Intuition, Reflection & Communication In the Building of Human Cultures Nicolas Baumard1 & Pascal Boyer2
Abstract. In recent years, a naturalist understanding of human cultures has proposed to explain human culture with the help of disciplines such as evolutionary biology, cognitive psychology, behavioral economics and cultural modelling. Despite impressive results, this naturalist program has only had a limited impact on the various social sciences, on cultural anthropology in particular. Indeed, the naturalist programme does not seem to say much about what anthropologists usually work on. It puts forward theories of zoological folk-taxonomies but not of animal mythologies; of parental investment but not of lineage systems; of musical forms but not of artistic ideologies; of everyday actions but not of rituals; of people's botany but not of magic; of cooperation but not of people's moral imperatives. Here, we propose that a synthetic account of cultural knowledge is possible within the framework of an evolutionbased, cognitive account of cultural transmission. This requires that we pay particular attention to the distinction between intuitive beliefs and reflective beliefs, a distinction that is of crucial importance for the acquisition and transmission of cultural knowledge. Specially so, as most naturalist approaches have focused on intuitive beliefs so far, while most of the “thick” cultural material of anthropology consists of reflective beliefs.
1. Cultural knowledge and the naturalist program The naturalistic approach has allowed anthropologists and psychologists to combine findings and models from evolutionary biology, experimental psychology, behavioural economics and cultural anthropology (Tooby and Cosmides 1992; Sperber 1996; Richerson and Boyd 2005). In this framework, it has proved possible to put forward specific, testable models of cultural knowledge in such domains as folk-biology (Atran 1993, 1998), language (Evans and Levinson 2009), music (Patel 2010), numbers (Gallistel and Gelman 2000), coalitions (Kurzban and Leary 2001), kinship and ethnic categories (Hirschfeld 1994, 1996), racial categories (Kurzban, Tooby, and 1
University of Oxford and Institut Jean Nicod, Paris 2 Washington University in St. Louis
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Cosmides 2001), religious beliefs (Boyer 1992; Pyysiainen 2001), morality (Haidt 2007) and social exchange (Cosmides and Tooby 2005; Fiske 1992), among others. Also, formal quantitative models inspired by population genetics have been put forward to provide precise models of the diffusion of norms, concepts or behaviors (Richerson and Boyd 2005; Sperber and Claidière 2006). Despite impressive results, this naturalist program has only had a limited impact on the various social sciences, on cultural anthropology in particular. Indeed, a common reaction from social scientists, especially anthropologists, is that however interesting in principle the programme does not address issues they usually work on (Lloyd 2007; Descola 2009). The naturalist programme does not seem to say much about cultural symbolism, for lack of a better term. So we have studies of zoological folk-taxonomies but not of animal mythologies; of parental investment but not of lineage systems; of musical forms but not of artistic ideologies; of everyday actions but not of rituals; of people's botany but not of magic; of cooperation but not of people's moral imperatives. Conversely, it is clear that current cultural anthropology does not provide a coherent answer to fundamental questions of cultural transmission (Boyd and Richerson 1996; Sperber 1996), viz., Why do we find similarities in different cultural traditions? Why do cultural concepts and norms remain stable across generations? What explains success and failure in cultural transmission?. In the last thirty years or so, many cultural anthropologists have actually abandoned these general questions and more generally segregated their research programs from related scientific disciplines such as economics, biology, psychology and the neurosciences (D'Andrade 1995). Surprisingly, this happened at the very time these disciplines made great progress while a large readership manifested a great interest in an integrated understanding of human nature (Boyer 2011). These developments resulted in a division of labor in which various sciences account for the capacities that make cultures possible (but rarely consider the similarities and diversity in the result), while anthropologists consider the results but cannot integrate them into any scientific explanation. We propose that a synthetic account of cultural knowledge is possible within the framework of an evolution-based, cognitive account of cultural transmission. This requires that we pay particular attention to the distinction 2
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between intuitive beliefs and reflective beliefs, a distinction that is of crucial importance for the acquisition and transmission of cultural knowledge. Specially so, as most naturalist approaches have focused on intuitive beliefs so far, while most of the “thick” cultural material of anthropology consists of reflective beliefs. Here, we delineate three logical steps in the creation of roughly shared mental representations in human groups. [1] Human minds comprise a large number of highly specialized cognitive systems that produce intuitive beliefs about a range of situations of evolutionary import. [2] Human minds also produce a large number of spontaneous, highly variable reflective beliefs that complement, compare and evaluate their intuitive beliefs. [3] Communication results in the selection of a small subset of these reflective beliefs that become widespread within a social group. We illustrate these points with empirical evidence concerning folk-medicine, moral prescriptions, social categorization and theories of the person. The framework suggests an integrated view of human cultures that connects scientific knowledge about human evolution and cognition to a renewed understanding of classical anthropological issues.
2. Creating cultures, Step 1: Intuitive systems 2.1. Evolved domain-specific intuitive systems Evolutionary biology and cognitive psychology suggest that human expertise about the natural and social environment is best described as the product of specialized mental systems, with their specific principles, developmental schedules, learning strategies, as well as specific orchestration of underlying neural circuitry (Pinker 1997; Hirschfeld and Gelman 1994). These mental systems have been selected by evolution to solve recurrent fitness-related situations or problems, e.g. interaction with predators, competitors, toolmaking, foraging techniques, mate selection, social exchange, interactions with kin, etc. (Cosmides and Tooby 1994). Here are few examples of such cognitive systems, chosen for their relevance to salient domains of cultural knowledge.
