Many psychological studies of categorization and reasoning use undergraduates to make claims about human conceptualization. Generalizability of findings to other populations is often assumed but rarely tested. Even when comparative studies are conducted, it may be challenging to interpret differences. As a partial remedy, in the present studies we adopt a 'triangulation strategy' to evaluate the ways expertise and culturally different belief systems can lead to different ways of conceptualizing the biological world. We use three groups (US bird experts, US (...) undergraduates, and ordinary Itza' Maya) and two sets of birds (North American and Central American). Categorization tasks show considerable similarity among the three groups' taxonomic sorts, but also systematic differences. Notably, US expert categorization is more similar to Itza' than to US novice categorization. The differences are magnified on inductive reasoning tasks where only undergraduates show patterns of judgment that are largely consistent with current models of category-based taxonomic inference. The Maya commonly employ causal and ecological reasoning rather than taxonomic reasoning. Experts use a mixture of strategies (including causal and ecological reasoning), only some of which current models explain. US and Itza' informants differed markedly when reasoning about passerines (songbirds), reflecting the somewhat different role that songbirds play in the two cultures. The results call into question the importance of similarity-based notions of typicality and central tendency in natural categorization and reasoning. These findings also show that relative expertise leads to a convergence of thought that transcends cultural boundaries and shared experiences. (shrink)

This essay explores the universal cognitive bases of biological taxonomy and taxonomic inference using cross-cultural experimental work with urbanized Americans and forest-dwelling Maya Indians. A universal, essentialist appreciation of generic species appears as the causal foundation for the taxonomic arrangement of biodiversity, and for inference about the distribution of causally-related properties that underlie biodiversity. Universal folkbiological taxonomy is domain-specific: its structure does not spontaneously or invariably arise in other cognitive domains, like substances, artifacts or persons. It is plausibly an innately-determined (...) evolutionary adaptation to relevant and recurrent aspects of ancestral hominid environments, such as the need to recognize, locate, react to, and profit from many ambient species. Folkbiological concepts are special players in cultural evolution, whose native stability attaches to more variable and difficult-to-learn representational forms, thus enhancing the latter's prospects for regularity and recurrence in transmission within and across cultures. This includes knowledge that cumulatively enriches (folk expertise), overrides (religious belief) or otherwise transcends (science) the commonsense ontology prescribed by folkbiology. Finally, the studies summarized here indicate that results gathered from “standard populations” in regard to biological categorization and reasoning more often than not fail to generalize in straightforward ways to humanity at large. This suggests the need for much more serious attention to cross-cultural research on basic cognitive processes. (shrink)

Religion is not an evolutionary adaptation per se, but a recurring by-product of the complex evolutionary landscape that sets cognitive, emotional and material conditions for ordinary human interactions. Religion involves extraordinary use of ordinary cognitive processes to passionately display costly devotion to counterintuitive worlds governed by supernatural agents. The conceptual foundations of religion are intuitively given by task-specific panhuman cognitive domains, including folkmechanics, folkbiology, folkpsychology. Core religious beliefs minimally violate ordinary notions about how the world is, with all of its (...) inescapable problems, thus enabling people to imagine minimally impossible supernatural worlds that solve existential problems, including death and deception. Here the focus is on folkpsychology and agency. A key feature of the supernatural agent concepts common to all religions is the triggering of an "Innate Releasing Mechanism," or “agency detector,” whose proper domain encompasses animate objects relevant to hominid survival - such as predators, protectors and prey - but which actually extends to moving dots on computer screens, voices in wind, faces on clouds. Folkpsychology also crucially involves metarepresentation, which makes deception possible and threatens any social order; however, these same metacognitive capacities provide the hope and promise of open-ended solutions through representations of counterfactual supernatural worlds that cannot be logically or empirically verified or falsified. Because religious beliefs cannot be deductively or inductively validated, validation occurs only by ritually addressing the very emotions motivating religion. Cross-cultural experimental evidence encourages these claims. (shrink)

