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Spreading Non-natural Concepts: The Role of Intuitive Conceptual Structures in Memory and Transmission of Cultural Materials
Abstract
The four experiments presented support Boyer's theory that counterintuitive concepts have transmission advantages that account for the commonness and ease of communicating many non-natural cultural concepts. In Experiment 1, 48 American college students recalled expectation-violating items from culturally unfamiliar folk stories better than more mundane items in the stories. In Experiment 2, 52 American college students in a modified serial reproduction task transmitted expectation-violating items in a written narrative more successfully than bizarre or common items. In Experiments 3 and 4, these findings were replicated with orally presented and transmitted stimuli, and found to persist even after three months. To sum, concepts with single expectation-violating features were more successfully transmitted than concepts that were entirely congruent with category-level expectations, even if they were highly unusual or bizarre. This transmission advantage for counterintuitive concepts may explain, in part, why such concepts are so prevalent across cultures and so readily spread. Peer Reviewed http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/43711/1/10881_2004_Article_brill_15677095_v1n1_s4.pdf
... In experiments, for example, subjects do not choose the narratives that are transmitted, and these narratives often hail from cultures with which subjects are unfamiliar. For example, Bartlett used the Kathlamet story "The War of the Ghosts" (Boas, 1901), while Barrett and Nyhoff (2001) used stories from Erdoes and Ortiz's (1984) collection of Native North American tales. In both of these studies, subjects were non-Natives; consequently, they were not personally invested in the information being transmitted and were thus unlikely to be highly motivated to communicate or memorize it accurately. ...
... Under such conditions, both storytellers and audiences are more invested in accurate replication of the transmitted material. Barrett and Nyhoff (2001) acknowledge many of these shortcomings, noting for example that their initial experiment examined recall immediately after transmission, "whereas in natural settings transmission of a concept may occur long after exposure to the concept," and that "real world transmission involves actual face to face interactions, hearing different versions from multiple speakers, and the effects of telling stories multiple times" (Barrett & Nyhoff, 2001:83-84). This brings us to yet another difference between experimental models and real-world storytelling: variants. ...
... Paralanguage. Style, too, is another important component of performed narrative that is absent from transmission models and tests of narrative memorability (e.g., Barrett & Nyhoff, 2001;Boyer & Ramble, 2001;Upal et al., 2007). For example, one of the most paradigmatic features of oral storytelling is the pronounced use of what linguists refer to as paralanguage and psychologists refer to as ostensive communication (Sperber & Wilson, 1986), motherese (Fernald, 1985), or natural pedagogy (Csibra & Gergely, 2009). ...
... Initial empirical tests of the MCI hypothesis lent support to the main predictions of Boyer's account in Western adults (Barrett & Nyhof, 2001;Johnson et al., 2010), children (Banerjee et al., 2013), and non-Western populations as well (Boyer & Ramble, 2001). In these experiments, memorability for supernatural concepts is assessed relative to intuitive (INT) control concepts with equivalent numbers of characteristics. ...
... Since the advent of Boyer's pioneering ideas, the empirical predictions of the MCI account have been supported by findings in Western adults (Barrett & Nyhof, 2001;Johnson et al., 2010), children (Banerjee et al., 2013), and non-Western populations (Boyer & Ramble, 2001). These studies find that MCI concepts have improved memorability relative to intuitive concepts, and that this mnemonic advantage decreases as the number or complexity of violations grows. ...
... Stimuli range from concepts of the form noun + characteristic, as in "A lizard that could never die no matter how old it was" (Banerjee et al., 2013), to more elaborate descriptions such as "A being that can see or hear things no matter where they are. For example, it could make out the letters on a page in a book hundreds of miles away and the line of sight is completely obstructed" (Barrett & Nyhof, 2001), to items like "closing cat" and "thirsty door" (Norenzayan & Atran, 2004). ...
We introduce the first set of stimuli designed to resolve methodological and theoretical issues that have muddled the interpretation of results on the memorability of supernatural concepts (e.g., ghosts, souls, spirits), an important line of research in the cognitive science of religion (Barrett, 2007). We focus here on Boyer’s (1994), Boyer, 2001) pioneering minimally counterintuitive (MCI) hypothesis according to which supernatural concepts tap a special memory-enhancing mechanism linked to violations of default intuitive inferences. Empirical tests of the MCI account have given rise to a vexed picture that renders meaningful interpretation difficult. The lack of a common standard of comparison among different studies, coupled with the presence of uncontrolled variables independently known to affect memorability, lie at the heart of these problems. We show that our new stimuli offer the hope of resolving these issues, thereby establishing a more secure foundation for the study of the memorability of supernatural concepts.
... As anthropologist Dan Sperber asked in 1985, what makes some '[narratives and concepts] more successful … more contagious, more 'catching' than others?' (Sperber 1985: 74). In response, a number of studies have been carried out, focusing on the memorability of types of concepts (Boyer and Ramble 2001;Norenzayan et al. 2006;Nyhof and Barrett 2001;Stubbersfield et al. 2017). These studies have found that many psychological and ecological factors influence the extent to which a narrative achieves cultural success, but human psychology places constraints on the memorability and transmission of narratives. ...
... If MCI narrative elements enjoy a better long-term recall than other concepts, they should dominate religions, folktales, and myths at a greater rate than Norenzayan et al. suggested. However, Norenzayan et al. (2006: 534) cites the study by Nyhof and Barrett (2001) which supports their hypothesis of the advantage of MCI elements in memory. Nyhof and Barrett (2001) reported their study where participants were divided into two groups, one that was told an entirely intuitive narrative, and the other was told a narrative with MCI elements. ...
... However, Norenzayan et al. (2006: 534) cites the study by Nyhof and Barrett (2001) which supports their hypothesis of the advantage of MCI elements in memory. Nyhof and Barrett (2001) reported their study where participants were divided into two groups, one that was told an entirely intuitive narrative, and the other was told a narrative with MCI elements. The recall advantage was observed when the group told a story with MCI elements after a three-month delay. ...
Diversity in Archaeology is the result of the fourth Cambridge Annual Student Archaeology Conference (CASA 4), held virtually from January 14–17, 2021. CASA developed out of the Annual Student Archaeology Conference, first held in 2013, which was formed by students at Cambridge, Oxford, Durham and York. In 2017, Cambridge became the home of the conference and the name was changed accordingly. The conference was developed to give students (from undergraduates to PhD candidates) in archaeology and related fields the chance to present their research to a broad audience.
The theme for the 2020/2021 conference was Diversity in Archaeology which opened our conference to multiple interpretations, varied presentations and sundry perspectives from different regions of the world. This volume consists of 30 papers which were presented in 7 different sessions. The papers present a great variety in both geography and chronology and explore a wide range of topics such women’s voices in archaeological discourse; researching race and ethnicity across time; use of diversified science methods in Archaeology; critical ethnographic studies; diversity in the Archaeology of Death; heritage studies; archaeology of ‘scapes’ and more.
... Furthermore, analogous to the metacognitive explanation-based theory of surprise (e.g., Foster & Keane, 2019;Klein et al., 2021), implausible items could lead to better memory because more effort is required for trying to fit the information into one's knowledge representation, regardless of whether the information does eventually fit (Friedman, 1979). This may explain the findings by Nyhof and Barrett (2001), who showed that participants' recall of counterintuitive story details (a jumping rose) was better than their recall of common (a crumpled newspaper) and unusual (a bright pink newspaper) details, even though the counterintuitive story details were not possible in the real world. In this case, the context in which the information was presented (fictional stories) may have allowed for or even facilitated the recall of counterintuitive information. ...
... Regarding the implausible items, there are conflicting hypotheses. On the one hand, implausible items are expected to stand out and trigger sensemaking processes (Cimbalo, 1978;Kelley & Nairne, 2001;Nyhof & Barrett, 2001), suggesting that participants would show superior recall of these statements, similar to surprising statements that are considered plausible. Alternatively, if participants quickly and automatically dismiss implausible items (Richter et al., 2009), this will likely result in reduced memory compared to plausible items (van Moort et al., 2020). ...
It has been demonstrated that surprising information often leads to better recall. Yet, this might not apply to information that is considered to be implausible. The present study examines how surprise and plausibility judgments relate to participants’ memory for numerical statements. Participants performed an estimation task in which they were presented with an incomplete numerical fact (e.g., X out of 10 bus drivers are women) for which they were asked to provide an estimation. After being presented with an answer, they indicated how surprised they were about the answer and whether they found the answer plausible. Next, participants performed a memory test to examine the effects of surprise and plausibility on recall of the presented answers. Finally, 24–48 hr later, participants provided new estimations for the numerical statements to examine whether participants had integrated the presented answer into their knowledge representation. A U-shaped relation between surprise and memory recall was found for recall on Day 1, with unsurprising and highly surprising items being remembered better than moderately surprising items. Importantly, the relationship between surprise and recall was only found for plausible items. Next, new estimations on Day 2 indicated that unsurprising and plausible items were incorporated into participants’ knowledge representation more often than surprising and implausible items. Taken together, our findings support the notion that surprise enhances memory but also show that metacognitive judgments influence this effect. Moreover, our findings revealed that enhanced recall does not necessarily mean the information is fully incorporated into participants’ knowledge representation.
