Another look at the two-systems model of mindreading
Apperly and Butterfill (2009) and Butterfill and Apperly (2013) have proposed a two-systems model of mindreading. According to this model, humans make use of two distinct psychological syste…
Tag: featured
[extended deadline] Berlin Symposium on Reciprocity and Social Cognition
The deadline for submissions to this symposium has been extended to November the 1st. A symposium on ‘Reciprocity and social cognition’ organized by Anna Strasser, Stephen Butterfill, Richard Moor…
Cultural Evolution at the Santa Fe Institute
Last May, Daniel Dennett gathered, at the Santa Fe Institute, a handful of people who have written about cultural evolution. The general impression was that (as he tweeted…
Perspectives on Cultural Evolution, by Daniel C. Dennett
These are Daniel Dennett’s introductory remarks on the workshop on cultural evolution he conveyed in Santa Fe in May 2014. Click to see the summaries and comments by Blackmore, Boyd, Cl…
Call for posters: Reciprocity and Social Cognition
The Berlin School of Mind and Brain organizes a symposium on “Reciprocity and Social Cognition”, from the 23rd to the 25th of March, 2015. Keynote speakers will be…
Has a decimal point error misled millions into believing that spinach is a good source of iron?
A great cultural epidemiology story by Ole Bjørn Rekdal, “Academic urban legends,” in Social Studies of Science (2014, 44(4)) freely available here Abstract: Many of the me…
Random choice among the Kantu, swidden agriculturalists of Kalimantan
An excellent post by Michael Schulson at Aeon magazine entitled “How to choose? When your reasons are worse than useless, sometimes the most rational choice is a random stab in the…
Alberto Acerbi on cultural evolution
Alberto Acerbi’s excellent blog hosts a noteworthy discussion of Claidière, Scott-Phillips and Sperber’s recent PTRS paper on cultural attraction. Alex Mesoudi, Thom Scott-Phillips and Dan Speber join…
Babies’ and birds’ causal understanding
A very interesting comparison between crows and humans in a new (free access) paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society B entitled “Of babies and birds: complex tool…
Kinship, theology and deep grammar
One of the most salient paradoxes in the study of kinship systems is their sheer analytical complexity, from the point of view of an external observer, and simultaneously…
Deparmental Lectureship in Cognitive Anthropology, Oxford
Applications are invited for a Departmental Lectureship in Cognitive Anthropology, effective from 1 September 2014, tenable until 30 September 2015. The post is based at the School of…
Making! The Other Story: Robot#10, Twins Separated at Birth, and Hacker Mama
Silvia Lindtner Amelia Guimarin Editor’s Note: Silvia Lindtner (@yunnia) and Amelia Guimarin (@femhacktweets) round out the March-April theme on makers, hackers, and engineers with this post tha…
Combinatorial Communication in Bacteria?
Here is a challenge to standard views about the evolution of linguistic generativity: ““Combinatorial Communication in Bacteria: Implications for the Origins of Linguistic Generativity” by Thomas…
Engineering obsolescence
Marisa Cohn Editor’s Note: Marisa Leavitt Cohn writes to us from Stockholm, where she is a postdoctoral scholar studying the politics of software systems and computing work practices. In…
Negatively-Biased Credulity and the Cultural Evolution of Beliefs
A new article by Dan Fessler, Anne Pisor,& David Navarrete, highly relevant to cultural epidemiology in PLoS ONE 9(4): e95167. doi:10.1371 Abstract: The functions of cultural beliefs are often…
Ethnography as Diaspora
Lilly U. Nguyen Editor’s Note: Lilly U. Nguyen (@deuxlits) tells us how in her own work on the ethnography of software in Vietnam, she both studies and embodies “diaspora” –…
Measurements: The Qualitative Work of Quantitative Work
Katie Pine Max Liboiron Editor’s Note: Katie Pine and Max Liboiron continue this week’s theme of makers, hackers, and engineers with a post about the politics and performativity…
Studying Up: The Ethnography of Technologists
Nick Seaver Editor’s Note: Nick Seaver (@npseaver) kicks off the March-April special edition of Ethnography Matters, which will feature a number of researchers at the Intel Science and Technolog…
The Moral Domain: Conceptual Issues in Moral Psychology. Vilnius . 9-11 October 2014
The Vilnius Experimental Philosophy Lab, the Departments of General Psychology and of Logic and History of Philosophy organize a conference on: The Moral Domain: Conceptual Issues…
The Content of Our Cooperation, Not the Color of Our Skin
A new, important article by David Pietraszewski, Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby: The Content of Our Cooperation, Not the Color of Our Skin: An Alliance Detection System Regulates Categorization…
“Hey, y’all got to understand – y’all prolly scared of us… we scared of y’all too!”
Phoenix Jackson is a researcher at the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation, a Cornelius Hopper Diversity Fellow with UCSF, and a Somatic Counseling Psychotherapy graduate student at…
A shift in the business environment that ethnographers can’t ignore
Ken Anderson (@kxande2) manages the Cultural Transformations Lab at Intel. He is an iconoclast by nature and a symbolic anthropologist by training. Over the last 20 years, his…
Relationship Thinking
Nick Enfield — ethnolinguist at the Max Planck institute for psycholinguistics (and contributor to ICCI) — has published a new book, Relationship Thinking. Here’s the blurb from Oxford…
This year’s Edge question
The new The Edge annual question, and the answers, are now online. The question was: “What scientific idea is ready for retirement?” Here are some answers that could…