Forthcoming in PNAS, an innovative study entitled "Interaction of natural survival instincts and internalized social norms exploring the Titanic and Lusitania disasters" by Bruno S. Frey, David A. Savage and Benno Torgler (and already available here alas with subscription; earlier version freely available here)

Abstract: "...This study explores the interaction of natural survival instincts and internalized social norms using data on the sinking of the Titanic and the Lusitania. We show that time pressure appears to be crucial when explaining behavior under extreme conditions of life and death. Even though the two vessels and the composition of their passengers were quite similar, the behavior of the individuals on board was dramatically different. On the Lusitania, selfish behavior dominated (which corresponds to the classical homo economicus); on the Titanic, social norms and social status (class) dominated, which contradicts standard economics. This difference could be attributed to the fact that the Lusitania sank in 18 min, creating a situation in which the short-run flight impulse dominated behavior. On the slowly sinking Titanic (2 h, 40 min), there was time for socially determined behavioral patterns to reemerge. Maritime disasters are traditionally not analyzed in a comparative manner with advanced statistical (econometric) techniques using individual data of the passengers and crew. Knowing human behavior under extreme conditions provides insight into how widely human behavior can vary, depending on differing external conditions."

The great 3 Quarks Daily blog is holding a competition for the best Arts and Literature blog post and one of Nicolas Baumard's posts on our blog, "The universality of music: Cross-cultural comparison, the recognition of emotions, and the influence of the the Backstreet Boys on a Cockatoo," has been nominated. You have only until Sunday, March 7, 2010 to look here at the various nominees (several of which are quite outstanding, including from a cognition and culture point of view) and to vote for the one you prefer. The three winners will be chosen from a shortlist by Robert Pinsky.

As Dan Sperber was complaining that no anthropologist posted "pictures of the week", here is a follow-up of the Punjabi Jingle Bells video, which also raises questions on cultural "borrowings". These pictures come from India as well, but 2500km to the East. They were taken inside a village temple in the Eastern Himalayas (Arunachal Pradesh). This is a region that had been long kept isolated from the plains. Its recent opening has seen a rapid rise of Christian conversions. Since the 1980, a revivalist movement, Donyi-Polo, aims at "modernising the tribal religions" by unifying the different local practices, developing a "moral code" and promoting the creation of village temples, where the deities are depicted by paintings like the ones shown here. The movement has some backing from Hindu fundamentalists, who try to convince the tribals not to convert to Christianity. Previously, the local religions had neither temples nor permanent shrines and did not use images.

The first painting shows Nibo and Robo, the two apical ancestors, with what clearly looks like prehistoric attire (and which obviously has no equivalent in the local dresses and tools). I suspect the inspiration might be found in a globalized representation of the "ancestors" carried both by schoolbooks and TV programs like Discovery Channel or National Geographic, which are accessible in many villages nowadays.

Given the strong reservations that most social scientists have towards evolutionary biology, they might welcome Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini's new book, What Darwin Got Wrong (2010), as they once did Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin famous article, "The Spandrels of San Marco" that criticized the so-called "adaptationist programme." From the book's blurb: "Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, a distinguished philosopher and a scientist working in tandem, reveal major flaws at the heart of Darwinian evolutionary theory. Combining the results of cutting-edge work in experimental biology with crystal-clear philosophical arguments, they mount a reasoned and convincing assault on the central tenets of Darwin's account of the origin of species."

Before getting carried away however, read Ned Block and Philip Kitcher's review (here) in the Boston Review. In their conclusion, Block and Kitcher note: "Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini take the role of philosophy to consist in part in minding other people's business. We agree with the spirit behind this self-conception. Philosophy can sometimes help other areas of inquiry. Yet those who wish to help their neighbors are well advised to spend a little time discovering just what it is that those neighbors do [...] What Darwin Got Wrong shows no detailed engagement with the practice of evolutionary biology..."

