Showing posts with label evolutionary psychology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label evolutionary psychology. Show all posts

Friday, March 08, 2024

Explaining the evolution of gossip

 A fascinating open source article from Pan et al.:

Significance
From Mesopotamian cities to industrialized nations, gossip has been at the center of bonding human groups. Yet the evolution of gossip remains a puzzle. The current article argues that gossip evolves because its dissemination of individuals’ reputations induces individuals to cooperate with those who gossip. As a result, gossipers proliferate as well as sustain the reputation system and cooperation.
Abstract
Gossip, the exchange of personal information about absent third parties, is ubiquitous in human societies. However, the evolution of gossip remains a puzzle. The current article proposes an evolutionary cycle of gossip and uses an agent-based evolutionary game-theoretic model to assess it. We argue that the evolution of gossip is the joint consequence of its reputation dissemination and selfishness deterrence functions. Specifically, the dissemination of information about individuals’ reputations leads more individuals to condition their behavior on others’ reputations. This induces individuals to behave more cooperatively toward gossipers in order to improve their reputations. As a result, gossiping has an evolutionary advantage that leads to its proliferation. The evolution of gossip further facilitates these two functions of gossip and sustains the evolutionary cycle.

Friday, March 01, 2024

The Hidden History of Debt

I pass on this link from the latest Human Bridges newsletter, and would encourage readers to subscribe to and support the Observatory's Human Bridges project, which is part of the Independent Media Institute:

Recent scientific findings and research in the study of human origins and our biology, paleoanthropology, and primate research have reached a key threshold: we are increasingly able to trace the outlines and fill in the blanks of our evolutionary story that began 7 million years ago to the present, and understand the social and cultural processes that produced the world we live in now.

Wednesday, February 28, 2024

What Is a Society?: The Importance of Building an Interdisciplinary Perspective

I'm passing on the abstract I just received of a forthcoming article in Behavioral and Brain Sciences that I am starting to have a look through. Motivated readers can obtain a PDF of the article by emailing me.
Abstract: I submit the need to establish a comparative study of societies, namely groups beyond a simple, immediate family that have the potential to endure for generations, whose constituent individuals recognize one another as members, and that maintain control over access to a physical space. This definition, with refinements and ramifications I explore, serves for cross-disciplinary research since it applies not just to nations but to diverse hunter-gatherer and tribal groups with a pedigree that likely traces back to the societies of our common ancestor with the chimpanzees. It also applies to groups among other species for which comparison to humans can be instructive. Notably, it describes societies in terms of shared group identification rather than social interactions. An expansive treatment of the topic is overdue given that the concept of a society (even the use of such synonyms as primate "troop") has fallen out of favor among biologists, resulting in a semantic mess; while sociologists rarely consider societies beyond nations, and social psychologists predominantly focus on ethnicities and other component groups of societies. I examine the relevance of societies across realms of inquiry, discussing the ways member recognition is achieved; how societies compare to other organizational tiers; and their permeability, territoriality, relation to social networks and kinship, and impermanence. We have diverged from our ancestors in generating numerous affiliations within and between societies while straining the expectation of society memberships by assimilating diverse populations. Nevertheless, if, as I propose, societies were the first, and thereafter the primary, groups of prehistory, how we came to register society boundaries may be foundational to all human "groupiness." A discipline-spanning approach to societies should further our understanding of what keeps societies together and what tear them apart.

Wednesday, February 07, 2024

Historical Myths as Culturally Evolved Technologies for Coalitional Recruitment

I pass on to MindBlog readers the abstract of a recent Behavioral and Brain Science article by Sijilmassi et al. titled "‘Our Roots Run Deep’: Historical Myths as Culturally Evolved Technologies for Coalitional Recruitment."  Motivated readers can obtain a PDF of the article from me. 

One of the most remarkable manifestations of social cohesion in large-scale entities is the belief in a shared, distinct and ancestral past. Human communities around the world take pride in their ancestral roots, commemorate their long history of shared experiences, and celebrate the distinctiveness of their historical trajectory. Why do humans put so much effort into celebrating a long-gone past? Integrating insights from evolutionary psychology, social psychology, evolutionary anthropology, political science, cultural history and political economy, we show that the cultural success of historical myths is driven by a specific adaptive challenge for humans: the need to recruit coalitional support to engage in large scale collective action and prevail in conflicts. By showcasing a long history of cooperation and shared experiences, these myths serve as super-stimuli, activating specific features of social cognition and drawing attention to cues of fitness interdependence. In this account, historical myths can spread within a population without requiring group-level selection, as long as individuals have a vested interest in their propagation and strong psychological motivations to create them. Finally, this framework explains, not only the design-features of historical myths, but also important patterns in their cross-cultural prevalence, inter-individual distribution, and particular content.

