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Children’s Ethno-National Flag Categories in Three Divided Societies Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2020-12-11 Jocelyn B. Dautel, Edona Maloku, Ana Tomovska Misoska, Laura K. Taylor
Flags are conceptual representations that can prime nationalism and allegiance to one’s group. Investigating children’s understanding of conflict-related ethno-national flags in divided societies sheds light on the development of national categories. We explored the development of children’s awareness of, and preferences for, ethno-national flags in Northern Ireland, Kosovo, and the Republic of North
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Ethnic Essentialism or Conciliatory Multiculturalism? The People’s Republic of China Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2020-12-11 Raymond U. Scupin
Numerous scholars from different fields ranging from history, political science, ethnic and cultural studies, sociology, and anthropology have discussed ethnic and racial identity issues in the People’s Republic of China. Most have noted that there are competing narratives regarding the conceptions of race and ethnicity. Much of the scholarship has been based on social constructivist orientations.
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How Propaganda Works: Nationalism, Revenge and Empathy in Serbia Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2020-12-11 Jordan Kiper, Yeongjin Gwon, Richard Ashby Wilson
What is the relationship between war propaganda and nationalism, and what are the effects of each on support for, or participation in, violent acts? This is an important question for international criminal law and ongoing speech crime trials, where prosecutors and judges continue to assert that there is a clear causal link between war propaganda, nationalism, and mass violence. Although most legal
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Towards a Standard Model of the Cognitive Science of Nationalism – the Calendar Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2020-12-11 Michal Fux, Amílcar Antonio Barreto
The Cognitive Science of Nationalistic Behavior (CSNB), presented in this paper, integrates the political sciences of nationalities as invented communities with an evolutionary cognitive analysis of social forms as products of the human mind. The framework is modeled after the Cognitive Science of Religion, where decades of cross-disciplinary work has generated standards, predictions, and data about
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A Case of Sustained Internal Contradiction: Unresolved Ambivalence between Evolution and Creationism Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2020-08-26 S. Emlen Metz, Deena Skolnick Weisberg, Michael Weisberg
Many people feel the pull of both creationism and evolution as explanations for the origin of species, despite the direct contradiction. Some respond by endorsing theistic evolution, integrating the scientific and religious explanations by positing that God initiated or guided the process of evolution. Others, however, simultaneously endorse both evolution and creationism despite the contradiction
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Cross-Cultural Differences in Strategies of Peer Persuasion of Hebrew-Speaking and Arabic-Speaking Children Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2020-08-26 Rachel Karniol
The purpose of the current research was to examine strategies of persuasion used by Arabic-speaking and Hebrew-speaking boys and girls to determine the relative contributions of culture and gender in determining communication styles. Children were asked to write a letter to a male or female peer asking for a gender-stereotyped or a gender-neutral gift. Four meta-categories were identified: formality
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Cultural Attraction in Film Evolution: the Case of Anachronies Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2020-08-26 Oleg Sobchuk, Peeter Tinits
In many films, story is presented in an order different from chronological. Deviations from the chronological order in a narrative are called anachronies. Narratological theory and the evidence from psychological experiments indicate that anachronies allow stories to be more interesting, as the non-chronological order evokes curiosity in viewers. In this paper we investigate the historical dynamics
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Does Cognitive Structure Ground Social Structure? The Case of the Radical Enlightenment Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2020-08-26 Laurence Fiddick
Cross-culturally two widely observed forms of social structure are individualism (open societies) and ascribed hierarchies (closed societies). Associated with these two types of social structure are a wide range of recurrent concomitant features. It is proposed that these two forms of social structure are common, in part, because they are associated with modular forms of understanding that lend intuitive
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The Fitness Relevance of Counterintuitive Agents Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2020-08-26 Thomas Swan, Jamin Halberstadt
Cognitive scientists have attributed the ubiquity of religious narratives partly to the favored recall of minimally counterintuitive (MCI) concepts within those narratives. Yet, this memory bias is inconsistent, sometimes absent, and without a functional rationale. Here, we asked if MCI concepts are more fitness relevant than intuitive concepts, and if fitness relevance can explain the existence and