Our face tells a lot about us. Well, at least this is what other people seem to think: having seen our face for a few seconds-or even a few milliseconds-they will think that we are more or less attractive - unsurprisingly - but also competent, dominant or trustworthy (e.g. Todorov et al., 2008). And people seem to act on the basis of these evaluations: such inferences will influence judge's verdicts (Zebrowitz & McDonald, 1991) and employers' decisions (Collins & Zebrowitz, 1995). They also seem to play a role in the way we vote. In a series of studies, Alexander Todorov and his colleagues have shown that the evaluations of politicians' faces, even after an exposure as short as one tenth of a second, can often predict their electoral success: those who were rated higher on competence tended to win more races (Willis and Todorov, 2006, available here).

Do such evaluations vary across cultures? This is the subject of a new paper by Nicholas Rule, and Nalini Ambady from Tufts, Reginald B. Adams from Penn State, and Hiroki Ozono, Satoshi Nakashima, Sakiko Yoshikawa, and Motoki Watabe from Kyoto University. They set out to find if people from different societies would pass similar judgments on the faces of people belonging to other groups (Rule et al., 2010, available here).

Who would you vote for? (OK, Palpatin didn't look like that when he was elected...)

A hot debate has been taking place these last few days, in the comments section of Harvey Whitehouse's recent post on religion. Part of the dispute has to do with the way cognitive scientists working on that topic might be influenced by the money they get, particularly from a Christian foundation that hopes to promote a more favorable view of religion by funding research in that area, albeit in a nonintrusive way. What, everyone wonders, does funding of this kind do to the work it finances? Is Christian-funded research biased? Is it more likely to present religious people with a rosy mirror?

This question has been adressed systematically by a recent paper looking at broad trends in the sociology of religion (found via The Immanent Frame). The authors, David Smilde and Matthew May, looked at thirty years of religious sociology in five high-profile social science journals, and (among other things) they looked for correlations between funding types and 'pro-religiousness'. Articles were classified as pro-religious when they considered a religious independent variable and a non-religious dependent variable (say, how being baptized affects your likelihood of being in jail), and concluded that the religious variable had 'positive socio-evaluative effects' (baptized people are less likely to go to jail). As for funding type, they looked more precisely at the papers whose authors were funded by foundations with obvious Christian sympathies like the Pew Foundation, the John Templeton Foundation, the Metanexus Institute, etc. - compared with papers whose authors had money from other sources, and with papers not funded at all.

Bottom line: authors financed by Christian foundations are more likely to write pro-religious papers than authors who declare no funding at all, but the same applies to all financed authors, wherever their money may come from - governments, or non-religious private foundations. This is just one of many surprising findings.

In Psychological Science (Vol, 20 (12) pp.1437-1442), an interesting article by Irving Biederman, Xiaomin Yue, and Jules Davidoff entitled: "Representation of Shape in Individuals From a Culture With Minimal Exposure to Regular, Simple Artifacts: Sensitivity to Nonaccidental Versus Metric Properties" freely available here. Abstract below the fold.

Let's talk about politics for once. It is common knowledge that in rich societies the poor have shorter lives and suffer more from almost every social problem. In a quite fascinating book, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always do Better, epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett demonstrate that more unequal societies are bad for almost everyone - the well-off as well as the poor (here is the Guardian review, and here is Nature's). The remarkable data the book lays out and the measures it uses are like a 'spirit level' which we can hold up to compare the conditions of different societies. The differences revealed, even between rich market democracies, are striking. Almost every modern social and environmental problem - ill-health, lack of community life, violence, drugs, obesity, mental illness, long working hours, big prison populations - is more likely to occur in a less equal society. The book goes to the heart of the apparent contrast between the material success and social failings of many modern societies. The Spirit Level does not simply provide a key to diagnosing our ills. It tells us how to shift the balance from self-interested 'consumerism' to a friendlier and more collaborative society. It shows a way out of the social and environmental problems which beset us and opens up a major new approach to improving the real quality of life, not just for the poor but for everyone. Last but not least, (at least for the reader of the ICCI's blog), it is a very good piece of sociology based on cognition and evolution.

I happen to know the secret of academic success. So far I have never divulged it because, well, charity begins at home. But it looks like the field of cognition and culture might be in need of a shot in the arm, so to speak. So I agreed to part with the secret, against a small compensation negotiated with the ICCI.

