Search

In reply to commentary on our target article, we supply further evidence and hypotheses in the description of ritualized behaviors in humans. Reactions to indirect fitness threats probably activate specialized precaution systems rather than a unified form of danger-avoidance or causal reasoning. Impairment of precaution systems may be present in pathologies other than obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), autism in particular. Ritualized behavior is attention-grabbing enough to be culturally transmitted whether or not it is associated with group identity, cohesion, or with any other social aspect of collective ceremonies.

Ritualized behavior, intuitively recognizable by its stereotypy, rigidity, repetition, and apparent lack of rational motivation, is found in a variety of life conditions, customs, and everyday practices: in cultural rituals, whether religious or non-religious; in many children's complicated routines; in the pathology of obsessive-compulsive disorders (OCD); in normal adults around certain stages of the life-cycle, birthing in particular. Combining evidence from evolutionary anthropology, neuropsychology and neuroimaging, we propose an explanation of ritualized behavior in terms of an evolved Precaution System geared to the detection of and reaction to inferred threats to fitness. This system, distinct from fear-systems geared to respond to manifest danger, includes a repertoire of clues for potential danger as well as a repertoire of species-typical precautions. In OCD pathology, this system does not supply a negative feedback to the appraisal of potential threats, resulting in doubts about the proper performance of precautions, and repetition of action. Also, anxiety levels focus the attention on low-level gestural units of behavior rather than on the goal-related higher-level units normally used in parsing the action-flow. Normally automatized actions are submitted to cognitive control. This 'swamps' working memory, an effect of which is a temporary relief from intrusions but also their long-term strengthening. Normal activation of this Precaution System explains intrusions and ritual behaviors in normal adults. Gradual calibration of the system occurs through childhood rituals. Cultural mimicry of this system's normal input makes cultural rituals attention-grabbing and compelling. A number of empirical predictions follow from this synthetic model. Keywords: childhood ritual; compulsion; event boundaries; evolutionary psychology; obsessive-colnpulsive disorder; ritual; thought intrusion

Ritualized behavior is a specific way of organizing the flow of action, characterized by stereotypy, rigidity in performance, a feeling of compulsion, and specific themes, in particular the potential danger from contamination, predation, and social hazard. We proposed elsewhere a neurocognitive model of ritualized behavior in human development and pathology, as based on the activation of a specific hazard-precaution system specialized in the detection of and response to potential threats. We show how certain features of collective rituals--by conveying information about potential danger and presenting appropriate reaction as a sequence of rigidly described precautionary measures--probably activate this neurocognitive system. This makes some collective ritual sequences highly attention-demanding and intuitively compelling and contributes to their transmission from place to place or generation to generation. The recurrence of ritualized behavior as a central feature of collective ceremonies may be explained as a consequence of this bias in selective transmission. [Keywords: ritual, cognition, evolution, epidemiology, cultural transmission]

To purchase or authenticate to the full-text of this article, please visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2006.00888.x Byline: Brian Bergstrom (1), Bianca Moehlmann (1), Pascal Boyer (1) Abstract: Children's learning-in the domains of science and religion specifically, but in many other cultural domains as well-relies extensively on testimony and other forms of culturally transmitted information. The cognitive processes that enable such learning must also administrate the evaluation, qualification, and storage of that information, while guarding against the dangers of false or misleading input. Currently, the development of these appraisal processes is not clearly understood. Recent work, reviewed here, has begun to address three important dimensions of the problem: how children and adults evaluate truth in communication, how they gauge the inferential potential of information, and how they encode and evaluate its source. Author Affiliation: (1)Washington University Article note: Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Pascal Boyer, Department of Psychology, Washington University, Campus Box 1125, St. Louis, MO 63130. Electronic mail may be sent to pboyer@artsci.wustl.edu.