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HIDD’n HADD in Intelligent Design Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2020-08-26 Andrew Ross Atkinson
The idea that religious belief is ‘almost inevitable’ is so forcefully argued by Justin Barrett (2004, 2012) that it can warrant justifiable concern (Shook, 2017; Sterelny, 2018) – especially since he claims atheism is an unnatural handicap (2012, p. 203). In this article, I argue that religious belief in Homo sapiens isn’t inevitable – and that Barrett does agree when pushed. I describe the role played
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Moral and Conventional Violations in Childhood: Brazilians Tolerate Less but Expect More Punishment than U.S. Americans Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2020-08-26 Susana K. de M. Oliveira, Deise M. L. F. Mendes, Ebenézer A. de Oliveira, Luciana F. Pessôa
Brazilian and US American children were compared for differences in tolerance and punishment expectancy. We hypothesized that participants would be less tolerant and more punishing of moral than conventional violations; tolerance and punishment expectancy would relate with age; Brazilians would tolerate less and expect more punishment than US Americans; and social domain would moderate effects of age
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Prestige Does Not Affect the Cultural Transmission of Novel Controversial Arguments in an Online Transmission Chain Experiment Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2020-08-26 Ángel V. Jiménez, Alex Mesoudi
Cultural evolutionary theories define prestige as social rank that is freely conferred on individuals possessing superior knowledge or skill, in order to gain opportunities to learn from such individuals. Consequently, information provided by prestigious individuals should be more memorable, and hence more likely to be culturally transmitted, than information from non-prestigious sources, particularly
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Violent CRED s toward Out-Groups Increase Trustworthiness: Preliminary Experimental Evidence Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2020-08-26 Dan Řezníček, Radek Kundt
In the process of cultural learning, people tend to acquire mental representations and behavior from prestigious individuals over dominant ones, as prestigious individuals generously share their expertise and know-how to gain admiration, whereas dominant ones use violence, manipulation, and intimidation to enforce obedience. However, in the context of intergroup conflict, violent thoughts and behavior
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The Cultural Evolution of Oaths, Ordeals, and Lie Detectors Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2020-08-26 Hugo Mercier
In a great variety of cultures oaths, ordeals, or lie detectors are used to adjudicate in trials, even though they do not reliably discern liars from truth tellers. I suggest that these practices owe their cultural success to the triggering of cognitive mechanisms that make them more culturally attractive. Informal oaths would trigger mechanisms related to commitment in communication. Oaths used in
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Do Social Constraints Inhibit Analytical Atheism? Cognitive Style and Religiosity in Turkey Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2020-05-04 Catherine L. Caldwell-Harris, Sevil Hocaoğlu, Jonathan Morgan
Recent studies claim that having an analytical cognitive style is correlated with reduced religiosity in western populations. However, in cultural contexts where social norms constrain behavior, such cognitive characteristics may have reduced influence on behaviors and beliefs. We labeled this the ‘constraining environments hypothesis.’ In a sample of 246 Muslims in Turkey, the hypothesis was supported
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Early Interculturation, Late Interculturation – Does It Make a Difference in Our Memories? Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2020-05-04 Rachid Oulahal, Patrick Denoux
Our research is in the perspective of intercultural psychology and addresses the question of memories an intercultural situation leaves for individuals who experience it during their life. More precisely, it is through the autobiographical memory that our research analyzes the articulation between identity and memory processes in relation to a life experience in an intercultural situation, whether
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Epistemic Vigilance and the Science/Religion Distinction Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2020-05-04 Konrad Talmont-Kaminski
Both science and religion are human endeavours that recruit and modify pre-existing human capacity to engage in epistemic vigilance. However, while science relies upon a focus on content vigilance, religion focusses on source vigilance. This difference is due, in turn, to the function of religious claims not being connected to their accuracy – unlike the function of scientific claims. Understanding
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The Relationship between Locus of Control and Conformity Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2020-05-04 Ameer Maadal