There is some truth in the old adage that it takes an enormous amount of education to be truly credulous. Indeed, years of familiarity with several academic fields have convinced me that the proposition is quite literally true. Being an academic means (at least in some disciplines I am familiar with) believing a great number of impossible things before breakfast, and, it would seem, the more preposterous the better.

Consider for instance the academic fondness for the idea that madness is “defined by culture”, as discussed here by Ophelia Deroy. One could discuss the serious claims made by Deroy and the various issues they raise (which I did elsewhere). For the time being, note just this. The notion that there is nothing to madness, except what “culture” decrees, is counter-intuitive to most people in most societies in the world - except to Western academics. Most people in most places who had any contact with insanity inferred that something was really non-standard in some other people’s mental functioning. Hence, probably, the frisson of the notion that it is all arbitrary and changing.

To turn to more telling examples, consider relativism, which tells us that people literally live in incommensurable worlds. Or the common anthropological idea that kinship has nothing to do with reproduction and genetics. Or the literary critics who say that writing is primary and orality is a derived form of communication. Or the notion that gender is completely unrelated to sex.

The mechanism that made these strange notions popular is actually not so mysterious.

In the last decade, extended altruism towards unrelated group members has been proposed to be a unique characteristic of human societies. Experimental studies on captive chimpanzees have shown, on the other hand, that they are limited in the ways they share or cooperate with others. Individuals are indifferent to the welfare of unrelated group members; they do not care about fairness, and so on (see my previous posts here and here). The behaviour of chimpanzees in the wild is quite selfish, even when some cooperation is involved. For instance, they build coalitions, but that's to climb the social ladder, or they give meat, but only so that they can get sex.

In the last issue of PLoS, however, Boesch, Bolé, Eckhardt and Boesch report 18 cases of adoption, a highly costly behavior, of orphaned youngsters by group members in Taï forest chimpanzees. Half of the orphans were adopted by males and remarkably only one of these proved to be the father. Such adoptions by adults can last for years and thus imply extensive care towards the orphans. These observations suggest that, under the appropriate socio-ecological conditions, chimpanzees do care for the welfare of unrelated group members.

Why are these chimpanzees so altruistic?

On July 7th 2009, the The London Evolutionary Research Network held a extremely interesting debate on group selection in which four eminent speakers in the field discussed the motion: "Is natural selection at the group level an important evolutionary force?"

Stuart West, Professor of Evolutionary Biology, University of Oxford
Herbert Gintis, Professor of Economics, Santa Fe Intitute, University of Siena, and CEU
Samir Okasha, Professor of Philosophy of Science, University of Bristol
Mark Pagel, Professor of Biology, University of Reading

After many months of waiting, the videos have finally been uploaded online. You can now watch the debate videos here.

The aim of the post is to bring to the attention of experimentally minded anthropologists the work of Chip Heath and his collaborators. A professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Heath describes his research as examinining "why certain ideas - ranging from urban legends to folk medical cures, from Chicken Soup for the Soul stories to business strategy myths - survive and prosper in the social marketplace of ideas." Heath has a knack for fun psychology experiments that test broader concepts of cultural transmission. In chronological order, here are some examples from his recent publications--I'll bet that many of you will find stuff that is relevant to your own research or ideas for how to test your own hypotheses.

An article entitled "The Evolution of  Misbeliefs" by Ryan McKay and Daniel Dennett In Behavioral and Brain Sciences (2009) 32, 493-561, freely available here, with commentaries by (among many others) George Ainslie, Roberto Casati, Pascal Boyer, Max Coltheart, Owen Flanagan, Keith Frankish, Gary Marcus, Ruth Millikan, Ara Norenzayan, Dan Sperber, David Sloan Wilson, and a reply by the authors.

