What is the function of our capacity for ‘mental time travel’? Evolutionary considerations suggest that vivid memory and imaginative foresight may be crucial cognitive devices for human decision ...making. Our emotional engagement with past or future events gives them great motivational force, which may counter a natural tendency towards time discounting and impulsive, opportunistic behavior. In this view, whereas simple episodic memory provides us with a store of relevant, case-based information to guide decisions, mental time travel nudges us towards more restrained choices, which in the long term are advantageous, especially so given human dependence on cooperation and coordination.
Information about potential danger is a central component of many rumors, urban legends, ritual prescriptions, religious prohibitions and witchcraft crazes. We investigate a potential factor in the ...cultural success of such material, namely that a source of threat-related information may be intuitively judged as more competent than a source that does not convey such information. In five studies, we asked participants to judge which of two sources of information, only one of which conveyed threat-related information, was more knowledgeable. Results suggest that mention of potential danger makes a source appear more competent than others, that the effect is not due to a general negativity bias, and that it concerns competence rather than a more generally positive evaluation of the source.
A scientist integrates evolutionary biology, genetics, psychology, economics, and more to explore the development and workings of human societies. "There is no good reason why human societies should ...not be described and explained with the same precision and success as the rest of nature." Thus argues evolutionary psychologist Pascal Boyer in this uniquely innovative book. Integrating recent insights from evolutionary biology, genetics, psychology, economics, and other fields, Boyer offers precise models of why humans engage in social behaviors such as forming families, tribes, and nations, or creating gender roles. In fascinating, thought-provoking passages, he explores questions such as: Why is there conflict between groups? Why do people believe low-value information such as rumors? Why are there religions? What is social justice? What explains morality? Boyer provides a new picture of cultural transmission that draws on the pragmatics of human communication, the constructive nature of memory in human brains, and human motivation for group formation and cooperation. "Cool and captivating…It will change forever your understanding of society and culture."—Dan Sperber, co-author of The Enigma of Reason "It is highly recommended…to researchers firmly settled within one of the many single disciplines in question. Not only will they encounter a wealth of information from the humanities, the social sciences and the natural sciences, but the book will also serve as an invitation to look beyond the horizons of their own fields."—Eveline Seghers, Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture
Divination is found in most human societies, but there is little systematic research to explain (1) why it is persuasive or (2) why divination is required for important collective decisions in many ...small-scale societies. Common features of human communication and cooperation may help address both questions. A highly recurrent feature of divination is “ostensive detachment,” a demonstration that the diviners are not the authors of the statements they utter. As a consequence, people spontaneously interpret divination as less likely than other statements to be influenced by anyone’s intentions or interests. This is enough to give divination an epistemic advantage compared with other sources of information, answering question 1. This advantage is all the more important in situations where a diagnosis will create differential costs and benefits, for example, determining who is responsible for someone’s misfortune in a small-scale community. Divinatory statements provide a version of the situation that most participants are motivated to agree with, as it provides a focal point for efficient coordination at a minimal cost for almost all participants, which would answer question 2.
"This volume brings together a collection of seven articles previously published by the author, with a new introduction reframing the articles in the context of past and present questions in ...anthropology, psychology and human evolution. It promotes the perspective of ‘integrated’ social science, in which social science questions are addressed in a deliberately eclectic manner, combining results and models from evolutionary biology, experimental psychology, economics, anthropology and history. It thus constitutes a welcome contribution to a gradually emerging approach to social science based on E. O. Wilson’s concept of ‘consilience’. Human Cultures through the Scientific Lens spans a wide range of topics, from an examination of ritual behaviour, integrating neuro-science, ethology and anthropology to explain why humans engage in ritual actions (both cultural and individual), to the motivation of conflicts between groups. As such, the collection gives readers a comprehensive and accessible introduction to the applications of an evolutionary paradigm in the social sciences. This volume will be a useful resource for scholars and students in the social sciences (particularly psychology, anthropology, evolutionary biology and the political sciences), as well as a general readership interested in the social sciences. "
Explanations of misfortune are the object of much cultural discourse in most human societies. Recurrent themes include the intervention of superhuman agents (gods, ancestors, etc.), witchcraft, ...karma, and the violation of specific rules or ‘taboos’. In modern large‐scale societies, people often respond by blaming the victims of, for example, accidents and assault. These responses may seem both disparate and puzzling, in the sense that the proposed accounts of untoward events provide no valuable information about their causes or the best way to prevent them. However, these responses make sense if we see them in an evolutionary context, where accidents, assault, and illness were common occurrences, the only palliative being social support to victims. This would create a context in which all members of a group might be (a) required to offer support, (b) willing to offer such support to maintain a reputation as co‐operators, and (c) desirous to limit that support because of its cost. In this context, recurrent explanations of misfortune would constitute strategic attempts to create and broadcast a specific description of the situation that concentrates responsibility and potential costs on a few individuals. This strategic model accounts for otherwise perplexing features of explanations based on mystical harm (ancestors, witchcraft, etc.), as well as the tendency to denigrate victims, and offers new predictions about those cultural phenomena.