For much of their history, the relationship between anthropology and psychology has been well captured by Robert Frost's poem, “Mending Wall,” which ends with the ironic line, “good fences make good neighbors.” The congenial fence was that anthropology studied what people think and psychology studied how people think. Recent research, however, shows that content and process cannot be neatly segregated, because cultural differences in what people think affect how people think. To achieve a deeper understanding of the relation between process (...) and content, research must integrate the methodological insights from both anthropology and psychology. We review previous research and describe new studies in the domain of folk biology which examine the cognitive consequences of different conceptualizations of nature and the place of humans within it. The focus is on cultural differences in framework theories among Native Americans and European American children and adults living in close proximity in rural Wisconsin. Our results show that epistemological orientations affect memory organization, ecological reasoning, and the perceived role of humans in nature. This research also demonstrates that cultural differences in framework theories have implications for understanding intergroup conflict over natural resources and are relevant to efforts to improve science learning, especially among Native American children. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

Lankford overgeneralizes individual psychology from limited, fragmentary and doubtful materials, and underplays strategic, ideological, and group dynamical factors. His speculative claims manifest a form of fundamental attribution error: the tendency – especially evident in popular attachment to moral presumptions of individual responsibility and volition – to overestimate effects of personality and underestimate situational effects in explaining social behavior. The book's appeal may owe more to ideological preference than to interests of science or national security.

Sacred values differ from material or instrumental values in that they incorporate moral beliefs that drive action in ways dissociated from prospects for success. Across the world, people believe that devotion to essential or core values – such as the welfare of their family and country, or their commitment to religion, honor, and justice – are, or ought to be, absolute and inviolable. Counterintuitively, understanding an opponent's sacred values, we believe, offers surprising opportunities for breakthroughs to peace. Because of the (...) emotional unwillingness of those in conflict situations to negotiate sacred values, conventional wisdom suggests that negotiators should either leave sacred values for last in political negotiations or try to bypass them with sufficient material incentives. Our empirical findings and historical analysis suggest that conventional wisdom is wrong. In fact, offering to provide material benefits in exchange for giving up a sacred value actually makes settlement more difficult because people see the offering as an insult rather than a compromise. But we also found that making symbolic concessions of no apparent material benefit might open the way to resolving seemingly irresolvable conflicts. We offer suggestions for how negotiators can reframe their position by demonstrating respect, and/or by apologizing for what they sincerely regret. We also offer suggestions for how to overcome sacred barriers by refining sacred values to exclude outmoded claims, exploiting the inevitable ambiguity of sacred values, shifting the context, provisionally prioritizing values, and reframing responsibility. (shrink)

Resolution of quarrels arising from conflicting sacred values, as in the Middle East, may require concessions that acknowledge the opposition's core concerns.

Anthropological inquiry suggests that all societies classify animals and plants in similar ways. Paradoxically, in the same cultures that have seen large advances in biological science, citizenry's practical knowledge of nature has dramatically diminished. Here we describe historical, cross-cultural and developmental research on how people ordinarily conceptualize organic nature, concentrating on cognitive consequences associated with knowledge devolution. We show that results on psychological studies of categorization and reasoning from “standard populations” fail to generalize to humanity at large. Usual populations have (...) impoverished experience with nature, which yields misleading results about knowledge acquisition and the ontogenetic relationship between folkbiology and folkpsychology. We also show that groups living in the same habitat can manifest strikingly distinct behaviors, cognitions and social relations relative to it. This has novel implications for environmental decision making and management, including commons problems. (shrink)

Strong adaptationists explore complex organic design as taskspecific adaptations to ancestral environments. This strategy seems best when there is evidence of homology. Weak adaptationists don't assume that complex organic (including cognitive and linguistic) functioning necessarily or primarily represents taskspecific adaptation. This approach to cognition resembles physicists' attempts to deductively explain the most facts with fewest hypotheses. For certain domainspecific competencies (folkbiology) strong adaptationism is useful but not necessary to research. With grouplevel belief systems (religion) strong adaptationism degenerates into spurious notions (...) of social function and cultural selection. In other cases (language, especially universal grammar) weak adaptationism's 'minimalist' approach seems productive. (shrink)