Monday, July 17, 2023

MindBlog's reading list.

I've decided to pass on links to articles I have found worthwhile reading , realizing that I am not going to have time to frame their ideas into longer posts because I'm speading more time now at my Steinway B's keyboard than at my computer's keyboard. If you encounter a paywall with any of the links, you might try entering the URL at https://archive.is/.

An installment of Venkatesh Rao’s newsletter: The permaweird narrative 

Jaron Lanier “There is no A.I.” in The New Yorker  

Human Beings Are Soon Going to Be Eclipsed’ David Brooks in The New York Times commenting on Douglas Hofstadter's  recent ideas.  

Marc Andreessen offers a horrific commentary titled "Fighting" on Elon Musk challenging Mark Zuckerberg to a cage fight.  

Learning from history. Archeological evidence that early hierarchical or authoritarian cultures didn't persist as long as more cooperative eqalitarian ones.  

Arthur Brooks on "The illusion of explanatory depth", an installment in his series "How to build a life.""  

Potential anti-aging therapy.  One sample of the effusive outpouring of new ideas and widgets offered by New Atlas.

 

 

 

Tuesday, June 20, 2023

The psychological illusion of "The Good Old Days"

Mastroianni and Gilbert (open access) do a nice study illustrating that the the universal perception of our ongoing moral decline is a psychological illusion to which people all over the world and throughout history have been susceptible. Their abstract:
Anecdotal evidence indicates that people believe that morality is declining. In a series of studies using both archival and original data (n = 12,492,983), we show that people in at least 60 nations around the world believe that morality is declining, that they have believed this for at least 70 years and that they attribute this decline both to the decreasing morality of individuals as they age and to the decreasing morality of successive generations. Next, we show that people’s reports of the morality of their contemporaries have not declined over time, suggesting that the perception of moral decline is an illusion. Finally, we show how a simple mechanism based on two well-established psychological phenomena (biased exposure to information and biased memory for information) can produce an illusion of moral decline, and we report studies that confirm two of its predictions about the circumstances under which the perception of moral decline is attenuated, eliminated or reversed (that is, when respondents are asked about the morality of people they know well or people who lived before the respondent was born). Together, our studies show that the perception of moral decline is pervasive, perdurable, unfounded and easily produced. This illusion has implications for research on the misallocation of scarce resources, the underuse of social support and social influence.

Monday, May 22, 2023

Multilevel cultural evolution - new theory and practical applications

I want to point to a exceptionally lucid and well written expostion by David Sloan Willson et al. and pass on the opening paragraphs of their article that frames the context for understanding how group level selection operates at multiple levels, from cells to societies to the entire earth system. I strongly recommend reading through it slowly and carefully. If that seems a bit much, skip down to the section titled "The earth system as the ultimate unit of selection.'  (added note: for a comprehensive game theoretic analysis of evolutionary dynamics within and among competing groups see Cooney et al.)

Darwin’s theory of evolution is celebrated for its explanatory scope, prompting the geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky to declare in 1973 that “nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution”. However, what became the “modern synthesis” can also be called the “great constriction.” The study of evolution was confined almost entirely to genetic evolution, relegating the study of human cultural change to other disciplines.
It was not until the 1970s that evolutionary thinkers started to go back to basics by defining natural selection as Darwin did—any process that combines the triad of variation, selection, and replication—irrespective of the proximate mechanisms. The first mathematical models of cultural evolution were based on population genetics models developed 50 y earlier.
Today, the study of cultural evolution in humans and other species is in full swing —and these advances in basic scientific knowledge have practical applications. In this article, we will first review major developments in our basic understanding of human cultural evolution. Then, we will show how they can be applied to a diversity of positive change efforts, no matter what the scale (e.g., from the individual person to global governance) or topic domain. We elaborate for the topics of complex systems science and engineering, economics and business, mental health and well-being, and global change efforts.

Here is the text from the section near the end of the article titled "The earth system as the ultimate unit of selection.' 