... Content biases occur when evolved attentional, affective, ontological, and/or other systems are triggered by certain properties of cultural artifacts, thereby increasing the odds that the artifact will be copied. These include threat bias (e.g., Blaine & Boyer, 2018), social bias (e.g., Stubbersfield, Tehrani, & Flynn, 2015), stereotype consistency bias (e.g., Lyons & Kashima, 2006), negative bias (e.g., Acerbi, 2019); emotion bias (e.g., Stubbersfield, Flynn, & Tehrani, 2017), and minimally counterintuitive (MCI) bias (e.g., Barrett & Nyhoff, 2001;Norenzayan, Atran, Faulkner, & Schaller, 2006), among others. In contrast, the biased transformation model (e.g., Sperber, 1985) posits that cultural traits are reinterpreted and transformed to greater or lesser degrees by variables such as the receiver's cognitive biases, pre-existing knowledge, or individual learning. ...
... Experimental research, too, indicates that the triggering of cognitive and perceptual biases does not produce completely faithful story copies. In a series of four experiments using culturally unfamiliar folk stories, Barrett and Nyhoff (2001) found that subjects recalled minimally counterintuitive items better than mundane items in the stories. If these findings are representative of oral story transmission in general, then over time we would expect the practical ("mundane") information encoded in myth (e.g., how to make fire, glue, a canoe, etc.) to be lost. ...
For most of human evolution, accumulated cultural knowledge has been stored in memory and transmitted orally. This presents a daunting information management problem: how to store and transmit this knowledge in a portable format that resists corruption. One solution--widespread among foragers--is to encode knowledge in narrative. However, this strategy depends on accurate performance of the story. Significantly, some forager cultures have rules regulating myth performance, although the extent of this phenomenon is unknown. We hypothesize that these rules subserve high-fidelity transmission across generations. Accordingly, we predicted that, across forager cultures, myth-telling rules will mandate: (P1) transmission by the most proficient storytellers (P2) under low-distraction conditions with (P3) multiple individuals and (P4) multiple generations present, and the application of measures that (P5) prevent, identify, and/or correct errors, (P6) maintain audience attention, (P7) discourage rule violations and/or (P8) incentivize rule compliance. To test these predictions, we searched the forager ethnographic record for descriptions of myth performance and coded them for prescriptions/proscriptions regarding narrator age, performance context, audience composition, narrative delivery, and audience comportment, as well as sanctions associated with rule transgression or compliance. Results indicate that rules regulating myth performance are widespread across forager cultures and are characterized by features that reduce the likelihood of copy errors. These findings help elucidate the role that anthropogenic ratchets played in the emergence of cumulative culture.
... Several studies have found that concepts which are counterintuitive are advantaged in individual memory. An advantage for counterintuitive concepts in short-and longerterm recall has been demonstrated in studies using Native American folk tales and original vignettes in US samples (Barrett & Nyhof, 2001), and in samples from France, Nepal, and Gabon, suggesting a strong, cross-cultural effect of counterintuitive concepts in memory (Boyer & Ramble, 2001). Further studies using lists which varied in the relative proportion of intuitive and counterintuitive concepts found that lists which contain a minority of counterintuitive concepts relative to a majority of intuitive concepts are best recalled, rather than lists of mostly or wholly counterintuitive concepts (Norenzayan et al., 2006), hence minimally counterintuitive bias. ...
... Further studies using lists which varied in the relative proportion of intuitive and counterintuitive concepts found that lists which contain a minority of counterintuitive concepts relative to a majority of intuitive concepts are best recalled, rather than lists of mostly or wholly counterintuitive concepts (Norenzayan et al., 2006), hence minimally counterintuitive bias. An advantage for counterintuitive content has also been found in recall-based transmission using original vignettes (Barrett & Nyhof, 2001), and again was found in cross-cultural samples (Gregory, Greenway, & Keys, 2019), and biological counterintuitive information has been found to play a more important role in faithful transmission than prestige bias (Berl et al., 2021). Upal, Gonce, Tweney, and Slone (2007) argues that MCI bias is adaptive as an intelligent agent should evolve to preferentially recall those events or objects which violate the agent's expectations "but can be justified once they have been observed" (Upal et al., 2007, p. 432) and that MCI "concepts of ghosts and gods, when they appear in myths and folk tales, meet these requirements" (p. ...
Cultural evolution theory proposes that information transmitted through social learning is not transmitted indiscriminately but is instead biased by heuristics and mechanisms which increase the likelihood that individuals will copy particular cultural traits based on their inherent properties (content biases) and copy the cultural traits of particular models, or under particular circumstances (context biases). Recent research suggests that content biases are as important, or more important, than context biases in the selection and faithful transmission of cultural traits. Here, evidence for biases for emotive, social, threat-related, stereotype consistent and counterintuitive content is reviewed, focusing on how these biases may operate across three phases of transmission: choose-to-receive, encode-and-retrieve, and choose-to-transmit. Support for some biases primarily functioning as biases of attention and memory, while others primarily function as biases of selection to share with others, and the implications for this in wider cultural evolution is discussed. Ultimately, a more consistent approach to examining content biases, and greater engagement with wider literature, is required for clear conclusions about their mechanism and potential differences across the three phases of transmission.
... Among these problems, a critical one is about information evolution, a phenomenon referring to the dynamic variation of information content during its diffusion (e.g., spatial heterogeneity of neural information representation in the brain [35][36][37][38] and opinion polarization in social networks [39][40][41][42][43][44] ). Even though the significant roles of information content and its evolution in shaping diffusion processes have been empirically discovered 34,[45][46][47][48][49][50][51] , information evolution has not been considered in conventional information diffusion models because the particle-like information entirety is not applicable to represent content variation dynamics. Although recent efforts have been devoted to introduce information content into the analysis of information diffusion (e.g., see Refs. ...
... Similar empirical instances, to name a few, can be seen in Refs. [49][50][51] . Compared with these empirical studies, our fourth contribution is to demonstrate that characteristics of information selectivity (e.g., distribution and diversity) in a complex network intrinsically determine the quantities of information invariants and the distortion speeds of variable parts of information contents during information diffusion. ...
Many biological phenomena or social events critically depend on how information evolves in complex networks. However , a general theory to characterize information evolution is yet absent. Consequently, numerous unknowns remain about the mechanisms underlying information evolution. Among these unknowns, a fundamental problem, being a seeming paradox, lies in the coexistence of local randomness, manifested as the stochastic distortion of information content during individual-individual diffusion, and global regularity, illustrated by specific non-random patterns of information content on the network scale. Here, we attempt to formalize information evolution and explain the coexistence of randomness and regularity in complex networks. Applying network dynamics and information theory, we discover that a certain amount of information, determined by the selectivity of networks to the input information, frequently survives from random distortion. Other information will inevitably experience distortion or dissipation, whose speeds are shaped by the diversity of information selectivity in networks. The discovered laws exist irrespective of noise, but the noise accounts for the intensification. We further demonstrate the ubiquity of our discovered laws by analyzing the emergence of neural tuning properties in the primary visual and medial temporal cortices of animal brains and the emergence of extreme opinions in social networks. Information dynamically evolves during its diffusion in complex networks (e.g., from individuals to individuals).
... Минимально контринтуитивные концепции запоминаются и передаются повторно с большей готовностью, чем интуитивные или чрезмерно контринтуитивные концепции. Эксперименты, направленные на изучение воспоминаний, показывают, что минимально контринтуитивные концепции и убеждения обладают когнитивным преимуществом в механизмах памяти и трансмиссии по сравнению с интуитивными концепциями и повседневными убеждениями (Barrett, Nyhof 2001). Результаты были получены немедленно, а также после трехмесячной отсрочки в образцах из Соединенных Штатов, Франции, Габона, Непала (Boyer, Ramble 2001), а также из Майя (Atran, Norenzayan 2004). ...
Understanding religion requires explaining why supernatural beliefs, devotions, and rituals are both universal and variable across cultures, and why religion is so often associated with both large-scale cooperation and enduring group conflict. Emerging lines of research suggest that these oppositions result from the convergence of three processes. First, the interaction of certain reliably developing cognitive processes, such as our ability to infer the presence of intentional agents, favors—as an evolutionary by-product—the spread of certain kinds of counterintuitive concepts. Second, participation in rituals and devotions involving costly displays exploits various aspects of our evolved psychology to deepen people’s commitment to both supernatural agents and religious communities. Third, competition among societies and organizations with different faith-based beliefs and practices has increasingly connected religion with both within-group prosociality and between-group enmity. This connection has strengthened dramatically in recent millennia, as part of the evolution of complex societies, and is important to understanding cooperation and conflict in today’s world.
