Previous research suggests that how people conceive of minds depends on the culture in which they live, both in determining how they interact with other human minds and how they infer the unseen minds of gods. We use exploratory factor analysis to compare how people from different societies with distinct models of human minds and different religious traditions perceive the minds of humans and gods. In two North American samples (American adults, N = 186; Canadian students, N = 202), we (...) replicated a previously found two‐factor agency/experience structure for both human and divine minds, but in Fijian samples (Indigenous iTaukei Fijians, N = 77; Fijians of Indian descent, N = 214; total N = 679) we found a three‐factor structure, with the additional containing items related to social relationships. Further, Fijians’ responses revealed a different three‐factor structure for human minds and gods’ minds. We used these factors as dimensions in the conception of minds to predict (a) expectations about human and divine tendencies towards punishment and reward; and (b) conception of gods as more embodied (an extension of experience) or more able to know people's thoughts (an extension of agency). We found variation in how these factors predict conceptions of agents across groups, indicating further theory is needed to explain how culturally generated concepts of mind lead to other sorts of social inferences. We conclude that mind perception is shaped by culturally defined social expectations and recommend further work in different cultural contexts to examine the interplay between culture and social cognition. (shrink)

Recent work with infants suggests that plant foraging throughout evolutionary history has shaped the design of the human mind. Infants in Germany and the US avoid touching plants and engage in more social looking toward adults before touching them. This combination of behavioral avoidance and social looking strategies enables safe and rapid social learning about plant properties within the first two years of life. Here, we explore how growing up in a context that requires frequent interaction with plants shapes children’s (...) responses with the participation of communities in rural Fiji. We conducted two interviews with adults and a behavioral study with children. The adult interviews map the plant learning landscape in these communities and provide context for the child study. The child study used a time-to-touch paradigm to examine whether 6- to 48-month-olds in participating communities exhibit avoidance behaviors and social looking patterns that are similar to, or different from, those of German and American infants. Our adult interview results confirmed that knowledge about daily and medicinal uses of plants is widely known throughout the communities, and children are given many opportunities to informally learn about plants. The results of the child behavioral study suggest that young Fijian children, like German and American infants, are reluctant to reach for novel artificial plants and are fastest to interact with familiar household items and shells. In contrast to German and American infants, Fijian children also quickly reached for familiar real plants and did not engage in differential social looking before touching them. These results suggest that cultural contexts flexibly shape the development of plant-relevant cognitive design. (shrink)

In Cognitive Gadgets, Heyes seeks to unite evolutionary psychology with cultural evolutionary theory. Although we applaud this unifying effort, we find it falls short of considering how culture itself evolves to produce indigenous psychologies fitted to particular environments. We focus on mentalizing and autobiographical memory as examples of how socialization practices embedded within culture build cognitive adaptations.

We develop a cultural evolutionary theory of the origins of prosocial religions and apply it to resolve two puzzles in human psychology and cultural history: (1) the rise of large-scale cooperation among strangers and, simultaneously, (2) the spread of prosocial religions in the last 10–12 millennia. We argue that these two developments were importantly linked and mutually energizing. We explain how a package of culturally evolved religious beliefs and practices characterized by increasingly potent, moralizing, supernatural agents, credible displays of faith, (...) and other psychologically active elements conducive to social solidarity promoted high fertility rates and large-scale cooperation with co-religionists, often contributing to success in intergroup competition and conflict. In turn, prosocial religious beliefs and practices spread and aggregated as these successful groups expanded, or were copied by less successful groups. This synthesis is grounded in the idea that although religious beliefs and practices originally arose as nonadaptive by-products of innate cognitive functions, particular cultural variants were then selected for their prosocial effects in a long-term, cultural evolutionary process. This framework (1) reconciles key aspects of the adaptationist and by-product approaches to the origins of religion, (2) explains a variety of empirical observations that have not received adequate attention, and (3) generates novel predictions. Converging lines of evidence drawn from diverse disciplines provide empirical support while at the same time encouraging new research directions and opening up new questions for exploration and debate. (shrink)

