ICCI team

Pulotu – database of Pacific Religions

If good ethnographic databases works as a guilty pleasure for you, you may want to have a look at Pulotu (pulotu.com), and thank Prof. Russell Gray and his team. Pulotu is a remarkable database of

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For the record: A commentary by Csibra, Senju, et al. on gaze following

In 2008, Atsushi Senju and Gergely Csibra published in Current Biology (18, 668–671) an often quoted and important contribution to natural pedagogy theory: “Gaze following in human infants

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State of the art research on social behavior

In Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences 2015, 3, a really useful open access collection of review papers on state of the art research on social behavior edited by Molly Crockett and Amy Cuddy. From

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An evolutionary framework for the study of teaching

A new article or obvious cognition-and-culture relevance by Michelle Ann Kline on "How to learn about teaching: An evolutionary framework for the study of teaching behavior in humans and other

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Social Norms and Cultural Dynamics

A Special Issue on "Social Norms and Cultural Dynamics" of Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes (Volume 129, July 2015) Edited by Michael Morris, Ying-yi Hong and Chi-Yue Chiu. For

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Social Anthropology meets “the cognitive challenge”

Social Anthropology devotes an exciting special issue to "taking up the cognitive challenge", edited by Rita Astuti and Denis Regnier, with contributions by (among others) Tamara Hale, Charles

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Sign language as a window into universally accessible linguistic biases

A very interesting new article: "Event representations constrain the structure of language: Sign language as a window into universally accessible linguistic biases" by Brent Strickland, Carlo Geraci,

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Scott Atran’s address to the UN security council

It is not everyday that an anthropologist is asked to speak before the security council: Scott Atran did, on the 23d of April. See video here [1]. [1] "Scott Atran: The Youth Need Values and

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Astuti and Bloch on “Incest, intentionality, and morality”

A thought-provoking article by Rita Astuti and Maurice Bloch, "The causal cognition of wrong doing: incest, intentionality and morality," in Frontiers in Psychology, 18 February 2015. From the

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Should preferences based on authoritarianism and social dominance be treated as moral?

An interesting critical discussion of Jonathan Haidt's apprach to morality from a social psychology and political science point of view: "Another Look at Moral Foundations Theory: Do Authoritarianism

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What Explains the Emergence of Moralizing Religions?

An ambitious article: "Increased Affluence Explains the Emergence of Ascetic Wisdoms and Moralizing Religions", by Nicolas Baumard, Alexandre Hyafil, Ian Morris, and Pascal Boyer in Current Biology,

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A Cognitive Science of Theology?

A new, interesting, and original book by Helen De Cruz and Johan De Smedt: A Natural History of Natural Theology: The Cognitive Science of Theology and Philosophy of Religion. MIT Press 2014. Over

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Is probabilistic cognition universal?

An interesting paper by Laura Fontanari, Michel Gonzalez, Giorgio Vallortigara, and Vittorio Girotto: "Probabilistic cognition in two indigenous Mayan groups", forthcoming in PNAS. Abstract: "Is

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Has a decimal point error misled millions into believing that spinach is a good source of iron?

A great cultural epidemiology story by Ole Bjørn Rekdal, "Academic urban legends," in Social Studies of Science (2014, 44(4)) freely available here. Abstract: "Many of the messages presented in

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Random choice among the Kantu, swidden agriculturalists of Kalimantan

An excellent post by Michael Schulson at Aeon magazine entitled "How to choose? When your reasons are worse than useless, sometimes the most rational choice is a random stab in the dark," showing,

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Babies’ and birds’ causal understanding

A very interesting comparison between crows and humans in a new (free access) paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society B entitled "Of babies and birds: complex tool behaviours are not sufficient for

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Combinatorial Communication in Bacteria?

Here is a challenge to standard views about the evolution of linguistic generativity: "Combinatorial Communication in Bacteria: Implications for the Origins of Linguistic Generativity" by Thomas C.

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Negatively-Biased Credulity and the Cultural Evolution of Beliefs

A new article by Dan Fessler, Anne Pisor,& David Navarrete, highly relevant to cultural epidemiology in PLoS ONE. Abstract: The functions of cultural beliefs are often opaque to those who hold

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Making sense of early false-belief understanding

A new article from Helming, K. A., Strickland, B., & Jacob, P. (2014). Making sense of early false-belief understanding. Trends in Cognitive Sciences. Abstract: We address the puzzle about early

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The Content of Our Cooperation, Not the Color of Our Skin

A new, important article by David Pietraszewski, Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby: The Content of Our Cooperation, Not the Color of Our Skin: An Alliance Detection System Regulates Categorization by

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A Cultural Epidemiology of Monsters?

A new book by the archeologist David Wengrow: The Origins of Monsters: Image and Cognition in the First Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Princeton U.P.) The blurb: It has often been claimed that

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The Phylogeny of ATU 333 (a.k.a. Little Red Riding Hood)

An interesting, methodologically innovative paper by Jamie Terhani in PLoS One on the phylogeny of "Little Red Riding Hood." Abstract: Researchers have long been fascinated by the strong continui

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Does “science” make you moral?

Whatever one thinks of priming studies, it is nice to have, after many studies where priming religion reinforces moral attitudes (for instance Shariff & Norenzayan 2007), an article in PLOS One,

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Did the Neandertals speak?

In an open access article, "On the antiquity of language: the reinterpretation of Neandertal linguistic capacities and its consequences" published in Frontiers in Language Sciences, that challenges

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