RSS

Children with Williams Syndrome don’t form racial stereotypes

WILLIAMS Syndrome (WS) is a rare neurodevelopmental disorder caused by the deletion of about 28 genes from the long arm of chromosome 7. It is characterized by mild to moderate mental retardation and “elfin” facial features. Most strikingly, individuals with WS exhibit highly gregarious social behaviour: they approach strangers readily and indiscriminately, behaving as if…

Source: Children with Williams Syndrome don’t form racial stereotypes

 
Leave a comment

Posted by on October 11, 2016 in cognitive science

 

The evolutionary level of human violence — Why Evolution Is True

There’s a new paper in Nature about the level of intraspecific violence in humans and other species, written by José Maria Gómez et al. (free reference and download below). The question is how often members of single species kill each other in the wild, and whether humans are outliers. It’s already gotten a lot of attention in the press, […]

via The evolutionary level of human violence — Why Evolution Is True

 
Leave a comment

Posted by on October 3, 2016 in religion

 

Why Conservatives Are Against Science And Social Justice

 

The Fundamental Premise

Everyone I don't like is Hitler
It’s been a long time since I’ve posted! I think I don’t really have much more to say about religion and belief that I haven’t already said. So this post is more like my conclusion about why people believe what they do, the grand conclusion of all of my reading of scholarly literature related to religion and cognitive science over the past eight years.

What brought this up is another blog post I’ve read. The following is from In Due Course (h/t Marginal Revolution):

The whole “normative sociology” concept has its origins in a joke that Robert Nozick made, in Anarchy, State and Utopia, where he claimed, in an offhand way, that “Normative sociology, the study of what the causes of problems ought to be, greatly fascinates us all”(247). Despite the casual manner in which he made the remark, the observation is an astute one. Often when we study social problems, there is an almost irresistible temptation to study what we would like the cause of those problems to be (for whatever reason), to the neglect of the actual causes. When this goes uncorrected, you can get the phenomenon of “politically correct” explanations for various social problems – where there’s no hard evidence that A actually causes B, but where people, for one reason or another, think that A ought to be the explanation for B. This can lead to a situation in which denying that A is the cause of B becomes morally stigmatized, and so people affirm the connection primarily because they feel obliged to, not because they’ve been persuaded by any evidence.

Let me give just one example, to get the juices flowing. I routinely hear extraordinary causal powers being ascribed to “racism” — claims that far outstrip available evidence. Some of these claims may well be true, but there is a clear moral stigma associated with questioning the causal connection being posited – which is perverse, since the question of what causes what should be a purely empirical one. Questioning the connection, however, is likely to attract charges of seeking to “minimize racism.” (Indeed, many people, just reading the previous two sentences, will already be thinking to themselves “Oh my God, this guy is seeking to minimize racism.”) There also seems to be a sense that, because racism is an incredibly bad thing, it must also cause a lot of other bad things. But what is at work here is basically an intuition about how the moral order is organized, not one about the causal order. It’s always possible for something to be extremely bad (intrinsically, as it were), or extremely common, and yet causally not all that significant.

I actually think this sort of confusion between the moral and the causal order happens a lot. Furthermore, despite having a lot of sympathy for “qualitative” social science, I think the problem is much worse in these areas. Indeed, one of the major advantages of quantitative approaches to social science is that it makes it pretty much impossible to get away with doing normative sociology.

Incidentally, “normative sociology” doesn’t necessarily have a left-wing bias. There are lots of examples of conservatives doing it as well (e.g. rising divorce rates must be due to tolerance of homosexuality, out-of-wedlock births must be caused by the welfare system etc.) The difference is that people on the left are often more keen on solving various social problems, and so they have a set of pragmatic interests at play that can strongly bias judgement. The latter case is particularly frustrating, because if the plan is to solve some social problem by attacking its causal antecedents, then it is really important to get the causal connections right – otherwise your intervention is going to prove useless, and quite possibly counterproductive.

This quote points towards the heart of what I think leads people to believe what they do.