Suicide attack is the most virulent and horrifying form of terrorism in the world today. The mere rumor of an impending suicide attack can throw thousands of people into panic. This occurred during a Shi‘a procession in Iraq in late August 2005, causing hundreds of deaths. Although suicide attacks account for a minority of all terrorist acts, they are responsible for a majority of all terrorism-related casualties, and the rate of attacks is rising rapidly across the globe. During 2000–2004, there (...) were 472 suicide attacks in 22 countries, killing more than 7,000 and wounding tens of thousands. Most have been carried out by Islamist groups claiming religious motivation, also known as jihadis. Rand Corp. vice president and terrorism analyst Bruce Hoffman has found that 80 percent of suicide attacks since 1968 occurred after the September 11 attacks, with jihadis representing 31 of the 35 responsible groups. More suicide attacks occurred in 2004 than in any previous year, and 2005 has proven even more deadly, with attacks in Iraq alone averaging more than one per day, according to data gathered by the U.S. military. The July 2005 London and Sinai bombings, a second round of bombings at tourist destinations in Bali in October, coordinated hotel bombings in Jordan in November, the arrival of suicide bombings in Bangladesh in December, a record year of attacks in Afghanistan, and daily bombings in Iraq have spurred renewed interest in suicide terrorism, with recent analyses stressing the strategic logic, organizational structure, and rational calculation involved. Whereas they once primarily consisted of organized campaigns by militarily weak forces aiming to end the perceived occupation of their homeland, as argued by University of Chicago political scientist Robert Pape in Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, suicide attacks today serve as banner actions for a thoroughly modern, global diaspora inspired by religion and claiming the role of vanguard for a massive, media-driven transnational political awakening. Living mostly in the diaspora and undeterred by the threat of retaliation against original home populations, jihadis, who are frequently middle-class, secularly well educated, but often “born-again” radical Islamists, including converts from Christianity, embrace apocalyptic visions for humanity's violent salvation. In Muslim countries and across western Europe, bright and idealistic Muslim youth, even more than the marginalized and dispossessed, internalize the jihadi story, illustrated on satellite television and the Internet with the ubiquitous images of social injustice and political repression with which much of the Muslim world's bulging immigrant and youth populations intimately identifies. From the suburbs of Paris to the jungles of Indonesia, I have interviewed culturally uprooted and politically restless youth who echo a stunningly simplified and decontextualized message of martyrdom for the sake of global jihad as life's noblest cause. They are increasingly as willing and even eager to die as they are to kill. The policy implications of this change in the motivation, organization, and calculation of suicide terrorism may be as novel as hitherto neglected. Many analysts continue to claim that jihadism caters to the destitute and depraved, the craven and criminal, or those who “hate freedom.” Politicians and pundits have asserted that jihadism is nihilistic and immoral, with no real program or humanity. Yet, jihadism is none of these things. Do we really understand the causes of today's suicide terrorism? Do suicide attacks stem mainly from a political cause, such as military occupation? Do they need a strong organization, such as Al Qaeda? What else could be done to turn the rising tide of martyrdom? (shrink)

Accession Number: ATLA0001712240; Hosting Book Page Citation: p 407-429.; Physical Description: graphs, tables ; Language(s): English; General Note: Bibliography: p 426-429.; Issued by ATLA: 20130825; Publication Type: Essay.

People usually fail the Wason selection task, choosing P and Q cases, when attempting to validate descriptive rules having the form “If P, then Q.” Yet they solve it, selecting P and not-Q cases, when validating deontic rules of the form “If P, then must Q.” The field of evolutionary psychology has overwhelmingly interpreted deontic versions of the selection task in terms of a naturally-selected, domain-specific social-contract or cheating algorithm. This work has done much to promote evolutionary psychology as an (...) alternative to a mindblind sociobiology that ignores the computational structure of cognitive mechanisms in producing people's behaviors. Nevertheless, evolution-minded researchers outside cognitive psychology know little of the ample literature challenging this interpretation and uncritically cite the “cheater-detection module” as a key insight into human cognition. Although a priori arguments for a specially evolved cheater-detection module are plausible, the selection task provides no direct evidence for such a module. (shrink)