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2.2. Illustrations
Contagion and disgust A variety of substances trigger the visceral experience of disgust, accompanied by strong motivation to avoid the targets of disgust (e.g. faeces, rotting corpses, wounds, vomit, etc.) (Rozin, Haidt, and McCauley 1993). The system also produces the intuition that something “bad” or “dangerous” is contained in these substances or objects (although what is bad about them is often left undefined) (Nemeroff 1995). The disgust system is highly specific in its operation. For instance, most humans assume that some substances are disgusting regardless of dosage (e.g., whether one put a large dollop or just a drop of cow urine in the stew makes it just as revolting) while others are dosedependent (e.g. if you abhor cheese you can still tolerate a stew that includes only a few grams of it). It seems that our dose-independent intuitions track substances containing pathogens (viruses and bacteria) which multiply once ingested, while the damage created by toxins (e.g. secondary compounds in cabbage) is a function of the amount ingested.
Moral intuitions and feelings Humans beings belong to a highly cooperative species and get most of their resources from collective action and social exchanges (Cosmides and Tooby 1992, 2005; Hill and Kaplan 1999). In ancestral environments, it was vital to share the benefit of cooperation in a mutually advantageous manner. This provided a strong selective pressure for a sense of fairness, a cognitive device that gives humans the intuition that others have rights, claims and entitlements to some resources and that motivates people to pay attention to others’ interests (Baumard 2010). Immoral acts typically upset the balance of relationships, providing the bad person with an advantage over their victim. So we have an intuition that the perpetrator should suffer a loss of resources in the victim’s favor, to restore a balance of welfare between the agents concerned. Indeed, a recent study shows that people can’t help to relate misdeed and misfortune, even when they do not believe in any sort of immanent justice (Baumard and Chevallier 0000). Participants were asked to say whether two events in a story were causally related. In conditions where the events were not causally related, participants were slower to answer that there was no causal relationship between a misdeed and a misfortune, a good deed and a
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good fortune, than between morally neutral events and similar events. Strikingly, this effect disappears when the misfortune is disproportionate compared to the misdeed: In this case, the equilibrium of interests is indeed not achieved and participants lose the intuition of immanent justice.
Intuitive psychology All normal human beings interpret other agents’ behaviors in terms of underlying mental states and processes – beliefs, intentions, memories. The process requires specific computational principles that appear very early in development (Leslie, Friedman, and German 2004; Onishi and Baillargeon 2005). For instance, infants can infer a person’s attention from her gaze, emotional states from facial expressions, and probable goals from observed behaviors. This process is fast and automatic in both children and adults. What we are aware of are the results of all this – the seemingly obvious intuitions that person p wants to do x, that she’s interested or bored, satisfied or angry, that she certainly remembers y or regrets z, and so on.
Coalitional psychology Humans build efficient, large-scale, durable coalitions. Sustained cooperation between non-kin in stable groups is rare in non-human animals, and ubiquitous in humans, from tribal warfare to party politics, from office cliques to school gangs (Harcourt and de Waal 1992). Coalitional cooperation requires a set of complex assumptions that seem entirely obvious to human beings. For instance, people intuitively assume that agents including themselves are or are not members of a coalition and that membership is relatively stable, so that past coalitional affiliation can be used to infer probable future behavior, that positive outcomes for other agents qua members of the coalition are positive outcomes for themselves, that rival coalitions play a zero-sum game, that it makes sense to retaliate against aggression from one member of a rival coalition by attacking another member of that coalition, that defection on the part of a member of the coalition is potentially very dangerous and should be made very costly. All these complex, context-sensitive intuitions are obvious to all normal human beings, because they are delivered by intuitive systems that are not accessible to conscious inspection, and require no explicit instruction.
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Many other systems… This list is only illustrative, and mentions only systems whose effects on cultural transmission are discussed below. Many other such specialized systems govern intuitions in different domains of thought and behavior. For instance, our intuitive mechanics delivers expectations about the statics and dynamics of solid objects (from infancy) and slightly less organised expectations about other objects (Spelke 2000). Our number system produces estimates of amounts and also supports the acquisition of number systems (Gallistel and Gelman 2000). Complex mate-selection principles govern emotions and decisions about when and with whom to mate, how to guard one’s mates against “poachers”, in what circumstances to invest in offspring, etc, (Buss 1989; LeCroy and Moller 2000). A specialized face-detection system is involved in recognizing different faces and associating them with memories of persons; the system develops from infancy and may be disrupted by specific pathology (Kanwisher 2000). Kin-selection results in specialize cognitive capacities for the recognition of kin and of kin-relatedness (Lieberman, Tooby, and Cosmides 2007). Conversations are supported by specific pragmatic principles that govern turn-taking and extract optimal speakers’ meanings from utterances (Sperber and Wilson 1995). As a last example, musical pieces automatically activate various sensorial systems specialized to detect time intervals (rhythm) or wavelength (pitch) (Falk 2000; Halpern and Zatorre 1999).
