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Explaining Mythical Composite Monsters in a Global Cross-Cultural Sample Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2023-12-15 Timothy W. Knowlton, Seán G. Roberts
Composite beings (“monsters”) are those mythical creatures composed of a mix of different anatomical forms. There are several scholarly claims for why these appear in the imagery and lore of many societies, including claims that they are found near-universally as well as those arguments that they co-occur with particular sociocultural arrangements. In order to evaluate these claims, we identify the
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The Soul: A Psychological Enquiry Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2023-11-10 Frederic Peters
Soul beliefs are universal among religious folk but vary tremendously from culture to culture, In fact, in tribal societies without formal religious dogmas, soul beliefs can vary from individual to individual. A review of notions regarding the soul (or souls) amongst tribal and post-tribal societies does evidence, nonetheless, a recurring pattern of focus on the soul envisaged as the vital life energy
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Sympathetic Magic: A Psychological Enquiry Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2023-11-10 Frederic Peters
Sympathetic magic features strongly in virtually all religious traditions and in folk customs generally. Scholars agree that It is based on the association of ideas perceived as external, mind-independent causal realities, as connections mediating causal influence. Moreover, religious folk believe that this mediation involves forms of supernatural agency. From a psychological perspective, the key question
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Bound to Share or Not to Care. The Force of Fate, Gods, Luck, Chance and Choice across Cultures Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2023-09-05 Renatas Berniūnas, Audrius Beinorius, Vilius Dranseika, Vytis Silius, Paulius Rimkevičius
People across cultures consider everyday choices in the context of perceived various external life-determining forces: such as fate and gods (two teleological forces) and such notions as luck and chance (two non-teleological forces). There is little cross-cultural evidence (except for a belief in gods) showing how people relate these salient notions of life-determining forces to prosociality and a
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Could Religions Augment Cooperation by Recruiting Hamilton’s Rule through the Use of Fictive Kinship Language? Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2023-09-05 Andrew Ross Atkinson
Some scholars have raised the potential functional role of fictive kinship for religion, generally. This paper seeks to develop that idea. It is argued in this paper that fictive kinship language in religion (and some other non-religious contexts) recruits traits connected to Hamilton’s rule as it is expressed in Homo sapiens psychology. The effect is that cooperation is augmented within a population
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Cross-Cultural Language Awareness: Contrasting Scenarios of Literacy Learning Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2023-09-05 Norbert Francis, Silvia-Maria Chireac, John McClure
In the research on literacy learning the concept of language awareness has come forward as a unifying framework for understanding the underlying knowledge that supports ability in reading and writing. Consensus is gathering around the idea that language awareness is an essential foundation. If subsequent work in this area confirms it, this factor may turn out to be the key cognitive-domain explanation
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Cultural Conceptualization of Congratulatory Happy Events in British English and Turkish: A Cross-Cultural Perspective Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2023-09-05 Hümeyra Can, Çiler Hatipoğlu
This study investigates the cultural conceptualization of congratulatory happy events in British English and Turkish and discusses them cross-culturally. A lexical search was carried out in various corpora from the newspaper genre using the verbs congratulate in English and its dictionary counterparts tebrik etmek and kutlamak in Turkish along with their various lexical forms, which not only report
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Deeper than Belief: Intuitive Judgment as a Context-Driven Process Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2023-09-05 Jacob Lang, Christin Körner, Annett Körner
Based on “laws” of contagion and similarity, it is understood that people tend to believe that meanings associated with one object may be transferred onto another, and the meanings of the first may “contaminate” the second. The perceived contamination may influence the individual’s way of interacting with the object. We aimed to produce a rich description of individual differences that predict intuitive
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Differences in Experienced Memory Qualities between Factual and Fictional Events Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2023-09-05 Pierre Gander, Robert Lowe