... Cognitive theories of religion often focus on specific religious phenomena and try to explain the mechanisms behind them from an evolutionary byproduct perspective (Martin, 2009). The studies by Barrett and Nyhof (2001) are an example of this. They investigated recall of counterintuitive concepts that violate expectations of ontological categories, which are believed to have a mnemonic advantage and therefore be prevalent in religious stories (see the section on evolutionary by-product theories above). ...
... Both the original Bartlett study and its recent follow-ups found that people selectively retain information that is coherent with the narrator and renarrator's prior conceptions (schemata) and therefore reproduce and even distort information in ways that assimilate the stories to the schemata available to them (e.g., refs. [15][16][17][18]. For example, when folk tales from another culture, "weird stories" for Bartlett's British audience, were passed down a transmission chain, many of the folk tales' supernatural elements were removed and replaced (14). ...
Like biological species, words in language must compete to survive. Previously, it has been shown that language changes in response to cognitive constraints and over time becomes more learnable. Here, we use two complementary research paradigms to demonstrate how the survival of existing word forms can be predicted by psycholinguistic properties that impact language production. In the first study, we analyzed the survival of words in the context of interpersonal communication. We analyzed data from a large-scale serial-reproduction experiment in which stories were passed down along a transmission chain over multiple participants. The results show that words that are acquired earlier in life, more concrete, more arousing, and more emotional are more likely to survive retellings. We reason that the same trend might scale up to language evolution over multiple generations of natural language users. If that is the case, the same set of psycholinguistic properties should also account for the change of word frequency in natural language corpora over historical time. That is what we found in two large historical-language corpora (Study 2): Early acquisition, concreteness, and high arousal all predict increasing word frequency over the past 200 y. However, the two studies diverge with respect to the impact of word valence and word length, which we take up in the discussion. By bridging micro-level behavioral preferences and macro-level language patterns, our investigation sheds light on the cognitive mechanisms underlying word competition.
... . Various types of content bias have been identified (Stubbersfield, 2022): survival bias, a preference for content related to life and death or health (Nairne & Pandeirada, 2008); social bias, a preference for content related to social interaction and social relationships between individuals (Mesoudi et al., 2006); emotional bias, a preference for content that arouses some emotion highly (Eriksson & Coultas, 2014;Heath et al., 2001;Nichols, 2002); stereotype consistency bias, a preference for content that matches stereotypes (Clark & Kashima, 2007;Kashima, 2000;Lyons & Kashima, 2006); and minimally counterintuitive (MCI) bias, a preference for content that minimally violates intuitive expectations, such as physical laws (Barrett & Nyhof, 2001;Boyer, 1994;Norenzayan et al., 2006). ...
This study aimed to investigate norm bias, a novel type of content bias, in cultural transmission. Using online vignettes with 106 participants, we investigated whether participants preferred normative information over social information. Following the method of Stubbersfield et al. (2015), we examined norm bias in three transmission phases: choose-to-receive, encode-and-retrieve, and choose-to-transmit. The results showed that normative bias was preferred over social bias in the choose-to-retrieve and choose-to-transit phases, but not in the encode-and-retrieve phase, suggesting that normative information may be more likely to be transmitted over social information.
... Moreover, multiple-dyad WOM, where countless senders and receivers have interactions, has become more common in new media channels (Chen & Yuan, 2020;Mendoza et al., 2010;Stoica, 2020;Wang et al., 2018). The most important characteristic of multidyad WOM is that the initial senders' messages become increasingly distorted as they are transmitted to the second, third, and subsequent receivers (Barrett & Nyhof, 2001;Melumad et al., 2021;Tan et al., 2016). Given the current status of new media, it is necessary to understand the various phases of information transmission, including WOM retransmission, to better understand the entire process of information diffusion via WOM. ...
Recently, word of mouth (WOM) has gained increasing strategic importance. The rising prevalence of communication via social media has made information retransmission through WOM a new norm. However,
although several WOM studies have revealed that information becomes distorted as it is disseminated and that WOM retransmission tends to distort information, the phenomenon of information distortion in the WOM retransmission context remains relatively underexplored. This study examined the role of two key factors (retransmitter intention and source expertise) in WOM retransmission and how they influence the distortion of WOM information in terms of information sources and content. Two carefully designed experiments revealed that a retransmitter’s persuasive (vs. informative) intention increases (1) information distortion, including exaggeration of its content, and (2) information source distortion when the source has relatively less expertise. These findings expand the scholarly understanding of WOM communication and offer managerial insights into viral marketing strategies.
... Experimental research, too, indicates that the triggering of cognitive and perceptual biases does not produce completely faithful story copies. In a series of four experiments using culturally unfamiliar folk stories, Barrett and Nyhoff (2001) found that subjects recalled minimally counterintuitive items better than mundane items in the stories. If these findings are representative of oral story transmission in general, then over time we would expect the practical ("mundane") information encoded in myth (e.g., how to make fire, glue, a canoe, etc.) to be lost. ...
For most of human evolution, accumulated cultural knowledge has been stored in memory and transmitted orally. This presents a daunting information management problem: how to store and transmit this knowledge in a portable format that resists corruption. One solution--widespread among foragers--is to encode knowledge in narrative. However, this strategy depends on accurate performance of the story. Significantly, some forager cultures have rules regulating myth performance, although the extent of this phenomenon is unknown. We hypothesize that these rules subserve high-fidelity transmission across generations. Accordingly, we predicted that, across forager cultures, myth-telling rules will mandate: (P1) transmission by the most proficient storytellers (P2) under low-distraction conditions with (P3) multiple individuals and (P4) multiple generations present, and the application of measures that (P5) prevent, identify, and/or correct errors, (P6) maintain audience attention, (P7) discourage rule violations and/or (P8) incentivize rule compliance. To test these predictions, we searched the forager ethnographic record for descriptions of myth performance and coded them for prescriptions/proscriptions regarding narrator age, performance context, audience composition, narrative delivery, and audience comportment, as well as sanctions associated with rule transgression or compliance. Results indicate that rules regulating myth performance are widespread across forager cultures and are characterized by features that reduce the likelihood of copy errors. These findings help elucidate the role that anthropogenic ratchets played in the emergence of cumulative culture.
... This is because of Barret and McCauley's insistence that defining counterintuitiveness as violation of maturationally natural knowledge means that context can be ignored. Barrett & Nyhof (2001) claim that this is necessary in order to explain cross-cultural success of religious concepts: ...
Traditional cognitive scientists of religion (CSR) have argued that memorability for minimally counterintuitive concepts is a distinct phenomenon unconnected with distinctiveness effect and the von restorff effect. I argue that this assumption flies in the face of cognitive science bias towards unified theories of cognition which dictates that we should assume that two similar seeming behaviors arise from the same cognitive processes unless we have strong evidence to believe otherwise. Furthermore, the traditional CSR approach is unable to explain the success of some of the most widespread religious beliefs such as the belief in God or spread of religious concepts (such as NRM beliefs) in the modern world. The context-based model not only redeems the historical and sociocultural study of religion as an essential complement for a cognitive science of religion, but it also provides a systematic way of integrating the two in developing a truly scientific approach to the study of religion.
... Those that survived the test of time should, by definition, be more memorable. Both the original Bartlett study and its recent follow-ups found that people selectively retain information that is coherent with the narrator and re-narrator's pre-existing preconceptions (in Bartlett's terminology "schemas") and therefore reproduce and even distort information in ways that assimilate the stories to the schemata available to them (e.g., Barrett & Nyhof, 2001;Bangerter, 2000;Mesoudi & Whiten, 2004;Kashima, 2000). ...
Like biological species, competition for survival is a constant among words in language. Previously, it has been shown that language evolves in response to cognitive constraints and over time becomes more learnable. Here, we use two complementary research paradigms to demonstrate how survival of words can be predicted by psycholinguistic properties that impact language production. In the first study, we analyzed survival of words in the context of inter-personal communication. We used a large-scale serial reproduction experiment in which stories were passed down along a transmission chain over multiple participants. The result shows that words that are acquired earlier in life, more concrete, more arousing, and more emotional have better chance to survive retellings. We reason that the same trend might scale up to language evolution over multiple generations of natural language users. If that is correct, the same set of psycholinguistics properties should also account for the change of word frequency in natural language corpora over evolutionary time. That is what we found in two large historical language corpora (study 2): early acquisition, concreteness and high arousal all predicts increasing word frequency over the past 200 years. By bridging micro-level behavioral preferences and macro-level language patterns, our study sheds light on the evolutionary mechanism of word competition.
