Radu Umbres - 2014/05/09 – 11:30 am

Date: Friday 9th May

Time: 11:30 am

Place: Conference room, Pavillon Jardin - 29, rue d'Ulm

Speaker: Radu Umbres (IJN)

Title: “Cultural imitation, cognitive opacity, and secrecy. The continuing enigma of the cargo cult”

Abstract: Cargo cults were one of the most spectacular phenomenon in human history, yet their most puzzling aspect remains largely unexplained. In hundreds of (probably unrelated) events across thousands of kilometres and spanning several decades, Melanesian communities engaged in apparently irrational behaviour in response to contact with Western civilisations. From makeshift airstrips cut through the forest, equipped with guiding fires, observation towers and "radio" shacks using coconut headphones, to "five o'clock teas", military parades and handshakes, natives performed amazing replications of Western behaviour and artefacts. While most anthropologists focused on these practices as anti-colonial, revolutionary or forms of cultural accommodation, the task of explaining an absurd form of cultural imitation was somewhat brushed aside. I will argue that theories developed by CEU psychologists Gergely and Csibra following Dan Sperber can shed some light upon the issue. By analysing what was imitated and especially what was not, cargo cult imitation appears as neither indiscriminate, nor unreasonable. Rather, given the huge technological disparity between the cultures in contact, the polarised attitudes of Whites versus Melanesians, and the local folk epistemology of linking knowledge, power and secrecy,  it is a case of hyper-creative cultural learning gone wrong due to cognitive opacity and lack of cooperation. Moreover, cargo cults as cultural imitation may raise a fascinating hypothesis about the adoption of missionary Christianity in Melanesia and elsewhere.

Katharina Helming - 2014/04/18 – 11:30 am

Date: Friday 18th April

Time: 11:30 am

Place: Conference room, Pavillon Jardin - 29, rue d'Ulm

Speaker: Katharina Helming (IJN)

Title: “Making sense of early false-belief understanding”

Abstract: The topic of this talk is the puzzle about early belief-ascription: Young children demonstrate spontaneous false-belief understanding, but they fail elicited-response false-belief tasks. Based on recent converging evidence, a pragmatic framework to solve this puzzle will be introduced. Young children do understand the contents of others’ false belief, but they are overwhelmed when they must simultaneously make sense of two distinct actions: the instrumental action of a mistaken agent and the experimenter’s communicative action. I will discuss predictions of this account and present preliminary data supporting it.

Guillaume Dumas - 2014/04/04 - 3:30 pm

Date: Friday 4th April

Time: 3:30 pm – 5:00 pm

Place: Conference room, Pavillon Jardin - 29, rue d'Ulm

Speaker: GuillaumeDumas (Florida Atlantic University)

Title: “Second-person neuroscience and complex systems approach of social interaction”

Abstract: This talk will present empirical investigations of both human-human and human-machine interactions, with a focus on the neurobiological mechanisms of social cognition and the multi-scale modeling of neural, behavioral and social coordination dynamics. While several theories have been proposed to infer the link between neurobiology and social psychology, the dynamical and reciprocal components of human interaction are still poorly explored. This is especially true for social neuroscience, where recording simultaneously the brain activity from several subjects remains difficult. This is nevertheless possible with a neuroimaging methodology called "hyperscanning". I will first present how the combination of situated social paradigms with hyperscanning recordings allows to relate social patterns at the behavioral level with the emergence of specific patterns at the brain level (Dumas et al. PLoS ONE 2010; Dumas et al. Front. Hum. Neurosci. 2012). The related intra- and inter-brain patterns reflect different aspects of social interaction, such as interactional synchrony, anticipation of other's actions and co-regulation of turn-taking. Then, I will present biologically inspired numerical simulations can reproduce some of the results and how it points out a potential role of the human brain anatomical structure in the facilitation of sensorimotor coordination and thus may partly account for our propensity to enter in couplings with others (Dumas et al. PLoS ONE 2012). Finally, I will present a recent tool called the Human Dynamic Clamp, which consists in an artificial agent integrating equations of human motion at the neurobehavioral level. A human and this "virtual partner" are then reciprocally coupled in real-time, which allow controlling both its intrinsic dynamics and the coupling with the human, while maintaining the continuous flow of interaction. This generalizes previous empirical paradigms and also provides a Turing-test for theoretical models of social cognition. Preliminary results already showed an effect of the coupling on the collective behavior and attribution of intention. In conclusion, I will compare these results with other published studies (Froese et al. 2014), and discuss their place in the current theoretical debate about the constitutive role of social interaction for social cognition (Gallotti 2012; Gallotti & Frith 2013).