The experienced qualities of memories of factual and fictional events have been little researched previously. The few studies that exist find no or few differences. However, one reason to expect differences in memory qualities is that processing of fact and fiction seem to involve activation of different brain areas. The present study expands earlier research by including a wider range of memory qualities
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The Effects of Foreign Language and Religiosity on Moral Decisions: Manipulating Norms and Consequences Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2023-09-05 Elyas Barabadi, Mohsen Rahmani Tabar, James R. Booth
The primary purpose of this study was to examine the association of foreign language use and religiosity to moral decision-making in the context of a realistic set of scenarios about the COVID-19 pandemic. We used the CNI model in which four variants of a single dilemma manipulated norms and consequences, which are the defining characteristics of deontology and utilitarianism, respectively. A secondary
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Emotion Understanding in Polish Children: A Cross-Cultural Comparison between Polish, British, and Italian Children Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2023-09-05 Małgorzata Stępień-Nycz, Marta Białecka-Pikul, Yulong Tang, Francisco Pons
Emotion understanding (EU) is the capacity to understand the nature, causes, and consequences of the emotional experience of the self and others. The cultural differences and similarities in the development of EU are still not well recognized, especially within Slavic culture and language. We tested 180 Polish children aged 5–11 years using the Test of Emotion Comprehension and compared their results
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Native Ontological Framework Guides Causal Reasoning: Evidence from Wichi People Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2023-09-05 Matías Fernández Ruiz, Andrea Taverna
Causal cognition – how we perceive, represent and reason about causal events – are fundamental to the human mind, but it has rarely been approached in its cultural specificity. Here, we investigate this core concept among Wichi people, an indigenous group living in Chaco Forest. We focus on the Wichi, because their epistemological orientations and explanatory frameworks about ecosystem differ importantly
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Past Life Meditation Decreases Existential Death Anxiety and Increases Meaning in Life among Individuals Who Believe in the Paranormal Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2023-09-05 Claire White, Miguel Farias
Despite their growing popularity, little is known about the psychological effects of participating in past-life meditation groups in contemporary western contexts. We conducted a study to re-create some of the conditions observed in the field by facilitating a group of adults interested in exploring past life meditation. Before the session, participants completed a survey about their afterlife beliefs
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Affective and Motivational Accounts of Moralizing COVID-19-Preventive Behaviors Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2023-04-06 Reina Takamatsu, May Cho Min, Jiro Takai
The purpose of this study was to investigate the role of perceived vulnerability to disease, emotions (disgust, anger), and perceived norms in predicting moral judgments of anti-COVID-19-preventive behaviors in US and Japan. A total of 442 Japanese and 365 American participants completed an online survey. Disgust and anger mediated the link between perceived vulnerability to disease (germ aversion)
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The Computations Underlying Religious Conversion: A Bayesian Decision Model Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2023-04-06 Francesco Rigoli
Inspired by recent Bayesian interpretations about the psychology underlying religion, the paper introduces a theory proposing that religious conversion is shaped by three factors: (i) novel relevant information, experienced in perceptual or in social form (e.g., following interaction with missionaries); (ii) changes in the utility (e.g., expressed in an opportunity to raise in social rank) associated
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Dangerous Speech: A Cross-Cultural Study of Dehumanization and Revenge Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2023-04-06 Jordan Kiper, Christine Lillie, Richard A. Wilson, Brock Knapp, Yeongjin Gwon, Lasana T. Harris
Dehumanization is routinely invoked in social science and law as the primary factor in explaining how propaganda encourages support for, or participation in, violence against targeted outgroups. Yet the primacy of dehumanization is increasingly challenged by the apparent influence of revenge on collective violence. This study examines critically how various propaganda influence audiences. Although
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Distance from a Cultural Prototype and Psychological Distress in Urban Brazil: A Model Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2023-04-06 William W. Dressler, Mauro C. Balieiro, José Ernesto dos Santos