Abstract: From an evolutionary standpoint, a default presumption is that true beliefs are adaptive and misbeliefs maladaptive. But if humans are biologically engineered to appraise the world accurately and to form true beliefs, how are we to explain the routine exceptions to this rule? How can we account for mistaken beliefs, bizarre delusions, and instances of self-deception? We explore this question in some detail. We begin by articulating a distinction between two general types of misbelief: those resulting from a breakdown in the normal functioning of the belief formation system (e.g., delusions) and those arising in the normal course of that system's operations (e.g., beliefs based on incomplete or inaccurate information). The former are instances of biological dysfunction or pathology, reflecting "culpable" limitations of evolutionary design. Although the latter category includes undesirable (but tolerable) by-products of "forgivably" limited design, our quarry is a contentious subclass of this category: misbeliefs best conceived as design features. Such misbeliefs, unlike occasional lucky falsehoods, would have been systematically adaptive in the evolutionary past. Such misbeliefs, furthermore, would not be reducible to judicious - but doxastically noncommittal - action policies. Finally, such misbeliefs would have been adaptive in themselves, constituting more than mere by-products of adaptively biased misbeliefproducing systems. We explore a range of potential candidates for evolved misbelief, and conclude that, of those surveyed, only positive illusions meet our criteria.

Participant watching the experimenter play a stimulus and indicating her response

There is an intersting forthcoming open access (available here) article of PNAS entitled "Cross-cultural recognition of basic emotions through nonverbal emotional vocalizations," by Disa Sauter, Frank Eisner, Paul Ekman, and Sophie K. Scott.

Abstract: Emotional signals are crucial for sharing important information, with conspecifics, for example, to warn humans of danger. Humans use a range of different cues to communicate to others how they feel, including facial, vocal, and gestural signals. We examined the recognition of nonverbal emotional vocalizations, such as screams and laughs, across two dramatically different cultural groups. Western participants were compared to individuals from remote, culturally isolated Namibian villages. Vocalizations communicating the so-called "basic emotions" (anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, and surprise) were bidirectionally recognized. In contrast, a set of additional emotions was only recognized within, but not across, cultural boundaries. Our findings indicate that a number of primarily negative emotions have vocalizations that can be recognized across cultures, while most positive emotions are communicated with culture-specific signals.

The goal of this 4th International Conference on Intercultural Pragmatics and Communication (web site: http://conference.clancorpus.net/) is to promote both theoretical and applied research in pragmatics. Three parallel sessions will be held according to the following topics:

Pragmatics theories: meaning, role of context, semantics-pragmatics interface, explicature, implicature, speech act theory, etc.
Intercultural aspects of pragmatics: research involving more than one language and culture or varieties of one language, lingua franca, intercultural misunderstandings, effect of dual language and multilingual systems on the development and use of pragmatic skills
Applications: usage and corpus-based approaches, teachability and learnability of pragmatic skills, pragmatic variations within one language and across languages, developmental pragmatics, etc.

From an article in the Financial Times, fascinating both from an anthropological and a biological point of view: 'According to Poyarkov [a biologist specialising in wolves who also studies these dogs, see picture], there are 30,000 to 35,000 stray dogs in Moscow, while the wolf population for the whole of Russia is about 50,000 to 60,000. Population density, he says, determines how frequently the animals come into contact with each other, which in turn affects their behaviour, psychology, stress levels, physiology and relationship to their environment.

"The second difference between stray dogs and wolves is that the dogs, on average, are much less aggressive and a good deal more tolerant of one another," says Poyarkov. Wolves stay strictly within their own pack, even if they share a territory with another. A pack of dogs, however, can hold a dominant position over other packs and their leader will often "patrol" the other packs by moving in and out of them. His observations have led Poyarkov to conclude that this leader is not necessarily the strongest or most dominant dog, but the most intelligent - and is acknowledged as such. The pack depends on him for its survival.'

You can read here the whole article here.

Shrine at Qixian Monastery, China (photo Harvey Whitehouse)

Over dinner the other evening, it struck me that religion is rather like ratatouille. People disagree about the ingredients of both but in fact there is no such thing as the one true recipe for either. The concepts ‘religion’ and ‘ratatouille’ are elastic and contested, and will almost certainly undergo further modification in the future. Foody fundamentalists tell us that real ratatouille is an Occitan dish originating in France but are divided into factions claiming descent from Provence (Provença ratatolha) and Nice (Niça ratatolha). According to Wikipedia (which apparently is rude to consult at the dinner table), there are four main kinds of ratatouille. Let us count the main types of religion.