The past three years saw more suicide attacks than the last quarter century. Most of these were religiously motivated. While most Westerners have imagined a tightly coordinated transnational terrorist organization headed by Al Qaeda, it seems more likely that nations under attack face a set of largely autonomous groups and cells pursuing their own regional aims. Repeated suicide actions show that massive counterforce alone does not diminish the frequency or intensity of suicide attack. Like pounding mercury with a hammer, this (...) sort of top-heavy counterstrategy only seems to generate more dispersed and insidious forms of suicide terrorism. Even with many top Qaeda leaders now dead or in custody, the transnational Jihadist fraternity is transforming into a hydra-headed network more difficult to fight than before. Poverty and lack of education per se are not root causes of suicide terrorism. And Muslims who have expressed support for martyr actions and trust in Osama Bin Laden or the late Hamas leader Sheikh Yassin do not as a rule hate democratic freedoms or Western culture, although many despise American foreign policy, especially in the Middle East. Rising aspirations followed by dwindling expectations – especially regarding civil liberties – are critical factors in generating support for suicide terrorism. The United States, Israel, Russia and other nations on the frontline in the war on terror need to realize that military and counterinsurgency actions are tactical, not strategic responses to suicide terrorism, the most politically destabilizing and psychologically devastating form of terrorism. When these nations back oppressive and unpopular governments this only generates popular resentment and support for terrorism against those governments and their backers. To attract potential recruits away from Jihadist martyrdom – suicide terrorism's most virulent strain - and to dry up its popular support, requires addressing these grievances before a downward spiral sets in where core meaning in life is sought, and found, in religious networks that sanctify vengeance at any cost against stronger powers, even if it kills the avenger. (shrink)

What impelled the Industrial Revolution's spectacular economic growth? Life History Theory, Baumard argues, explains how England's world-supreme affluence psychologically fostered innovation; moreover, wherever similar affluence abounds, a “civilizing process” bringing enlightenment and democracy is apt to evolve. Baumard insightfully analyzes a “constellation of affluence” but proffers somewhat whiggish history given England's prior and unique proto-capitalist culture of economic liberty and individualism.

Why do some individuals willingly make extreme sacrifices for their group? Whitehouse argues that such willingness stems from a visceral feeling of oneness with the group – identity fusion – that emerges from intense, shared dysphoric experiences or from perceived close kinship with others. Although Whitehouse's argument makes a valuable contribution to understanding extreme sacrifice, factors independent of identity fusion, such as devotion to sacred values, can predict self-sacrifice.

AS diplomats stitch together a cease-fire between Hamas and Israel, the most depressing feature of the conflict is the sense that future fighting is inevitable. Rational calculation suggests that neither side can win these wars. The thousands of lives and billions of dollars sacrificed in fighting demonstrate the advantages of peace and coexistence; yet still both sides opt to fight. This small territory is the world's great symbolic knot. “Palestine is the mother of all problems” is a common refrain among (...) people we have interviewed across the Muslim world: from Middle Eastern leaders to fighters in the remote island jungles of Indonesia; from Islamist senators in Pakistan to volunteers for martyrdom on the move from Morocco to Iraq. Some analysts see this as a testament to the essentially religious nature of the conflict. But research we recently undertook suggests a way to go beyond that. For there is a moral logic to seemingly intractable religious and cultural disputes. These conflicts cannot be reduced to secular calculations of interest but must be dealt with on their own terms, a logic very different from the marketplace or realpolitik. (shrink)

The "surrogate colonization" of Palestine had a foreign power giving to a nonnative group rights over land occupied by an indigenous people. It thus brought into play the complementary and conflicting agendas of three culturally distinguishable parties: British, Jews and Arabs. Each party had both "externalist" [those with no sustained practical experience of day to day life in Palestine] and "internalist" representatives. The surrogate idea was based on a "strategic consensus" involving each party's externalist camp: the British ruling elite, the (...) leadership of the World Zionist Organization and the Hashemite Dynasty of Arabia. The collapse of this triangular consensus, which put an end to the policy but not the process of surrogate colonization, resulted from irreconcilable antagonisms within and between the major currents of each internalist camp. A focus on the land problem in Palestine highlights contradictions in each party's internalist agenda, which forestalled a rift between the Jewish and British sides of the consensus long enough for the Zionist settlement in Palestine to acquire territory and to develop a largely self-sufficient economic, cultural, political and military infrastructure. (shrink)

The evolutionary landscape that canalizes human thought and behavior into religious beliefs and practices includes naturally selected emotions, cognitive modules, and constraints on social interactions. Evolutionary by-products, including metacognitive awareness of death and possibilities for deception, further channel people into religious paths. Religion represents a community's costly commitment to a counterintuitive world of supernatural agents who manage people's existential anxieties. Religious devotion, though not an adaptation, informs all cultures and most people.

