois lives we actually live, without supposing that they must be lives without ethical foundations. _High Noon_, Kant, Bill Murray, the modern novel, van Gogh, and of course economics and the economy all come into play in a book that can only be described as a monumental project and a life’s work. _The Bourgeois Virtues _is nothing less than a dazzling reinterpretation of Western intellectual history, a dead-serious reply to the critics of capitalism—and a surprising page-turner. (shrink)

In one conception of cultural evolution, the evolutionary success of cultural units that are transmitted from individual to individual is determined by forces of cultural selection. Here we argue that it is helpful to distinguish between several distinct phases of the transmission process in which cultural selection can operate, such as a choose-to-receive phase, an encode-and-retrieve phase, and a choose-to-transmit phase. Here we focus on emotional selection in cultural transmission of urban legends, which has previously been shown to operate in (...) the choose-to-transmit phase. In a series of experiments we studied serial transmission of stories based on urban legends manipulated to be either high or low on disgusting content. Results supported emotional selection operating in all three phases of cultural transmission. Thus, the prevalence of disgusting urban legends in North America may be explained by emotional selection through a multitude of pathways. (shrink)

This study used urban legends to examine the effects of a cognitive bias for content which evokes higher levels of emotion on cumulative recall. As with previous research into content biases, a linear transmission chain design was used. One-hundred and twenty participants, aged 16–52, were asked to read and then recall urban legends that provoked both high levels and low levels of emotion and were both positively and negatively valenced. The product of this recall was presented to the next participant (...) in a chain of three generations. A significant effect of emotion level on transmission fidelity was found with high emotion legends being recalled with significantly greater accuracy than low emotion legends. The emotional valence of a legend was found not to have any effect on cumulative recall; thus emotional biases in recall go beyond disgust and can incorporate other emotions such as amusement, interest and surprise. This study is the first to examine an emotion bias in cultural transmission as a general phenomenon without focusing on the emotion of disgust. (shrink)

A long-standing observation about the interface between emotion and language is that positive words are used more frequently than negative ones, leading to the Pollyanna hypothesis which alleges a predominantly optimistic outlook in humans. This paper uses the largest available collection of affective ratings as well as insights from linguistics to revisit the Pollyanna hypothesis as it relates to two dimensions of emotion: valence (pleasantness) and arousal (intensity). We identified systematic patterns in the distribution of words over a bi-dimensional affective (...) space, which (1) run counter to and supersede most prior accounts, and (2) differ drastically between word types (unique, distinct words in the lexicon) and word tokens (number of occurrences of available words in the lexicon). We argue for two factors that shape affect in language and society: a pro-social benevolent communication strategy with its emphasis on useful and dangerous phenomena, and the structure of human subjective perception of affect. (shrink)

Research on cultural transmission among Americans has established a bias for transmitting stories that have disgusting elements. Conceived of as a cultural evolutionary force, this phenomenon is one type of emotional selection. In a series of online studies with Americans and Indians we investigate whether there are cultural differences in emotional selection, such that the transmission process favours different kinds of content in different countries. The first study found a bias for disgusting content among Americans but not among Indians. Four (...) subsequent studies focused on how country interacts with kind of emotional content in reactions to transmission of stories or information. Whereas Indian participants, compared to Americans, tended to be less interested in, and excited by, transmission of stories and news involving common disgust-elicitors, the opposite pattern held for transmission of happy surprises and good news. We discuss various possible explanations and implications. (shrink)