Two ambitious papers just published offer broad contrasting views on the biological and cultural bases of human languages:

Nicholas Evans, N. , & Stephen Levinson (2009). The myth of language universals: Language diversity and its importance for cognitive science. Behavioral and Brain Sciences,  32(5), 429-492. (With commentaries and response) available here,

and W. Tecumseh Fitch 2009) Prolegomena to a Future Science of Biolinguistics. Biolinguistics, Vol 3, No 4 (2009) available here

Read more for the the abstracts

Relativity of mental illness has enjoyed the favours of philosophers for decades (Michel Foucault, Ian Hacking and, more recently Geoffrey Llyod in his Cognitive Variations). It has lead to the development of the « new cross-cultural psychiatry », heralded by Kleinman in 1977. It  may become the best pop version of culture and cognition – as shown by the recent piece in the New York Times « The Americanization of mental illness », published on the 10th of january. The essay is adapted from Ethan Watters’ forthcoming book, Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche.

As with many fashionable ideas,  it is a bit difficult to isolate the arguments from the seductive examples. The thesis itself, as it appears in the paper, leaves room to different interpretations: « Mental illnesses are not discrete entities like the polio virus with their own natural histories….and have never been the same the world over (either in prevalence or in form) but are inevitably sparked and shaped by the ethos of particular times and places. » What is sparked and shaped by culture? The boundary between mental illness and mental health, the distinction between mental and physical illness, or the division between kinds of mental illnesses? Some examples in the article even suggest that cultural classifications of mental illnesses converge, but give different explanations of their origins, significance or treatments. Others stress the fact that what is spreading is basically a « symptom repertoire », i.e. knowledge of how to diagnose illnesses, rather than definitions of what is diagnosed.

Moreover, as nobody challenges the idea that different cultures have different views on health and medicine, which in their turn influence the treatments people are – or are not – offered, the revolutionary potential of the thesis can be a bit hard to see.  

But the paper highlights two more interesting, or disturbing points: first, that western categories of mental illnesses spread and contaminates the other cultures, and second, that this contagion is not for the best.

James Cameron's Avatar is about to become the most viewed film in history. While Cameron may deserve this success for his special effects and breathtaking landscapes, Pandora, the world he has created, may seem rather disappointing. It is situated several light-years away from Earth but it looks very much like our world: There are trees, and grass, as well as predators and preys, birds and monkeys and, above all, the aliens called the Na'vis are just like us, except for a blue skin and a long tail (they even have breasts for those who read Playboy for the articles). They also have language, rituals and so on! One may ask: Why such a lack of imagination? Why create a whole encyclopaedia if it is for re-inventing the Earth?

Actually, I may be unfair with Cameron. After all, the convergences between the Earth and Pandora make sense from an evolutionary point of view. Indeed, there are good reasons to expect that life on others planets might evolve as it did on Earth. Everywhere in the universe, living beings would face similar evolutionary problems: They need energy, detectors, and computational systems. And everywhere in the universe, they will discover the same solutions exactly as, on Earth, the same tricks (enzymes, sex, eyes, etc.) have been discovered again and again by different species (see for instance Conway Morris's wonderful book about convergences; see also our old reader at alphapsy).

So far, so good for the biology (as for the physics, see here for the floating mountains!). Everywhere, life is likely to re-invent photosynthesis, sex or echolocation. But what about cognition and culture? Can we expect aliens to be so humanlike? I see no good reasons to be sceptical about the Na'vis' cognition.

High Culture: Da Vinci's Last Supper (as seen in The Da Vinci Code).

We cognitive anthropologists deal with “culture” in the broad sense of distributed mental representations widespread in a social group (and many of us don’t really believe that the terms “culture” or “cultural” pick up a natural kind of representations - but that will be the topic of another post). We do not usually have much time for “culture” in the elevated sense of high culture - the sense usually associated with the names of Matthew Arnold or TS Eliot, among others.