Press Release: Terrorism in Southeast Asia: An Interview with Abu Bakar Ba'asyir 10/03/2005 - In August, Dr. Scott Atran travelled to Southeast Asia and conducted extensive research on terrorist groups operating in the region. This interview with Abu Bakar Ba'asyir, alleged leader of the Jemaah Islamiyah organization, was conducted on August 13 and 15, 2005 from Cipinang Prison in Jakarta. Questions were formulated by Dr. Atran and posed for him in Behasa Indonesian by Taufiq Andrie. The interview took (...) place in a special visitor's room, where Ba'asyir had seven acolytes acting as his bodyguards, including Taufiq Halim, the perpetrator of the Atrium mall bombing in Jakarta, and Abdul Jabbar, who blew up the Philippines ambassador's house. Excerpts from the interview are below; click here to read the full interview. Q. In your personal view, what do you think of bombings in our homeland, namely the Bali, Marriott and Kuningan bombings? A. I call those who carried out these actions all mujahid. They all had a good intention, that is, Jihad in Allah's way, the aim of the jihad is to look for blessing from Allah. They are right that America is the proper target because America fights Islam. So in terms of their objectives, they are right, and the target of their attacks was right also. But their calculations are debatable. My view is that we should do bombings in conflict areas not in peaceful areas. We have to target the place of the enemy, not countries where many Muslims live. Q. What do you mean by “wrong calculation,” that the victims included Muslims? A. That was one them. In my calculation, if there are bombings in peaceful areas, this will cause fitnah [discord] and other parties will be involved. This is my opinion and I could be wrong. Yet I still consider them mujahid. If they made mistakes, they are only human beings who can be wrong. Moreover, their attacks could be considered as self-defense. (shrink)

Fincher & Thornhill's (F&T's) central hypothesis is that strong in-group norms were formed in part to foster parochial social alliances so as to enable cultural groups to adaptively respond to parasite stress. Applied to ancestral hominid environments, the story fits with evolutionary theory and the fragmentary data available on early hominid social formations and their geographical distributions. Applied to modern social formations, however, the arguments and inferences from data are problematic.

Those who assume domain-specificity, or conceptual modularity, must face “Fodor's Paradox”. One strategy involves postulating a “metamodule” that evolved to take as input the output of all other specialized conceptual modules, and then integrate these outputs into cross-domain thoughts. It's difficult to see whether this proposed metamodular capacity stems from language or Theory of Mind.

There have been many criticisms of “nativism” in “Cartesian linguistics,” attacking positions that neither Chomsky nor any well-known generative grammarian has ever thought to defend. Shanker's polemic is no exception. It involves two spurious claims: Cartesian linguistics vitiates understanding language structure and use; nativism permits linguistic anthropology only to “validate” and “apply” generative principles. Briefly, Chomsky's outlines a language system, LS, of the human brain. LS reflexively discriminates and categorizes parts of the flux of human experience as “language,” and develops (...) complex abilities to infer and interpret this highly structured, and structurally peculiar, type of human production. There is nothing intrinsically different about LS – concerning innateness, evolution or universality – than the visual system, immune system, respiratory system, or any other complex biological system. Much polemic is driven by distaste for “innateness,” “genes,” and “evolution.” Historical and ideological reasons explain this aversion - some well-justified. None bear on universal grammar. Biologists believe all life consists of universal, highly structured codings of biological information. Still, biologists go on to explore diversity at many different levels. Similarly, linguistic anthropology can use generative grammar to better comprehend the diversity of languages and the cultural worlds they describe. This includes the very issues about proper names that Shanker highlights. (shrink)

