Anthropology is not a science, says the AAA
(editor's note: click here to learn more about the AAA's decision from a partial but enlightening point of view)
The Board of the American Anthropological Association has recently adopted a new "mission statement" that omits any reference to "science" in its characterization of anthropology. The ...
Natural pedagogy and A-not-B tasks
This post is part of our 'Pedagogy theory week' series.
Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday
For a very short presentation of pedagogy theory, see the Monday post. Here, Marion Vorms describes and discusses the Pedagogical treatment of a famous psychological effect. György Gergely ...
Is human communication biased?
This post is part of our 'Pedagogy theory week' series.
Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday
For a very short presentation of pedagogy theory, see the Monday post. This one is about the genericity bias. You can read György's reply on this topic on Friday.
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According to Pedagogy ...
György Gergely replies to Marion Vorms and Olivier Morin
This post is part of our 'Pedagogy theory week' series.
Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday
For a very short presentation of pedagogy theory, see the Monday post. In this post, György Gergely starts to reply to Marion Vorms and Olivier Morin's comments of Monday, Tuesday, and ...
György Gergely on genericity
This post is part of our 'Pedagogy theory week' series.
Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday
For a very short presentation of pedagogy theory, see the Monday post. In this post, György Gergely replies to Marion and Olivier's concerns about the notion of a "Genericity Bias" (see in ...
György Gergely on the A-not-B task
This post is part of our 'Pedagogy theory week' series.
Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday
For a very short presentation of pedagogy theory, see the Monday post. In this post, György Gergely replies to Marion's Tuesday post on the A-not-B task.
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Marion scrutinizes the theory's ...
Pedagogy week starts today!
This week, the Cognition and Culture blog will be hosting a series of posts discussing György Gergely and Gergely Csibra's theory of Pedagogy, a theory of communication and cultural transmission that ICCI bloggers love to discuss (see these two posts by P. Jacob, and this one by György Gergely). ...
The Zeus problem revisited – or is it the Jedi problem?
In their recent paper (available here) in Journal of Cognition and Culture, Will M. Gervais and Joseph Henrich call attention to the Zeus problem. If religious belief is solely guided by representational content biases (as many scholars in the cognitive science of religion have argued), why do ...
In TiCS: Space, Time and Number
Trends in Cognitive Sciences is publishing a special issue on space, time and number with articles by Brian Butterworth, Manuela Piazza, Daniel B.M. Haun and collaborators, and Dori Derdikman and Edvard I. Moser. As Manuella Piazza explains in her article, the field is reap for a very interesting ...
New book: Human evolution and the origin of hierarchies
Philosopher Benoît Dubreuil just published a book at Cambridge University Press: Human evolution and the origins of hierarchies: the state of nature. [1] Based on his dissertation, the book promises to shed fresh light on key anthropological issues, such as social evolution or the origins of the ...
Special issue of Mind and Society on experimental economics
Note the Special issue of Mind and Society on "Experimental economics and the social embedding of economic behavior and cognition".
Here is the abstract of the introductory article, "The implication of social cognition for experimental economics" by Christophe Heintz and Nicholas Bardsley:
"Can ...
Where good ideas come from
Following up on the news of a few days earlier about the role of different network structures in the spread of new ideas, it's worth mentioning the new Steven Johnson book on a related topic: Where good ideas come from [1]. Johnson sets out to dispel the myth of the lone inventor whose main ...
Which network structures favor the rapid spread of new ideas, behaviors, or technologies?
Forthcoming in PNAS, an article entitled "The spread of innovations in social networks" by Andrea Montanari and Amin Saberi (full text available here).
Abstract : Which network structures favor the rapid spread of new ideas, behaviors, or technologies? This question has been studied extensively ...
Video games as applied anthropology
Pursuing its ambitious development, the ICCI blog has decided now to open a "video games" section. And today, we are discussing the release of Civilization V, the last sequel of one of the most famous series in the history of video games [1].
OK I was just kidding. There won't be any video games ...
Picture of the week: The colors of the Web
In a recent post, Ophelia wondered about the basis of people's colours preference: Which colour do you prefer ? Have you always preferred it, or did your preference change ? Can you tell why you prefer pink to, let's say, yellow ?
One of the problem here is that, as Ophelia noticed, we lack data, ...
Learning suicide in Sri Lanka
Durkheim's sociological study of suicide as a 'social fact' was premised, in part, on the idea that only human beings were known to commit suicide. But ethologists tell us that the ability to commit self-injury or to deliberately self-destruct has been found across separate species including other ...