... W zarządzaniu wiedza o wyobrażeniach kontrintuicyjnych powinna być interesująca z tego względu, że przy zachowaniu pewnych dodatkowych warunków (Norenzayan, Atran 2004;Gonce et al. 2006;Slone et al. 2007;Upal 2010;Porubanova-Norquist et al. 2014) są one skuteczniejsze w przyciąganiu ludzkiej uwagi, w konsekwencji lepiej się także utrwalają (zarówno w ludzkiej pamięci, jak i w przekazie międzyosobniczym) (Boyer 2005(Boyer : 82-87, 1998Boyer, Ramble 2001;Barrett, Nyhof 2001). Dzieje się tak, gdyż jako wyobrażenia zaskakujące i nietypowe wyróżniają się na tle wyobrażeń zgodnych z ludzkimi intuicyjnymi oczekiwaniami, a jednocześnie -z uwagi na jeszcze wyraźne związki z wrodzonymi kategoriami ontologicznymi -są wciąż dla naszych umysłów łatwe do wytworzenia czy zachowania w pamięci. ...
Managing the Mythical Mind The aim of the article is to consider whether the mental mechanisms essential for the functioning of a myth, used effectively for many years in culture-creating activities (especially in the area of art and entertainment), can also be applied to the processes of cultural management. The hypothesis of such a possibility is based on the belief that the same properties of human cognitive architecture that account for the popularity of the form of myth are (or can be) used to shape specific attitudes and actions. In particular, this applies to such properties of myth as narrative communication, fiction, worldview referencing, concepts of agency, as well as counterintuitive imagery and primary metaphors. The article is a theoretical study based on a review of literature in the field of the theory of myth and cognitive science, discussing the perspective of the application of findings made at the intersection of these two domains in management theory and practice as well as potential empirical research in this area.
... An analogous approach would be to consider BST's role in the wider context of religion (Whitehouse, , 2012. For instance, do minimally counterintuitive concepts (MCI; Boyer, 2002;Nyhof & Barrett, 2001) serve a similar affiliative function as action sequences that are perceived as irretrievably opaque? Future research might establish whether socially and goal-driven motivations modulate the fidelity with which certain story elements and narratives are retold, thus further exploring the reach of BST's explanatory potential. ...
The target article elaborates upon an extant theoretical framework, “Imitation and Innovation: The Dual Engines of Cultural Learning.” We raise three major concerns: (1) There is limited discussion of cross-cultural universality and variation; (2) overgeneralization of overimitation and omission of other social learning types; and (3) selective imitation in infants and toddlers is not discussed.
... Emotion not only impacts information processing at an individual level but also the propagation of information through communities. Research has showed that contexts high in emotionality result in high information propagation rates (Harber & Cohen, 2005), in the "viral" success of New York Times articles (Berger & Milkman, 2012), and in communicative advantages in dyadic interactions (Barrett & Nyhof, 2001). It is notable that during times of crisis, this enhanced propagation of information-be it from public sources or routine interactions among individuals-could easily backfire and result in the spread of inaccurate information. ...
The diffusion of accurate knowledge about diseases in the population is of critical concern to public health officials. This is because an informed public should be in a position to make better decisions, especially when these decisions impact other individuals, as is the case during pandemics. This article is aimed at presenting current research on the acquisition and propagation of medical knowledge in social networks under conditions of high perceived risk of viral infection. I will review recent psychological findings to show how anxiety associated with high perceived risk of infection could (a) negatively impact information processing, (b) activate motivational frames of processing, and (c) exacerbate the adoption of misinformation. Finally, I make specific recommendations for how to maximize accurate information dissemination and minimize the spread of misinformation.
... For example, the CT that 9/11 was an inside job adopts commonly accepted facts about the event and adds the (deviating) idea of a blasting by the U.S. government. The synergy of common sense and alternative elements increases the recall (and probably the appeal) of a narrative (Barrett & Nyhof, 2001). In terms of content, the violation of common sense in (especially monotheistic) religions and CTs often includes invisible forces at play (e.g., God or intelligence services), and the explanatory style suggests further similarities like using anomalies as explanatory starting points and offering explanations that tend to be unfalsifiable (Keeley, 2018). ...
Religious and conspiracy beliefs share the feature of assuming powerful forces that determine the fate of the world. Correspondingly, they have been theorized to address similar psychological needs and to be based on similar cognitions, but there exist little authoritative answers about their relationship. We delineate two theory‐driven possibilities. If conspiracy theories and religions serve as surrogates for each other by fulfilling similar needs, the two beliefs should be negatively correlated. If conspiracy and religious beliefs stem from the same values and cognitions, this would speak for a positive correlation that might be diminished—for example—by controlling for shared political ideologies. We approached the question with a meta‐analysis (N = 10,242), partial correlations from large Christian‐dominated datasets from Germany, Poland, and the United States (N = 12,612), and a preregistered U.S. study (N = 500). The results indicate that the correlations between religiosity and conspiracy theory endorsement were positive, and political orientation shared large parts of this covariance. Correlations of religiosity with the more need‐related conspiracy mentality differed between countries. We conclude that similarities in the explanatory style and ideologies seem to be central for the relation between intrinsic religiosity and endorsing conspiracy theories, but psychological needs only play a minor role.
... For example, the CT that 9/11 was an inside job adopts commonly accepted facts about the event and adds the (deviating) idea of a blasting by the US government. The synergy of common-sense and alternative elements increases the recall (and probably the appeal) of a narrative (Barrett & Nyhof, 2001). Content-wise, the violation of common-sense in (especially monotheistic) religions and CTs often includes invisible forces at play (e.g., God or intelligence services) and the explanatory style suggests further similarities like using anomalies as explanatory starting points and offering explanations that tend to be unfalsifiable (Keeley, 2018). ...
Religious and conspiracy beliefs share the feature of assuming powerful forces that determine the fate of the world. Correspondingly, they have been theorized to address similar psychological needs and be based on similar cognitions, but there exist little authoritative answers about their relationship. We delineate two theory-driven possibilities. If conspiracy theories and religions serve as surrogates for each other by fulfilling similar needs, the two beliefs should be negatively correlated. If conspiracy and religious beliefs stem from the same values and cognitions, this would speak for a positive correlation that might be diminished—for example—by controlling for shared political ideologies. We approached the question with a meta-analysis (N = 10,242), partial correlations from large Christian-dominated datasets from Germany, Poland, and the USA (N = 12,612), and a preregistered US-study (N = 500). The results indicate that the correlations between religiosity and conspiracy theory endorsement were positive and political orientation shared large parts of this covariance. Correlations of religiosity with the more need-related conspiracy mentality differed between countries. We conclude that similarities in the explanatory style and ideologies seem to be central for the relation between intrinsic religiosity and endorsing conspiracy theories, but psychological needs only play a minor role.
... Under such a view, high-fidelity transmission is achieved through convergent transformations; that is, individuals with the same goal will give rise to similar cultural products through shared cognitive skills, goals, and environments (30,31). This view has recently received support from theoretical, experimental, and field studies on cultural evolution in humans (32)(33)(34)(35)(36)(37) and nonhuman primates (31,38) and is also in line with studies on language evolution (39). For instance, arguments transmitted along transmission chains could become degraded and then fully reconstructed through deductive reasoning (40). ...
Understanding the evolution of human technology is key to solving the mystery of our origins. Current theories propose that technology evolved through the accumulation of modifications that were mostly transmitted between individuals by blind copying and the selective retention of advantageous variations. An alternative account is that high-fidelity transmission in the context of cumulative technological culture is supported by technical reasoning, which is a reconstruction mechanism that allows individuals to converge to optimal solutions. We tested these two competing hypotheses with a microsociety experiment, in which participants had to optimize a physical system in partial- and degraded-information transmission conditions. Our results indicated an improvement of the system over generations, which was accompanied by an increased understanding of it. The solutions produced tended to progressively converge over generations. These findings show that technical reasoning can bolster high-fidelity transmission through convergent transformations, which highlights its role in the cultural evolution of technology.
... These examples are linguistic, but a great deal of empirical data shows clear evidence of convergent transformation in a wide range of other cultural domains (e.g. Nyhof and Barrett, 2001;Morin, 2013;Gandon et al., 2014;Miton et al., 2015;Strachan et al., 2020; see also Tennie et al., 2020 on ape culture). ...