2.3. What intuitions are – and are not
Automaticity Intuitions are the product of cognitive processes that we cannot consciously examine. We can see the objects around us, but cannot perceive what operations are required to transform two retinal projections into volume and depth perception. Intuitions are generally automatic. We do not choose to parse sentences into meanings. Cognitive systems have a specific input format. Any information that meets that format gets processed. As a consequence of this combination of features – specific input format and automaticity – intuitive cognitive systems often process information that is not part of their functional domain but happens to meet their input conditions. Fast moving objects are in some conditions treated (for a short while) as pouncing preda-
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tors. A hose pulled in the grass may trigger panic as its slithering motion matches the input conditions for snake-detection. More pertinent for cultural transmission, cognitive systems are of course activated by stimuli designed to fool them - the face-recognition system is triggered not just by actual faces but also by masks or caricatures (Sperber and Hirschfeld 2004). We can distinguish between the proper or evolutionary domains of systems (what they evolved to process – snakes, faces) and their actual domains (what in fact triggers their activity –hoses, caricatures, masks) (Sperber 1994).
Cultural variability The outputs of intuitive systems often vary as a function of different social and natural environments (Boyer and Barrett 2005). Language production and comprehension for instance are entirely intuitive, automatic, fast, and obviously culturally specific. Our language-acquisition capacities quickly “home in” on the average acoustic properties of the surrounding language environment (Kuhl 2001). This is true of many other domains, such as the connection between musical experience and emotions, notions of what is and is not disgusting in the natural environment, representations about what substances are contaminants, and some aspects of mate-attractiveness criteria (Gangestad and Buss 1993). Even some perceptual illusions may depend on the kind of environment in which one grew up (McCauley and Henrich 2006).
Limitations All intuitive systems are limited in their scope. That is, they do not deliver reliable and stable intuitions in all situations that we can face. For instance, our intuitive psychology works very smoothly in most standard situations of social interaction. But it is not very good at interpreting the behavior of infants, of demented people and of most non-human animals. Although we speculate on these agents’ beliefs and intentions, we cannot very well predict and explain their behavior. In the same way, we have intuitive physical intuitions about colliding mid-size objects and bouncing balls, but none about the shape of our planet or the way objects move in zero gravity. We have intuitions about alliances and conflicts in small groups, but none about the workings of large-scale corporations and institutions. All these limitations stem from the fact that intuitive systems evolved as solutions to highly specific recurrent problems (Boyer and Barrett 2005).
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Intuitive beliefs An organism with such cognitive systems have intuitive beliefs, that is, representations of the world that govern the organism’s behavior (Sperber 1997). Obviously, using the term belief does not imply that the contents of such representations are conscious. Even in humans, they generally are not – consider the intuitive belief that the tree is still around when we turn our back to it, or that the object in our hand will fall down if we drop it. Intuitive beliefs are automatically accessed and drive behavior whenever a situation meets their activation criteria.
3. Creating cultures, Step 2: Reflective elaborations 3.1. Reflective beliefs Along with intuitive beliefs, humans also entertain another kind of beliefs that we call reflective beliefs, found in explicit trains of thought about our intuitions. In the physical domain for instance, these trains of thought may consist in explaining the trajectory of a ball in terms of “impetus” or “force” and “bouncing”. In psychology, reflective beliefs occur when we consciously wonder or comment about our own or other people’s behaviors, or think of the mind as a hidden entity that is independent of the body. These beliefs are not the output of the intuitive systems described above. Our intuitive physics predicts the trajectory of solid objects but does not include terms like “momentum” or “elastic”, which we use when we explicitly consider why different objects move in different ways. These beliefs are made possible by the human
meta-representational ability, of which we provide a few illustrations before proceeding to general features of reflective beliefs and their consequences for cultural phenomena.
3.2. Illustrations
Contagion and contamination An intuitive disgust system directs our attention to specific substances (rotting meat, bodily fluids, etc.) and typically elicit a strong emotion and motivation to avoid touching or ingesting them (Rozin, Haidt, and McCauley
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1993). The system does not by itself provide any information about what is wrong with these different disgust stimuli, or whether there is anything in common between them. As mentioned above, it makes distinctions (dosedependence vs. independence) without any description of the difference in the targets (toxins vs. pathogens). So there is a large domain of potential thoughts about the underlying causes of disgust and more broadly of avoidance reactions. This is particularly clear in the domain of diseases and their transmission. In all human groups people try to avoid close or sustained contact with diseased persons. Their intuitive system automatically produces intuitions like these: [1] Do not touch [/kiss /share food with] this person [2] If you touch the sick person you may get the same disease [3] It is possible that sickness jumps from one person to another which make people particularly receptive to other people’s statements or explanations about contagion processes: [4] It is true that [2] because [3] [5] Sick people foul the air around them [6] Tiny particles fly off from people’s mouths when they’re sick … and the like, which may themselves be associated with memories of specific cases, comparisons of different cases, etc. Indeed, most people in most places develop such notions of contagion processes, which go beyond intuitions and experience by postulating invisible vectors and processes. Many children for instance assume that most medical conditions are contagious, including e.g. nausea or cancer (Raman and Gelman 2004; Siegal 1988). In adults as well as children, tacit principles inform people’s on contagion process, stipulating for instance that like causes like, or that certain forms of contact are more likely to result in contagion (Nemeroff 1995).
