Abstract: Can human social cognitive processes and social motives be grasped by the methods of experimental economics? Experimental studies of strategic cognition and social preferences contribute to our understanding of the social aspects of economic decisions making. Yet, papers in this issue argue that the social aspects of decision-making introduce several difficulties for interpreting the results of economic experiments. In particular, the laboratory is itself a social context, and in many respects a rather distinctive one, which raises questions of external validity.
Abstract: Humans massively depend on communication with others, but this leaves them open to the risk of being accidentally or intentionally misinformed. To ensure that, despite this risk, communication remains advantageous, humans have, we claim, a suite of cognitive mechanisms for epistemic vigilance. Here we outline this claim and consider some of the ways in which epistemic vigilance works in mental and social life by surveying issues, research and theories in different domains of philosophy, linguistics, cognitive psychology and the social sciences.
Abstract: Studying institutions as part of the research on cultural evolution prompts us to analyze one very important mechanism of cultural evolution: institutions do distribute cultural variants in the population. Also, it enables relating current research on cultural evolution to some more traditional social sciences: institutions, often seen as macro-social entities, are analyzed in terms of their constitutive micro-phenomena. This article presents Sperberâs characterization of institutions, and then gives some hints about the set of phenomena to which it applies. Culture evolves through the advent of cognitive causal chains, which span across individuals and their environment, and which distribute mental representations and public production in the population and its habitat. Institutions are characterized by the specific causal chains that distribute representations. These chains include representations that cause the recurrence of a series of events and thus regulate the distribution of a set of representations to which they themselves belong. Saying that some cultural phenomenon is an institution is, in this theoretical framework, explaining that some representations that are part of the cultural phenomenon cause it to endure. This technical characterization applies to what is usually understood as institutions, from marriage to money. It also opens the way for the analysis of complex phenomena in cultural evolution, such as the maintenance of cultural niches and the distribution of labor.
Abstract: I analyse the impact of search engines on our cognitive and epistemic practices. For that purpose, I describe the processes of assessment of documents on the Web as relying on distributed cognition. Search engines together with Web users, are distributed assessment systems whose task is to enable efficient allocation of cognitive resources of those who use search engines. Specifying the cognitive function of search engines within these distributed assessment systems allows interpreting anew the changes that have been caused by search engine technologies. I describe search engines as implementing reputation systems and point out the similarities with other reputation systems. I thus call attention to the continuity in the distributed cognitive processes that determine the allocation of cognitive resources for information gathering from others.
Abstract: I argue that altruistic behavior and its variation across cultures may be caused by mental cognitive mechanisms that induce cooperative behavior in contract-like situations and adapt that behavior to the kinds of contracts that exist in oneâs socio-cultural environment. I thus present a cognitive alternative to Henrich et al.âs motivation-based account. Rather than behaving in ways that reveal preferences, subjects interpret the experiment in ways that cue their social heuristics. In order to distinguish the respective roles of preferences and cognitive processes that determine economic behavior, we need more ethnography of strategies âÂÂin the wild.âÂÂ
Abstract: I argue that questions, methods and theories drawn from cognitive anthropology are particularly appropriate for the study of science. I also emphasize the role of cognitive anthropology of science for the integration of cognitive and social studies of science. Finally, I briefly introduce the papers of the volume and attempt to draw the main directions of research.
Abstract: I suggest that one of the best ways to pursue and go beyond the programme of Writing Culture is to do cognitive anthropology of anthropology. I will situate Writing Culture with regard to this field of research and I will argue that Writing Culture can contribute to the development of the cognitive anthropology of anthropology. This is because it is sensible to start the anthropological study of anthropology with an analysis of the cultural product -- in our case, the ethnographic texts. The analyst can then pick up relevant properties of the cultural product and track down what caused them. Among these causes stand the cognitive processes of actual practitioners, namely working ethnographers. Thus, starting with textual analysis, I argue that some rhetoric conventions analysed in Writing Cultures are informing the reader about the cognitive genesis of the ethnography. These conventions, far from being misleading, are in fact relevant to the reader: in particular information about the cognitive genesis of an ethnographic text enables the reader to evaluate its ethnographic account. This gives me the occasion to briefly specify some cognitive processes at work in the production of ethnographies. These include, I argue, a reflexive and critical cognition that is distributed among the community of anthropologists, and "mind-reading" -- a cognitive process much studied by cognitive psychologists that enables ethnographers to make sense of the behaviour of indigenous people by attributing mental states to them (beliefs, intentions, desires, feelings).
Abstract: Cultural epidemiology is a theoretical framework that enables historical studies to be informed by cognitive science. It incorporates
some insights from evolutionary psychology (viz. cultural evolution
is constrained by universal properties of the human cognitive apparatus that result from biological evolution) and some from Darwinian
models of cultural evolution (viz. population thinking: cultural phenomena are distribution of resembling items among a community and
its habitat). Its research program include the study of the multiple
cognitive mechanisms that cause the distribution, on a cultural scale,
of representations and material cultural items. By a detailed analysis
of the social cognitive causal chain that occurred in the past, one can
ï¬nd out and specify which are the factors of attraction that account
for cultural stability as well as historical cultural change.
<p>
After reviewing recent research and developments in cognitive history, I present the concept of cultural attractor and explain why cul-
tural attractors are historically variable. In doing so, I emphasize the
role of historically constituted cognitive mechanisms, which account
for much of historical cultural developments. I argue that the framework of cultural epidemiology can better account for these important
historical phenomena than evolutionary psychology accounts of culture and dual inheritance theory. I ï¬nally conclude that describing
and explaining the history of cultural attractors is a good research
question for historians.</p>
Abstract: I argue that scientific cognition can be accounted for in a massive modularity theoretical framework. Scientific cognition is then described as a culturally informed reflection, allowed by meta-representational abilities, upon the mandatory output of preliminary modules.
Abstract: The present work is a study in the historiography of science. Its goal is to provide some theoretical tools for studying the evolution of science as a social and cognitive phenomenon. It aims at showing that some concepts and frames of analysis drawn from cognitive anthropology are fruitful tools for the scientific study of science. The theories that I advocate using are the epidemiology of representation and the theory of distributed cognition. The added value of these theories stems in great part from their enabling to integrate results from cognitive and social studies of science.
