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.
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 comparis
How cultural is sensitivity to shape properties?
In Psychological Science (Vol, 20 (12) pp.1437-1442), an interesting article by Irving Biederman, Xiaomin Yue, and Jules Davidoff entitled: "Representation of Shape in Individuals From a Culture With
Viral columns
The New York Times picks up on an interesting study of what journal articles people email to their friends. Short answer: those that inspire awe.
Quoting from the NYT:
People preferred e-mailing
Video: A Debate on Group Selection
On July 7th 2009, the The London Evolutionary Research Network held a extremely interesting debate on group selection in which four eminent speakers in the field discussed the motion: "Is natural
The evolution of misbeliefs
An article entitled "The Evolution of Misbeliefs" by Ryan McKay and Daniel Dennett In Behavioral and Brain Sciences (2009) 32, 493-561, freely available here, with commentaries by (among many
Universal and culture-specific recognition of emotions
Participant watching the experimenter play a stimulus
and indicating her response
There is an intersting forthcoming open access (available here) article of PNAS entitled "Cross-cultural recognition
Moscow’s stray dogs
From an article in the Financial Times, fascinating both from an anthropological and a biological point of view:
'According to Poyarkov [a biologist specialising in wolves who also studies these
Language evolution and universals
Two ambitious papers just published offer broad contrasting views on the biological and cultural bases of human languages:
Nicholas Evans, N. , & Stephen Levinson (2009). The myth of language
Body movement in language and cognition
A study by Daniel Haun, published in the December 15th 2009 edition of Current Biology, reports cross-cultural variability in how people memorize bodily movements in space, depending on how space is
Predation enhances cooperation in wee little birds.
In a recent article entitled "The increased risk of predation enhances cooperation"published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Volume 277, Pages 513 - 518 and available here, Indrikis Krams
Does power increase hypocrisy?
An article entitled "Power Increases Hypocrisy: Moralizing in Reasoning, Immorality in Behavior" by Joris Lammers, Diederik A. Stapel, and Adam D. Galinsky coming out in Psychological Science and
Is Imitation Necessary?
In an article entitled "Social Learning Mechanisms and Cumulative Cultural Evolution: Is Imitation Necessary?" published in Psychological Science, Volume 20 Issue 12, Pages 1478 - 1483 and available
Monkeys recognize the faces of group mates in photographs
Jennifer J. Pokorny and Frans B. M. de Waal show that "Monkeys recognize the faces of group mates in photographs" (PNAS December 22, 2009 vol. 106 no. 51 21539-21543).
Subjects need to select the odd
Uta and Chris Frith on the social brain
In the special issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B entitled "Personal perspectives in the life sciences for the Royal Society's 350th anniversary", a freely available
The study of cognition and culture today
A special series of lectures supported by the LSE Annual Fund, organised by the department of anthropology of the LSE and the International Cognition and Culture Institute. All lectures to be held at
The Biological Link Between Music and Speech
In PLoS One, two researchers from the Duke Institute for Brain Science, Kamraan Z. Gill and Dale Purves, publish an article providing "A Biological Rationale for Musical Scales" and freely available
Can you tell the language of the mother from her baby’s cry?
A recently published article by Birgit Mampe, Angela D. Friederici, Anne Christophe and Kathleen Wermke entitled "Newborns' Cry Melody Is Shaped by Their Native Language" shows evidence that newbor
Cosma Shalizi on social contagion
Statistician and polymath blogger Cosma Shalizi is preparing a paper [1] on social contagion, basically dwelling on the fact that the transmission of behaviours through social influence ('contagion')
Human expansion, drift, and cultural evolution
A new paper in PNAS, "Y chromosome diversity, human expansion, drift, and cultural evolution," by Jacques Chiaroni, Peter A. Underhill and Luca L. Cavalli-Sforza (Published online Nov. 17, 2009).
FOXP2 again in the news
The gene FOXP2 has been in the news ever since it was revealed in 1998 that the members of an extended London family who had a serious language impairment also had an abnormal version of that gene.
Claude Lévi-Strauss has died
Claude Lévi-Strauss, probably the most famous antrhopologist in the history of the field, died last Friday. We celebrated his 100th birthday here almost a year ago and concluded: "If the study of
Mind and society: Special issue on social simulation
The latest issue of Mind and Society (Volume 8, Number 2 / décembre 2009), a journal of obvious cognition and culture relevance, is on social simulation. Here is the table of content:
Special issue
The cultural group selection hypothesis
A new paper by Adrian V. Bell, Peter J. Richerson, and Richard McElreath published online in PNAS entitled "Culture rather than genes provides greater scope for the evolution of large-scale human