The earth system as the ultimate unit of selection.
We have seen that multilevel selection is like a perverse alchemist who turns gold into lead. Self-preservation—a good thing—becomes disruptive selfishness. Helping kith and kin—a good thing—becomes cronyism and nepotism. The welfare of my nation—a good thing—leads to international conflicts. Thriving economies—a good thing—leads to overheating the earth. Nearly everything that is pathological at higher scales can be traced to behaviors that are prosocial at smaller scales.
The only solution to this problem is for policies to be formulated with welfare of the whole-earth system in mind. This is not sufficient by itself, as we will elaborate below, but the basic logic of multilevel selection reveals that it is necessary. There is no invisible hand to permute lower-level interests into higher-level welfare other than our own conscious efforts.
Superficially, it might seem that selection at the planetary scale is impossible because our planet is not competing with any other planets. What makes planet-level selection possible is a decision-making process that makes planetary welfare the target of selection, orients variation around the target, and identifies and replicates better practices, realizing they will be sensitive to context. This is how conscious cultural evolution takes place at smaller scales, as described in the previous sections, and can also take place at the global scale.
The concept of the whole earth as a cooperative system and the primary social identity of an individual was beyond the imagination only a few centuries ago. Nevertheless, when it comes to cultural evolution, the past does not predict the future. Given the myriad forms of globalization that have taken place during the last century, it is difficult not to consider the whole earth as a single system that must transition from CAS2 (“survive”) to CAS1 (“thrive”). Human social groups are nearly always socially constructed. To say “I am first and foremost a human being and citizen of the earth” is no more difficult than to say “I am an American” or “I am a Christian.”
Many people have already adopted a whole-earth ethic, which does manifest as action to a degree—but they do not have a common and authoritative theoretical framework to invoke and from which to derive effective policies. This is in contrast to neoclassical economics and its elaborate mathematical justification of the invisible hand metaphor. Multilevel selection reveals the invisible hand metaphor to be profoundly untrue. It is simply not the case, in economics or any other policy domain, that the lower-level pursuit of self-interest robustly benefits the common good. However, multilevel selection does lead to another, more legitimate conception of the invisible hand metaphor. We must act in two capacities: as designers of whole systems and as participants in the systems that we design. As designers, we must have the welfare of the whole system in mind, which is the opposite of the invisible hand metaphor. As participants, we can indeed respond to our local concerns without having the whole system in mind. Put another way, selection at the level of whole systems is the hand, which winnows the small set of lower-level behaviors that benefit the common good from the much larger set of lower-level behaviors that undermine the common good.

Wednesday, May 17, 2023

An evolutionary psychology perspective on the politics of leadership

Thomas Edsall does another of his scholarly analyses, this time putting Trump as the wannabe alpha male in a larger evolutionary context. I started this post with a number of clips from Edsall's text, but then decided to have another go at asking ChatGPT 4 to do a summary for me. In response to my request "Please condense and summarize the following essay by Thomas Edsall" it did a quite credible job, and I'm going to be lazy and pass on what the bot did!

Thomas Edsall's essay discusses how Donald Trump's alpha-male image conflicts with the barrage of criminal investigations and civil suits he faces, threatening his self-portrayal and traditional leadership standards. Trump's bid for dominance never garnered majority support, yet he still poses a serious threat to American democracy.

The essay delves into the evolutionary and neuroendocrine foundations of human aggression, highlighting the crucial role of coalition formation in overcoming coercive alpha males. Early sub-elite males formed coalitions to overthrow alpha males who violated social norms, paving the way for a more egalitarian society. This development has been traced to the roots of democracy, as it eventually led to the state's acquisition of police power and the legal use of force to enforce norms and laws.

The criminal investigations and civil suits against Trump represent America's democratic system of government, attempting to constrain a deregulated alpha-male wannabe. Over time, complex systems have evolved to limit the power of leaders, like coalitions, power-sharing agreements, parliaments, and constitutions. However, the dynamic of dominance persists, as voters often favor taller candidates and crave strong leaders.

Prof. Rose McDermott explains the process of self-domestication in human societies, where beta and gamma males work together to unseat coercive alpha males who exploit the community, leading to more egalitarian dynamics. McDermott views former President Trump as an example of a coercive alpha male, and suggests that the polarization in the U.S. has prevented the formation of coalitions strong enough to oppose him.

Some academics disagree with this biological explanation for modern social behavior, such as Prof. John Horgan, who finds it deterministic and promoting fatalism, and Prof. R. Brian Ferguson, who disputes the idea of alphas facing death due to sub-alpha elite coalitions. On the other hand, Prof. Dan McAdams argues that Trump's personality and authoritarian dynamic align with an older, evolutionarily-driven paradigm of dominance.

Prof. Kevin Smith attributes the rise of coercive alpha males and other unprincipled personalities in politics to the weakening of democratic norms, pointing out that these norms are difficult to institutionalize and easy to destroy. Once gone, they may be difficult to re-establish, leaving the political system vulnerable to demagogues and tyrants.

Monday, May 08, 2023

Can a theory of events-in-time - our future history - ever be crafted?