Moral reflections While the moral sense gives people moral intuitions, it does not give them the rationale of their intuitions. However, people may examine their moral intuitions and observe the existence of some stability in moral judgments, e.g.: [7] It is (generally) wrong to lie In line with this idea, experiments show that people spontaneously explain their own moral intuitions and feelings in terms of principles (Hauser et al.
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2007) even though the principles generally lag behind the intuitions, for which they provide insufficient explanation (Haidt 2001). Another extension of moral intuitions lies in the tendency for many people in different cultures to reflect about moral intuitions in terms of disgust and contagion (Rozin, Haidt, and McCauley 1993; Haidt 2001): [8] Stealing from your friends is disgusting [9] When she gave back the stolen goods she felt cleansed which stem from similarities between the processes engaged in these two domains. For instance, it is unpleasant to consider immoral behavior, in the same was as it is unpleasant to consider disgust stimuli (Chapman et al. 2009). We feel a strong motivation to avoid cheaters in the same way as we are compelled to avoid diseased individuals.
Reflective beliefs about mental function and dysfunction Our intuitive psychology provides interpretations of specific behaviors in terms of specific mental states: [10] Annie gave me sweets because she wants me to be happy as well as generic intuitions about specific people: [11] Annie is kind and supports generic statements that can be used to illustrate or explain specific intuitions: [12] People who are nice try to help others [13] Angry people cannot listen to reason [14] People in love do not notice the flaws in their beloved and accumulate to form a spontaneous, explanatory, common-sense psychology. As noted above, some observed behaviors do not result in a clear interpretation as they seem to violate some of our intuitive psychological expectations. This happens for instance, when a person does not register any state of affairs (because she is in a vegetative state or in coma) or fails to react to salient stimuli (her reflexes are absent or diminished, she fails to gaze at moving objects, she displays no emotion related to actual events). Or someone’s gaze does not conform to culturally appropriate forms of gaze following and eyecontact. Or it seems impossible to maintain a coherent conversation with one’s interlocutor. In many such situations, people have a strong intuition that something is “not right” in the other person. However, our intuitive psycholo-
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gy does not tell us what is disrupted or why (Boyer 2011). For instance, the cries and gesticulation of a Tourette patient may be the starting point of very diverse reflective elaborations: [15] He keeps shouting because his brain is tired [16] He is gesticulating because his limbs are disconnected from his brain [17] He shouts because he is in a panic More generally, many (but not all) aberrant behaviors trigger the intuition that there is some dysfunction. But our intuitive psychology does not specify what it consists of, it creates an empty place-holder that we fill with various explicit reflections.
Groups and social essentialism One of the most widespread and spontaneous interpretations of the social world is in terms of separate groups with different, essential properties. For instance, one may think that Scots are naturally dour while Brazilians are funloving. Such essentialism assumes [a] that all members of the category share some (undefined) internal property, [b] that this property is inherited, not accidental and [c] that the internal property causes external behavior (GilWhite 2001; Haslam, Rothschild, and Ernst 2000). This makes social categories very similar to living kinds, which are universally construed in terms of these three essentialist assumptions (Atran and Medin 1999; Gelman and Hirschfeld 1999). Social categories are treated as quasi-species (Boyer 1990; Rothbart and Taylor 1990) which may indicate that our biological intuitions are misled by the fact that social groups often relatively endogamous and filiation-based (Gil-White 2001). But it is not clear that people are actually committed to “social essences”. Perhaps the appearance of essentialism stems from the way people consider e.g. the following intuitions from their coalitional psychology: [18] The Poldovians are not like us [19] All Poldovians share interests and goals and produce spontaneous reflective explanations for these facts: [20] There must be something that makes Poldovians similar [21] In some way brand-new Poldovian infants are already Poldovian which are compatible with postulating essences, but are actually an on-thehoof, not altogether coherent but serviceable way of construing observed social differences.
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3.3. What reflective beliefs are and are not
Reflections are meta-representational Reflective beliefs differ from intuitive beliefs in several ways. First and most important, they are representations, not of the world, but of other representations, which is why we call them meta-representational. This occurs for instance when we consider abstract thoughts or people’s utterances: [22] Victoria said I am not amused. [23] It is odd that she does not like me. [24] He believes in Make love not war so he must be optimistic. [25] I thought they're coming soon because I heard the car. These representations are not about the world but about other representations (in italics above), adding to them a source, an epistemic comment, an inference and an explanation, respectively. The meta-representational ability is engaged in the domains described above. Take the case of immanent justice. Jack trips up and breaks his leg. I recall that Jack has cheated on his partner. Because these two events are quite salient in my mind and because they seem roughly proportionate, my intuitive fairness system is activated and produces the intuition that the misfortune was related to the misdeed: [26] Jack got what he deserved. However, this intuition may contradict other intuitions – e.g. the intuitive physics system may suggest that the direct cause of the accident was a slippery sidewalk. Such a clash of intuitions may result in one of them being rejected. It is also possible to maintain the intuition of “just dessert” but to metarepresent it, as a representation that needs to be interpreted: [27] It’s possible that Jack got what he deserved and even add comments or inferences: [28] If [25] is true then perhaps people generally get what they deserved. Lest one confuse meta-representational processes with deliberation or consciousness, note that the process that triggers meta-representations of intuitions is itself intuitive. For instance, the occurrence of two conflicting intuitions: [29] Jack tripped up because he cheated on his partner [30] Jack tripped up because there was ice on the sidewalk triggers a meta-representation like:
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[31] It is probably not true that both [27] and [28] …and this process is automatic and effortless. The difference between this kind of process and the intuitions described in the previous section is that the latter were thoughts about the world, and these are thoughts about thoughts. Reflective beliefs add to our intuitions in many different ways. They may specify the content of a place-holder in an intuition, as in [5-6] that specify the “something” pathological that is transmitted between persons. Reflections may also provide a source (see [24]) or evaluate the validity of an intuition (see [25]) or compare several intuitions (see [33]).