People sort of waffle between thinking of the universe as operating in a mechanistic or empirical way and operating in a “social” or “moral” way. We restrict, at least ideally, mechanistic thinking to relationships between inanimate objects. A rock on some remote coastline crumbles into the sea due to water/air erosion. A simple (ish) math formula can probably be used to predict when that particular piece of rock will erode and crumble.

On the other hand, for interactions between agents, we think in a “moral” way. That is, when we think in the moral way, we think in moral “shoulds” and “oughts” instead of the mechanical “shoulds” and “oughts”. In the quote above, racism “should” be responsible for a host of other social ills because, well, racism is bad. It’s a horns effect applied to a concept.

Most importantly, people intuit that this “moral” way supercedes the mechanistic way in both value and precedence. The moral way is both more important and it’s the ultimate cause. The moral way is the fundamental rule of the universe. Instead of the universe running on the laws of physics, “moral” thinking intuits that the universe runs on the laws of proper social protocols. If something of great import either has happened or has to happen, then the rules behind social interactions owns the day. Due to this tendency, we as humans tend to ascribe moral causality behind things and events that are in actuality mechanistic. Your car didn’t start this morning? What did you do (to your car?) or what moral failing did you enact to deserve this!? And so on.

The more relevant case of this, since this is an early Christianity blog as well, is the sacrifice of Jesus. This makes absolutely no sense in a mechanistic way (i.e., biology; laws of physics). But it makes sense in a social way: Concepts of sin, blood sacrifice, redemption, and so on are social concepts. You feel bad or guilty, or are overwhelmed with empathy and a sense of indebtedness. And our brains give precedence to these social and moral aspects of “causality” since those are the fundamental building blocks of the universe… intuitively.

This follows our cognitive architecture of System 1 and System 2 thinking. In my parlance, the Intuitionists and the Rationalists.

Moreover, people seem to balk at reference overlap. At least, in one direction anyway. Imagine someone saying that the reason for the rock eroding and crumbling into the coastline was because we didn’t sit and talk to the coastline enough. This is the basics behind concepts like animism. When we hear people talk like this, we sort of shrug our shoulders and go on with our lives. Animism makes sort of intuitive sense; especially if we didn’t know any better.

But the other direction, if someone were to apply mechanical thinking to human relationships, this is where the real fireworks happens. It’s not allowed! You can’t do that! Notice that people have the same reactions if you try to apply mechanical thinking to religious concepts. You can’t do that! Non-Overlapping Magisteria! Because religion is premised on the idea that the fundamental reality of the universe is social. The supernatural? Psi? Deepak Chopra-like universal consciousness? Life after death? Even free will? All based on the idea that the fundamental rule of the universe is social.

Why do we think like this? I think it’s because our brains evolved intelligence in a social environment, where socialization was the main determinant for who lived and who died. Having too much gain on social rules, in that environment, probably didn’t hurt. However, when all you know is your tribe and trying to model other minds, applying mechanical thinking is probably detrimental.

The problem being that a lot of our experiences of the world involve intentional agents interacting with unintentional inanimate objects and vice versa. We yell at inanimate objects when they do us wrong, and we assume we must have committed some social faux pas if bad things happen to us. This undergirds intuitive concepts like the just world fallacy.

It just so happens that mechanical vs social modes of thinking not only inhibit each other (i.e., thinking in a mechanical way makes you less empathetic and thinking in a social way makes you less “technical” so to say) but seem to be represented in the genders: There’s the “extreme” male brain and the “extreme” female brain:

It turns out that, when it comes to brains, being a super-male may not be such a good deal. According to Baron-Cohen, Autism-Spectrum-Disorders (ASD), which are far more common in males than in females, may reflect the expression of an extreme male brain, one that has extremely high systemizing skills and extremely low empathizing ones. Individuals with ASD often have excellent abilities for analyzing, organizing, and remembering technical information but poor abilities for communication, expressing emotions, and understanding the emotional and communicative expressions of others. Baron-Cohen has suggested that this extreme male brain may be the result of exposure to too much testosterone in the first trimester of pregnancy.