I first drafted this as I usually do to pass on clips that attempt to extract the core points from a fascinating brief piece by Venkatesh Rao.  I then decided to ask Chat GPT 4, Google's bard and Microsoft Bing to "Please condense the core ideas in the following document into a few paragraphs:"  The response from Chat GPT 4 was amazing, so I paste it in here before giving you my clips :

Venkatesh Rao explores the idea of the "End of History" as an analogy to the "End of Biology," where biology transitioned from an independent area of intellectual inquiry to one subservient to the sciences of non-living matter. The End of History could signify a move away from vitalist understandings of the logic of events-in-time. Rao acknowledges that the End of History theory is not widely popular due to its non-constructive nature, as it subverts vitalist understanding of events without providing a parsimonious and generative alternative.

Rao suggests that deeper logics of events-in-time exist in nature, with biological evolution and thermodynamics offering more complex explanations than a mere "one damn thing after another" perspective. He proposes that events-in-time might be viewed as the trace of an irreversible, non-ergodic computation process, with long-term collective memory playing a significant role. History, as we have understood it so far, might be considered a particular memory architecture with a specific irreversible and non-ergodic structure to the evolving computation. This perspective could potentially pave the way for a more refined and deliberate understanding of future events, reducing events-in-time after the End of History to a specialized kind of computation.

Here are my clips that Chat GPT 4 used to generate the above condensation:

What if the Hegel-Fukuyama idea of the End of History is something like Darwin’s idea of natural selection?

The Darwinian century began with The Origin of the Species in 1859 and ended with the discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953. Humanity experienced an End of Biology moment somewhere between those bookend events…a demotion of the discipline from an independent area of intellectual inquiry to one subservient to the sciences of non-living matter…Biology went from being an inscrutable aspect of providence to an emerging engineering discipline, subservient to physics and mathematics by way of chemistry.

By analogy, the End of History moment is something like an end to vitalist understandings of the logic of events-in-time…There is no role for divine agency, and no justification for assigning a particular positive or negative valence to apparent secular tendencies in the stream of events…The fact that the theory is historicist without being normative is perhaps what makes it so powerfully subversive. The End of History theory is the historicism that kills all other historicisms. Past the End of History, notions like progress must be regarded as analogous to notions like élan vital past the End of Biology. …it is undeniable that 30 years in, the End of History theory is still not particularly popular…One obvious reason is that it is non-constructive. It subverts a vitalist understanding of events in time without supplying a more parsimonious and generative alternative.

In Fukuyama’s theory, there are no notions comparable to variation and natural selection that allow us to continue making sense of events-in-time. There are no Mendelian clues pointing to something like a genetics of events-in-time. There is no latent Asimovian psychohistorical technology lurking in the details of the End of History theory…Perhaps one damn thing after another is where our understanding of events in time ought to end, for our own good.

I think this is too pessimistic though. Deeper logics of events-in-time abound in nature. Even biological evolution and thermodynamics, which are more elemental process aspects of reality, admit more than a one damn thing after another reading. History, as a narrower class of supervening phenomena that must respect the grammars of both, ought to admit more interesting readings, based on broadly explanatory laws that are consistent with both, but more specific than either. Dawkins’ memetic view of cultural evolution, and various flavors of social darwinism, constitute first-order attempts at such laws. Some flavors of cosmism and transhumanism constitute more complex attempts that offer hope of wresting ever-greater agency from the universe.

So what does explain the logic of events-in-time in a way that allows us to make sense of events-in-time past the End of History, in a way that improves upon a useless one damn thing after another sense of it, and says something more than the laws of evolution or thermodynamics?

I don’t have an answer, but I have a promising clue: somehow, events-in-time must be viewed as the trace of an irreversible, non-ergodic computation process, in which long-term collective memory plays a significant role.

History, as we have understood it so far, is something like a particular memory architecture that assumes a particular irreversible and non-ergodic structure to the evolving computation. The contingency and path dependence of events-in-time in human affairs is no reason to believe there cannot also be theoretical richness within the specificity. A richness that might open up futures that can be finely crafted with a psychohistorical deliberateness, rather than simply vaguely anticipated and crudely shaped. 

Perhaps, just as life after the End of Biology was reduced to a specialized kind of chemistry, events-in-time, after the End of History, can be reduced to a specialized kind of computation.