This study was performed in an attempt to investigate the following three hypotheses: 1) There is a significant relationship between locus of control and conformity. 2) Women conform more in comparison to men. 3) Men have a more internal locus of control compared to women. For this purpose, 365 university students were selected randomly as the sample group, and a questionnaire regarding locus of control
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Socio-Cognitive and Cultural Influences on Children’s Concepts of God Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2020-05-04 Anondah R. Saide, Rebekah A. Richert
The current study examined (a) the impact of religious socialization practices and parents’ concepts on the development of an abstract religious concept (i.e., God) in young children, and (b) whether or not children’s socio-cognitive ability moderates the relationship between their religious concept and sources of information about the concept. 215 parent-child dyads from diverse religious backgrounds
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Development and Validation of a Porous Theory of Mind Scale Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2020-05-04 Michiel van Elk, David Maij, Bastiaan Rutjens
We report the results of an empirical investigation of the extent to which supernatural believers endorse a porous conception of the mind, i.e., the belief that one’s thoughts can be directly perceived by others. We developed a porous theory of mind (PToM) scale, tested its factor structure by using both exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, and showed its relation with supernatural beliefs
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Animals, Superman, Fairy and God: Children’s Attributions of Nonhuman Agent Beliefs in Madrid and London Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2020-05-04 Virginia L. Lam, Silvia Guerrero
There have been major developments in the understanding of children’s nonhuman concepts, particularly God concepts, within the past two decades, with a body of cross-cultural studies accumulating. Relatively less research has studied those of non-Christian faiths or children’s concepts of popular occult characters. This paper describes two studies, one in Spain and one in England, examining 5- to 10-year-olds’
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The 7E Model of the Human Mind: Articulating a Plastic Self for the Cognitive Science of Religion Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2019-11-08 Flavio A. Geisshuesler
This article proposes a 7E model of the human mind, which was developed within the cognitive paradigm in religious studies and its primary expression, the Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR). This study draws on the philosophically most sophisticated currents in the cognitive sciences, which have come to define the human mind through a 4E model as embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended. Introducing
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Theory of Mind, Religiosity, and Autistic Spectrum Disorder: a Review of Empirical Evidence Bearing on Three Hypotheses Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2019-11-08 Robert N. McCauley, George Graham, A. C. Reid
The cognitive science of religions’ By-Product Theory contends that much religious thought and behavior can be explained in terms of the cultural activation of maturationally natural cognitive systems. Those systems address fundamental problems of human survival, encompassing such capacities as hazard precautions, agency detection, language processing, and theory of mind. Across cultures they typically
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Rethinking Cultural Evolutionary Psychology Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2019-11-08 Ryan Nichols, Henrike Moll, Jacob L. Mackey
This essay discusses Cecilia Heyes’ groundbreaking new book Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking. Heyes’ point of departure is the claim that current theories of cultural evolution fail adequately to make a place for the mind. Heyes articulates a cognitive psychology of cultural evolution by explaining how eponymous “cognitive gadgets,” such as imitation, mindreading and language,
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Reasonable Irrationality: the Role of Reasons in the Diffusion of Pseudoscience Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2019-11-08 Stefaan Blancke, Maarten Boudry, Johan Braeckman
Pseudoscience spreads through communicative and inferential processes that make people vulnerable to weird beliefs. However, the fact that pseudoscientific beliefs are unsubstantiated and have no basis in reality does not mean that the people who hold them have no reasons for doing so. We propose that, reasons play a central role in the diffusion of pseudoscience. On the basis of cultural epidemiology
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The Aztec Gods in Blended-Space: a Cognitive Approach to Ritual Time Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2019-08-07 Danièle Dehouve
By applying diverse approaches to study the Aztec gods, light can be shed on different aspects of their personalities. In this article the cognitive theory of conceptual blending, developed by Fauconnier and Turner, is applied. In this perspective the functioning of the human mind is viewed as being grounded on the constant blending of mental spaces, a process that, in turn, makes new mental spaces