The metaphor of culture as a space or environment of meaning is widely employed. Going beyond metaphor, we present a model of culture as a 3-dimensional Euclidean space, using data from Brazil on cultural models of life goals. The dimensions of this space are defined by degree of sharing of culture (cultural competence); alternate configurations of that shared meaning (residual agreement); and social
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Further Applications of Social Cognition to Göbekli Tepe Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2023-04-06 Tracy B. Henley, Stephen Reysen
Göbekli Tepe is an archaeological site that has challenged much prior thought on human history with respect to our Neolithic revolution from animistic, egalitarian, hunter-gatherers to settled, socially stratified, and religious peoples. In the present paper we review the structures and possible purposes of Göbekli Tepe, summarize past considerations of the connection between psychological concepts
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The Moral Foundations of Left-Wing Authoritarianism: On the Character, Cohesion, and Clout of Tribal Equalitarian Discourse Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2023-04-06 Justin E. Lane, Kevin McCaffre, F. LeRon Shults
Left-wing authoritarianism remains far less understood than right-wing authoritarianism. We contribute to literature on the former, which typically relies on surveys, using a new social media analytic approach. We use a list of 60 terms to provide an exploratory sketch of the outlines of a political ideology – tribal equalitarianism – with origins in 19th and 20th century social philosophy. We then
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Morality is in the Cultural Eye of the Beholder: A Situation Sampling Study Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2023-04-06 Akiko Matsuo
Shweder et al. (1997) proposed the three domains of morality: Autonomy, Community, and Divinity. This study used situation sampling to explore how people from Japan and the U.S. interpret moral transgressions provided in their own and another cultural context. Specifically, the analysis tested whether participants with one cultural background recognize culturally congruent moral transgressions as violations
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The R.A.S.H. Mentality of Radicalization Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2023-04-06 Pierre Lienard, Michael Moncrieff
In the study of the process of radicalization, precedence has been given to answering ‘how’ questions over the exact qualification of the concept of radicalization itself. What does it mean to be radicalized? What are the cognitive entailments of such state? What are the features that make radicalization recognizable? We rely on a game theoretic model to characterize the essence of what it is to be
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Understanding Maternal Rewards and Their Subtypes between Gender and Culture with Adolescents Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2023-04-06 Nicole M. Summers-Gabr
The effects of parent rewards on youth outcomes have been studied extensively; however, research has not systematically categorized parent rewards. Centralizing the analysis of rewards within a given study would help compare the prevalence of reward types at superordinate and subordinate levels. Moreover, it could reveal which level is the most effective for assessing cultural group similarities and
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Children’s Pedagogical Competence and Child-to-Child Knowledge Transmission: Forgotten Factors in Theories of Cultural Evolution Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2022-10-10 Fanxiao Wani Qiu, Henrike Moll
Theories of cultural evolution tend to agree that teaching is one of the most powerful social learning mechanisms whereby knowledge gets passed on from one generation to the next. Researchers have mainly focused on the communicative signals adults produce when teaching. Natural pedagogy theory, for example, discusses how adults’ use of ostensive communication leads children to adopt a learning stance
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Cultural Conservatism Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2022-10-10 Olivier Morin
Trying to preserve cultural forms as faithfully as possible is a key motivation for cultural transmission. This paper reviews two possible accounts of it. One, evolutionary conservatism, is premised on the superiority of accumulated cultural knowledge compared to individual judgement – a theme that runs strongly through both the cultural evolution literature and conservative political philosophy. I
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The Cultural Evolution of Information Seeking Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2022-10-10 Joëlle Proust
The mechanisms of selection, assimilation and transmission at work in cultural accumulation need to include evaluative processes for detecting informational lacunae and repair mechanisms. Novelty, interest, learnability of alternative concepts and practices need to be permanently monitored at the individual and at the group level. It is proposed that the evaluative mechanisms that control cultural
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From Copying to Coordination: An Alternative Framework for Understanding Cultural Learning Mechanisms Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2022-10-10 Mathieu Charbonneau, James W. A. Strachan