Wednesday, February 01, 2023

Market exposure and human morality

In the face of resurgent threats to place religion over the rest of civil society, and specious claims that we can't have a moral society without the (varying) moral injunctions of various religions, this recent article by Enke in Nature Human Behavior offers a nice explication of one of several other routes by which moral behaviors have evolved over time. Here is the abstract:
According to evolutionary theories, markets may foster an internalized and universalist prosociality because it supports market-based cooperation. This paper uses the cultural folklore of 943 pre-industrial ethnolinguistic groups to show that a society’s degree of market interactions, proxied by the presence of intercommunity trade and money, is associated with the cultural salience of (1) prosocial behaviour, (2) interpersonal trust, (3) universalist moral values and (4) moral emotions of guilt, shame and anger. To provide tentative evidence that a part of this correlation reflects a causal effect of market interactions, the analysis leverages both fine-grained geographic variation across neighbouring historical societies and plausibly exogenous variation in the presence of markets that arises through proximity to historical trade routes or the local degree of ecological diversity. The results suggest that the coevolutionary process involving markets and morality partly consists of economic markets shaping a moral system of a universalist and internalized prosociality.

Wednesday, January 25, 2023

The Evolution of Peace

I pass on the abstract of an article by Luke Glowacki that has been submitted to the network of Behavioral and Brain Science reviewers who might offer commentary on its arguments. Motivated readers can obtain a copy of the article from me.
Abstract: While some species have affiliative and even cooperative interactions between individuals of different social groups, humans are alone in having durable, positive-sum, interdependent relationships across unrelated social groups. Our capacity to have harmonious relationships that cross group boundaries is an important aspect of our species' success, allowing for the exchange of ideas, materials, and ultimately enabling cumulative cultural evolution. Knowledge about the conditions required for peaceful intergroup relationships is critical for understanding the success of our species and building a more peaceful world. How do humans create harmonious relationships across group boundaries and when did this capacity emerge in the human lineage? Answering these questions involves considering the costs and benefits of intergroup cooperation and aggression, for oneself, one's group, and one's neighbor. Taking a game theoretical perspective provides new insights into the difficulties of removing the threat of war and reveals an ironic logic to peace—the factors that enable peace also facilitate the increased scale and destructiveness of conflict. In what follows, I explore the conditions required for peace, why they are so difficult to achieve, and when we expect peace to have emerged in the human lineage. I argue that intergroup cooperation was an important component of human relationships and a selective force in our species history in the past 300 thousand years. But the preconditions for peace only emerged in the past 100 thousand years and likely coexisted with intermittent intergroup violence which would have also been an important and selective force in our species' history.

Wednesday, October 12, 2022

Third-party punishment by preverbal infants

From Kanakogi et al.:
Third-party punishment of antisocial others is unique to humans and seems to be universal across cultures. However, its emergence in ontogeny remains unknown. We developed a participatory cognitive paradigm using gaze-contingency techniques, in which infants can use their gaze to affect agents displayed on a monitor. In this paradigm, fixation on an agent triggers the event of a stone crushing the agent. Throughout five experiments (total N = 120), we show that eight-month-old infants punished antisocial others. Specifically, infants increased their selective looks at the aggressor after watching aggressive interactions. Additionally, three control experiments excluded alternative interpretations of their selective gaze, suggesting that punishment-related decision-making influenced looking behaviour. These findings indicate that a disposition for third-party punishment of antisocial others emerges in early infancy and emphasize the importance of third-party punishment for human cooperation. This behavioural tendency may be a human trait acquired over the course of evolution.

Wednesday, October 05, 2022

Cognitive and Evolutionary Foundations of Puritanical Morality

MindBlog receives articles for commentary from the Cambridge University Journal of Behavioral and Brain Sciences. I will pass on the following abstract of an article by Fitouchi et. al. Motivated readers can email me to request a copy.
Why do many societies moralize apparently harmless pleasures, such as lust, gluttony, alcohol, drugs, and even music and dance? Why do they erect temperance, asceticism, sobriety, modesty, and piety as cardinal moral virtues? According to existing theories, this puritanical morality cannot be reduced to concerns for harm and fairness: it must emerge from cognitive systems that did not evolve for cooperation (e.g., disgust-based "Purity" concerns). Here, we argue that, despite appearances, puritanical morality is no exception to the cooperative function of moral cognition. It emerges in response to a key feature of cooperation, namely that cooperation is (ultimately) a long-term strategy, requiring (proximately) the self-control of appetites for immediate gratification. Puritanical moralizations condemn behaviors which, although inherently harmless, are perceived as indirectly facilitating uncooperative behaviors, by impairing the self-control required to refrain from cheating. Drinking, drugs, immodest clothing, and unruly music and dance, are condemned as stimulating short-term impulses, thus facilitating uncooperative behaviors (e.g., violence, adultery, free-riding). Overindulgence in harmless bodily pleasures (e.g., masturbation, gluttony) is perceived as making people slave to their urges, thus altering abilities to resist future antisocial temptations. Daily self-discipline, ascetic temperance, and pious ritual observance are perceived as cultivating the self-control required to honor prosocial obligations. We review psychological, historical, and ethnographic evidence supporting this account. We use this theory to explain the fall of puritanism in WEIRD societies, and discuss the cultural evolution of puritanical norms. Explaining puritanical norms does not require adding mechanisms unrelated to cooperation in our models of the moral mind.