But we should pay some attention, perhaps. True, high culture does not occur in all human societies, it is a minority pursuit wherever it does, and there may be more important problems for cognitive anthropology to solve. But it is interesting nonetheless. Wherein lies the difference between the high and low registers? Is there any cultural variation in that difference? How does it translate in terms of cognitive processes?

We academics and other literate types are often misguided in our approach to this, as we compare the best examples of high culture with the worst of the low. This was recently and vividly brought to my attention by the request of a friend and colleague, that we both read something called The Da Vinci Code, which we would then discuss in various undergraduate classes on literature, myth and history. This turned out to be a Serious Mistake.

A study by Daniel Haun, published in the December 15th 2009 edition of Current Biology, reports cross-cultural variability in how people memorize bodily movements in space, depending on how space is encoded in the local language. Here is the first paragraph;

In a recent article entitled "The increased risk of predation enhances cooperation"published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Volume 277, Pages 513 - 518 and available here, Indrikis Krams and colleagues experimentally demonstrate an interaction between predation risk and cooperation in breeding songbirds. It is worth reading in the light of current discussions about the co-evolution of warfare and cooperation (for example: Bowles, 2008).

"It was 7:30 PM, December 4th, 2005. The second Sunday of advent, in Joshua Tree, California. Personal Chef Karin Winkler started to prepare dinner. While thinking about upcoming Christmas, she was peeling and cutting a potato. Everything appeared to be normal. When she was peeling and cutting the second potato in half, a miracle happened: the symbol of a perfectly shaped holy cross appeared on both halves of the potato."

I stumbled recently upon a picture of a cross potato, and in the course of searching for more information about it I found that there have been a number of these things.

An article entitled "Power Increases Hypocrisy: Moralizing in Reasoning, Immorality in Behavior" by Joris Lammers, Diederik A. Stapel, and Adam D. Galinsky coming out in Psychological Science and available here illustrates how insights into 'power', a notion central in the standard social sciences, can be gained through a cognitive and experimental approach. Abstract under the fold.

Over the past few decades, there has been a lot of research published on 'psychological essentialism', which has been observed cross-culturally in young children. Essentialism is the tendency to think about animals, plants and social categories in terms of hidden 'essences'. The earliest experiments that indicated psychological essentialism in children were by Frank Keil (1989, Concepts, Kinds, and Cognitive Development, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA) who asked preschoolers what would happen if an animal was surgically altered to look like a member of another species. For example, would a raccoon that is surgically modified to look and smell like a skunk actually be a skunk? Young children believed that the creature would still be a raccoon. Three-year-olds and four-year-olds believe that also an apple seed, planted in a flowerpot would still grow out to be an apple tree, or that a cow raised by foster parent pigs would still exhibit normal bovine behavior (Gelman & Wellman, 1991. Insides and essences: Early understandings of the non-obvious. Cognition, 38, 213–244). What is more, children are even more essentialist than adults. For instance, Indian preschoolers believe a Brahmin child remains Brahmin, even when raised by untouchables; Five-year-olds believe that French babies brought up by English-speaking parents will grow up to speak French. Essentialism has been documented in several non-western cultures, indicating that this psychological tendency may be a stable part of human cognition (Gelman 2004, Psychological essentialism in children. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 8, 404–409).

This raises the question: Is essentialism restricted to humans, or does it also occur in other species? Obviously, the experimental procedures I just discussed all rely on language, so experimental design should be radically adapted to probe psychological essentialism in other animals. Yesterday, I was observing (in an unsystematic way) my cat's behavior (an adult male), and his behavior motivated me to think that essentialism may have its roots in the way animals make concepts.

Let me elaborate. Since he was a young kitten, Leibniz, my cat, has been playing with balls of various sizes and in various materials. Ping pong balls, small rubber balls with bells, soft, fluffy balls, etc. Whenever he is presented with a ball and he is in a playful mood, he will gently tap the ball with his front paw. Occasionally, he sees a ball that is obviously too large to play with. Even then, he will try to tap the ball with his front paw (as he did a moment after the picture was taken) and gives up only after a few tries.

