The future of human cooperation: Some minuscule evidence
I look at the table of content and some abstracts in several journals, and, last week, one abstract really caught my attention. Here is how it begins:
"Globalization magnifies the problems that affect all people and that require large-scale human cooperation, for example, the overharvesting of ...
An update on the Pirahã
The Pirahã are a tribe of Amazonian Indian who have become famous among linguists and psychologists because it has been claimed that they lack a number system (not even a word for one), recursion, and color words (and they seem to be a very happy people despite the absence of Louis ...
10,000 Year Danger Marker?
Here's a real-world puzzle for students of precautionary cognition.
The US Department of Energy's "Waste Isolation Pilot Plan" is a program to store nuclear waste in an area that will remain toxic to humans for at least 10,000 years. The planners need to place markers that will discourage vandal...
Language and colour, again
In PNAS March 17, 2009 vol. 106 no. 11 4567-4570: "Unconscious effects of language-specific terminology on preattentive color perception" by Guillaume Thierry, Panos Athanasopoulos, Alison Wiggetta, Benjamin Deringa and Jan-Rouke Kuipers.
Abstract:
It is now established that native language ...
Pictures of the week: Culture and Cognition in Cetaceans
At the Centre d'éducation et de recherche de Sept-Iles (cersi.org) in Quebec, we study social interactions among cetaceans. Culture and cognition studies on cetaceans are quite recent compared with the extensive research conducted on other species. There are three reasons for this: 1) most ...
Why are minimally counter-intuitive concepts special?
For me, it was love at first sight. As soon as I saw Pascal Boyer's Religion Explained at the new-books-shelf of a suburban Maryland Barnes & Nobles on a rainy Saturday morning in 2001, I was smitten. My wife complained that I became physically incapable of looking away from the pages of the ...
How Grandma stopped worrying, and started to love cognitive anthropology
In the latest Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a paper [1] by Dimitrios Kapogiannis et al. proposes "an integrative cognitive neuroscience framework for understanding the cognitive and neural foundations of religious belief." The Independent [´2] comments the study in the following ...
Interpretive traditions
My principle contribution to the Cognitive Science of Religion has been an ethnography of an interpretive tradition, How the Bible Works, in which I developed a cognitively informed model of evangelical Christians' use of the Bible. As extraordinary and fascinating as the Biblicist tradition is, I ...
In Bad Taste: Evidence for the Oral Origins of Moral Disgust
The last issue of Science reports a fascinating piece of research on the facial display of disgust among participants whom have been treated unfairly in an economic game. Here is the abstract:
In common parlance, moral transgressions “leave a bad taste in the mouth.” This metaphor implies a ...
What is an institution, that people may participate in it?
In a recent post, Christophe Heintz told us about “institutions that make us smart”. The posting was of great interest by itself, and got us thinking about institutions - our field still has its work cut out if we want to make sense of institutions.
We have all sorts of interesting tools and ...