Friday, April 08, 2022

Humans don’t have culture because we’re smart, we’re smart because we have culture.

The title of this post is a sentence taken from the final paragraph of Henrich's Perspective article in Science on the work of Thompson et al. which notes that Thompson et al.'s results
...highlight a deeper point: Humans don’t have culture because we’re smart, we’re smart because we have culture. The selective processes of cultural evolution not only generate more sophisticated practices and technologies but also produce new cognitive tools—algorithms—that make humans better adapted to the ecological and institutional challenges that we confront. Thompson et al.’s results underline the need for the psychological sciences to abandon their implicit reliance on a digital computer metaphor of the mind (hardware versus software) and transform into a historical science that considers not just how cultural evolution shapes what we think (our mental contents) but also how we think [our cognitive processes].
Here I pass on the introductory paragraphs and then the abstract of the Thompson et al. article. Motivated readers can obtain the full text by emailing me.
Reading, counting, cooking, and sailing are just some of the human abilities passed from generation to generation through social learning... Complex abilities like these often depend on learned cognitive algorithms: procedural representations of a problem that coordinate memory, attention, and perception into sequences of useful computations and actions. Accumulation of complex algorithms—from ancient tool-making techniques to bread making, boat building, or horticulture—is central to human adaptation yet challenging to explain because algorithmic concepts can be difficult to discover, communicate, and learn from observation, making them vulnerable to loss. Theories of cultural evolution suggest that human social learning may help overcome this fragility. For example, mathematical models predict that choosing to learn from successful or prestigious individuals can prevent the loss of rare innovations. However, this potential link between sociality and complex abilities is challenging to establish.
We conducted large-scale simulations of cultural evolution with human participants to assess how selective social learning influenced the evolution of cognitive algorithms. Prior research shows that social learning can improve decisions in multiple-choice tasks, perceptual judgments, and search problems and can improve artifacts such as physical structures or computer programs. However, the evolution of cognitive algorithms at the population level has been difficult to study. We developed custom software to recruit large numbers of participants online and organize them into evolving societies facing a common problem. Twenty populations tackled a sequential decision problem... Presented with six images, participants attempted to establish hidden arbitrary orderings using pairwise comparisons. Out-of-order pairs swapped positions when compared. Participants were rewarded for establishing the ordering using fewer comparisons. This task poses a sorting problem, requiring a strategy for executing appropriate sequences of actions, analogous to culturally evolved strategies for making tools or food.
Abstract:
Many human abilities rely on cognitive algorithms discovered by previous generations. Cultural accumulation of innovative algorithms is hard to explain because complex concepts are difficult to pass on. We found that selective social learning preserved rare discoveries of exceptional algorithms in a large experimental simulation of cultural evolution. Participants (N = 3450) faced a difficult sequential decision problem (sorting an unknown sequence of numbers) and transmitted solutions across 12 generations in 20 populations. Several known sorting algorithms were discovered. Complex algorithms persisted when participants could choose who to learn from but frequently became extinct in populations lacking this selection process, converging on highly transmissible lower-performance algorithms. These results provide experimental evidence for hypothesized links between sociality and cognitive function in humans.

Wednesday, February 09, 2022

Expression unleashed: The evolutionary & cognitive foundations of human communication

I'm passing on the abstract of a dense but interesting article by Christophe Heintz and Thom Scott-Phillips that will be published in Behavioral and Brain Science and is now being circulated for comment by reviewers. Motivated readers can request a PDF of the article from me.
Human expression is open-ended, versatile and diverse, ranging from ordinary language use to painting, from exaggerated displays of affection to micro-movements that aid coordination. Here we present and defend the claim that this expressive diversity is united by an interrelated suite of cognitive capacities, the evolved functions of which are the expression and recognition of informative intentions. We describe how evolutionary dynamics normally leash communication to narrow domains of statistical mutual benefit, and how they are unleashed in humans. The relevant cognitive capacities are cognitive adaptations to living in a partner choice social ecology; and they are, correspondingly, part of the ordinarily developing human cognitive phenotype, emerging early and reliably in ontogeny. In other words, we identify distinctive features of our species’ social ecology to explain how and why humans, and only humans, evolved the cognitive capacities that, in turn, lead to massive diversity and open-endedness in means and modes of expression. Language use is but one of these modes of expression, albeit one of manifestly high importance. We make cross-species comparisons, describe how the relevant cognitive capacities can evolve in a gradual manner, and survey how unleashed expression facilitates not only language use but novel behaviour in many other domains too, focusing on the examples of joint action, teaching, punishment and art, all of which are ubiquitous in human societies but relatively rare in other species. Much of this diversity derives from graded aspects of human expression, which can be used to satisfy informative intentions in creative and new ways. We aim to help reorient cognitive pragmatics, as a phenomenon that is not a supplement to linguistic communication and on the periphery of language science, but rather the foundation of the many of the most distinctive features of human behaviour, society and culture.