Copying has been a productive paradigm for the study of cultural learning. Copying is about information transmission, the success of which is measured by the similarity of knowledge between models and learners. In this paper, we identify some shortcomings in the use of copying mechanisms (e.g., imitation, emulation) as explanations of cultural learning, emphasizing their focus on the flow of information
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‘Imitation Is the Sincerest Form of’ … Cultural Evolution, or Is It? Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2022-10-10 Emma Flynn
Culture and cultural transmission is underpinned by social learning, allowing an individual to adopt the traditions of one’s cultural group by interacting with others. Here I describe studies which demonstrate the role of imitation, the copying of methods and outcomes of behaviour, on cultural sustainability and innovation. Through diffusion studies with children using artificial fruits, the transmission
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The Institution as an Explanatory Mechanism in Cultural Evolution: A Review of Three Theories Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2022-10-10 Ryan Nichols
The purpose of this paper is to stimulate productive research on institutions from within cultural evolutionary science and, especially, philosophy of science. It aims to achieve this goal by distinguishing between three types of question a theory of institutions ought to answer; by comparing and analyzing three theories of institutions; and by raising, for each theory, potential challenges and questions
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Reputation Management and Cultural Evolution Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2022-10-10 Hugo Mercier
Sociologists and social psychologists have long seen reputation management as an important human motivation. More recently, evolutionary analyses have helped understand the function of reputation management, demonstrating the fitness consequences of being thought of as dominant, moral, or competent. Here, I argue that reputation management likely plays an important, but understudied, role in cultural
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What Sort of Mind/Brain Is Compatible with Cultural Adaptation? Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2022-10-10 Peter J. Richerson, Robert T. Boyd
Cultural evolution is substantially driven by agentic forces and rather less by the random variation and natural selection that dominate the evolution of genes. Reinforcement based decisions (attractors) keep cultural evolution tolerably on track of genetic fitness. Reinforcement can come from a variety of proximate mechanisms ranging from rather general-purpose appetites and emotions to highly specific
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Counterfactual Thinking Made in a Relevant Choice and Negative Consequences Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2022-07-27 Juan F. Muñoz-Olano, Glenys J. Ruiz-Zapata
The counterfactual thinking cannot be only developed in early childhood, but it also could be a requirement for the causal reasoning. In this research a replica of German (1999) was made using counterfactual stories with Latin American kids between three and four years, demonstrating the possible main role counterfactual reasoning, by using computer animations. This was a different approach to the
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Cultural Conventions as Group-Makers Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2022-07-27 Marc Slors
In most literature on human cultural evolution and the emergence of large-scale cooperation, the main function of cultural conventions is described as providing group-markers. This paper argues that cultural conventions serve another purpose as well that is at least as important. Large-scale cooperation is characterized by complex division of labour and by a diversity of social roles associated with
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The Dead May Kill You Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2022-07-27 Claire White, Maya Marin, Daniel M. T. Fessler
There is considerable evidence that beliefs in supernatural punishment decrease self-interested behavior and increase cooperation amongst group members. To date, research has largely focused on beliefs concerning omniscient moralistic gods in large-scale societies. While there is an abundance of ethnographic accounts documenting fear of supernatural punishment, there is a dearth of systematic cross-cultural
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Forty-Eight Classical Moral Dilemmas in Persian Language: A Validation and Cultural Adaptation Study Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2022-07-27 Sajad Sojoudi, Azra Jahanitabesh, Javad Hatami, Julia F. Christensen
Moral dilemmas are a useful tool to investigate empirically, which parameters of a given situation modulate participants’ moral judgment, and in what way. In an effort to provide moral judgment data from a non-WEIRD culture, we provide the translation and validation of 48 classical moral dilemmas in Persian language. The translated dilemma set was submitted to a validation experiment with N = 82 Iranian