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Biculturals’ Flexible Identity Affects the Retrieval of Autobiographical Memories: an Online Replication of Wang (2008) Using a Pretest-Posttest Group Design Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2019-08-07 Benjamin Uel Marsh, Hyun Seo Lee, Janna Schirmer
The current study is a conceptual replication of Wang (2008) using a pretest-posttest design and an online sample through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Seventy-one Asian-Americans recalled a recent memory before and after being primed as either Asian or American. On pre-prime memories, conditions did not significantly differ. However, on post-prime memories, participants primed as American recalled more
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Cross-Cultural Differences in the Valuing of Dominance by Young Children Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2019-08-07 Rawan Charafeddine, Hugo Mercier, Takahiro Yamada, Tomoko Matsui, Mioko Sudo, Patrick Germain, Stéphane Bernard, Thomas Castelain, Jean-Baptiste Van der Henst
Developmental research suggests that young children tend to value dominant individuals over subordinates. This research, however, has nearly exclusively been carried out in Western cultures, and cross-cultural research among adults has revealed cultural differences in the valuing of dominance. In particular, it seems that Japanese culture, relative to many Western cultures, values dominance less. We
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Cultural Variations in the Curse of Knowledge: the Curse of Knowledge Bias in Children from a Nomadic Pastoralist Culture in Kenya Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2019-08-07 Siba Ghrear, Maciej Chudek, Klint Fung, Sarah Mathew, Susan A. J. Birch
We examined the universality of the curse of knowledge (i.e., the tendency to be biased by one’s knowledge when inferring other perspectives) by investigating it in a unique cross-cultural sample; a nomadic Nilo-Saharan pastoralist society in East Africa, the Turkana. Forty Turkana children were asked eight factual questions and asked to predict how widely-known those facts were among their peers.
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Good Gods Almighty: A Report Concerning Divine Attributes from a Global Sample Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2019-08-07 Justin L. Barrett, R. Daniel Shaw, Joseph Pfeiffer, Jonathan Grimes, Gregory S. Foley
If “Big Gods” evolved in part because of their ability to morally regulate groups of people who cannot count on kin or reciprocal altruism to get along (Norenzayan, 2013), then powerful gods would tend to be good gods. If the mechanism for this cooperation is some kind of fear of supernatural punishment (Johnson & Bering, 2006), then we may expect that mighty gods tend to be punishing gods. The present
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How Prone are Bulgarians to Heuristics and Biases? Implications for Studying Rationality across Cultures Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2019-08-07 Nikolay R. Rachev, Miglena Petkova
Dual-processes theories of cognition implicitly assume universality of the human mind. However, research has shown that large-scale differences exist in thinking styles across cultures. Thereby, the universality of the effects found in Western samples remains an open empirical question. Here, we explored whether effects predicted by prospect theory, such as the framing effect, would be observed in
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Melting Lizards and Solid Gold Stop Signs: Preferential Recall of Both Counterintuitive and Bizarre Concepts Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2019-08-07 Makena J. Easker, Allen H. Keniston
Research has shown that minimally counterintuitive concepts (MCI) are more memorable than concepts that are simply bizarre. However, this disparity may exist only in studies using cross-cultural samples. To test the impact of bizarreness on culturally homogeneous populations, we read a fictional narrative to 33 college-age students at a Midwestern university. This narrative featured 18 sets of target
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The Role of Encoding Strategy in the Memory for Expectation-Violating Concepts Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2019-08-07 Michaela Porubanova
Minimal counterintuitiveness and its automatic processing has been suggested as the explanation of persistence and transmission of cultural ideas. This purported automatic processing remains relatively unexplored. We manipulated encoding strategy to assess the persistence of memory for different types of expectation violation. Participants viewed concepts including two types of expectation violation
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Turning Water into Wine: Young Children’s Conception of the Impossible Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2019-08-07 Consuelo Orozco-Giraldo, Paul L. Harris
Young children judge that violations of ordinary, causal constraints are impossible. Yet children’s religious beliefs typically include the assumption that such violations can occur via divine agency in the form of miracles. We conducted two studies to examine this potential conflict. In Study 1, we invited 5- and 6-year-old Colombian children attending either a secular or a religious school to judge
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Why Hazing? Measuring the Motivational Mechanisms of Newcomer Induction in College Fraternities Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2019-08-07 Gentry R. McCreary, Joshua W. Schutts