Possible vagueness in reflective beliefs Our ability to metarepresent allows us to accept a representation without fully interpreting it. Most of the time, we use natural language to represent the result of our reflections. We may thus talk about “just dessert” for instance. These are linguistic symbols that need in turn to be interpreted: In what sense do people get what they deserve? How could the cosmos implement the punishment system (e.g. making cheaters slip on sidewalks and break legs)? A similar vagueness is present in our descriptions of personality, when we consider that some person is “charming” or that another one has “the right stuff” for a particular job. These are particularly vague reflective elaborations of intuitions, e.g. the intuition that we have pleasure in interacting with the person or the intuition that we trust them to do the job. We have no description of what led to these intuitions and we attribute them to undefined qualities of the persons themselves. In the literature, the content of meta-representations is described as potentially semi-propositional (Sperber 1997).
Authority as a special case of validating context When children learn new beliefs from their parents, they have a clear intuition that their parents are to be trusted even though they do not fully understand what they are telling them. In this case, they have the intuition ‘‘p is true’ without having any intuition about p: [32] Mum said that spiders have eyes on their backs [33] It is true that spiders have eyes on their backs Insertion of an abstract thought or utterance in a validating context is one of the most familiar forms of meta-representations, and one that is common in everyday situations: [34] Bruno said that Burgundy wines age better than Bordeaux 13
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[35] Bruno is a vintner [36] It is true that Burgundy wines age better than Bordeaux The framing in such meta-representations may be diverse but they generally consist in an appeal to authoritativeness, that is, they are based on the major premise that “What vintners [/scientists, /priests, /everyone, /my parents] say about x is true” and warrant the inference “therefore p is true”. Also, inserting a representation in such a context may of course result in diverse epistemic evaluations, as in “what vintners say about x is true [/probably true, /dubious, /certainly false]”. Again, all these thought are meta-representations because there are not about the world, but about abstract thoughts (and in particular about their epistemic properties).
3.4. Representational entropy: Most reflective beliefs are not “cultural” Human minds can and do come up with vast numbers of different reflections. Most of these are transient, others are stable and recurrent in a particular person's mental life. We should expect the contents of different people’s reflective beliefs to be largely different, even when they focus on the same objects, for two reasons. First, people engage in verbal communication, as a means to modify in specific ways the mental representations of others (Sperber and Wilson 1995). As a result of communication, people constantly create variants of other people's representations. When they express their own thoughts, public representations of these variants are created and listeners produce new inferences. Transmission after transmission, reflections are thus modified by people’s minds. Second, people’s memories are not passive stores of data. They consist in inferential processes that filter, organize, connect and often distort previous material (Roediger 1996). As a consequence, the triggers for reflective beliefs – e.g., someone’s utterance, a particular situation – may vary as they are recalled over time. The profusion and instability of reflective beliefs should result in cultural entropy, producing a social world where few people ever have similar representations of anything.
4. Creating cultures, Step 3: Selection and Epidemics Instead of entropy, what social scientists observe are group-wide similarities in beliefs, which we call “cultural” for that reason. A common principle of 14
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models of cultural transmission is that such similarity is a result of the selective retention of variants (Boyd and Richerson 1985; Durham 1991; Sperber 1991). Here, we first illustrate some forms taken by this form of transmission before considering general selective processes.
4.1. Illustrations
Medical folk-theories As we said above, intuitions about illness may result in reflective beliefs about the process whereby diseases occur and are transmitted between organisms. In most human groups one finds that some of these reflective beliefs have stabilized as a set of roughly shared notions. Consider for instance the notion of “bad air” in traditional China (Martin 1981), the widespread versions of beliefs in miasma (Douglas 1966), or the cooties of children’s folklore (Siegal 1988). These are all expressions and extensions of disgust and prophylaxis intuitions. As we noted people frequently reflect that: [37] There must be something that jumps from one sick person to another but this kind of thought contains an empty place-holder (“something”) that communication with other people may help to fill in a stable way. If people around us call that something “bad air”, we are all the more likely to add this element to our reflective repertoire, that it easily explains other aspects of contagion, e.g. the fact that the vectors are invisible (air is transparent), that diseases are sometimes transmitted without physical contact (one does not feel the touch of air) over long distances (winds travel). In general, one should expect folk-medical traditions to be all the more successful as they are tightly meshed with intuitions. Consider for instance the rivalry in many industrialized countries between official bio-medicine and a variety of “alternative” systems of healing (Bishop, Yardley, and Lewith 2007). These correspond to two diametrical processes. Official medicine requires extremely complex physiological knowledge, it typically uses unfamiliar substances created in large factories, it relies entirely on the authority of opaque data. By contrast, alternative medicine usually makes use of simple metaphors (“cleansing the body”), seems to use familiar objects (plants) and to process them in a very simple manner (“extract of x”). The way the system is represented is meshed with very common intuitions, to do with cleanliness, the noxious effects of invisible contaminants, the efficacy of such actions as wash-
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ing (Van den Bulck and Custers 2010). In other words, the alternative systems are based on reflections that dovetail our intuitions so well that they are highly persuasive.