Wednesday, January 12, 2022

Children universally across societies enforce conventional norms but in culturally variable ways

From Kanngiesser et al. in PNAS:
Humans, as compared with other animals, create and follow conventional norms that determine how we greet each other, dress, or play certain games. Conventional norms are universal in all human societies, but it is an open question whether individuals in all societies also actively enforce conventional norms when others in their group break them. We investigated third-party enforcement of conventional norms in 5- to 8-y-old children (n = 376) from eight diverse small-scale and large-scale societies. Children learned the rules for playing a new sorting game and then, observed a peer who was apparently breaking them. Across societies, observer children intervened frequently to correct their misguided peer (i.e., more frequently than when the peer was following the rules). However, both the magnitude and the style of interventions varied across societies. Detailed analyses of children’s interactions revealed societal differences in children’s verbal protest styles as well as in their use of actions, gestures, and nonverbal expressions to intervene. Observers’ interventions predicted whether their peer adopted the observer’s sorting rule. Enforcement of conventional norms appears to be an early emerging human universal that comes to be expressed in culturally variable ways.

Monday, November 01, 2021

What the mind is - similarities and differences in concepts of mental life in five cultures

From Weisman et al., who do a fascinating study of cognitive structures 'from the bottom up', allowing data to give rise to ontological structures, rather than working 'from the top down' by using a theory to guide hypothesis-driven data collection. :
How do concepts of mental life vary across cultures? By asking simple questions about humans, animals and other entities – for example, ‘Do beetles get hungry? Remember things? Feel love?’ – we reconstructed concepts of mental life from the bottom up among adults (N = 711) and children (ages 6–12 years, N = 693) in the USA, Ghana, Thailand, China and Vanuatu. This revealed a cross-cultural and developmental continuity: in all sites, among both adults and children, cognitive abilities travelled separately from bodily sensations, suggesting that a mind–body distinction is common across diverse cultures and present by middle childhood. Yet there were substantial cultural and developmental differences in the status of social–emotional abilities – as part of the body, part of the mind or a third category unto themselves. Such differences may have far-reaching social consequences, whereas the similarities identify aspects of human understanding that may be universal.

Friday, October 01, 2021

Can we get human nature right?

Iris Berent does an interesting Perspective artice in PNAS that considers the strong intuitions that laypeople hold about human nature. People's attitudes bifurcate for "hot emotions" and "cold ideas." Emotions, people believe, are innate, whereas ideas must be learned. She suggests that the dissonance between intuitive dualism and essentialism explains why emotions and ideas elicit such conflicting reactions. Here is her summary graphic, followed by the article's abstract: 


Few questions in science are as controversial as human nature. At stake is whether our basic concepts and emotions are all learned from experience, or whether some are innate. Here, I demonstrate that reasoning about innateness is biased by the basic workings of the human mind. Psychological science suggests that newborns possess core concepts of “object” and “number.” Laypeople, however, believe that newborns are devoid of such notions but that they can recognize emotions. Moreover, people presume that concepts are learned, whereas emotions (along with sensations and actions) are innate. I trace these beliefs to two tacit psychological principles: intuitive dualism and essentialism. Essentialism guides tacit reasoning about biological inheritance and suggests that innate traits reside in the body; per intuitive dualism, however, the mind seems ethereal, distinct from the body. It thus follows that, in our intuitive psychology, concepts (which people falsely consider as disembodied) must be learned, whereas emotions, sensations, and emotions (which are considered embodied) are likely innate; these predictions are in line with the experimental results. These conclusions do not speak to the question of whether concepts and emotions are innate, but they suggest caution in its scientific evaluation.

Thursday, July 15, 2021

Evolutionary models of financial markets.