Intelligence estimates based on models keyed to frequency and recency of past occurrences make people less secure even if they predict most harmful events. The U.S. presidential commission on WMDs, the 9/11 commission, and Spain's comisión 11-M have condemned the status quo mentality of the intelligence community, which they see as being preoccupied with today's “current operations” and tactical requirements, and inattentive to tomorrow's far-ranging problems and strategic solutions. But the overriding emphasis in these commissions' recommendations is on further vertically (...) integrating intelligence collection, analysis, and operations. Such proposals to further centralize intelligence and unify command and control are not promising given recent transformations in Jihadist networks to a somewhat “leaderless resistance” in the wake of Al Qaeda's operational demise. To defeat terrorist networks requires grasping novel relations between an englobing messianic moral framework, the rootless intellectual and physical mobility of immigrant and diaspora communities, and the overarching conceptual, emotional, and logistical afford- ances of the Internet. Britain's WWII experience provides salutary lessons for think- ing creatively with decentralized expertise and partially autonomous approaches. (shrink)

In September President Bush reasserted his commitment to the "road map" for Middle East peace, launched in 2003 to achieve a comprehensive Israeli-Palestinian agreement by 2005. He called on Palestinians to renounce terrorism, implicitly urged world leaders to cut ties to Yasser Arafat, and appealed to Israel to end "the daily humiliation" of Palestinians. He framed his remarks within an overall appeal for democracy in the Arab world, citing Iraq as a model of the "transformational power of liberty." In fact, (...) for more than a year the US disastrously ignored Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani's pleas to set up elections. Real democracy is the willingness to accept results we may not like. US policy on a future Palestinian state is just as short-sighted. (shrink)

If people vote rationally for their economic interests, one would expect Democrats to be perennial favorites among working poor and middle class, and especially so in this year of economic downturn. Why then does polling show the election a tossup? A culture's moral compass is not an innate or logical determination, but an underdetermined product of historical contingency and willful choice. Belief in moral "rightness" or "truth" is always a matter of faith rather than reason. Only some professional philosophers, jurists, (...) scientists and academics believe that the principal point of political argument is, or ought to be, truth rather than persuasion, and that an argument's principal appeal should be reason rather than passion. The fundamental social constituent of economic and political culture in the United States was neither the individual nor the state, but the sectarian community. The religious community in the USA was a civic as well as moral community, a combination which infused American economic and political culture with particular dynamism. As Darwin noted, in competition between groups with similar levels of technology and population size, those groups will tend to win out that favor and transmit willingness to sacrifice some self interest for group interests. Religions with morally concerned deities arguably made the rise of civilization and large-scale cooperation between genetic strangers possible. (shrink)

The framework of the Israel-Palestinian Arab conflict has evolved over the last half century through an instrumentalization of violence by the parties concerned. Two alternating "structures of violence" have emerged to define this instrumentality: the one Israeli, the other Palestinian. I call these structures of violence "alternating" rather than merely "reciprocating" because the one not only feeds off the other and actually practices on the other that which is merely fancied and projected as the other's intention but also because they (...) have inverse periodicities: The "Great Revolt" of 1936-1939 introduced the principle of "armed struggle" into the practice and lore of a fractured and often factional antiBritish and anti-Zionist insurgency. It was effectively countered by British might coupled with an essentially defensive Jewish posture of consensus and "restraint". By contrast the current Palestinian "Uprising" has the Arab side preaching restraint if not always nonviolence, through a pluralistic consensus on the immediate national ends such practice aims to achieve. Against this is an avowed Israeli policy of "the iron fist" that for the first time since independence has broken the general Zionist consensus with regard not only to the utility and morality of violent means but also to national goals. (shrink)

Now we need to bring this perspective to Afghanistan and Pakistan — one that is smart about cultures, customs and connections. The present policy of focusing on troop strength and drones, and trying to win over people by improving their lives with Western-style aid programs, only continues a long history of foreign involvement and failure. Reading a thousand years of Arab and Muslim history would show little in the way of patterns that would have helped to predict 9/11, but our (...) predicament in Afghanistan rhymes with the past like a limerick.... There's a good chance that enough factions in the loose Taliban coalition would opt to disinvite their troublesome guest if we forget about trying to subdue them or hold their territory. This would unwind the Taliban coalition into a lot of straggling, loosely networked groups that could be eliminated or contained. This means tracking down family and tribal networks, gaining a better understanding of family ties and intervening only when we see actions by Taliban and other groups to aid Al Qaeda or act outside their region.... To defeat violent extremism in Afghanistan, less may be more — just as it has been elsewhere in Asia. (shrink)