Typical examples of cultural phenomena all exhibit a degree of similarity across time and space at the level of the population. As such, a fundamental question for any science of culture is, what ensures this stability in the first place? Here we focus on the evolutionary and stabilising role of ‘convergent transformation’, in which one item causes the production of another item whose form tends to deviate from the original in a directed, non-random way. We present a series of stochastic models of cultural evolution investigating its effects. The results show that cultural stability can emerge and be maintained by virtue of convergent transformation alone, in the absence of any form of copying or selection process. We show how high-fidelity copying and convergent transformation need not be opposing forces, and can jointly contribute to cultural stability. We finally analyse how non-random transformation and high-fidelity copying can have different evolutionary signatures at population level, and hence how their distinct effects can be distinguished in empirical records. Collectively, these results supplement existing approaches to cultural evolution based on the Darwinian analogy, while also providing formal support for other frameworks – such as Cultural Attraction Theory – that entail its further loosening.
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Culture can be produced and maintained by convergent transformation, without copying or selection involved.
... MCI theory was developed not to explain religious concepts as a naturally demarcated conceptual domain (e.g., Barrett, 2017), but rather why some slightly counterintuitive concepts form distinct cultural patterns. Minimally counterintuitive concepts, it was found, are recalled better than maximally counterintuitive ones, and are cognitively optimal in cultural transmission and communication (Nyhof & Barrett, 2001;Boyer & Ramble, 2001). In this way MCI theory provided a cognitive model for why certain concept prevail, are catchier, seize people's attention, and are more memorable than others in a cultural environment, and one crucial factor of such catchiness seems to reside in their relevance and how well they match our human conceptual systems rather than in the concepts themselves. ...
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 and narrative are connected with religious ideas and practices in traditional societies. Scholars have even proposed that dreaming is a primary source of religious beliefs and practice (here labelled DPSR theory). Using Barrett’s coding system, we measured a high frequency of minimally counterintuitive dream content among Hindu Nepalese, and we aim to quantify (1) the relation between counterintuitive imagery and reported likelihood to communicate dreams in general and to religious experts, (2) the relation between counterintuitive imagery and reported religiosity, and (3) the proclivity to communicate SA dreams among those who are more or less religious. These aims will then be related to the broader topic of (4) possible explanatory value of DPSR theory, or versions thereof, by framing the issue at the level of cultural transmission, religiosity and credibility of religious dream representations in relation to MCI theory. The article mainly draws upon data from ethnographic research among Hindu Nepalese.
... Counterintuitive concepts with many violations of expectation (e.g., "a ghost that knows nothing and could never interact with the world"), however, lose their memorability advantage as they cease to hook into existing knowledge and fail to yield many meaningful inferences. Boyer's (2001) account has received empirical support from laboratory experiments with adults from across cultures (e.g., Boyer and Ramble, 2001;Nyhof and Barrett, 2001) and with children (Banerjee et al., 2013). Participants in these studies were asked to recall or retell narratives to others, with results demonstrating a memory advantage for minimally counterintuitive (e.g., "a chair that can float in midair") compared to ordinary (e.g., "a table that can hold a lot of weight") or very counterintuitive concepts (e.g., "a rock that could give birth to a singing teapot"). ...
Epidemiological models of culture posit that the prevalence of a belief depends in part on the fit between that belief and intuitions generated by the mind’s reliably developing architecture. Application of such models to pseudoscience suggests that one route via which these beliefs gain widespread appeal stems from their compatibility with these intuitions. For example, anti-vaccination beliefs are readily adopted because they cohere with intuitions about the threat of contagion. However, other varieties of popular pseudoscience such as astrology and parapsychology contain content that violates intuitions held about objects and people. Here, we propose a pathway by which “counterintuitive pseudoscience” may spread and receive endorsement. Drawing on recent empirical evidence, we suggest that counterintuitive pseudoscience triggers the mind’s communication evaluation mechanisms. These mechanisms are hypothesized to quarantine epistemically-suspect information including counterintuitive pseudoscientific concepts. As a consequence, these beliefs may not immediately update conflicting intuitions and may be largely restricted from influencing behavior. Nonetheless, counterintuitive pseudoscientific concepts, when in combination with intuitively appealing content, may differentially draw attention and memory. People may also be motivated to seek further information about these concepts, including by asking others, in an attempt to reconcile them with prior beliefs. This in turn promotes the re-transmission of these ideas. We discuss how, during this information-search, support for counterintuitive pseudoscience may come from deference to apparently authoritative sources, reasoned arguments, and the functional outcomes of these beliefs. Ultimately, these factors promote the cultural success of counterintuitive pseudoscience but explicit endorsement of these concepts may not entail tacit commitment.
... Boyer's "minimal counterintuitiveness" model has been verified by several empirical studies (Banerjee et al., 2013;Boyer & Ramble, 2001;Upal et al., 2007;Nyhof & Barrett, 2001). Concepts that violate a few intuitions, like a lizard that can never die, are better remembered than concepts that violate no intuitions, like a lizard that eats many insects, or concepts that violate many intuitions, like a lizard that never dies, floats in midair, and turns invisible when it sleeps. ...
Belief in beings without physical bodies is prevalent in present and past religions, from all-powerful gods to demonic spirits to guardian angels to immortal souls. Many scholars have explained this prevalence by a quirk in how we conceptualize persons, intuitively representing their minds as separable from their bodies. Infants have both a folk psychology (for representing the mental states of intentional agents) and a folk physics (for representing the properties of objects) but are said to apply only folk psychology to persons. The two modes of construal become integrated with development, but their functional specialization and initial independence purportedly make it natural for people of all ages to entertain beliefs in disembodied minds. We critically evaluate this thesis. We integrate studies of both children and adults on representations of intentional agents, both natural and supernatural, beliefs about the afterlife and souls, mind transfer, body duplication, and body transplantation. We show that representations of minds and bodies are integrated from the start, that conceptions of religious beings as disembodied are not evident in early ages but develop slowly, and that early-acquired conceptions of religious beings as embodied are not revised by theological conceptions of such beings as disembodied. We argue that belief in disembodied beings requires cultural learning-a learned dualism. We conclude by suggesting that disembodied beings may be prevalent not because we are developmentally predisposed to entertain them but because they are counterintuitive and thus have a social transmission advantage. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).
Control of fire had profound impacts on human evolution; survival in the foraging niche depends heavily on mastery of fire technology for warmth and illumination, hunting and warfare, healing and hygiene, cooking and preserving food, and repelling insects and predators, among other things. Significantly, stories about the acquisition of fire occur in many forager societies, and often exhibit a similar plot structure, with anthropomorphic animals as the main characters. This plot entails the theft of fire by those who lack it because those who possess it refuse to share. Given that many foraging peoples regard their myths as teachings, these narratives may encode local knowledge critical to producing and using fire, as well as social norms related to resource sharing. Additionally, the anthropomorphic characters may encode information about animal traits. If so, we would expect fire acquisition narratives to contain references to: 1) materials for making fire; 2) locations where fire-making materials can be found; 3) fire-making procedures; 4) different uses of fire; (5) fire behaviour and properties; 6) hazards associated with fire use; 7) animal traits; 8) resource hoarding; 9) resource theft; and 10) social norms pertaining to hoarding and theft. To test these predictions, a sample of forager fire myths was analysed for the presence of this information. Results indicate that, across diverse forager cultures, fire acquisition narratives regularly encode local pyrotechnical and zoological knowledge.
The Cambridge Handbook of the Psychology of Prejudice aims to answer the questions: why is prejudice so persistent? How does it affect people exposed to it? And what can we do about it? Providing a comprehensive examination of prejudice from its evolutionary beginnings and environmental influences through to its manifestations and consequences, this handbook is an essential resource for scholars and students who are passionate about understanding prejudice, social change, collective action, and prejudice reduction. Featuring cutting-edge research from top scholars in the field, the chapters provide an overview of psychological models of prejudice; investigate prejudice in specific domains such as race, religion, gender, and appearance; and develop explicit, evidence-based strategies for disrupting the processes that produce and maintain prejudice. This handbook challenges researchers and readers to move beyond their comfort zone, and sets the agenda for future avenues of research, policy, and intervention.
Minimally counterintuitive (MCI) theory has been proposed to explain common features inherent in supernatural, mythological, or religious concepts across diverse cultural traditions. According to this theory, these concepts often embody an optimal balance of counterintuitive elements, enhancing their cognitive attraction and likelihood of widespread transmission. Previous research has explored the prevalence of minimal counterintuitiveness in characters portrayed in various folkloristic and religious written materials. Here, we extend this investigation to examine the presence of minimal counterintuitiveness in yokai, Japanese monstrous beings. Using Barrett’s MCI coding scheme, we analyzed 54 unique entities described in “Yōkai Zukan”, a compilation of four materials written before the Westernization of Japan. Our findings, in line with previous research, demonstrate that 92.5% of the entities exhibit a minimal number of counterintuitive traits. The result highlights the applicability of the MCI theory to the analysis of Japanese monstrous beings that were recorded in Japan before Westernization.