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Grains of Description in Biological and Cultural Transmission Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2022-07-27 Pierrick Bourrat, Mathieu Charbonneau
The question of whether cultural transmission is faithful has attracted significant debate over the last 30 years. The degree of fidelity with which an object is transmitted depends on 1) the features chosen to be relevant, and 2) the quantity of details given about those features. Once these choices have been made, an object is described at a particular grain. In the absence of conventions between
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Human-Animal Similarity and the Imageability of Mental State Concepts for Mentalizing Animals Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2022-07-27 Esmeralda G. Urquiza-Haas, Kurt Kotrschal
The attribution of mental states (MS) to other species typically follows ascala naturaepattern. However, “simple” mental states, including emotions, sensing, and feelings are attributed to a wider range of animals as compared to the so-called “higher” cognitive abilities. We propose that such attributions are based on the perceptual quality (i.e.imageability) of mental representations related toMSconcepts
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Merit Is Not Meritorious Everywhere: Fairness in First and Third Party Tasks among Kogi Children Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2022-07-27 Rafael G. Angarita, Hugo Viciana
Experimental research has studied the emergence of fairness criteria such as merit and equality at increasingly younger ages. How much does the recognition and practice of these principles depend on the influence of central aspects of Western educated and industrialized societies? In an attempt to answer these questions, this article provides evidence regarding the choices of children in the Kogi indigenous
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Moral Foreign Language Effect on Responses to the Trolley Dilemma amongst Native Speakers of Arabic Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2022-07-27 Gabriel Andrade
Trolley dilemmas have been tested cross-culturally, but only recently have researchers begun to assess the effect of responding to such dilemmas in a foreign language. Previous studies have found a Moral Foreign Language Effect (MFLE) in trolley dilemmas, whereby subjects who respond to these dilemmas in a foreign language, tend to offer more utilitarian responses. The present study seeks to test whether
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“Black CNN”: Cultural Transmission of Moral Norms through Narrative Art Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2022-07-27 Jan Horský
In recent debates in moral psychology and literary Darwinism, several authors suggested that narrative art plays a significant role in the process of the social learning of moral norms, functioning as storage of locally salient moral information. However, an integrative view, which would help explain the inner workings of this morally educative function of narrative art, is still lacking. This paper
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Buckets of Steam and Left-handed Hammers. The Fool’s Errand as Signal of Epistemic and Coalitional Dominance Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2022-03-11 Radu Umbreș
In various professional groups, experts send rookies on absurd tasks as a joke. The fool’s errand appears in factories and hospitals, in elite schools and scout camps, among soldiers, sailors, and airmen. Why are newcomers deceived and humiliated, and why are pranks relatively similar and remarkably persistent over time? I propose that the cultural success and the recurrent features of the fool’s errand
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Cultural Metaphors in Hungarian Folk Songs as Repositories of Folk Cultural Cognition Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2022-03-11 Judit Baranyiné Kóczy
The paper explores the status of NATURE metaphors in Hungarian folk songs with respect to their representation and transmission of folk culture and worldview. Employing a Cultural Linguistic analysis, metaphors are observed from three perspectives: in relation to cultural schemas, generic-level conceptual metaphors, and experiential motivation. NATURE metaphors are to a large extent framed by cultural
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The Development of Theory of Mind in Saudi Children Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2022-03-11 Ruba Abdelmatloub Moawad
Theory of Mind is considered a person’s ability to understand his or her own mind and the minds of others, it includes a social-cognitive skill with implications for many aspects of children’s life, such as social competence, peer acceptance and early success in school. The aims of this research were to study the development of Theory of Mind and to investigate differences in the performance of Theory
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Experimental Philosophy of Mind: Free Will and a Scientific Conception of the World: A Cross-Cultural Survey on Iran’s Revolution Generation and Contemporary Europeans Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2022-03-11 Morteza Izadifar