In the heat of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln made a speech in which he referred sympathetically to the Southern rebels. A member of the audience lambasted him for wanting to treat his enemies kindly when he ought to be thinking of destroying them. Lincoln's answer: "Why, madam, do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?" Harshness and cruelty were to be banished from the moral imagination of the nation he was trying to save. The late (...) Jack Maple, a famously flamboyant but phenomenally effective former deputy commissioner of the NYPD, wrote that "the more information a detective has, the more creative, authoritative and effective he or she can be." Under attack in 2001, and then at war in Iraq in 2003, American law enforcement, intelligence and military really didn't have much information at first. They rounded up the usual suspects, but didn't know what usual meant. So they smacked people around, and that was always a bad idea, as Maple said: "Forget that smacking somebody around is illegal and just plain wrong, it's also the quickest way to ruin the chances of getting a statement of any kind." Professional interrogators talk about building empathy and dependence. Maple would get down on his knees and pray with a suspect if he thought that would work. But the best technique? "If you can get them to laugh, you'll get a statement. That's always true." Internal CIA documents reveal that empathy is also likely what got Abu Zubaydah to reveal how Al Qaeda planned 9/11 and its other operations. His torture brought nothing of real value, only the moral demeaning of his tormentors.... (shrink)

Soccer, paintball, camping, hiking, rafting, body building, martial arts training and other forms of physically stimulating and intimate group action create a bunch of buddies, which becomes a “band of brothers” in a simple heroic cause. It's usually enough that a few of these action buddies identify with a cause, and its heroic path to glory and esteem in the eyes of peers, for the rest to follow even unto death. Humans need to socially organize, to lead and be led; (...) however, notions of “charismatic leaders” and Svengali-like “recruiters” that “brainwash” unwitting minds into joining well-structured organizations with command and control is exaggerated. Viewed from the field, notions of “cells” and “recruitment” - and to a degree even “leadership” – may reflect more the psychology and organization of those analyzing terrorist groups than terrorist groups themselves. (shrink)

The presidential commission on WMDs and the 9/11 commission have condemned the status quo mentality of the intelligence community, which they see as being preoccupied with today's "current operations" and tactical requirements, and inattentive to tomorrow's far-ranging problems and strategic solutions. Both commissions call for steps to improve analysis and encourage diversity, including routine critiques of finished intelligence and alternative assessments by outside experts. But the overriding emphasis in both commissions' reports is on further vertically integrating intelligence collection, analysis, and (...) operations. Such proposals to centralize intelligence and unify command and control are not promising given recent transformations in Jihadist networks in the wake of al-Qaeda's operational demise. (shrink)

Science, then, may never replace religion in the lives of most people and in any society that hopes to survive for very long. But neither can religion replace science if humankind hopes to unlock nature's material secrets. And parodies of science, like the so-called "theory" of intelligent design, only cripple science education.

The great British biologist J.B.S Haldane counted monotheism's creation of fanaticism as one of the most important inventions of the last 5,000 years. Call it love of God or love of group, it matters little in the end. Modern civilizations spin the potter's wheel of monotheism to manufacture the greatest cause of all, humanity. Before missionary monotheism, people did not consider that all others could be pigeonholed into one kind. The salvation of humanity is a cause as stimulating as it (...) is impossible to achieve. Nevertheless, all modern missionary "-isms," whether religious or in their secular post-Enlightenment guise, preach devotion unto death for the sake of humanity, including allowance for mass killing for the mass good. "The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare's evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology," wrote Alexander Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago. Especially for young men, mortal combat in a great cause provides the ultimate adventure and glory to gain maximum esteem in the eyes of many and, most dearly, in the hearts of their peers. By identifying their devotion with the greater defense and salvation of humanity, they commit themselves to a path that allows massive killing for what they think is a massive good.... (shrink)