Anthropologists have documented substantial cross-society variation in people’s willingness to treat strangers with impartial, universal norms versus favoring members of their local community. Researchers have proposed several adaptive accounts for these differences. One variant of the pathogen stress hypothesis predicts that people will be more likely to favor local in-group members when they are under greater infectious disease threat. The material security hypothesis instead proposes that institutions that permit people to meet their basic needs through impartial interactions with strangers reinforce (...) a tendency toward impartiality, whereas people lacking such institutions must rely on local community members to meet their basic needs. Some studies have examined these hypotheses using self-reported preferences, but not with behavioral measures. We conducted behavioral experiments in eight diverse societies that measure individuals’ willingness to favor in-group members by ignoring an impartial rule. Consistent with the material security hypothesis, members of societies enjoying better-quality government services and food security show a stronger preference for following an impartial rule over investing in their local in-group. Our data show no support for the pathogen stress hypothesis as applied to favoring in-groups and instead suggest that favoring in-group members more closely reflects a general adaptive fit with social institutions that have arisen in each society. (shrink)

In our response to the 27 commentaries, we refine the theoretical claims, clarify several misconceptions of our framework, and explore substantial disagreements. In doing so, we show that our framework accommodates multiple historical scenarios; debate the historical evidence, particularly about “pre-Axial” religions; offer important details about cultural evolutionary theory; clarify the termprosociality;and discuss proximal mechanisms. We review many interesting extensions, amplifications, and qualifications of our approach made by the commentators.

The purpose of this study was to illuminate the ethically difficult situations experienced by care providers working in a nursing home. Individual interviews using a narrative approach were conducted. A phenomenological-hermeneutic method developed for researching life experience was applied in the analysis. The findings showed that care providers experience ethical challenges in their everyday work. The informants in this study found the balance between the ideal, autonomy and dignity to be a daily problem. They defined the culture they work in (...) as not supportive. They also thought they were not being seen and heard in situations where they disagree with the basic values of the organization. The results are discussed in terms of Habermas’s understanding of modern society. Care settings for elderly people obviously present ethical challenges, particularly in the case of those suffering from dementia. The care provider participants in this study expressed frustration and feelings of powerlessness. It is possible to understand their experiences in terms of Habermas’s theory of modern society and the concept of the system’s colonization of the life world. (shrink)

This book uses neuroscience discoveries concerning religious experiences, the Self and personhood to deepen, enhance and interrogate the theological and philosophical set of ideas known as Personalism. McNamara proposes a new eschatological form of personalism that is consistent with current neuroscience models of relevant brain functions concerning the self and personhood and that can meet the catastrophic challenges of the 21st century. Eschatological Personalism, rooted in the philosophical tradition of "Boston Personalism", takes as its starting point the personalist claim (...) that the significance of a self and personality is not fully revealed until it has reached its endpoint, but theologically that end point can only occur within the eschatological realm. That realm is explored in the book along with implications for personalist theory and ethics. Topics covered include the agent intellect, dreams and the imagination, future-orientation and eschatology, phenomenology of Time, social ethics, Love, the challenge of AI, privacy and solitude and the individual ethic of autarchy. This book is an innovative combination of the neuroscientific and theological insights provided by a Personalist viewpoint. As such, it will be of great interest to scholars of Cognitive Science, Theology, Religious Studies and the philosophy of the mind. (shrink)

What does it mean to get hooked by a work, whether a bestseller or a classic, a TV series or a painting in a museum? What is this aesthetic experience that makes us feel captivated? What do works of art do, and how, in particular, do they bind us to them? In "Hooked," Rita Felski builds an aesthetics premised on our attachments rather than our free agency and challenges the ethos of critical aloofness that is so much a part (...) of modern intellectuals' self-image. The result is sure to be as widely read, and as controversial, as Felski's 2015 book, "The Limits of Critique." Felski looks at several "attachment devices." One of these is "attunement"--those affinities and stirrings that often fall below the threshold of consciousness. Why, for example, are we drawn to a painting or piece of music in ways we struggle to explain, while being left cold by others whose merits we duly acknowledge? Another attachment device is "identification"--a widespread response to fiction that is often invoked by critics but usually treated as synonymous with either identity or empathy. But Felski shows that identifying has no neat fit with identity categories, and it can trigger ethical, political, or intellectual affinities that have little to do with co-feeling. What people most commonly identify with, Felski argues, are characters who are alluring, arresting, or alive, not in spite of their aesthetic qualities but because of them. This kind of identification is not limited to naïve readers or over-invested viewers, but is also a defining aspect of what scholars in the humanities do. Relatedly, academic "interpretation" emerges here as another circuit of connection: critics forge ties to the works they explicate, the methods they use, the disciplinary identities they inhabit. "Hooked" returns us to the fundamentals of aesthetic experience, showing that the social meanings of artworks do not lie encrypted in their depths, within reach only of expert critics, but are generated within the embrace of captivated audiences. (shrink)