Moral codes and norms The moral codes explicitly represented, codified, and transmitted as cultural traditions are heavily influenced by moral intuitions and their common reflective counterparts. As we noted, the moral sense tends to expect, and see as desirable, a loss of welfare for the perpetrator of a misdeed, and to focus on roughly proportionate events as compensating each other. This provides an intuitive grounding for moral codes that emphasize retribution or require punishment of misdeeds, but also make distinctions between minor and major violations, e.g. theft and homicide. The same intuitions make some variants of moral or legal codes easier to acquire and live by than others (Cosmides and Tooby 2006), for instance by codifying and explicating an intuitive distinction between misdemeanors and crimes, or spelling out our intuitive notions of responsibility (Sousa 2009). As noted above, people’s moral reflections often use disgust to think about morality. These reflections may explain a range of cultural phenomenon. If immoral acts are seen as pollutions, then ritual cleansing as in Christianity and Hinduism can function as a way to get rid of one’s bad actions (Fuller 1992). If disgust is used to convey moral condemnation, then some actions that are potentially related to disgust (such as sexual practices, food custom, etc.) may seem intuitively immoral. People may perceive their own disgust as an evidence of the immorality of these actions and may condemn them even if they do not specifically represent in what way moral prescriptions were violated (Haidt 2001). Finally, the intuition that misdeeds require some loss of resources from the perpetrator provides the background against which practices like pilgrimages, alms, flagellation or fasting may appear to make sense, thereby contributing to their transmission. It may also enhance the salience and easy processing of notions of retribution in the afterlife.
Folk-psychologies and psychiatries People’s reflective beliefs about the reasons for behavior, or general properties of minds, partly “gel” in the form of roughly shared understandings and explicit theories of the mind and self. These may be based on locally specific 16
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constructs, e.g. different components of the person (Carrithers, Collins, and Lukes 1985) or different descriptions of how minds work (Wierzbicka 2006; Lillard 1997; Choi, Nisbett, and Norenzayan 1999). The detection of non-standard behavior creates a niche for the adoption and transmission of “folk-psychiatries”, explicit accounts of the processes that may result in mental disorder (Haslam 2005). In the literature of ethnopsychiatry, it is often assumed that such stabilized notions of madness precede and shape people’s understandings of what behaviors are odd and why (Gaines, 1992; Jovanovski, 1995). Indeed, even scholarly models of madness sometimes become widespread among non-specialists and shape local “ways of being mad” (Hacking 1995, 1998). But explicit models do not spread and stabilize unless they dovetail common intuitions and reflections about disorder. Our intuitive psychology and spontaneous reflections construe cognitive function as conscious and language-like, not as the integration of many discrete computational modules. As a result, it is easy to construe mental dysfunction that affects consciousness, makes it vague or disordered, but it is much more difficult to construe limited damage to specialised mental structures. This may explain why there are many cultural models of insanity, but practically none about circumscribed neuro-psychological pathologies like prosopagnosia or aphasia (Boyer 2011). These constraints from intuitive understandings also extend to scholarly constructions. Consider Freudian psychoanalysis, a cultural tradition that had great cultural success for a while, and is still considered a source of inspiration in some fields outside scientific psychology. Perhaps this cultural success owes a lot to the way in which intuitive psychology is activated when we try to make sense of psychoanalytic statements (Gellner 1996). The theory states that many mental states are unconscious. This is a violation of our intuitive psychological assumption that mental states are conscious thoughts that we can examine and reflect on. Moreoever, the theory is shocking as it postulates odd or repulsive unconscious thoughts. However, the doctrine also meshes with our psychological intuitions, as it describes the “unconscious” as a little person, an agent that tries to achieve certain goals, knows how to disguise “its” intentions. This combination of a salient, counter-intuitive element and a set of largely intuitive assumptions is often found in successful ideologies (Boyer 1994; Gellner 1979).
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Lineages, ethnies, “ blood” and “race” As noted above, spontaneous social essentialism is widespread. It stabilizes in many human groups in a local, roughly shared account of social categories as the consequence of different unique essences. This may be applied to very diverse social groups. In many tribal societies, a widespread model construes lineages as based on the transmission of a special substance, metaphorically described as the permanent “blood” or “bones” embodied in transient individuals (Bloch 1992, 1993; Daniel 1984). This is also routinely applied to divisions within a polity, as in the many caste theories that make different social categories the consequence of naturally different properties (Quigley 1993). Ideologies of ethnic and national identity are also based on an explicit, codified version of such reflections, to the effect that common language or mores are the outcome of common internal properties (Brubaker, Loveman, and Stamatov 2004; Smith 1987). Racialist theorizing seem plausible to minds used to essentlializing social differences (Hirschfeld 1996), especially when coalitional intuitions already describe social categories associated with “race” as incompatible groups (Kurzban, Tooby, and Cosmides 2001; Sidanius and Pratto 1999). Also, intuitions about contagion (even a tiny dose of pathogens is dangerous) provide support for “one-drop” rules and notions of “pure blood”, as well as culturally successful associations between strangers and contaminants (Schaller 2006).
