Cosma Shalizi on Supernatural Horror in Electoral Politics
Some of you may not know Cosma Shalizi, one of the most interesting intellectuals and interdisciplinary scientists of our time. Well, the last post in his blog, Three-Toed Sloth asks an anthropological question about the cultural origin of the demonization in some quarters of the Democratic ...
Are humans intuitive dualists?
Mitch Hodge has just published an article questioning the hypothesis that human intuitive reasoning about other persons supposes a type of Cartesian mind (or soul)-body substance dualism (see Journal of Cognition and Culture 8, 2008), a hypothesis that has been defended by researchers such as Paul ...
Tasty food for anthropological thought
Picture: Taste buds from Gray's Anatomy
The alleged non-existence of universal colours categories provided a textbook illustration for cultural and linguistic relativism until Berlin and Kay’s published their famous Basic color terms: Their universality and evolution (1969), which has played a ...
The AHRC Culture & the Mind Project
We view the International Cognition and Culture Institute as complementary to other initiatives that pursue the same general goal, often in a more focused manner and within a limited time frame. We obviously welcome information about such initiatives in our news, including, at this juncture, about ...
Maori Memories
In last February's issue of Child Development, I found a paper [1] from a team that investigates the problem of childhood memories among the Maoris. It turns out that when you ask them, Maoris produce the earliest childhood memories on record: 2.5 years on average (the average American has 3.5, ...
The origin and evolution of religious prosociality
Norenzayan, A., & Shariff, A. F. (2008). The origin and evolution of religious prosociality. Science, 322, 58:62.
We examine empirical evidence for religious prosociality, the hypothesis that religions facilitate costly behaviors that benefit other people. Although sociological surveys reveal ...
Religion: Bound to Believe?
Boyer, Pascal (2008) Religion: Bound to Believe? Nature vol 455: 1038-39.
Is religion a product of our evolution? In the past ten years, the evolutionary and cognitive study of religion has begun to mature. It puts forward new hypotheses and testable predictions. It asks what in the human make-up ...
Ideas of immanent justice in cognition and culture
How common in cognitive development and how widespread across cultures is the idea of immanent justice, with the good or bad fortune being seen as generally deserved and even as a sign of the moral worth of lucky or unlucky people? A new article by Kristina R. Olson, Yarrow Dunham, Carol S. Dweck, ...
Picture of the week: enteromancy among the Dorze of Southern Ethiopia
This picture, taken in 1969, shows two Dorze elders discussing how to interpret the entrails of a lamb that had just been slaughtered.
The pattern of blood vessels on the entrails represents genealogical relationships and blemishes show which of these relationships (with the living or with the ...
Site launch!
Welcome to our web site!
It feels good to be able to open it at last after countless twists of fate - like the time our web domain got kidnapped by a Lacanian psychoanalyst/driving-school professor (here's looking at you, Cybergraphik!). There are so many people to thank that I made a special ...
Politics and the psychology of irrational decisions
In my previous post (Cases of institution that make us smart), I have been considering a proposal about increasing taxes on junk food and decreasing taxes on fruits and greens. The proposal differed from campaigns of information (see picture as an example) because it implied direct action on the ...