There is little work of a systematic nature in ethical theory or deontic logic on aretaic notions such as praiseworthiness and blameworthiness, despite their centrality to common-sense morality. Without more work, there is little hope of filling the even larger gap of attempting to develop frameworks integrating such aretaic concepts with deontic concepts of common-sense morality, such as what is obligatory, permissible, impermissible, or supererogatory. It is also clear in the case of aretaic concepts that agency is central to such (...) appraisal, so some agential notions must be integrated with aretaic concepts as well. The current paper takes the first step in a larger project aimed at the closure of these gaps. Here I sketch a simple framework for the aretaic appraisal of an agent's performance, layered on top of a simple framework for agency and predetermination. In Part I, I develop the framework for agency, ability, and inevitability, combining elements of work by Brown, Elgesem, Carmo, Santos, and Jones. In Part II, drawing on work by Chisholm and Sosa on intrinsic preferability, I sketch and explore a framework for defining aretaic superiority, praiseworthiness, blameworthiness, neutrality, and indifference, etc., retaining proper links to agency. (shrink)

This is a review of John Horty's book, _Agency and Deontic Logic_, OUP 2000.

We present a general framework for analyzing the contribution to reproductive success of a behavioural action. An action may make a direct contribution to reproductive success, but even in the absence of a direct contribution it may make an indirect contribution by changing the animal's state. We consider actions over a period of time, and define a reward function that characterizes the relationship between the animal's state at the end of the period and its future reproductive success. Working back from (...) the end of the period using dynamic programming, the optimal action as a function of state and time can be found. The procedure also yields a measure of the cost, in terms of future reproductive success, of a suboptimal action. These costs provide us with a common currency for comparing activities such as eating and drinking, or eating and hiding from predators. The costs also give an indication of the robustness of the conclusions that can be drawn from a model. We review how our framework can be used to analyze optimal foraging decisions in a stochastic environment. We also discuss the modelling of optimal daily routines and provide an illustration based on singing to attract a mate. We use the model to investigate the features that can produce a dawn song burst in birds. State is defined very broadly so that it includes the information an animal has about its environment. Thus, exploration and learning can be included within the framework. (shrink)

Though âeoepejorationâe is an important notion for linguistic analysis and theory, there is still a lack of theoretical understanding and sound descriptive analysis. In this timely collection, the phenomenon of pejoration is studied from a number of angles. It contains studies from phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics, and deals with diverse languages and their variants. Thus, the collection will appeal to all those linguists with a genuine interest in locating pejoration at the grammar-pragmatics interface.

This book re-assesses the life and legacy of Swami Vivekananda from the vantage point of socially-engaged religion in a time of global dislocations and inequities. Due to the complexity of Vivekananda as a historical figure on the cusp of a new era, few works offer a nuanced, academic examination of his liberative vision and legacy.

The proposed multilevel framework of discourse comprehension includes the surface code, the textbase, the situation model, the genre and rhetorical structure, and the pragmatic communication level. We describe these five levels when comprehension succeeds and also when there are communication misalignments and comprehension breakdowns. A computer tool has been developed, called Coh-Metrix, that scales discourse (oral or print) on dozens of measures associated with the first four discourse levels. The measurement of these levels with an automated tool helps researchers track (...) and better understand multilevel discourse comprehension. Two sets of analyses illustrate the utility of Coh-Metrix in discourse theory and educational practice. First, Coh-Metrix was used to measure the cohesion of the text base and situation model, as well as potential extraneous variables, in a sample of published studies that manipulated text cohesion. This analysis helped us better understand what was precisely manipulated in these studies and the implications for discourse comprehension mechanisms. Second, Coh-Metrix analyses are reported for samples of narrative and science texts in order to advance the argument that traditional text difficulty measures are limited because they fail to accommodate most of the levels of the multilevel discourse comprehension framework. (shrink)

