Steve Jones on evolutionary psychology

A couple of BBC Radio 4 programs aired recently, which were quite critical of EP:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00nk0wz

Neuroanthropology

Another one for the links section - looks like an interesting blog, and regularly updated:

http://neuroanthropology.net/

Essay Questions

Deadline: Friday 0^th week (Hilary Term) – 15^th January 2010 – at 1:00 pm.

Choose one question each, but it doesn't have to be one that nobody else has chosen. You should aim to make the essay around 2000 words (excluding references), give or take 500 or so. Email them to me at gordon.ingram@anthro.ox.ac.uk. 

1.       Theoretical Approaches: Explain how the basic assumptions and methodologies of cognitive/evolutionary anthropology differ from more traditional approaches in the social sciences. In what ways has the latter sort of approach been influenced by metaphors such as the blank slate, the noble savage and the ghost in the machine? How has evolutionarily motivated research challenged these assumptions?

2.       Cognitive Development: Discuss at least three areas in which preverbal infants have been claimed to demonstrate conceptual knowledge. How convincing do you find these claims? Is this kind of nativist approach compatible with the idea of general learning processes?

3.       Cultural Transmission: What are the main similarities and differences between genetic and cultural transmission? Discuss with reference to Sperber’s epidemiological approach, Boyd & Richerson’s theory of gene-culture coevolution / cultural group selection, and one other author of your choice. Give at least one concrete example of how cultural and genetic selection interact. Is this a problem for Sperber’s theory?

4.       Language and Theory of Mind: How much of theory of mind is shared with non-human animals and how much is unique to humans? Is theory of mind necessary for language? How does language enhance human psychology and social life?

5.       Cultural Relativity and Human Universals: To what extent to people in different cultures “think differently”? In what ways might the language we speak, and other aspects of our social lives, affect our thought processes? Give some examples of aspects of mind that may be psychological universals.

6.       Social Networks: Set out some of the psychological mechanisms and behaviours that allow humans to live in larger groups than other primates. What selection pressures might have led to this increase in group size?

7.       Sex and Gender Roles: Evaluate the relative merits of sexual selection theory, social role theory and biosocial theory in accounting for universal (or near-universal) features in the relations between the sexes. Can psychological essentialism help to explain why men and women tend to have different roles in most societies?

8.       Ethnicity and Race: Describe how people tend to think about members of other ethnic groups. Is the essentialised idea of some kind of biological, “racial” difference central to the folk concept of ethnicity? How strong are the parallels between how people think about species and how they think about races? Why does this sort of thinking tend to be associated with inter-group prejudice, and how might it have evolved?

9.       Dominance, Leadership and Prestige: Consider how dominance and status work in animal societies and in human societies. What are the differences between dominance and prestige? What are the evolutionary advantages and disadvantages of being a leader? What are the advantages of being a follower, instead of thinking for oneself?

10.   Moral Judgement: Set out some of the links between emotion, morality and theory of mind. Do affective reactions always precede moral judgements? Do moral judgements always affect the analysis of another agent’s behaviour? How do you think the links between these processes might have evolved? Include some cross-cultural evidence.

11.   Religion and Ritual: How does ordinary human cognition inform and constrain the recurrence of certain phenomena that might be called “religion”? Focus on the following three areas: afterlife beliefs; conceptions of superhuman agents; ritualized behaviours. Are all three areas necessary for a cultural pattern to be called a religion? Why might we expect these areas to be linked, from an evolutionary point of view?

12.   Research Methodology: What are some of the special challenges involved in testing evolutionary hypotheses about the relationship between culture and mind? Give details of two or three emerging  methodologies in this area.

Week 7 summary

Religion & Ritual

A.    How does ordinary human cognition inform and constrain—and hence, help to explain—the recurrence of certain phenomena that might be called “religion”, such as afterlife ideas, conceptions of superhuman agents, ritualized behaviours, and so forth?  Presenters need not address all of religion but may focus on a small number of developed areas in the cognitive science of religion.

The dominant approach in the cognitive science of religion is to analyse cross-cultural patterns in religious beliefs and practices as resulting from constraints imposed by “ordinary” processes of human cognition.

Afterlife ideas:

Children may be intuitive dualists (Bloom, 2005). In some sense, then, it may be “natural” to think of the soul continuing after the death of the body (although the idea of an eternal soul is hardly a logical implication of dualism). CSR tends to be silent on the motivation to believe in such ideas; theories such as terror management theory (which explains wide areas of human psychology and behaviour in terms of our innate fear of death) do a better job on this front. Afterlife beliefs might also be adaptive if they encourage a commitment to prosocial behaviour, but this is not likely to be culturally universal.