Children's learning-in the domains of science and religion specifically, but in many other cultural domains as well-relies extensively on testimony and other forms of culturally transmitted information. The cognitive processes that enable such learning must also administrate the evaluation, qualification, and storage of that information, while guarding against the dangers of false or misleading input. Currently, the development of these appraisal processes is not clearly understood. Recent work, reviewed here, has begun to address three important dimensions of the problem: how children and adults evaluate truth in communication, how they gauge the inferential potential of information, and how they encode and evaluate its source.

This article discusses the development of evolutionary psychology as a discipline. Topics include the subject's roots in Darwinism and the idea that environment and ecology help shape psychological evolution.

This article is an evaluation of how evolutionary psychology can contribute to the description and explanation of cultural material as a continuation of other research frameworks that connected genetic inheritance and cultural evolution. Evolutionary psychology provides a proximate explanation of cultural transmission in that it is based on a description of the cognitive mechanisms involved in acquisition of cultural representations. To illustrate this point, the author uses the example of religious concepts. A better understanding of cultural acquisition processes will probably require new descriptive models for anthropological data.

Pascal Boyer provides a persuasive argument for what makes anthropomorphism natural: the very fact that it is counter-intuitive (J. Roy. anthrop. Inst. (N.S.) 2, 83-97). Drawing on recent research in [...]

The projection of human attributes onto non-human domains is often explained in anthropology as the consequence of a tendency to animism and anthropomorphism present from the earliest stages of cognitive development. However, the experimental evidence suggests that intuitive ontological principles exclude such projections. So anthropomorphism, though widespread, is counter-intuitive. This apparent paradox can be solved by means of a cognitive theory of cultural representations, in which representations are likely to become stable and widespread if they have both salience and inferential potential. Anthropomorphic projections have inferential potential because they activate a powerful modular capacity for mentalistic accounts of behaviour. They are salient because they are counter-intuitive, and therefore attention-grabbing., Introduction In most cultural environments, one finds representations concerning the lifelike and human-like features of non-living or non-human objects: trees that protect people in exchange for sacrifices, animals that have [...]

Culturally successful religious concepts are the outcome of selective processes that make some concepts more likely than others to be easily acquired, stored and transmitted. Among the constructs of human [...]

A large amount of research in cognitive psychology is focused on memory distortions, understood as deviations from various (largely implicit) standards. Many alleged distortions actually suggest a highly functional system that balances the cost of acquiring new information with the benefit of relevant, contextually appropriate decision-making. In this sense many memories may be examples of functionally adaptive misbelief. doi:10.1017/S0140525X09991397

Is religion a product of our evolution? The very question makes many people, religious or otherwise, cringe, although for different reasons. Some people of faith fear that an understanding of [...]

Atran's account account of cultural transmission can be further refined by considering constraints from early-developed, domain-specific intuitive ontological understanding. These suggest specific predictions about the cultural survival of 'memes,' depending on the way they activate intuitive understanding. There is no general dynamic of cultural inheritance; only complex predictions for domain-specific competencies that cut across cultural domains.

Identifying objects as members of ontological domains activates category-specific processes. There is evidence that these processes include particular ways of 'tracking' substances and could do all the 'tracking' necessary for concept acquisition. There may be no functional need or evolutionary scenario for a general tracking capacity of the kind described by Millikan.

The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values SAM HARRIS The Free Press: 2010. 304 pp. $26.99 Philosopher David Hume wrote in the eighteenth century that one cannot derive [...]

'Acquired culture' depends on social transmission and displays salient cross-cultural variability. It seems unconnected to adaptive fitness. It is, however, constrained by evolved properties of the mind. Recurrent - not necessarily universal - features of acquired culture can be explained by taking into account the early development and constraining power of intuitive ontology, a set of principled domain-specific inferential capacities. These allow us to predict recurrent trends in domains as diverse as folk-psychology, representations of natural kinds, the uses of literacy, the acquisition of scientific beliefs, and even the limiting-case of religious ontologies. In all these domains the notion of cultural transmission along domain-specific cognitive tracks governed by intuitive ontology is supported by independent psychological evidence and provides testable explanations for recurrent features in the anthropological record. [evolution, culture, cultural universals, cognitive development, evolutionary psychology]