Believing Maurice Bloch on doubting, doubting him on believing
My friend Maurice Bloch and I have been arguing since even before we first met in the 70s. What makes it worthwhile is that there is much we agree on, and, once in a while, one of us causes the other to change his mind on some issue. There has been one issue however where I have failed to convince ...
Why do we make our tastes public?
Facebook has recently changed the way it asks its users to endorse brands and celebrities on the site. Rather than ask people to "become a fan" of say, Starbucks or Lady Gaga, Facebook will instead let users click to indicate that they "like" the item.
Facebook already lets people "like" comments ...
Alphapsy blog archive
Today, we retro-publish twenty posts from the (soon to be definitely closed) Alphapsy blog, that some contributors to the ICCI blog - mostly Nicolas Baumard, Hugo Mercier, Olivier Morin and Karim N'Diaye - started some years ago. Some of these oldies but goodies include a couple of pieces on naïve ...
Learning and prestige among chimpanzees
An interesting article by Victoria Horner, Darby Proctor, Kristin Bonnie, Andrew Whiten, Frans de Waal: "Prestige Affects Cultural Learning in Chimpanzees" in PLoS ONE, 2010, 5(5) freely available here.
In Group 1, more prestigious model A was trained to deposit tokens into the spotted receptacle ...
A deflationary approach to economic games
Forthcoming in PNAS, an important paper by Rolf Kümmerli, Maxwell Burton-Chellew, Adin Ross-Gillespie and Stuart West: “Resistance to extreme strategies, rather thanprosocial preferences, can explain human cooperation in public goods games” (available here) that illustrates "why caution must ...
Doubting among the Zafimaniry
In 2003, I organized a series of group discussions on psychological matters - thought, language, memory, dreams, ancestors, etc. - among Zafimaniry villagers, a group of forest dwellers in Madagascar who, for historical reasons, are fairly distinct and relatively isolated from other Malagasy. In ...
Overimitation in Kalahari Bushman: Children and the Origins of Human Cultural Cognition
An interesting paper by Mark Nielsen and Keyan Tomaselli “Overimitation in Kalahari Bushman Children and the Origins of Human Cultural Cognition” in Psychological Science,May 2010, 21: 729-736. You will find a freely available version here.
Abstract:
Children are surrounded by objects that ...
Do not confound homophily and contagion!
At arXiv.org, a relevant paper by Cosma Shalizi and Andrew C. Thomas “Homophily and Contagion Are Generically Confounded in Observational Social Network Studies” (available here).
Abstract:
We consider processes on social networks that can potentially involve three phenomena: homophily, or the ...
camphor – ammonia = anniseed x peppermint
How can we count? Where does our arithmetic capacity come from? A lot of progress has been made on this question, thanks, in no small part, to the work of cognitive scientists like Susan Carey and Stanislas Dehaene. The picture that emerges from this kind of work looks something like this: many ...
The Moral Life of Babies
In Today's New York Times Magazine, Paul Bloom has a long interesting and easy-read piece (freely available here) on "The Moral Life of Babies" that concludes:
"Morality, then, is a synthesis of the biological and the cultural, of the unlearned, the discovered and the invented. Babies possess ...
Heaven before the space age
or How I grew up with two parallel cosmologies
Much has been said in cognitive approaches to religion about the co-existence in believers of beliefs that may seem blatantly inconsistent. The way religious ideas about the heavens co-exist with Space Age understanding the Universe is an interesting ...
Innocents fornicating and apes grieving
In his novel Abbé Mouret's Transgression (La faute de l'abbé Mouret, 1875), Emile Zola has a young priest, Serge Mouret, and a teenage girl, Albine, fall in love with each other without any understanding of what is happening to them. Neither of them knows anything about sex - they don't even seem ...
Is there a language instinct?
Chomsky's theory has played a pivotal role in the cognitive revolution and is often seen as one of the pillar of cognitive sciences, especially in the cognition and culture field. It is therefore quite exciting to see some cognitive scientists attacking such a venerable theory and proposing a ...