Mark Sheskin - 2014/01/31

Date: Friday 31st January

Time: 11:30 am

Place: Conference room, Pavillon Jardin - 29, rue d'Ulm

Speaker: Mark Sheskin (IJN)

Title: “The Origins of Fairness: Experiments with Children and Monkeys”

Abstract: Recent research has argued that surprisingly advanced fairness judgments can be found early in childhood development and even in some nonhuman primates. I present new experiments showing the opposite: situations in which monkeys do not care about fairness and young children show spiteful preferences against fairness. Which set of research should you believe? Both, of course! In a review including both sets of research, I will discuss the similarities and differences in the fairness of these populations. The interesting question becomes about which aspects of adult fairness can be found in these other populations, and how the initial state matures into the adult one.

Workshop on the anthropology of psychological essentialism - Charles Stépanoff & Denis Regnier - 2014/01/24

Next session of JNEI will consist of a workshop entirely dedicated to the anthropology of psychological essentialism. Our two speakers will be Charles Stépanoff (EPHE) and Denis Regnier (IJN):

Anthropology of psychological essentialism

Date: Friday 24rd January

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Time: 11:30 – 12:45
Place: Conference room, Pavillon Jardin - 29, rue d'Ulm
Speaker: Charles Stépanoff (EPHE)

Title: “Understanding individuality: About individual essences and categories”

Abstract: Why do we essentialize social categories? Why do people consider belonging of individuals to certain categories as innate, inalterable and giving a lot of information about them (about their character, their vices, or their skills)? Social essentialism has been interpreted as the result of a transfer from folkbiology to social groups (Atran, Boyer, Gil-White): we essentialize social categories because we mistakenly treat them as biological species. This hypothesis, called “analogical transfer”, is based on the theory of the modularity of the mind. Other students interpret essentialism as a domain-general mode of understanding that permits interpreting causality in many domains independently from biology (Gelman, Hirschfeld). Ethnography can help to untangle empirically these questions. Among Tuvans (Southern Siberia), belonging to the category of shamans is innate and inalterable. However, their category is not conceptualized as a biological species, for shamans are supposed to eat each other. I advocate for the hypothesis of individual essentialism that helps to understand essentialization of high ranked categories (e.g. aristocracy), and leads to discard the “analogical transfer” hypothesis.

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Time: 12:45  – 14:00
Place: Conference room, Pavillon Jardin - 29, rue d'Ulm
Speaker: Denis Regnier (IJN)

Title: “Clean people, unclean people: History, cognition and the essentialization of  ‘slaves’ among the Betsileo”

Abstract: In the southern highlands of Madagascar, Betsileo descendants of ‘commoners’ (olompotsy) essentialize slave descendants: they think that slave descendants have an ‘inner essence’ that makes them what they are, cannot be cleansed and will be passed on to their children, no matter what they do. This case of psychological essentialism, as strong as it is among the Betsileo, raises the questions of why, when and how such an essentialization has taken place, since there is evidence that slaves in pre-abolition times (i.e., before 1896), although deemed ‘unclean’, were not essentialized – or only weakly essentialized – by ‘clean’ and free people.  The paper will discuss Betsileo history and ethnography, as well as recent research on the essentialism of social categories to suggest an answer to these questions.