The cognitive science of religion (CSR) research program aims to deliver theories and mechanisms using scientific-style causal explanations for ‘complex cultural concepts’ (CCCs) deemed ‘religious’ by social actors. Their explanandum is the phenomena of CCCs deemed ‘religion,’ and their explanans cognitive theories and mechanisms. In this research report, an exploration of these cognitive theories and mechanisms will take form. The main focus of this exploration is the construction of theories and mechanisms in CSR using evolutionary psychology and anthropology. Regarding the evolutionary by-product hypothesis, this includes Anthropomorphism Theory (1.1), Folk Theory (1.2), Theory of Mind (1.3), Hyperactive Agency Detection Device (1.4), Minimally Counterintuitives (1.5), and Ritual Form Hypothesis (1.6); regarding the dual-inheritance hypothesis, this includes Divergent Modes of Religiosity (2.1), Adaptative Prosociality (2.2), and Hazard-Precaution System (2.3); regarding the adaptationist hypothesis, this includes Group Cohesion and Kin Selection (3.1), Costly Religious Signalling (3.2), Sexual Selection Theory (3.3), and Supernatural Punishment Theory (3.4). This exploration tries to provide an up-to-date overview of the most explored theories and mechanisms of CSR–from the scholars who created them to contemporary CSR research that develops them.
Cognitive science of religion (CSR) is an interdisciplinary research project focusing on the cognitive foundations of religion. The aim of this article is to discuss the specificity of CSR and demonstrate that, although it is part of cognitive science, it can also be seen as an anthropological paradigm in its own right. I argue that such a view can be supported by highlighting the importance of cultural anthropology for the SCR genesis (especially the role of anthropological theories and the resulting research methods, the involvement of anthropologists in the emergence of the new paradigm) and stressing the way in which contemporary anthropology benefits from theories formulated within CSR, the debates they generate and inter-institutional collaborations. Thus, I wish to highlight the dual nature of CSR as part and parcel of both cognitive science and contemporary psychological anthropology.
Interactionism holds that explanatory and interpretive projects are mutually enriching. If so, then the evolutionary and cognitive science of religions’ explanatory theories should aid interpretive projects concerning religious meaning. Although interpretive accounts typically focus on the local and the particular, interpreters over the past century have construed Freud and Marx as offering general interpretive theories. So, precedent for general interpretive theorizing exists. 4E cognitive science, which champions how cognition is embedded in natural and cultural settings, extended into external structures, enacted via motor routines, and embodied via representations rooted in human bodily form, has encouraged interpretive researchers. Theories of embodied cognition especially have embraced a sweeping view of meaning that attends to the emotions’ role and to their evolutionary origins. That inspires a 6E cognitive science that attends to the emotional and evolved dimensions of cognition too and opens up the possibility of general interpretive theories of broadly Darwinian character. Evolved cognitive systems qualify as maturationally natural cognition, which exhibits a distinctive constellation of features. The by-product theory holds that religious representations’ engagement of maturationally natural cognition fosters religions’ success. Representations with some minimal violation of intuitive expectations concerning some ontological category grab attention, stick in memory, and preserve the many automatic inferences accompanying the category. The empirical evidence for this and other elaborations of the by-product view suggests that it discloses dynamics of evolved cognition and associated emotions that tend to guide the pursuit of religious meanings systematically toward well-worn grooves in the semantic landscape.
Stories have played a central role in human social and political life for thousands of years. Despite their ubiquity in culture and custom, however, they feature only peripherally in formal government policymaking. Government policy has tended to rely on tools with more predictable responses—incentives, transfers, and prohibitions. We argue that stories can and should feature more centrally in government policymaking. We lay out how stories can make policy more effective, specifying how they complement established policy tools. We provide a working definition of stories’ key characteristics, contrasting them with other forms of communication. We trace the evolution of stories from their ancient origins to their role in mediating the impact of modern technologies on society. We then provide an account of the mechanisms underlying stories’ impacts on their audiences. We conclude by describing three functions of stories— learning, persuasion, and collective action.
The minimally counterintuitive (MCI) thesis in the cognitive science of religion proposes that supernatural concepts are prevalent across cultures because they possess a common structure-namely, violations of intuitive ontological assumptions that facilitate concept representation. These violations are hypothesized to give supernatural concepts a memorability advantage over both intuitive concepts and "maximally counterintuitive" (MXCI) concepts, which contain numerous ontological violations. However, the connection between MCI concepts and bizarre (BIZ) but not supernatural concepts, for which memorability advantages are predicted by the von Restorff (VR) effect, has been insufficiently clarified by earlier research. Additionally, the role of inferential potential (IP) in determining MCI concepts' memorability has remained vague and only rarely controlled for. In a pre-registered experiment, we directly compare memorability for MCI and MXCI concepts, compared to BIZ concepts, while controlling for IP as well as degree of bizarreness. Results indicate that when IP and bizarreness are controlled for, memorability of counterintuitive and BIZ concepts-relative to intuitive control concepts-is similar across concepts with one, two, and three characteristics. Findings suggest that the MCI and VR effects may be manifestations of the same underlying mechanisms.
The bifocal stance theory (BST) of cultural evolution has prompted a wide-ranging discussion with broadly three aims: to apply the theory to novel contexts; to extend the conceptual framework; to offer critical feedback on various aspects of the theory. We first discuss BST's relevance to the diverse range of topics which emerged from the commentaries, followed by a consideration of how our framework can be supplemented by and compared to other theories. Lastly, the criticisms that were raised by a subset of commentaries allow us to clarify parts of our theory.
For some time interest has been growing in a dialogue between modern scientific research into human cognition and research in the humanities. This ground-breaking volume focuses this dialogue on the religious experience of men and women in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds. Each chapter examines a particular historical problem arising from an ancient religious activity and the contributions range across a wide variety of both ancient contexts and sources, exploring and integrating literary, epigraphic, visual and archaeological evidence. In order to avoid a simple polarity between physical aspects (ritual) and mental aspects (belief) of religion, the contributors draw on theories of cognition as embodied, emergent, enactive and extended, accepting the complexity, multimodality and multicausality of human life. Through this interdisciplinary approach, the chapters open up new questions around and develop new insights into the physical, emotional, and cognitive aspects of ancient religions.
Cultural Transmission covers psychological, developmental, social, and methodological research on how cultural information is socially transmitted from one generation to the next within families. Studying processes of cultural transmission may help analyze the continuity or change of cultures, including those that have to cope with migration or the collapse of a political system. An evolutionary perspective is elaborated in the first part of the book; the second takes a cross-cultural perspective by presenting international research on development and intergenerational relations in the family; the third provides intra-cultural analyses of mechanisms and methodological aspects of cultural transmission. Made up of contributions by experts in the field, this source book is intended for anyone with interests in cultural issues – especially researchers and teachers in disciplines such as psychology, social and behavioral sciences, and education – and for applied professionals in culture management and family counseling, as well as professionals dealing with migrants.
Curiosity plays a key role in directing learning throughout the lifespan. Prior work finds that violations of expectations can be powerful triggers of curiosity in both children and adults, but it is unclear which expectation-violating events induce the greatest curiosity and how this might vary over development. Some theories have suggested a U-shaped function such that stimuli of moderate extremity pique the greatest curiosity. However, expectation-violations vary not only in degree, but in kind: for example, some things violate an intuitive theory (e.g., an alligator that can talk) and others are merely unlikely (e.g., an alligator hiding under your bed). Combining research on curiosity with distinctions posited in the cognitive science of religion, we test whether minimally counterintuitive (MCI) stimuli, which involve one violation of an intuitive theory, are especially effective at triggering curiosity. We presented adults (N = 77) and 4- and 5-year-olds (N = 36) in the United States with stimuli that were ordinary, unlikely, MCI, and very counterintuitive (VCI) and asked which one they would like to learn more about. Adults and 5-year-olds chose Unlikely over Ordinary and MCI over Unlikely, but not VCI over MCI, more often than chance. Our results suggest that (i) minimally counterintuitive stimuli trigger greater curiosity than merely unlikely stimuli, (ii) surprisingness has diminishing returns, and (iii) sensitivity to surprisingness increases with age, appearing in our task by age 5.
Religious belief has often been labelled as "irrational belief"; however, in The rationality of heuristic religious belief, Wood (2012) proposed that religion could be understood as a set of heuristic devices that brings sub-optimal solutions to a complex and uncertain world. Wood's philosophical argument successfully reframed rationality from an adaptive perspective, evaluating whether or not such belief increase adaptability in a natural or social environment; however, since his arguments focused on philosophical issues, there is a need for further investigation with empirical studies and theoretical modeling. In the last few decades, studies in the cognitive and evolutionary science of religion have further accumulated findings to support the view of 'religion as a set of adaptive heuristic devices.' Here, we review both the empirical and theoretical literature on religion that could support the adaptive rationality of religious beliefs, specifically focusing on three topics: the adaptive aspects of superstitions, belief in supernatural agents, and rituals. Collectively, findings from these areas support Wood's view that religion can be rational in a sense of adaptation to ecological and social environments. We also discuss ongoing debates over the replicability of findings in the field and encourage further studies to perform more robust tests of the hypothesis.
