Articles on culture and cogntion: The cognitive foundations of cultural stability and diversity

Sperber, Dan & Hirschfeld, Lawrence A., "The Cognitive foundations of cultural stability and diversity", Trends in Cognitive Sciences 8 (2004), 40-46

Introducing concepts of negative and positive false domains.

p. 41
An evolved cognitive module if an adaptation to a range of phenomena that presented problems or opportunities in the ancestral environment of the species.

Its function i to process a given type of stimuli or input. These inputs constitute the proper domain of the module.

All inputs meeting the input conditions of a module constitute its actual domain. These inputs conditions can never be perfectly adequate.

Mismatch between domains
The mismatch between the proper and the actual domain of a module can result in part from exploitation of the module by other organisms.

The difference between the proper domain and the actual domain results in inputs being falsely attributed to certain modules.
Such can be false negatives (a snake looking like a wig, therefore not being recognized as a snake)
or a false positive: a stick looking like a snake, therefore falsely identified as a snake.

Table 1: domain for which strong developmental comparative and neurocognitive data exists:
Theory of mind
Folk biology
Number
Face recognition
Naive mechanics
Folk sociology

A great variety of cultural artifacts are aimed at specific modules.

p. 42
The effectiveness of these artifacts in turn helps xplain their cultural recurrence.
***** what effectiveness are they talking about?

THE CASE OF FOLK BIOLOGY
p. 43
The unique importance of animals and plans in ancestral environments .. suggest that a dedicated module might have evolve the governs the categorization of living kinds...
The similarities of fold taxonomies across cultures ... confirm this hypothesis.
However, the fact that inputs to this module come not just from direct experience ... but also .. from communication with other people allows expanding the actual domain of the module well beyond its proper domain.
*** this shows that the building of the module is primarily cultural.

cultural exploitation of the module: wolves, which are only encountered in zoos, are still represented as dangerous.

Culturally reinterpreted wolves have become superstimuli.
Modular processing of information about living kinds is similarly the basis for the variety of cultural exploitations lumped together in classical anthropological theory under the label of 'totemism'.

p. 44
THE CASE OF FOLK SOCIOLOGY
The cognitive demands of such reasoning (social grouping) is sufficiently specific and complex to suggest the possibility of a special purpose modular competence in naive or folk sociology.


Unlike the social lives of non-humans primates, human social life is thoroughly cultural. *** WHAT?! what does it mean "thoroughly"?



THE CASE OF SUPERNATURALISM
From a point of view informed both by cognitive science and evolutionary biology, the existence of such needs and the ability of religion to satisfy them are quite questionable.

Supernatural beings are not just impossible in nature. They blantantly violate thekind of basic expectations that are delivered by domain-specific cognitive mechanisms.
*** religion is not supernatural beings.

As argues by Boyer, it is this combination of a few strikin gviolation with otherwise conformity to ordinary expectations, that makes supernatural beings attention arresting and memorable, and rich in inferential potential.

p. 45
Representations of supernatural beings, ... spread and stabilize in different cultures because they function for one or several cognitive modules as superstimuli. ... typically comvine not just exaggerated but also paradoxical features with ordinary and essential ones... in falling in the actual domain of two different modules.

Conclusions

We agree with standard social science that culture is not human psychology write large and that it would make little sense to seek a psychological reductionist explanation of culture.

however psychological factors paly an essential role in culture.
Some of these .. factors have to do with emotion more than with cognition.