4.2. What reflective epidemics are – and are not
Explaining attractors: similar triggers and similar trajectories In the framework proposed here, the recurrence of particular concepts and norms, within and across populations, is explained by the fact that all human beings share essential aspects of cognitive architecture. Because of this, [a] the starting point of many reflective processes is likely to be the same, and [b] the trajectories followed by reflective elaborations are also highly constrained and therefore similar. Consider the triggers first. Reflective beliefs are often triggered by the limitations or inconsistencies of intuitions, or by the need to provide to other agents a consistent account of one’s intuitions. So given similar intuitive systems, the same situations are likely to be the focus of reflective elaborations. For instance, all over the world, people are puzzled by conflicting intuitions
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about death. On the one hand, they have a clear intuition about the cessation of agency (Barrett 2005; Barrett and Behne 2005). On the other hand, they continue entertaining intuitive processes about the deceased person’s thoughts and their relationship to the living (Bering 2002). This discrepancy leads them to elaborate or accept various theories about the soul and the dual nature of persons (Boyer 2001). To take another example, people have to justify their behaviors when it seems to depart from what is intuitively moral. This is why, all over, the world, we find explicit moral reflections that help people to explain in what way their behavior is moral, in terms of externally given laws, or abstract principles of good behavior, or the general interest. Also, reflections in certain domains tend to go in particular direction (almost) no matter where you start from. Consider reflections on the origins of species. People can’t help to notice functionality in living beings, that have a mouth to eat, eyes to see, legs to walk and so on, so that even young children espouse teleological explanations (Kelemen 1999). One common way of thinking about function is to recruit intuitions from our tool-making systems, and postulate the existence of prior goals and of an agent that created the organisms. Even adults taught about natural selection as a way to create adaptive function without a designer often revert to teleological explanation, e.g. considering that “Nature” has goals and foresight (Evans 2001).
Epidemics are not a matter of imitation Cultural transmission is often considered to be based on imitation (Mesoudi 2007). However, is it based on human communication that does not consist in “downloading” concepts from one mind to another, but consists in inferential processes whereby people attend to cues in other people's behavior, infer their communicative intentions and build new representations on the basis of what they inferred (Sperber 1996; Tomasello, Kruger, and Ratner 1993; Gergely, Egyed, and Király 2007). As we tried to show, many distinct mental systems seem to be geared to very narrow classes of adaptive problems, and produce very specific expectations about the natural and social environments. This process is acknowledged by various current models of cultural evolution, in particular in the coevolution and in dual-inheritance models, and called “content biases” (Richerson and Boyd 1989). The term stands in contrast to other, non-content biases, such as a frequency bias (people tend to behave in ways that they
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perceive as frequent in their environment) and a prestige-bias (people tend to imitate high-status individuals). The latter biases can apply to a variety of contents, which is why people e.g. may ape the clothing style of rock stars or the diction of aristocrats, even though neither feature is directly the cause of their prestige. Examples of content biases would be the spread of easy tunes (Pop goes the weasel) as opposed to difficult ones (Berg's Lyrische Suite) or the success of ice-cream trucks as opposed to (possible) broccoli stands. Or, one could consider any one of the domains we mentioned in this article – they are all examples of the pervasive influence of “content biases” in cultural transmission. That is where our account diverges from standard dual-inheritance models (Boyd and Richerson 1985; Lumsden and Wilson 1981; Durham 1991). Over twenty years, that research program has produced a great many precise and sophisticated mathematical models for cultural evolution in different domains (Collard, Shennan, and Tehrani 2006; Jordan and Shennan 2009). The focus in those models is overwhelmingly on non-content biases, such as frequency and prestige (Henrich and Gil-White 2001), as well as on the dynamics of social networks that make certain norms or concepts more or less likely to spread. By contrast, content biases of the kind described here are generally not described or explored in much detail. Although the models certainly include the possibility of content biases, there is no consideration of what biases should be considered and what their effects might be. The latter questions, for us, are the crucial ones for an explanation of cultural evolution. That is, explaining human cultures consists in answering, not just obviously important quantitative questions, such as, At what rate could a norm spread, given measurements of its persuasiveness, the status of agents that promote it, and the number of contacts between agents? but also questions such as, Why do we find recurrent norms and concepts in different places? What are the limits to variation? What mental capacities make some norms or concepts easy or difficult to acquire? and other such content questions. In other words, we consider that explaining cultures requires a rich psychology (Claidière and Sperber 2007), that is, taking on board all the empirical evidence we have concerning specific dispositions and biases in human mind.
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5. Re-connecting to anthropological tradition As noted in introduction, the naturalist programme has only had a limited impact so far on the various social sciences. We have argued that this is due to the fact that the naturalist program has focused only on intuitive systems such as object detection, moral evaluation, biological classification, mindreading, etc. Although these intuitive systems underlie numerous cultural phenomena such as music, art, language, techniques, they fall short in explaining cultural beliefs traditionally studied by social scientists. Throughout this paper, we have proposed a naturalistic account of symbolic beliefs. This account relies on the human ability to have representations about abstract representations, what we have called here “reflections”. This ability allows human to reflect on their intuitions and elaborate symbols whose meaning is open and who can represent all sort of contents human may not grasp intuitively. In the last section, we have shown that although reflective beliefs departs from intuitions, their cultural forms are nonetheless clearly constraints by intuitive systems for, in order to be culturally successful, reflections need to be intuitive enough to be communicated by individuals and retrieved by their audiences.