NOT all groups that the United States government classifies as terrorist organizations are equally bad or dangerous, and not all information conveyed to them that is based on political, academic or scientific expertise risks harming our national security. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court, which last week upheld a law banning the provision of “material support” to foreign terrorist groups, doesn't seem to consider those facts relevant.... The two of us are social scientists who study and interact with violent groups in order (...) to find ways out of intractable conflicts. In the course of this work and in our discussions with decision makers in the Middle East and elsewhere we have seen how informal meetings and exchanges of knowledge have borne fruit. It's not that religious, academic or scientific credentials automatically convey trust, but when combined with a personal commitment to peace, they often carry weight beyond mere opinion or desire.... In our own work on groups categorized as terrorist organizations, we have detected significant differences in their attitudes and actions. For example, in our recent interactions with the leader of the Palestinian militant group Islamic Jihad Ramadan Shallah, we were faced with an adamant refusal to ever recognize Israel or move toward a two-state solution. Yet when we talked to Khaled Meshal, the leader of Hamas, he said that his movement could imagine a two-state “peace”. In our time with Mr. Meshal's group, we were also able to confirm something that Saudi and Israeli intelligence officers had told us: Hamas has fought to keep Al Qaeda out of its field of influence, and has no demonstrated interest in global jihad. Whether or not the differences among Al Qaeda, Islamic Jihad, Hamas and other violent groups are fundamental, rather than temporary or tactical, is something only further exploration will reveal. But to assume that it is invariably wrong to engage any of these groups is a grave mistake.... (shrink)

The capacity to attribute beliefs to others in order to understand action is one of the mainstays of human cognition. Yet it is debatable whether children attribute beliefs in the same way to all agents. In this paper, we present the results of a false-belief task concerning humans and God run with a sample of Maya children aged 4–7, and place them in the context of several psychological theories of cognitive development. Children were found to attribute beliefs in different ways (...) to humans and God. The evidence also speaks to the debate concerning the universality and uniformity of the development of folk-psychological reasoning. (shrink)

Carey's book on conceptual change and the accompanying argument that children's biology initially is organized in terms of naïve psychology has sparked a great detail of research and debate. This body of research on children's biology has, however, been almost exclusively been based on urban, majority culture children in the US or in other industrialized nations. The development of folkbiological knowledge may depend on cultural and experiential background. If this is the case, then urban majority culture children may prove to (...) be the exception rather than the rule, because plants and animals do not play a significant role in their everyday life. Urban majority culture children, rural majority culture children, and rural Native American children were given a property projection task based on Carey's original paradigm. Each group produced a unique profile of development. Only urban children showed evidence for early anthropocentrism, suggesting that the co-mingling of psychology and biology may be a product of an impoverished experience with nature. In comparison to urban majority culture children even the youngest rural children generalized in terms of biological affinity. In addition, all ages of Native American children and the older rural majority culture children gave clear evidence of ecological reasoning. These results show that both culture and expertise play a role in the development of folkbiological thought. (shrink)

Atran argues that an autonomous ethnobiological information-processing module exists. This module imputes a “deep causal essence” to folk-biological taxa and uses a hierarchy of taxonomic ranks. I argue that Atran's own data suggest that rank is not an essential feature of the ethnobiological module, and that ethnobiological causal essences may be generalized to other domains and vice versa, limiting its autonomy.

Atran advances three theses: our folk-biological taxonomy is (1) universal, (2) innate, and (3) the product of natural selection. I argue that Atran offers insufficient support for theses (2) and (3) and that his evolutionary psychology thus amounts to nothing more than a just-so story.

Scott Atran has argued that scientific thinking about living things necessarily emerges out of a common-sense structure of ideas which reflects the ways in which humans are constitutionally disposed to think about ‘manifestly perceivable empirical fact’. He maintains that the uniformity in folk-biological taxonomy under diverse socio-cultural learning conditions established by recent ethnobiological research undermines the predominant view that folk classifications of living things are a function of local interests and culture, and he further maintains that such uniformity must (...) be grounded in species-specific and domain-specific cognitive capacities. I consider certain philosophically controversial lessons that Atran wishes to draw from these claims, concerning (a) philosophical theories of natural kinds, and (b) the ‘reality’ of folk-biological kinds and the relation between such kinds and the kinds posited by biological science. I argue that, even if we grant the ethnobiological evidence to which he appeals, such evidencedoes not bear upon the philosophical issues in the ways that he proposes. (shrink)

Atran reifies Fodor's metaphor of modularity to create a truth-producing apparatus to generate a priori taxonomies or natural kinds that lock a tautology in place.