In an article entitled "Social Learning Mechanisms and Cumulative Cultural Evolution: Is Imitation Necessary?" published in Psychological Science, Volume 20 Issue 12, Pages 1478 - 1483 and available here, Christine A. Caldwell and Ailsa E. Millen make an interesting contribution to the development of experimental studies of cultural transmission and to the discussion of the role of imitation vs. emulation.

Abstract: Cumulative cultural evolution has been suggested to account for key cognitive and behavioral attributes that distinguish modern humans from their anatomically similar ancestors, but researchers have yet to establish which cognitive mechanisms are responsible for this kind of learning and whether they are unique to humans. Here, we show that human participants' cumulative learning is not always reliant on sources of social information commonly assumed to be essential. Seven hundred participants were organized into 70 microsocieties and completed a task involving building a paper airplane. We manipulated the availability of opportunities for imitation (reproducing actions), emulation (reproducing end results), and teaching.Each condition was independently sufficient for participants to show cumulative learning. Because emulative learning can elicit cumulative culture on this task, we conclude that accounts of the unusual complexity of human culture in terms of species-unique learning mechanisms do not currently provide complete explanations and that other factors may be involved.

Another post from our holiday collection of oldies but goodies.

The first post in the series dealt with Nisbett's findings on different patterns of attention in Asian and Western cultures, and I talked a bit about how certain differences are more likely a priori than others. I mentioned that we cannot expect people to differ too much in being able to perceive, e.g., orientation, because it's difficult to imagine a functional visual system with orientation sensitivity. There are no visual environments without orientation. On the other hand, there is some variation between visual environments along other lines, and it would not be completely surprising to find that it causes differences in certain aspects of people's visual perception. An obvious example is in the perception of faces: in some Western environments people relatively rarely encounter Asian faces and in some Asian environments it's the opposite. There is a well-documented handicap in Europeans in the identification of Asian faces, and vice-versa (it's called the "other race" effect, holds for other populations, and is possibly the single greatest source of racist jokes). It's an interesting topic, but I won't discuss in today's post, saving it for some other time.  Instead, I will deal with less obvious sources of variation: depth clues.

Most readers have probably seen the Müller-Lyer illusion. It's a Psych 101 staple that dates back to 1889. Michael Bach has a page devoted to it on his (fantastic) website, here. Here the illusion is in its standard version:

I'm counting on the reader perceiving the figure with the outward-pointing arrow as longer. I probably won't kill the suspense by revealing that the two segments are actually of the same length, that's what makes it an illusion.

When we started this blog, we hoped that anthropologists among our readers would be willing to contribute 'pictures of the week', photos (or videos) that would illustrate in a suggestive manner a theme of cognition-and-culture relevance, but we had very little success and, sadly, we have all but given up. Here however is video not from an ethnographer but suggested by 3QuarksDaily and borrowed from YouTube that illustrates in a pleasant and timely manner how cultural items borrowed in another culture get transformed in the direction of a better integration to their novel environment.

Original creation by: Nupur. Music by: Amartya Rahut.

While taking a break, we are happy to republish some of our favorite 'oldies but goodies'. This one was first put online in December of last year (2008). It was the first installment of  a series of posts on Richard Nisbett's theory of culture and perception. Enjoy!

In a lively account published in Trends In Cognitive Sciences (see here), Nisbett and Miyamoto (2005) made the case for "cultural" influences on perception. The crux of the argument is this : visual perception in Americans is more analytical, while in Asians it is more holistic. Americans pay attention to details, Asians to the larger picture. Americans examine objects in isolation, Asians are more sensitive to context. In the authors' own words (p. 469):

"[...], we believe there is considerable evidence that shows that Asians are inclined to attend to, perceive and remember contexts and relationships whereas Westerners are more likely to attend to, perceive and remember the attributes of salient objects and their category memberships. It should be noted that the perceptual and attentional differences just described are in general quite large, sometimes even close to one standard deviation. Indeed, in the typical study, Asians and Westerners were found to behave in qualitatively different ways."

The evidence referred to above consists of psychological experiments that compared the behaviour of Westerners and Asians using mostly well-established paradigms. Change blindness, for example, is a popular staple of visual psychology: people often fail to detect large differences between two pictures shown in succession.