Until recently, it was unclear what an extreme female brain may look like, but a recent study conducted at the State University of New York in Albany and published in the online journal Evolutionary Psychology has offered some hints about it. The authors of this study, Jennifer Bremser and Gordon Gallup Jr., have shown that too much concern about what other people think and feel is associated with fear of negative evaluations, which may be expressed through apprehension and distress over negative evaluations by others, the avoidance of evaluative social situations, and the expectation that others would evaluate one negatively.

With this information, can you guess which gender is more religious?

But let me get this out of the way: No, the universe doesn’t ultimately run on social rules. No, the universe is not at its base ontologically mental; as a matter of fact, I can say with a high degree of Bayesian confidence that no ontologically mental entities exist, since that breaks all sorts of laws of thermodynamics.

Maybe I’m not the first to point this out, and maybe this is specious thinking, but it seems to me that, just as how ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, our developmental psychology (probably) recapitulates our evolutionary psychology.

 
Leave a comment

Posted by on September 19, 2016 in cognitive science, religion

 

Charts Are Persuasive

  

 
2 Comments

Posted by on September 17, 2015 in cognitive science, Funny

 

Anniversary!

I got a notification from WordPress that this is my “anniversary” for starting this blog. I actually started blogging at blogger.com, but I didn’t like the mobile interface, and since I do 99% of my blogging on my phone, that wasn’t conducive to writing blogs.

But wow, I’ve been blogging for 7 years now! I started in 2008, which was because of an overlong email I was writing someone which eventually turned into this post. Due to the circumstances that precipitated that email, I was listening to the following song a lot. So, I guess you might call it the theme song for this blog:

The main message of that email, and of this blog, is to

“Abandon naive realism

Surrender thought to cold precision

 
1 Comment

Posted by on August 13, 2015 in none

 

Moralizing Gods And… Kissing?

Here’s a relationship I bet you didn’t see coming.

A while back I posted a summary of Ara Norenzayan’s findings about the relationships between prosociality and religious belief. Here are some of the bullet points I took note of in his video:

* Small foraging societies typically don’t have moralizing gods. Big societies generally have moralizing gods. Causal or correlational?

* Economic games and small/big religions: Big religions, that is, the world religions, show more cooperative behavior in economic games. Small religions are more selfish. Again, causal or correlational?

* Belief in god in and of itself doesn’t correlate with any behavior in monetary generosity (belief in god per se doesn’t lead to moral behavior; you need to go to church to reap the benefits! And you get those same benefits being an atheist in church). Though in the context that Norenzayan was mentioning this fact, it was in the context of religious priming. Just declaring theism didn’t make someone more cooperative, but religious priming does. On the other hand, being non-religious makes you sort of impervious to religious priming; though secular priming has the same cooperative effect on the non-religious.

* Prosocial behavior correlates with a belief in a punishing god. Belief in a forgiving god correlates with cheating. Same for hell/heaven belief, respectively (though belief in hell seems to make people less happy).

* Religions are also correlated with extreme rituals for possibly belief in belief (i.e. costly signaling) reasons.

These are the social things that are correlated with types of religious beliefs. Religions that are spread across large areas (i.e. the eponymous Big Gods) are associated with different prosocial behavior than small gods.

Now, one of the concepts I kept with me when I joined the military 20 years ago and had to learn statistics/hypothesis testing was that, if you see a correlation, there are three possible causes you should automatically think of, and see if any of them make sense. So if you see that A and B have a correlation, then:

1. A causes B

2. B causes A

3. A and B are caused by C

There are others, but this is the simplest way of looking at the data since all of the variables to work with are already there. You just move them around and see which formulation fits.

It turns out that romantic kissing is correlated with large societies

From pop culture to evolutionary psychology, we have come to take kissing for granted as universally desirable among humans and inseparable from other aspects of affection and intimacy. However, a recent article in American Anthropologist by Jankowiak, Volsche and Garcia questions the notion that romantic kissing is a human universal by conducting a broad cross cultural survey to document the existence or non-existence of the romantic-sexual kiss around the world.