We model scientific theories as Bayesian networks. Nodes carry credences and function as abstract representations of propositions within the structure. Directed links carry conditional probabilities and represent connections between those propositions. Updating is Bayesian across the network as a whole. The impact of evidence at one point within a scientific theory can have a very different impact on the network than does evidence of the same strength at a different point. A Bayesian model allows us to envisage and analyze the (...) differential impact of evidence and credence change at different points within a single network and across different theoretical structures. (shrink)

Biobanks for long-term research pose challenges to the legal and ethical validity of consent to participate. Different models of consent have been proposed to answer some of these challenges. This paper contributes to this discussion by considering the meaning and value of consent to participants in biobanks. Empirical data from a qualitative study is used to provide a participant view of the consent process and to demonstrate that, despite limited understanding of the research, consent provides the research participants with some (...) level of control and a form of self determination that they value. Participation is framed as a moral act of a responsible citizen providing reinforcement of self identity. Consent symbolizes the trust invested in researchers and research institutions to use the biobank for the public good. The paper argues that consent continues to play an important role in biobank participation and that a participant view should inform proposals to modify consent processes. (shrink)

Across two studies, a wide age range of participants was interviewed about the nature of death. All participants were living in rural Madagascar in a community where ancestral beliefs and practices are widespread. In Study 1, children (8–17 years) and adults (19–71 years) were asked whether bodily and mental processes continue after death. The death in question was presented in the context of a narrative that focused either on the corpse or on the ancestral practices associated with the afterlife. Participants (...) aged 8 years and older claimed that death brings an end to most bodily and mental processes. Nevertheless, particularly in the context of the religious narrative, they claimed that certain mental processes continue even after death. This assertion of an afterlife was more evident among adults than children, especially with respect to cognitive processes, such as knowing and remembering. In Study 2, 5‐ and 7‐year‐olds were asked similar questions in connection with the death of a bird and a person. Seven‐year‐olds consistently claimed that bodily and mental processes cease at death, whereas 5‐year‐olds were unsystematic in their replies. Together, the two studies replicate and extend findings obtained with Western children showing that, in the course of development, different conceptions of death are elaborated—a biological conception in which death terminates living processes and a religious conception in which death marks the beginning of a new form of spiritual existence. (shrink)

Judges face difficult choices when the birth and genetic mothers of a child are separate people who dispute maternal access; the views of the general population may help them. Fifty women were asked whether, if they were infertile and could have only one child, they would prefer to be birth mothers (to carry a baby which was not genetically theirs) or genetic mothers (to have another woman carry their genetic baby). Similarly, fifty men were asked about their preference for a (...) partner's child. In both groups the strength of preferences was measured using a lottery technique. The direction and strength of preferences was similar between men and women, and approximately equally divided between birth and genetic motherhood. These attitudes should be taken into account by those adjudicating custody disputes between such mothers. (shrink)

This essay collects four decades of my own reflections, as an anthropologist and feminist, on gender and coloniality across various contexts in Latin America. It also highlights the decolonial methodology and vocabulary that I have had to develop in my various roles as scholar, public intellectual, and expert witness over the years. Briefly, what I present here is a decolonial feminist perspective that argues for the existence of a patriarchal political order in communal societies before colonization. Yet, in my view, (...) precolonial gender has a dual structure that is plural in essence and differs markedly from the binary gender structure of colonial-modern societies, which works in terms of a One and its marginalized others. As I argue, the capturing and transformation of precolonial dual gender structures by the modern gender system exacerbates inequality, increases violence against women, and disempowers them politically. For that reason, I speak of “low-intensity” and “high-intensity” patriarchal systems. (shrink)

Digital technology is transforming life and is beginning to have a profound effect on individual psychic life and the wider social milieu. This article seeks to understand the nature of the new technology and its implications for personal life, culture, and education. The scene is set by comparing the introduction of printing to the revolution inaugurated by digital technology. This new age is often called “postmodern,” and some of the characteristics of the age suggested by Lyotard, Baudrillard, McLuhan, and others (...) are identified. The cultural impact of technology, according to Heidegger, is outlined, together with the interpretation in terms of digital technology proposed by Dreyfus and Spinosa. This is illustrated with examples and compared with the position of other thinkers. Finally, the consequences for education, including universities, are presented, and some proposals for approaches to education in terms of meaning, embodiment, and teacher-student relationship are considered. (shrink)