The social rationality of footballers
Are footballers rational? It all depends on what their goals are (no pun intended). We will not be talking here about behavior outside the field, as it's not entirely clear what norms of rationality one should use in this case (as George Best put it: "I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast ...
Lévi-Strauss in comic form
Thanks to Culture Matters for drawing our attention to this tribute to Claude Lévi-Strauss in comic form published by The Financial Times. It has a clever twist and it might help you procrastinate after missing an hour of sleep on this first Sunday of daylight saving time (in Europe anyhow).
Learn about Social Neuroscience
In the last issue of Neuron (65, 6), a "Special Feature: Reviews on Social Neuroscience," of unique interest to cognitive and social scientists, "a series of reviews [most of them freely available online] highlighting exciting research in the field of Social Neuroscience, which seeks to understand ...
Varieties of disbelief
On March 15, the Washington Post website put a link to a small ethnographic study by Daniel Dennett and Linda LaScola entitled "Preachers who are not Believers." In this remarkable piece, the authors present interviews of five protestant pastors who have lost their faith, and analyse their predic...
Is the “problem of evil” universal?
Reading a book recommended by my brother, Gregory Boyd's God at war (1997), I have recently been thinking about the problem of evil. Boyd suggests that the problem of evil arises because Christians believe that God is both good and in direct control of all things. People in many other societies, ...
Babies got rhythm!
A participant listening to Mozart while her mother listens to speech. Watch the video here
Forthcoming in PNAS and freely available here, an article by Marcel Zentner and Tuomas Eerola: "Rhythmic engagement with music in infancy"
Abstract:
Humans have a unique ability to coordinate their ...
Cultural differences and linguistic justice
Franz de Waal just wrote an interesting post at 3 Quarks Daily. He is currently in Japan to promote his latest book The Age of Empathy and he writes about cultural differences among scientists: Although Japanese scientists were, he says, far ahead in the '60s, their research was not taken seriously ...
Do only humans share with non-kin?
"Comparisons between chimpanzees and humans have led to the hypothesis that only humans voluntarily share their own food with others. However, it is hard to draw conclusions because the food-sharing preferences of our more tolerant relative, the bonobo (Pan paniscus), have never been studied ...
Is hearing God like being a skilled athlete?
Not often do we find in the American Anthropologist material of clear Cognition and Culture relevance. Here is a noteworthy exception: "The Absorption Hypothesis: Learning to Hear God in Evangelical Christianity" (vol. 112,March 2010 issue, available here) by Tanya. M. Luhrmann (whose LSE-ICCI ...
How many minutes does it take for social norms to inhibit survival instinct?
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 available here).
Abstract:
"...This study explores the interaction of ...
3 Quarks Daily’s Arts and Literature Prize: Nicolas Baumard on the universality of music in the com
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 ...
Pictures of the week: Globalized Prehistory in Arunachal Pradesh
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 ...