Experimental philosophy has been engaged in many fields of philosophy and has tried to challenge philosophy from a new horizon. In this article, I have tried to examine what the role of sciences are (especially neuroscience) in altering people’s intuition about free will. Could science educate people’s philosophical intuitions? If yes, should we still rely on their intuition as a rational instrument
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How Shame and Guilt Influence Perspective Taking: A Comparison of Turkish and German Cultures Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2022-03-11 Sinem Söylemez, Mehmet Koyuncu, Oliver T. Wolf, Belgüzar Nilay Türkan
Shame and guilt are negative social emotions that are sensitive to culture, and findings from past research have suggested that shame impairs perspective-taking cognitive ability more than guilt does. However, to the best of our knowledge, there is a lack of research that has considered culture and experimentally tested the effect of shame and guilt on perspective-taking. Taking an experimental perspective
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The Memorability of Supernatural Concepts: Some Puzzles and New Theoretical Directions Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2022-03-11 Joseph Sommer, Julien Musolino, Pernille Hemmer
We evaluate the literature on the memorability of supernatural concepts (e.g., gods, ghosts, souls), itself part of a growing body of work in the emerging cognitive science of religion (Barrett, 2007). Specifically, we focus on Boyer’s (1994a, 2000, 2001) Minimally Counterintuitive (MCI) hypothesis according to which supernatural concepts tap a cognitively privileged memory-enhancing mechanism linked
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Modeling Emotion Contagion within a Computational Cognitive Architecture Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2022-03-11 Ron Sun, Joseph Allen, Eric Werbin
The issue of emotion contagion has been gaining attention. Humans can share emotions, for example, through gestures, through speech, or even through online text via social media. There have been computational models trying to capture emotion contagion. However, these models are limited as they tend to represent agents in a very simplified way. There exist also more complex models of agents and their
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Network Structure Impacts the Synchronization of Collective Beliefs Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2021-12-13 Madalina Vlasceanu, Michael J. Morais, Alin Coman
People’s beliefs are influenced by interactions within their communities. The propagation of this influence through conversational social networks should impact the degree to which community members synchronize their beliefs. To investigate, we recruited a sample of 140 participants and constructed fourteen 10-member communities. Participants first rated the accuracy of a set of statements (pre-test)
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Numerical Origins: The Critical Questions Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2021-12-13 Karenleigh A. Overmann
Four perspectives on numerical origins are examined. The nativist model sees numbers as an aspect of numerosity, the biologically endowed ability to appreciate quantity that humans share with other species. The linguistic model sees numbers as a function of language. The embodied model sees numbers as conceptual metaphors informed by physical experience and expressed in language. Finally, the extended
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Serpent Handling: Toward a Cognitive Account – Honoring the Scholarship of Ralph W. Hood Jr. Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2021-12-13 Thomas J. Coleman, Christopher F. Silver, Jonathan Jong
The ritual handling of serpents remains an unnoticed cultural form for the explanatory aims and theoretical insights desired by cognitive scientists of religion. In the current article, we introduce the Hood and Williams archives at The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga that contains data culled from Hood’s 40-plus year career of studying serpent handlers. The archives contain hundreds of hours
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To Give or to Receive? The Role of Giver Versus Receiver on Object Tracking and Object Preferences in Children and Adults Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2021-12-13 Nicholaus S. Noles, Susan A. Gelman, Sarah Stilwell
For adults, ownership is a concept that rests on principles and connections that apply broadly – whether the owner is the self or someone else, and whether the self is giver or receiver. The present studies tested whether preschool children likewise treat ownership in this abstract fashion. In Experiment 1, 20 children and 24 adults were assigned to be either “givers” or “receivers.” They were then
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Are Children Sensitive to What They Know?: An Insight from Yucatec Mayan Children Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2021-10-14 Sunae Kim, Olivier Le Guen, Beate Sodian, Joélle Proust
Metacognitive abilities are considered as a hallmark of advanced human cognition. Existing empirical studies have exclusively focused on populations from Western and industrialized societies. Little is known about young children’s metacognitive abilities in other societal and cultural contexts. Here we tested 4-year-old Yucatec Mayan (a rural native population from Mexico) by adopting a metacognitive