The authors based their research on a set of 168 cultures compiled from eHRAF World Cultures (128 cultures) as well as the Standard Cross Cultural Sample (27 cultures) and by surveying 88 ethnographers (13 cultures). The report’s findings are intriguing: rather than an overwhelming popularity of romantic smooching, the global ethnographic evidence suggests that it is common in only 46% (77) of the cultures sampled. The remaining 54% (91) of cultures had no evidence of romantic kissing. In short, this new research concludes that romantic-sexual kissing is not as universal as we might presume.

The report also reveals that romantic kissing is most common in the Middle East and Asia, and least common of all among Central American cultures. Similarly, the authors state that “no ethnographer working with Sub-Saharan African, New Guinea, or Amazonian foragers or horticulturalists reported having witnessed any occasion in which their study populations engaged in a romantic–sexual kiss”, whereas it is nearly ubiquitous in northern Asia and North America.

[…]

Among the indigenous Tapirapé people of Central Brazil, Wagley (1977) found that “couples showed affection”, but “kissing seems to have been unknown”. He explains,

When I described it to them, it struck them as a strange form of showing physical attraction … and, in a way, disgusting. It was common, instead, to see a married couple walking across the village plaza with the man’s arm draped over his wife’s shoulder. A couple might stand close to each other during a conversation with the man’s arms over his wife’s shoulders and she holding him around the hips (Wagley 1977: 158).

Across the Pacific Ocean in Melanesia, Bronislaw Malinowski’s (1929: 330) classic account describes the impression of kissing among Trobriand Islanders, who were equally bemused by the foreign custom:

Certainly it never forms a self-contained independent source of pleasure, nor is it a definite preliminary stage of love-making, as is the case with us. This caress was never spontaneously mentioned by the natives, and, to direct inquiries, I always received a negative answer. The natives know, however, that white people “will sit, will press mouth against mouth–they are pleased with it.” But they regard it as a rather insipid and silly form of amusement.

The Tsonga people of Southern Africa are also openly disgusted by the practice: “Kissing was formerly entirely unknown… When they saw the custom adopted by the Europeans, they said laughingly: “Look at these people! They suck each other! They eat each other’s saliva and dirt!” Even a husband never kissed his wife” (Junod 1927: 353-354).

…and thus, romantic kissing is correlated with Big Gods. Check out the religion of the Tapirapé people, or the religion of the Trobriand Islands peoples, or the religion of the Tsonga people: No romantic kissing, and no large moralizing gods.

So I have to ask, is belief in a large universal god the thing that causes kissing to have a romantic component? Or is it that romantic kissing causes people to believe in large, moralizing gods? Or is it that both are being caused by some other factor? I lean towards C, but who knows.

 
2 Comments

Posted by on August 4, 2015 in economics/sociology

 
 
NeuroLogica Blog

My ὑπομνήματα about religion

Slate Star Codex

Open threads at the Open Thread tab every Sunday and Wednesday

Κέλσος

Matthew Ferguson Blogs

The Wandering Scientist

Just another WordPress.com site

NT Blog

My ὑπομνήματα about religion

Euangelion Kata Markon

A blog dedicated to the academic study of the "Gospel According to Mark"

PsyPost

My ὑπομνήματα about religion

PsyBlog

Understand your mind with the science of psychology -

Vridar

Musings on biblical studies, politics, religion, ethics, human nature, tidbits from science

Maximum Entropy

My ὑπομνήματα about religion

My ὑπομνήματα about religion

My ὑπομνήματα about religion

atheist, polyamorous skeptics

Criticism is not uncivil

Say..

My ὑπομνήματα about religion

Research Digest

My ὑπομνήματα about religion

Disrupting Dinner Parties

Feminism is for everyone!

My ὑπομνήματα about religion

The New Oxonian

Religion and Culture for the Intellectually Impatient

The Musings of Thomas Verenna

A Biblioblog about imitation, the Biblical Narratives, and the figure of Jesus