Levin and Lo's introduction of a PNAS special issue on evolutionary models of financial markets is an interesting read. A few clips:
The brilliant evolutionary insights of Darwin and others have revolutionized our understanding of the world. Darwin was impressed by the “tangled bank” of elaborate forms that emerged from the undirected processes of evolution to produce the complexity of the biological world. Through continuous innovation coupled with the deceptively simple filter known as natural selection, the characteristics of species and their interactions change in response to changing environments. However, evolution is not limited only to the biological world. Wherever the evolutionary forces of reproduction, variation, and selection exist—as they do in financial markets—evolutionary consequences will follow. There are of course major differences as well between the nature of the evolutionary process in ecological and economic contexts, largely influenced by the relative importance of top-down control, and the degree to which predictive models and long-term planning can be invoked. These are, however, differences of degree.
There are profound similarities between financial systems and the biosphere. Both are complex adaptive systems in which individual agents act to enhance their own interests and objectives, leading to self-organization and emergent features. In viewing global financial markets as comprising a complex-adaptive biological system, researchers in this area intend to develop more effective models to understand these systems. This is not only of theoretical interest, but also has the practical aim to promote economic growth while maintaining financial stability, with the ultimate goal of allocating resources more efficiently through better financial methods.
Evolution is about short-term, relative optimality with respect to other participants in the system. In the biosphere, natural selection acts to improve reproductive success relative to the benchmark of other genomes, within and across species. Evolutionary change can thus be thought of in terms of differential fitness: that is, small differences in reproductive rates between individuals over time leading to large differences in populations. Even the very mechanisms of evolution—including those that generate new variation—are subject to constant modification. In the financial world, the evolutionary forces of mutation, recombination, reproduction, and selection often work on financial institutions and market participants through direct competition, finance “red in tooth and claw.” Financial concepts and strategies thus reproduce themselves through cultural transmission and adoption based on their success in the marketplace. These strategies undergo variation through financial innovation, analogous to mutation or genetic recombination in a biological system, but take place at the level of information and abstract thought in financial contexts. It is “survival of the richest.”
The evolutionary lens provides a natural way to introduce biological concepts into financial and economic analysis. As the evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky said, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution” (5). The same may hold for the financial world. Phenomena that have been difficult to analyze within a traditional economic framework, such as growth, size, scale, self-organization, the lifecycle of products and industries, bull/bear market cycles, and the rate of variation or innovation within a system, are all subject to evolutionary forces, whether they take place in the Petri dish or on the trading floor. Biological experiments thus may be able to directly inform economic insights, and market behavior may be able to shed light on evolutionary mysteries in the biological world.

Wednesday, June 30, 2021

Seven nuggets on how we confuse ourselves about our brains and our world.

In a series of posts starting on Nov. 27, 2020 I attempted to abstract and condense the ideas in Lisa Feldman Barrett’s 2017 book “How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain”. That book is a hard slog, as was my series of posts on its contents. Barrett also did her own condensation in her followup book, “Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain,” that appeared in late 2020 at the same time as my posts, and I’ve finally gotten around to scanning through it. I want to pass on her brief epilogue that extracts a few crisp nuggets from her lessons:
ONCE UPON A TIME, you were a little stomach on a stick, floating in the sea. Little by little, you evolved. You grew sensory systems and learned that you were part of a bigger world. You grew bodily systems to navigate that world efficiently. And you grew a brain that ran a budget for your body. You learned to live in groups with all the other little brains-in-bodies. You crawled out of the water and onto land. And across the expanse of evolutionary time - with the innovation that comes from trial and error and the deaths of trillions of animals - you ended up with a human brain. A brain that can do so many impressive things but at the same time severely misunderstands itself.
-A brain that constructs such rich mental experiences that we feel like emotion and reason wrestle inside us 
-A brain that’s so complex that we describe it by metaphors and mistake them for knowledge 
-A brain that’s so skilled at rewiring itself that we think we’re born with all sorts of things that we actually learn 
-A brain that’s so effective at hallucinating that we believe we see the world objectively, and so fast at predicting that we mistake our movements for reactions 
-A brain that regulates other brains so invisibly that we presume we’re independent of each other 
-A brain that creates so many kinds of minds that we assume there’s a single human nature to explain them all 
-A brain that’s so good at believing its own inventions that we mistake social reality for the natural world
We know much about the brain today, but there are still so many more lessons to learn. For now, at least, we’ve learned enough to sketch our brain’s fantastical evolutionary journey and consider the implications for some of the most central and challenging aspects of our lives.
Our kind of brain isn’t the biggest in the animal kingdom, and it’s not the best in any objective sense. But it’s ours. It’s the source of our strengths and our foibles. It gives us our capacity to build civilizations and our capacity to tear down each other. It makes us simply, imperfectly, gloriously human.