Hazing behaviors as a part of group initiations have been theorized to contribute to a sense of group solidarity, to ensure loyalty and commitment of group members, to teach group-relevant skills and attitudes to group members, and to reinforce the social hierarchy within groups. In a survey of members of an international college fraternity (n=2833), researchers propose and test a four-dimensional
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A Cross-Cultural Investigation of Early Memories using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk: Comparing the Early Memories of American and Indian Turkers Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2019-05-02 Zheng Ren, Rikki H. Sargent, James D. Griffith, Lea T. Adams, Erika Kline, Jeff Hughes
The topic of infantile amnesia, or often referred to as one’s earliest childhood memory, has been studied for more than 100 years. Recently, there have been increased efforts to examine cultural differences in earliest childhood memories. The present study recruited participants (N = 242) from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MT), referred to as Turkers, who were either from an individualist (United States)
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Cultural Models of Substance Misuse Risk and Moral Foundations: Cognitive Resources Underlying Stigma Attribution Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2019-05-02 Nicole Lynn Henderson, William W. Dressler
This study examines the cognitive resources underlying the attribution of stigma in substance use and misuse. A cultural model of substance misuse risk was elicited from students at a major U.S. state university. We found a contested cultural model, with some respondents adopting a model of medical risk while others adopted a model of moral failure; agreeing that moral failure primarily defined risk
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Fact or Fiction: Children’s Acquired Knowledge of Islam through Mothers’ Testimony Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2019-05-02 Nicole Marie Summers, Falak Saffaf
One way in which information about the unknown is socialized to children is through adult testimony. Sharing false testimony about others with children may foster inaccurate perceptions and may result in prejudicially based divisions amongst children. As part of a larger study, mothers were instructed to read and discuss an illustrated story about Arab-Muslim refugees from Syria with their 6- to 8-year-olds
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What War Narratives Tell About the Psychology and Coalitional Dynamics of Ethnic Violence Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2019-05-02 Michael Moncrieff, Pierre Lienard
Models of ethnic violence have primarily been descriptive in nature, advancing broad or particular social and political reasons as explanations, and neglecting the contributions of individuals as decision-makers. Game theoretic and rational choice models recognize the role of individual decision-making in ethnic violence. However, such models embrace a classical economic theory view of unbounded rationality
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Where the Gods Dwell: a Research Report Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2019-05-02 Justin L. Barrett, R. Daniel Shaw, Joseph Pfeiffer, Jonathan Grimes
Are the places that superhuman beings purportedly act and dwell randomly or arbitrarily distributed? Inspired by theoretical work in cognitive science of religion, descriptions of superhuman beings (e.g., ancestors, demons, ghosts, gods, spirits) were solicited from informants in 20 countries on five continents, resulting in 108 usable descriptions, including information about these beings’ properties
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Ritualized Objects: How We Perceive and Respond to Causally Opaque and Goal Demoted Action Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2019-05-02 Rohan Kapitány, Mark Nielsen
Rituals are able to transform ordinary objects into extraordinary objects. And while rituals typically do not cause physical changes, they may imbue objects with a particular specialness – a simple gold band may become a wedding ring, while an ordinary dessert may become a birthday cake. To treat such objects as if they were ordinary then becomes inappropriate. How does this transformation take place
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Truth and Consequences: When Is It Rational to Accept Falsehoods? Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2019-05-02 Taner Edis, Maarten Boudry
Judgments of the rationality of beliefs must take the costs of acquiring and possessing beliefs into consideration. In that case, certain false beliefs, especially those that are associated with the benefits of a cohesive community, can be seen to be useful for an agent and perhaps instrumentally rational to hold. A distinction should be made between excusable misbeliefs, which a rational agent should
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On Tools Making Minds: an Archaeological Perspective on Human Cognitive Evolution Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2019-05-02 Karenleigh A. Overmann, Thomas Wynn