Superhuman agents:

What intuitive dualism perhaps explains better is the cross-cultural recurrence of various kinds of beliefs about disembodied spirits (ghosts, ancestors, etc). If mind and body can be separated then it seems quite natural to think of a mind without a body, just as one can have a body without a mind (a corpse). It might also be adaptive to over-attribute agency in nature (the HADD; Guthrie, 1993). An alternative approach to the universality of ghosts is to view them as minimally counter-intuitive (Boyer, 2001): the idea is that a certain amount of counter-intuitiveness in a belief makes it more attention-grabbing and therefore more easily spread. Again though there is the problem of motivation: why do some people sometimes worship or venerate such superhuman agents, and other people at other times ignore them? The idea of MCI has little bearing on this question, which is really the central religious question about beliefs in superhuman agents. Again, belief in supernatural agents might be adaptive if they encourage prosocial behaviour, but they do not do this in all societies. What may be more universal is their encouragement of certain ritualised or conventional behaviours, in certain contexts, that help to define group identity.

Ritualised behaviour:

Here the by-product theory is that rituals arise as a by-product of a hazard avoidance system that leads to an innate aversion to dead bodies, bodily fluids, predators, and so on. Ritualised behaviour is also seen in people with OCD, which is thought to be due to this system misfiring. Others have argued that rituals are adaptive because they allow people to demonstrate either a commitment to the group (Sosis, 2004) or a commitment to a particular belief (Henrich, 2009).

Religion as an adaptation:

For each of these examples (afterlife ideas, superhuman agents, and ritualised behaviour) you can see there are some who see religion as a by-product and some who see it as adaptive. You will have to make up your own mind on this, but personally, just reasoning from first principles I think that religion is likely to be adaptive because it is (a) universal and (b) costly. It is likely to be adaptive at a group level rather than an individual level, because some kind of religion is shared by all societies but not by all individuals. But that’s just my personal intuition, based purely on ignorance because I haven’t actually done any research on religion.

B.      Introduction to the EXREL (“Explaining Religion”) project [staff-led]. Two members of staff will outline the project goals and its current status.

The EXREL project is a very comprehensive approach to studying religion, which is aimed at systematically connecting religious ideas and behaviour to other areas of cognitive science. The connections to theory of mind (Florian’s area) are particularly interesting since they provide a way of formalising some of the rather vague claims that have been made about people’s attribution of intentions (etc.) to supernatural agents. Personally I am also very interested about the connection between moral reasoning and religion, since I think morality is actually a much more central part of religion than belief. Maurice Bloch, for instance, has argued very strongly that the obsession with belief is a Western phenomenon that arose during the Enlightenment, and that if you go to “traditional” ethnographic settings you just do not get coherent, consistent answers from informants as to what they believe or why they believe it. Similarly Eastern religions such as Buddhism are typically much more concerned (at least at a theological level) with how to live one’s life than with the activities of superhuman agents or what happens in the afterlife. So the increasing focus on issues of morality and ritual practice, rather than belief, is to be welcomed.

Knobe on bloggingheads.tv

Joshua Knobe has occasionally appeared on a site called bloggingheads.tv, which is a sort of video blogging/discussion site. Several of his interviews are relevant to either morality or religion (or both). Here are his interviews with Jesse Bering, Joshua Greene and Paul Bloom:

http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/18974

http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/20446

http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/9785

Week 7 preview

Religion & Ritual

A.    How does ordinary human cognition inform and constrain—and hence, help to explain—the recurrence of certain phenomena that might be called ‘religion’ such as afterlife ideas, conceptions of superhuman agents, ritualized behaviours, and so forth.  Presenters need not address all of religion but may focus on a small number of developed areas in the cognitive science of religion.

One of the difficulties of coming up with a general evolutionary explanation of religion is that what we call “religion” has lots of different components, and not all of them are present in all religions across the world. One influential approach, which is particularly associated with the work of Pascal Boyer, has been to account for all these disparate but fairly common features of religion as by-products of other areas of normal human cognition. Sometimes this is referred to as the spandrel hypothesis (a spandrel in evolutionary theory being a complex feature of an organism that looks as if it might have adaptive value, but is actually just a by-product of some other feature). Other theorists, such as my own supervisor Jesse Bering, have defended the view that the core features of religion are actually adaptive, in particular because they encourage cooperation within a religious group (as well as providing psychological reassurance to religious individuals). A third possibility is that religion is an exaptation, which is something that initially arises for one reason and then turns out to have adaptive value in another area, leading to further evolutionary changes (as with feathers in birds, which initially evolved for insulation and then became rather useful for flying).

B.      Introduction to the EXREL (“Explaining Religion”) project [staff-led]. Two members of staff will outline the project goals and its current status.