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Being Easy to Communicate Might Make Verdicts Based on Confessions More Legitimate Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2021-10-14 Hugo Mercier, Anne-Sophie Hacquin, Nicolas Claidière
In many judicial systems, confessions are a requirement for criminal conviction. Even if confessions are intrinsically convincing, this might not entirely explain why they play such a paramount role. In addition, it has been suggested that confessions owe their importance to their legitimizing role, explaining why they could be required even when other evidence has convinced a judge. But why would
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A Cathedral with Disconnected Chapels? Reassessing the Cognitive Capacities of Neanderthals in Light of Recent Archaeological Discoveries Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2021-10-14 Cheng Liu
The reconstruction of hominins’ cognitive evolution has always been a crucial but challenging task. Researchers from various disciplines have tried to approach this issue, among which British archaeologist Steven Mithen’s cathedral model is regarded as one of the earliest and most creative attempts. In this model, he proposed that the Neanderthal’s mind is like a cathedral with disconnected chapels
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The Counterintuitiveness of Supernatural Dreams and Religiosity Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2021-10-14 Andreas Nordin, Pär Bjälkebring
One challenge for cognitive, evolutionary and anthropological studies of religion is to offer descriptions and explanatory models of the morphology and functions of supernatural dreaming, and of the religiosity, use of experience, and cultural transmission that are associated with these representations. The anthropological and religious studies literature demonstrates that dreaming, dream experience
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Did a Little Birdie Really Tell Odin? Applying Theory of Mind to Old Norse Religion Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2021-10-14 Declan Taggart
Theory of mind, the theory that humans attribute mental states to others, has become increasingly influential in the Cognitive Science of Religion in recent years, due to several papers which posit that supernatural agents, like gods, demons, and the dead, are accredited greater than normal knowledge and awareness. Using Old Norse mythology and literary accounts of Old Norse religion, supported by
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Do You Approach Positive Events or Do They Approach You? Linking Event Valence and Time Representations in a Dutch Sample Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2021-10-14 Annemijn C. Loermans, Bjorn B. de Koning, Lydia Krabbendam
In order to think and talk about time, people often use the ego- or time-moving representation. In the ego-moving representation, the self travels through a temporal landscape, leaving past events behind and approaching future events; in the time-moving representation, the self is stationary and temporal events pass by. Several studies contest to the psychological ramifications of these two representations
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Narrow and Broad Faculties in System 1 and System 2: Toward Consensus in the Debate on Modularity Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2021-10-14 Norbert Francis
Research on learning, the structure of attained knowledge, and the use of this competence in performance has repeatedly returned to longstanding proposals about how to better understand proficient use of knowledge and how humans acquire it. The following article takes up an exchange between Chiappe & Gardner (2011) and Barrett & Kurzban (2012) on the concept of modularity, one of these proposals. Despite
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The Associations among Moral Foundations, Political Ideology, and Social Issues: A Study of These Associations in an Asian Sample Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2021-06-01 I. J. Hsieh, Yung Y. Chen
This study examined the relationships among moral foundations, political ideology, and controversial social issues in an Asian culture. The study sample included 835 participants who completed a moral foundations questionnaire and three questions regarding attitudes toward social issues (i.e. nuclear power usage, the death penalty, and euthanasia), and a political ideology questionnaire. Results indicated
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Does “Faith” in Science Correlate with Indicators of Well-Being?: Evidence for Differential Effects by Gender Journal of Cognition and Culture Pub Date : 2021-06-01 Anondah Saide, Kevin McCaffree, Rebekah Richert
Religion has long been theorized to serve important functions for societies and individuals; specifically, as a source of knowledge about what is real and as a source of norms prescribing how individuals should behave. However, science and scientists appear to be playing an increasingly large role in public discourse. A majority of adults in the U.S. report interest in science and an increasing number