Using a model of cognition as extended and enactive, we examine the role of materiality in making minds as exemplified by lithics and writing, forms associated with conceptual thought and meta-awareness of conceptual domains. We address ways in which brain functions may change in response to interactions with material forms, the attributes of material forms that may cause such change, and the spans
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Cognition, Culture, and Social Simulation Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2018-11-28 Justin E. Lane, F. LeRon Shults
The use of modeling and simulation (M&S) methodologies is growing rapidly across the psychological and social sciences. After a brief introduction to the relevance of computational methods for research on human cognition and culture, we describe the sense in which computer models and simulations can be understood, respectively, as “theories” and “predictions.” Most readers of JoCC are interested in
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Human Simulation as the Lingua Franca for Computational Social Sciences and Humanities: Potential and Pitfalls Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2018-11-28 Andreas Tolk, Wesley J. Wildman, F. LeRon Shults, Saikou Y. Diallo
The social sciences and humanities are fragmented into specialized areas, each with their own parlance and procedures. This hinders information sharing and the growth of a coherent body of knowledge. Modeling and simulation can be the scientific lingua franca, or shared technical language, that can unite, integrate, and relate relevant parts of these diverse disciplines. Models are well established
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Massively Multi-Agent Simulations of Religion Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2018-11-28 William Sims Bainbridge
Massively multiplayer online (MMO) games are not merely electronic communication systems based on computational databases, but also include artificial intelligence that possesses complex, dynamic structure. Each visible action taken by a component of the multi-agent system appears simple, but is supported by vastly more sophisticated invisible processes. A rough outline of the typical hierarchy has
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Modeling Cultural Transmission of Rituals in Silico: The Advantages and Pitfalls of Agent-Based vs. System Dynamics Models Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2018-11-28 Vojtěch Kaše, Tomáš Hampejs, Zdeněk Pospíšil
This article introduces an agent-based and a system-dynamics model investigating the cultural transmission of frequent collective rituals. It focuses on social function and cognitive attraction as independently affecting transmission. The models focus on the historical context of early Christian meals, where various theoretically inspiring trends in cultural transmission of rituals can be observed
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Performing Orders: Speech Acts, Facial Expressions and Gender Bias Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2018-08-13 Filippo Domaneschi, Marcello Passarelli, Luca Andrighetto
The business of a sentence is not only to describe some state of affairs but also to perform other kinds of speech acts like ordering, suggesting, asking, etc. Understanding the kind of action performed by a speaker who utters a sentence is a multimodal process which involves the computing of verbal and non-verbal information. This work aims at investigating if the understanding of a speech act is
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Did Einstein Really Say that? Testing Content Versus Context in the Cultural Selection of Quotations Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2018-08-13 Alberto Acerbi, Jamshid J. Tehrani
We experimentally investigated the influence of context-based biases, such as prestige and popularity, on the preferences for quotations. Participants were presented with random quotes associated to famous or unknown authors (experiment one), or with random quotes presented as popular, i.e. chosen by many previous participants, or unpopular (experiment two). To exclude effects related to the content
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The Rutherford Atom of Culture Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2018-08-13 Lawrence A. Hirschfeld
Increasingly, psychologists have shown a healthy interest in cultural variation and a skepticism about assuming that research with North American and Northern European undergraduates provides reliable insight into universal psychological processes. Unfortunately, this reappraisal has not been extended to questioning the notion of culture central to this project. Rather, there is wide acceptance that
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Why was the Color Violet rarely used by Artists before the 1860s? Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2018-08-13 Allen Tager
Although the color violet is now used in a wide variety of everyday products, ranging from toys to clothing to cars, and although it now appears commonly in artistic works, violet was rarely used in fine art before the early 1860s. The color violet only became an integral part of modern culture and life with the rise of the French Impressionists. I investigated the use of violet in over 130,000 artworks
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Cross-Cultural Differences in Informal Argumentation: Norms, Inductive Biases and Evidentiality Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2018-08-13 Hatice Karaslaan, Annette Hohenberger, Hilmi Demir, Simon Hall, Mike Oaksford