After Cynthia has given her presentation and we have had a brief discussion, two members of the EXREL project team – Dr Florian Kiessling and Dr Claire White – will give short presentations about the project. Claire will cover the general background, objectives, organisation and progress of the project. Florian will focus on the particular “workpackages” with which he is most involved, namely Theory of mind and religion, Ecological primes in religious variation, and Simulating future trajectories in religion. There will be an opportunity for you to ask a few questions after each presentation.

Week 7 handout: Religion & Ritual

Religion & Ritual

The cognitive science of religion (CSR) is one area in which a wide range of theoretical ideas from cognitive and evolutionary psychology have been applied to diverse human societies and behaviours, and it is an important focus of study here at Oxford. As such, it makes a good case study for this course. But religion is of course a very controversial topic: there is a lot of debate over what (if anything) religions have in common, and whether we can find a general evolutionary explanation for some or all aspects of religion. We will try to disentangle some of these issues this week. Our two guest speakers will also tell us how the EXREL project is working to build a comprehensive cognitive and evolutionary account of religion.

A.    How does ordinary human cognition inform and constrain—and hence, help to explain—the recurrence of certain phenomena that might be called ‘religion’ such as afterlife ideas, conceptions of superhuman agents, ritualized behaviours, and so forth.  Presenters need not address all of religion but may focus on a small number of developed areas in the cognitive science of religion.

B.      Introduction to the EXREL (“Explaining Religion”) project [staff-led]. Two members of staff will outline the project goals and its current status.

Suggested readings for all

Barrett, J. L. (2007). Cognitive science of religion: What is it and why is it? Religion Compass, 1, 1–19. http://users.ox.ac.uk/~theo0038/pdf%20files/Religion%20Compass_Barrett%202007.pdf

Boyer, P. (2003). Religious thought and behavior as by-products of brain function.  Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7, 119–124.

Sosis, R. (2004). The adaptive value of religious ritual. American Scientist, 92, 166–172.

Suggested readings for Presenter A

Whitehouse, H., & Laidlaw, J. (Eds.). (2007) Religion, anthropology, and cognitive science. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press.  Especially Chapters 4–7, 9.

Bering, J. M. (2006). The folk psychology of souls. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 29, 453–498.

The EXREL project

Funded by a research grant from the European Commission, the 'Explaining Religion' (EXREL) project is a three-year interdisciplinary research initiative that seeks to understand both what is universal and cross-culturally variant in religious traditions as well as the cognitive mechanisms that undergird religious thinking and behaviour. EXREL is large-scale and ambitious in scope, integrating the world’s leading centres for psychological, biological, anthropological, and historical research on religion. The project has four principal scientific objectives:

1. To characterize precisely the main elements of the universal religious repertoire and the extent of its variation
2. To establish the principal causes of the universal religious repertoire
3. To account for variations in the degree of elaboration (and emphasis) of each element of the repertoire in different religious traditions, contemporaneously and historically
4. To develop models for simulating future courses of transformation in specified religious systems

These objectives involve ethnographic, historical and psychological research carried out by selected fellows, postgraduate students, and European project partners. Publication of major findings can be found on this website:

http://www.cam.ox.ac.uk/research/explaining-religion/

Further reading

Barrett, J. L. (2004). Why would anyone believe in God?  Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.

Bering, J. M. (2005). The evolutionary history of an illusion: Religious causal beliefs in children and adults. In B. J. Ellis & D. F. Bjorklund (Eds.), Origins of the social mind: Evolutionary psychology and child development (pp. 411–437). New York: Guilford Press.

Bloom, P. (2005). Is God an accident? The Atlantic Monthly, December 2005, 105–112.

Bloom, P. (2007). Religion is natural. Developmental Science, 10, 147–151.

Boyer, P. (2001). Religion explained: The human instincts that fashion gods, spirits and ancestors. New York: Basic.

Cohen, E. (2007). The mind possessed: The cognition of spirit possession in an Afro-Brazilian religious tradition. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.

Dawkins, R. (2007). The God delusion. London: Black Swan.

Guthrie, S. E. (1993). Faces in the clouds: A new theory of religion. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.

Henrich, J. (2009). The evolution of costly displays, cooperation and religion: Credibility enhancing displays and their implications for cultural evolution. Evolution and Human Behavior, 30, 244-260.

Lawson, E. T., & McCauley, R. N. (1990). Rethinking religion: Connecting cognition and culture. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

McCauley, R. N., & Lawson, E. T. (2002). Bringing ritual to mind: Psychological foundations of cultural forms. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Tremlin, T. (2005). Minds and gods: The cognitive foundations of religion. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.

Whitehouse, H. (2004).  Modes of religiosity: A cognitive theory of religious transmission. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.