For some time interest has been growing in a dialogue between modern scientific research into human cognition and research in the humanities. This ground-breaking volume focuses this dialogue on the religious experience of men and women in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds. Each chapter examines a particular historical problem arising from an ancient religious activity and the contributions range across a wide variety of both ancient contexts and sources, exploring and integrating literary, epigraphic, visual and archaeological evidence. In order to avoid a simple polarity between physical aspects (ritual) and mental aspects (belief) of religion, the contributors draw on theories of cognition as embodied, emergent, enactive and extended, accepting the complexity, multimodality and multicausality of human life. Through this interdisciplinary approach, the chapters open up new questions around and develop new insights into the physical, emotional, and cognitive aspects of ancient religions.
Many biological phenomena or social events critically depend on how information evolves in complex networks. However, a general theory to characterize information evolution is yet absent. Consequently, numerous unknowns remain about the mechanisms underlying information evolution. Among these unknowns, a fundamental problem, being a seeming paradox, lies in the coexistence of local randomness, manifested as the stochastic distortion of information content during individual–individual diffusion, and global regularity, illustrated by specific non-random patterns of information content on the network scale. Here, we attempt to formalize information evolution and explain the coexistence of randomness and regularity in complex networks. Applying network dynamics and information theory, we discover that a certain amount of information, determined by the selectivity of networks to the input information, frequently survives from random distortion. Other information will inevitably experience distortion or dissipation, whose speeds are shaped by the diversity of information selectivity in networks. The discovered laws exist irrespective of noise, but noise accounts for disturbing them. We further demonstrate the ubiquity of our discovered laws by analyzing the emergence of neural tuning properties in the primary visual and medial temporal cortices of animal brains and the emergence of extreme opinions in social networks.
In a high‐risk environment, such as during an epidemic, people are exposed to a large amount of information, both accurate and inaccurate. Following exposure, they typically discuss the information with each other. Here, we assess the effects of such conversations on beliefs. A sample of 126 M‐Turk participants rated the accuracy of a set of COVID‐19 statements, including accurate information, inaccurate information, and conspiracy theories (pre‐test). They were then paired and asked to discuss these statements (low epistemic condition) or to discuss only the statements they thought were accurate (high epistemic condition). Finally, they rated the accuracy of the initial statements again (post‐test). We do not find an effect of the epistemic condition on belief change. However, we find that individuals are sensitive to their conversational partners and change their beliefs according to their partners’ conveyed beliefs. In exploratory analyses, we report predictors of believing COVID‐19 conspiracies. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.
Narrative works by allowing us to entertain ideas as “secondary beliefs,” according to J.R.R. Tolkien. Using research in neuropsychology, anthropology, and sociology, this chapter explores the ways in which narrative fictions are held as objects of imagination in the mind by virtue of their ability to silence reality-testing and action-oriented mechanisms in the brain. Narratives can become more salient and memorable if they trigger areas on the brain associated with agency or have elements which are counterintuitive. If memorable enough and if allowed to permeate into the realm of “primary belief,” narrative can also spur individuals on to sacrificial action. Narrative, though, can also be promiscuously applied to conspiracy thinking, cognitive biasing, and groupthink.
We conducted the largest multiple-iteration retelling study to date (12,840 participants and 19,086 retellings) with two different studies that test how emotional appraisals are transmitted across retellings. We use a novel Bayesian model that tracks changes across retellings. Study 1 examines the preservation of appraisals of happy and sad stories and finds that retellings preserve the story's degree of happiness and sadness even when length shrinks and aspects of story coherence and rationalisation deteriorate. Study 2 compared the transmission of appraisals of happiness and sadness with embarrassment, disgust, and risk. Appraisals of happiness, sadness, and also embarrassment showed high appraisal preservation, while disgust and risk were not well preserved. We conclude that participants in our studies encoded happy and sad stories by encapsulating the events and details into an overall emotional appraisal of the story and that this processing strategy might also apply to stories involving other emotions like embarrassment. The emotional appraisal played a key role in retelling by helping to guide the selection, invention, and ordering of the story elements. Hence, we posit that emotion appraisals can operate as anchors for remembering and retelling stories, thus playing an important role in narrative communication.
Where does religion ultimately come from? How did this complex, universal feature of human societies come about and why does it persist? Moreover, how did religion make the transition to the large-scale, institutionalized systems of the late Holocene? There are today lively debates about these issues. This chapter introduces some central views on the origins of religion in CSR, focusing on early contributions and some recent criticisms of these. The chapter explores the views that religion is a biological adaptation, a cultural adaptation, or a by-product. It then looks in detail at some central theories related to the by-product view, such as anthropomorphism, the HADD-theory, and the minimal counterintuitiveness (MCI) theory. The chapter finally touches on the development of the Abrahamic traditions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
In the process of retelling information, individuals often inadvertently transform it to be more consistent with their cultural schemas. We explore the long‐term cultural change inherent in this process, focusing on utterances about cultural tastes as our case study (e.g., music, food, and outdoor hobbies). We use a word embedding model to simulate a “telephone game” where each actor partially hears an utterance, uses their cultural schemas to guess the missing word, and tells the result to the next actor. While laboratory “telephone games” explore short transmission chains of approximately four steps, our approach lets us simulate these chains out to 1000 steps. We find that these chains are often pulled toward powerful “cultural attractors”—essentially points of least resistance where communications end up through transmission error alone. Moreover, some attractors operate across taste domains: transmission chains gravitate toward these attractors regardless of which cultural domain they begin in. The most powerful such attractor we located concerns high‐status, broadly liked food. Taste in food may thus have an underappreciated centrality within personal taste: verbal accounts describing taste in food may be particularly stable across multiple retellings, while accounts about other taste domains may become transformed into accounts of taste in food.
Describes 2 experiments in which 186 university students listened to stories containing scripted activities (e. g., eating at a restaurant) and later received a memory test on the actions. The actions varied in typicality with respect to the scripts. Memory performance at short retention intervals supported the representational assumptions of a "script pointer plus tag" hypothesis that predicts better memory discrimination for atypical than for typical actions and no memory discrimination for very typical actions. Results of Exp I indicate that the relatively poor memory for typical actions was not an artifact of Ss' circumventing memory retrieval; Ss did not prematurely decide that the typical actions "must have been presented." Exp II compared recall and recognition memory after different retention intervals. Assessments of both correct retrieval and guessing differed between recall and recognition tests. For both types of tests, the generic scripts played a more important role in guiding retrieval as the retention interval increased. (42 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
The current status of the concept of distinctiveness an applied to memory research is discussed. In spite of the fact that distinctiveness is difficult to define, an increasing number of memory phenomena have been explained in terms of distinctiveness. These phenomena are grouped into four classes, which vary in how distinctiveness is operationalized. Distinctiveness has different effects on memory performance, depending on how it is defined, suggesting that the concept of distinctiveness has been overapplied. In addition, current theoretical explanations of the effects of distinctiveness on memory fail to specify what the different definitions of distinctiveness have in common, and fail to encompass adequately the broad range of phenomena to be explained. A limited theory of distinctiveness is proposed, in order to explain why conceptually incongruent material is remembered well.
Previous studies have shown that bizarre and common images produce equivalent levels of recall in unmixed-list designs. Using unmixed lists, we tested the view that bizarre images would be less susceptible than common images to common sources of interference. In all experiments, subjects imaged a list of either bizarre or common sentences and then performed some kind of interfering task before recalling the initial list of sentences. Experiment 1 showed that bizarre images were better accessed than common images after imaging an intervening list of common sentences. Also, components of common images tended to be better recalled than those of bizarre images after imaging an intervening list of bizarre sentences. Experiments 2a and 2b showed that interfering tasks consisting of studying lists of common concrete nouns did not differentially affect memory for bizarre and common images. In Experiment 3, labeling and imaging an interfering list of common pictures produced higher recall of bizarre images. Generally, bizarre images appeared to be less susceptible than common images to interference from certain types of common encodings. Importantly, the superior recall of bizarre images was always due to greater image (sentence) access, whereas higher recall of common images was associated with greater recovery of the image (sentence) constituents. Explanation of the precise pattern of results requires consideration of the distinctive properties of bizarre images.