Cross-cultural differences in argumentation may be explained by the use of different norms of reasoning. However, some norms derive from, presumably universal, mathematical laws. This inconsistency can be resolved, by considering that some norms of argumentation, like Bayes theorem, are mathematical functions. Systematic variation in the inputs may produce culture-dependent inductive biases although
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The Moral Priorities of Rap Listeners Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2018-08-13 Kalonji L.K. Nzinga, Douglas L. Medin
A cross-cultural approach to moral psychology starts from researchers withholding judgments about universal right and wrong and instead exploring what the members of a community subjectively perceive to be moral or immoral in their local context. This study seeks to identify the moral concerns that are most relevant to listeners of hip-hop music. We use validated psychological surveys including the
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Supernatural Agent Cognitions in Dreams Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2018-08-13 Patrick McNamara, Brian Teed, Victoria Pae, Adonai Sebastian, Chisom Chukwumerije
Purpose: To test the hypothesis that supernatural agents (SAs) appear in nightmares and dreams in association with evidence of diminished agency within the dreamer/dream ego. Methods: Content analyses of 120 nightmares and 71 unpleasant control dream narratives. Results: We found that SAs overtly occur in about one quarter of unpleasant dreams and about half of nightmares. When SAs appear in a dream
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Forgetting in Social Chains: The Impact of Cognition on Information Propagation Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2018-08-13 Jose Drost-Lopez, Alin Coman
Listening to a speaker selectively practicing previously encoded information leads to better memory for the practiced information, but at the same time results in induced forgetting of related memories. These effects have been found to occur due to the concurrent, and covert, retrieval of information on the part of the listener. Using a modified version of the method of serial reproduction (Bartlett
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Socioeconomic Differences in Parental Communication About Location Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2018-08-13 María del Rosario Maita, Daniela Jauck, Seamus Donnelly, Olga Peralta
This study explored whether parental directions about location differ by socioeconomic status ( SES ) and whether children’s performance is associated with parental spatial directions. We designed a task in which parents hid a toy in one of five identical boxes in a small-scale space, and then verbally guided their children’s search. Middle- SES ( MSES ) parents employed more language in general than
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Shame as a Culture-Specific Emotion Concept Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2018-08-13 Dolichan Kollareth, Jose-Miguel Fernandez-Dols, James A. Russell
On the assumption that shame is a universal emotion, cross-cultural research on shame relies on translations assumed to be equivalent in meaning. Our studies here questioned that assumption. In three studies ( N s, 108, 120, 117), shame was compared to its translations in Spanish ( verguenza ) and in Malayalam ( nanakedu ). American English speakers used shame for the emotional reaction to moral failures
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Individual Choose-to-Transmit Decisions Reveal Little Preference for Transmitting Negative or High-Arousal Content Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2018-03-28 Florian van Leeuwen, Nora Parren, Helena Miton, Pascal Boyer
Research on social transmission suggests that people preferentially transmit information about threats and social interactions. Such biases might be driven by the arousal that is experienced as part of the emotional response triggered by information about threats or social relationships. The current studies tested whether preferences for transmitting threat-relevant information are consistent with
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Costs do not Explain Trust among Secular Groups Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2018-03-28 John H. Shaver, Susan DiVietro, Martin Lang, Richard Sosis
Many human groups achieve high levels of trust and cooperation, but these achievements are vulnerable to exploitation. Several theorists have suggested that when groups impose costs on their members, these costs can function to limit freeriding, and hence promote trust and cooperation. While a substantial body of experimental research has demonstrated a positive relationship between costs and cooperation
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Seeking Common Cause between Cognitive Science and Ethnography: Alternative Logic in Cooperative Action Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2018-03-28 Thomas Widlok, Keith Stenning
Alternative logics have been invoked periodically to explain the systematically different modes of thought of the subjects of ethnography: one logic for ‘us’ and another for ‘them’. Recently anthropologists have cast doubt on the tenability of such an explanation of difference. In cognitive science, [Stenning and van Lambalgen, 2008] proposed that with the modern development of multiple logics, at least
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