Abstrait
Pourquoi nous faisons des reproches aux victimes, accusons les sorcières, inventons des tabous et invoquons les esprits : un modèle de réponses stratégiques à l'infortune
Résumé
Les explications de l'infortune alimentent de multiples discours culturels dans la plupart des sociétés humaines. L'intervention d'agents surhumains (dieux, ancêtres, etc.), la sorcellerie, le karma et la violation de règles ou « tabous » spécifiques en sont quelques thèmes récurrents. Dans les grandes sociétés modernes, on réagit souvent au malheur, par exemple aux accidents ou aux agressions, en critiquant ses victimes. Ces réactions peuvent sembler à la fois discordantes et intrigantes en cela que les récits proposés d’événements malencontreux n'apportent pas d'informations utiles sur leur cause ni sur le meilleur moyen de les éviter. Pourtant, elles ont un sens si nous les voyons dans le contexte de notre évolution, au cours de laquelle accidents, agressions et maladies étaient monnaie courante et la seule mesure palliative était le soutien du groupe aux victimes. Dans ce contexte, tous les membres d'un groupe pourraient être (a) appelés à apporter leur soutien, (b) disposés à offrir ce soutien afin de conserver leur réputation de coopérateurs et (c) désireux de limiter ce soutien à cause de son coût. Les explications récurrentes de l'infortune constitueraient dès lors des tentatives stratégiques de créer et de diffuser une description spécifique de la situation, qui en concentrerait la responsabilité et le coût potentiel sur quelques individus. Ce modèle stratégique rend compte des explications mettant en cause des entités mystiques malintentionnées (ancêtres, sorcellerie, etc.) qui laisseraient sinon perplexes, ainsi que la tendance à dénigrer les victimes. Il ouvre également de nouvelles perspectives sur ces phénomènes culturels.
Religions “in the wild” are the varied set of religious activities that occurred before the emergence of organized religions with doctrines, or that persist at the margins of those organized ...traditions. These religious activities mostly focus on misfortune; on how to remedy specific cases of illness, accidents, failures; and on how to prevent them. I present a general model to account for the cross-cultural recurrence of these particular themes. The model is based on (independently established) features of human psychology—namely, (a) epistemic vigilance, the set of systems whereby we evaluate the quality of information and of sources of information, and (b) threat-detection psychology, the set of evolved systems geared at detecting potential danger in the environment. Given these two sets of systems, the dynamics of communication will favor particular types of messages about misfortune. This makes it possible to predict recurrent features of religious systems, such as the focus on nonphysical agents, the focus on particular cases rather than general aspects of misfortune, and the emergence of specialists. The model could illuminate not just why such representations are culturally successful, but also why people are motivated to formulate them in the first place.
Abstract
Persistence of nondegeneracy is a phenomenon that appears in the theory of $\overline{\mathbb{Q}}_l$-representations of the linear group: every irreducible submodule of the restriction to ...the mirabolic sub-representation of a nondegenerate irreducible representation is nondegenerate. This is not true anymore in general, if we look at the modulo $l$ reduction of some stable lattice. As in the Clozel–Harris–Taylor generalization of global Ihara’s lemma, we show that this property, called nondegeneracy persistence and related to the notion of essentially absolutely irreducible and generic representations in the work of Emerton and Helm, remains true for lattices given by the cohomology of Lubin–Tate spaces. As a global application, we give a new construction of automorphic congruences in the Ribet spirit.
Résumé. La persistence de la non dégénérescence est un phénomène qui apparait dans la théorie des $\overline{\mathbb{Q}}_l$-représentations du groupe linéaire: toute sous-représentation irréductible de la restriction au groupe mirabolique d’une représentation irréductible non dégénérée, est non dégénérée. Ce n’est plus le cas en général pour la réduction modulo $l$ d’un réseau stable. Comme dans la généralisation par Clozel-Harris-Taylor du lemme d’Ihara, nous montrons que cette propriété de non dégénérescence, qui est reliée à la notion de représentation essentiellement absolument générique de Emerton-Helm, reste valide pour les réseaux donnés par la cohomologie des espaces de Lubin-Tate. Nous donnons une application de nature globale en construisant des congruences automorphes dans l’esprit du travail de Ribet.
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