Biology of cultural conflict
A new 'Theme Issue' of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences is available online: 'The biology of cultural conflict' compiled and edited by Gregory S. Berns and Scott Atran:
"Although culture is usually thought of as the collection of knowledge and traditions that ...
Incredible! Listening to ‘When I’m 64’ makes you forget your age
As an illustration of the power of priming experiments to produce astonishing findings, a recent study shows that people tend to underestimate their age (but not their father’s) after listening to the Beatles’ song « When I’m 64 ». The study was published in Psychological Science.
"We ...
Are humans innately bad social scientists?
I know, this sounds a bit extreme. How can the ability to do (bad) social science be influenced by our genes? Well, quite easily if you carefully read Robert Trivers’ last book (see reviews in NYT [1], Nature [2], Science [3]). Indeed, his book is about our innate tendency for self-deception. ...
It’s All in the Mind, but Whose Mind? The participants, or the experimenter’s?
In PLoS One, an article by Stéphane Doyen, Olivier Klein, Cora-Lise Pichon, and Axel Cleeremans entitled "Behavioral Priming: It's All in the Mind, but Whose Mind?" They begin:
"In their seminal series of experiments, Bargh Chen and Burrows (1996) demonstrated that activating a trait construct ...
Twelve Lessons (Most of Which I Learned the Hard Way) for Evolutionary Psychologists
This post was initially prepared for, and is published in: Wang, X.T. & Su Y.J. (Eds). 2011. Thus Spake Evolutionary Psychologists. Beijing: Peking University Press.
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As an undergraduate, most of the professors in the Anthropology Department at my university practiced psychological anthrop...
Early social cognition in three cultural contexts
Coming out of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Department of Developmental and Comparative Psychology An important comparative study on Early social cognition in three cultural contexts by T. Callaghan, H. Moll, H. Rakoczy, F. Warneken, U. Liszkowski, T. Behne, & M. ...
Why are the faces of primates so dramatically different from one another?
UCLA biologists working as "evolutionary detectives" studied the faces of 129 adult male primates from Central and South America, and they offer some answers in research published online Jan. 11, in Proceedings of the Royal Society B and available here. The faces they studied evolved over at least ...
Blogs from ICCI contributors
ICCI contributors also blog elsewhere. I am happy to recommend two new blogs: Hugo Mercier's Social by Design on Psychology Today is devoted to popularizing his and Sperber's argumentative theory of reasoning. It will teach you the truth about gulliblity (trust me). Simon Barthelmé's Dahtah will ...
Flavor network and the principles of food pairing
In the online and open access Scientific Reports of Nature, a fascinating paper on "Flavor network and the principles of food pairing" by Yong-Yeol Ahn, Sebastian E. Ahnert, James P. Bagrow and & Albert-László Barabási.
The backbone of the flavor network. Each node denotes an ingredient, ...
Attributing Mind to Groups vs. Group Members
Forthcoming in Psychological Science, an interesting social cognition article by Adam Waytz and Liane Young entitled "The Group-Member Mind Trade-Off: Attributing Mind to Groups Versus Group Members" available here.
Abstract:
People attribute minds to other individuals and make inferences about ...
Why are some languages more regular than others?
Many years ago, I did anthropological fieldwork among the Dorze of Southern Ethiopia. Since no grammar of the Dorze language was available, I had to find out what were its basic morphological and syntactic rules. The good news was that once I had identified a rule, I could apply it across the ...