We investigate the problem of how nonnatural entities are represented by examining university students' concepts of God, both professed theological beliefs and concepts used in comprehension of narratives. In three story processing tasks, subjects often used an anthropomorphic God concept that is inconsistent with stated theological beliefs; and drastically distorted the narratives without any awareness of doing so. By heightening subjects' awareness of their theological beliefs, we were able to manipulate the degree of anthropomorphization. This tendency to anthropomorphize may be generalizable to other agents. God (and possibly other agents) is unintentionally anthropomorphized in some contexts, perhaps as a means of representing poorly understood nonnatural entities.
One of the primary functions of natural kind terms (e.g., tiger, gold) is to support inductive inferences. People expect members of such categories to share important, unforeseen properties, such as internal organs and genetic structure. Moreover, inductions can be made without perceptual support: even when an object does not look much like other members of its category, and even when a property is unobservable. The present work addresses how expectations about natural kinds originate. Young children, with their usual reliance on perceptual appearances and only rudimentary scientific knowledge, might not induce new information within natural kind categories. To test this possibility, category membership was pitted against perceptual similarity in an induction task. For example, children had to decide whether a shark is more likely to breathe as a tropical fish does because both are fish, or as a dolphin does because they look alike. By at least age 4, children can use categories to support inductive inferences even when category membership conflicts with appearances. Moreover, these young children have partially separated out properties that support induction within a category (e.g., means of breathing) from those that are in fact determined by perceptual appearances (such as weight). Since we examined only natural kind categories, we do not know to what extent children have differentiated natural kinds from other sorts of categories. Children may start out assuming that categories named by language have the structure of natural kinds and with development refine these expectations.
The effects on memory of two types of bizarre sentences (rarely occurring, or atypical, and never occurring, or illogical) were investigated in comparison with those of common sentences. In Experiment 1, the effects of these three types of sentences, which were presented for 7 sec, were measured in mixed-list conditions. Evidence for the bizarreness effect (advantageous memorial effects of bizarre sentences over common ones) was found only with atypical and common sentences. In Experiment 2, the stimulus presentation time was 35 sec; free-recall and sentence-access performance were superior for the illogical sentences as opposed to the common and the atypical sentences. A proposal based on the assumption that subjects tend to spontaneously modify sentence structure is suggested.
College students imagined animals that might live on a planet somewhere else in the galaxy. In the first experiment, they provided drawings and descriptions of their initial imagined animal, another member of the same species, and a member of a different species. The majority of imagined creatures were structured by properties that are typical of animals on earth: bilateral symmetry, sensory receptors, and appendages. Subjects also allowed shape, appendages and sense receptors to vary often across species but rarely within species. In Experiment 2, subjects′ creations were influenced by correlated attributes; those told that the animal was feathered were more likely to produce creatures with wings and beaks, and those told it lived in water and had scales were more likely to produce creatures with fins and gills relative to subjects who were told the animal was furry or who were given no specific features. Experiments 3 and 4 revealed that many subjects approach the task by retrieving exemplars of known earth animals, but that instructions and task constraints can lead to greater use of broader knowledge frameworks. Experiment 5 revealed that the structuring found in college students′ imagined animals also holds for extraterrestrials developed by science fiction writers. The results are consistent with the idea that similar structures and processes underlie creative and noncreative aspects of cognition, and are discussed in terms of the concept of structured imagination. That is, when subjects create a new member of a known category for an imaginary setting, their imagination is structured by a particular set of properties that are characteristic of that category.
This study examines some of the effects of culturally based knowledge on memory for stories about people performing common activities. Monocultural college students in (a) the United States and (b) Mexico read three brief stories about people going on a date, going home from the office for lunch, and starting a new semester of school. There were two versions of each story, consistent with either a U.S. or a Mexican cultural script. A modified recognition memory test for information in the stories occurred at one of three different delay intervals (immediately after reading the stories, 1/24 hour later, or 1 week later). Results showed that, after 1 week, both groups of subjects misremembered the stories from the other culture as being more like their own culture than they in fact were. The findings were consistent with previous monocultural research and argue that any theory of the effects of script-based knowledge on memory must consider the cultural origin of that knowledge. Problems associated with use of the script or schema construct to describe such knowledge were considered.
Experiment I shows that readers write better summaries of stories for which they have an appropriate schema than for stories for which they lack a schema, and that this effect is related to the overall organization of the story and does not lie at the level of single sentences. Raters who judged the quality of the summaries found summaries from stories that corresponded to a familiar story schema more informative than those from stories for which they did not have an appropriate schema, even when the latter accurately summarized the story in question. In Experiment II, sequential recall of a story which deviated in various ways from the subjects’ story schema resulted in poor performance: the stories tended to break up after a chain of five sequential recalls, in contrast to a well‐structured, schema‐based story that was usually recalled quite completely and without serious distortions. It was suggested that a culture‐specific schema aids both in comprehending and reconstructing stories.
Discusses pictorial perception and the role of pictorial form in recognition. Perception despite incomplete information-the fact that the perceiver imposes perception or enriches the incoming information from the display or constructs his percepts from material other than the information included in the display-is examined. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
controversies have focused on the thesis that perceptual and linguistic decoding processes are modular, much more than on the alleged nonmodularity of thought / defend the view that thought processes might be modular too / articulate a modular view of human thought with the naturalistic view of human culture that [the author has] been developing under the label "epidemiology of representations" / show how, contrary to the received view, organisms endowed with truly modular minds might engender truly diverse cultures (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
The effects of structure and content variables on memory and comprehension of prose passages were studied in two experiments. The experimental passages exemplify a class of simple narrative stories that is described by a generative grammar of plot structures. A comprehension model is proposed that assumes a hierarchical organizational framework of stories in memory, determined by the grammar, representing the abstract structural components of the plot. The quality and characteristics of subjects' memory for stories were tested on a variety of experimental tasks in which story organization was manipulated. Comprehensibility and recall were found to be a function of the amount of inherent plot structure in the story, independent of passage content. Recall probability of individual facts from passages depended on the structural centrality of the facts: Subjects tended to recall facts corresponding to high-level organizational story elements rather than lower-level details. In addition, story summarizations from memory tended to emphasize general structural characteristics rather than specific content. For successively presented stories, both structure and content manipulations influenced recall. Furthermore, repeating story structure across two passages produced facilitation in recall of the second passage, while repeating story content produced proactive interference. The implications for a model of memory for narrative discourse are discussed.
Unusual information is generally recalled better than common information (the distinctiveness effect). Differential processing accounts propose that the effect occurs because unusual material elicits encoding processes that are different from those elicited by common material, and strong versions of these accounts predict distinctiveness effects in between-list as well as within-list designs. Experiment 1 employed a between-list design and manipulated presentation rate. Contrary to differential processing predictions, no distinctiveness effect emerged, nor did recall patterns for atypical versus common sentences differ as a function of presentation rate. Experiment 2 further tested differential processing accounts as well as representation accounts via a within-list manipulation and conditions that included experimenter-provided elaborations. Distinctiveness effects emerged in all conditions and, contrary to differential processing predictions, the pattern of recall in the elaborated conditions did not differ from that in the unelaborated conditions. Taken together, the results of this study lend more support to a representation view that suggests mechanisms related to the representation and subsequent retrievability of elements in the memory record play a major role in the distinctiveness effect.
Bibliography: leaves 72-87 Supported in part by the National Institute of Education under contract no. 400-81-0030
Noncompliance with medical instructions is a major problem in health care. In areas of the world where traditional and Western systems co-exist, failure to follow medical directives has been attributed to the conscious rejection of Western medical beliefs and values by the indigenous population. This study provides evidence that the absence of shared concepts between practitioners and patients may impede even willing compliance. When patients do not possess the background knowledge, or schemata, undergirding the Western practitioners' conclusions and proposed treatment, they are unable to fully understand what is communicated because they lack the conceptual framework for integrating and holding the information presented. Matched groups of Australian Aboriginal and American women heard and recalled two stories incorporating Aboriginal and Western conceptions of illness and treatment. Analysis of the recall protocols reveals the effect of culture-based schemata on comprehension of the two stories. Implications for health care delivery are discussed.
Little research exists on how children understand the actions of nonhuman agents. Researchers often assume that children overgeneralize and attribute human properties such as false beliefs to nonhuman agents. In this study, three experiments were conducted to test this assumption. The experiments used 24 children in New York (aged 2,11-6,11 years), 52 children in Michigan (aged 3,5-6,11 years), and a second group of 45 children in Michigan (3,4-8,5 years) from Christian backgrounds. In the first two experiments, children participated in false-belief tests in which they were asked about human and various nonhuman agents including animals and God. Experiment 3 consisted of a modified perspective-taking task, also including nonhuman agents. The results of the study suggest that children do not consistently use human agent concepts but instead can use different agent concepts for some nonhuman agents like God and special animals. Children are not bound to anthropomorphize, but they often do.
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