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 ...
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 Psycholo...
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 Nature, Science). Indeed, his book is about our innate tendency for self-deception. Here is the ...
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 ...
Twelve Lessons (Most of Which I Learned the Hard Way) for Evolutionary Psychologists
As an undergraduate, most of the professors in the Anthropology Department at my university practiced psychological anthropology, a subfield of sociocultural anthropology that combines theories from various branches of psychology with the study of culture. I decided that I was going to be a ...
International Conference on Thinking 2012 London
The 7th International Conference on Thinking will take place on the 4th to 6th July 2012 at Birkbeck College and University College London focusing on the most recent research on thinking from psychological, cognitive science and cognitive neuroscience perspectives. To submit papers, posters, or ...
Conference: Culture, Mind, and Brain: Emerging Concepts, Methods, Applications
A conference on "Culture, Mind, and Brain: Emerging Concepts, Methods, Applications" at UCLA, October 19–20, 2012
Many lines of research on culture, mind, and brain can no longer be neatly separated. Some questions run together, thanks to our growing understanding of the genome, ...
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 ...
Anthropology of this Century online
The new online journal Anthropology of this Century edited by Charles Stafford. "publishes reviews of recent works in anthropology and related disciplines, as well as occasional feature articles." While not uniquely focused on cognition-and-culture themes, is quite open to them. In the ...
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...
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. ...