5.1. Anthropological wisdom: Cultural knowledge is not integrated
The elusive content of cultural beliefs A consequence of the meta-representational format is that different people may have different attitudes to a certain proposition and be all (in some way) committed to the same proposition. The proposition is stated, while the attitudes are typically left implicit, and are in any case difficult to describe. We are often unaware of the different nuances of epistemic commitment - it takes intense introspection to decide whether we are entirely sure that p, or just convinced that p. Moreover we only have a limited vocabulary to explicate these attitudes (“I am sure that...”, “think that ...”, “suppose that...” etc.). To take a simple example, consider the Jain puja practice: “Interviews with worshippers produced a startlingly wide variety of spontaneous reflexive commentaries on the pushpa (flower) puja. To one Jain, this action meant that her knowledge should blossom like a flower; to another, it meant that his feelings should be soft and gentle like a flower; to another, it meant that the scent of flowers
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When people have to perform the ritual, they will modify it according to their own reflection. It is likely that after a few transmission episodes, its form will be quite different. This also has an effect on cultural transmission, to the extent that people are likely to over-estimate the degree of similarity between other people's beliefs and their own, and as a result the degree of consensus in their group.
The endless variability of reflexive beliefs The distinction between intuitive systems and reflective comments and theories may explain why cultural anthropologists can claim that people’s beliefs are endlessly variable while, in the same time, cross-cultural experiments demonstrate the universality of intuitive systems. Indeed, psychologists and anthropologists do not look at the same phenomenon. Psychologist focus on the way humans predict object’s trajectory, sort plants and animals by taxon, think about other’s thoughts or are disgusted by potentially contagious things. By contrast, anthropologists are mainly interested in reflective beliefs such as beliefs in supernatural beings, food taboos or kinship systems. This difference is reflected also in methods. Psychologists use experiments and study implicit pattern while anthropologists, historians and social scientists rely on conversations, archives or questionnaire that mainly elicit explicit reflections. Combining the two methods allows showing that people can think two different things in the same time. Astuti (2007), for instance, has studied the way Vezo beliefs about mind and body. Although Vezo informants in Madagascar produce statements that could be used to support such dualism, experimental procedures that target their inferential reasoning reveal that they systematically differentiate between mind and body, between the biological processes that determine the organism and the social processes that shape personhood. This suggests that there is a significant discrepancy between people’s explicit linguistic statements (reflective belifes) and their implicit theoretical knowledge (intuitive beliefs). There is thus no contradiction between the anthropological and the psychological
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literature: while psychologists have mainly study humans intuitions about the world, anthropologists have been interested in describing human’s theories, comments, reflections about the world
Irrationality and mysteries At the heart of the anthropological tradition lies the question of the irrationality of cultural knowledge (Sperber 1975; Gellner 1985). Why do people “believe” that burning someone's lock of hair can make them sick, or that reciting incantations will repel caterpillars? A great deal of anthropological discussion focused on whether people with such beliefs were engaging in a specifically primitive mode of thought, or their standard of rationality was special, or their statements were metaphorical (Hollis and Lukes 1982). To a large extent, understanding such beliefs was fraught because they were misdiagnosed as intuitive beliefs (Sperber 1996). But they are not. There is no intuitive system in cognitive architecture that produces thoughts like “bulls are cucumbers”. On the other hand, it is perfectly possible to be committed to, e.g. “bulls are cucumbers is probably true in some sense”, “bulls are cucum-
bers is what they ancestors told us”, “the priests are saying that bulls are cucumbers”, etc. These mysteries are not intuitions; they are only theoretical reflexions and comments that are transmitted from one generation to another. This is why important domains of cultural knowledge contain mysteries, that is, statements that could not even in principle receive a unique, stable interpretation. These are often found in highly elaborate, literate versions of religious systems, e.g. “reality is but an illusion”, “three different persons are one substance”, “the way is not the way that can be named”, etc. Many academic fads are based on such mysteries, e.g. “there is no objective truth”, “the text is the margin”, “writing precedes orality”, “the unconscious is structured like a language” (Sperber 2005). The loosely defined domain of “spirituality” is rife with such statements that challenge specific interpretation yet seem compelling to many, e.g. “you can find your true self”, “you can achieve unity with the cosmos”, etc. What people have in mind is that the mystery is true (this is their reflections which is about the property of the belief), but the content of the mystery (the belief itself) remains obscure.
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5.2. Why ethnography is difficult (and uncertain) Most anthropologists insist that ethnography is difficult, requires a lot of experience. One can be easily misled by what seem to be clear and precise “folk-models” but turn out to be one individual’s idiosyncratic musings. Another pitfall is over generalization, Finally it seems very difficult to know when one’s field experience is sufficient to understand a particular domain of culture. But why should the description of culture be that difficult? One may argue that it is a matter of complexity, but that is hardly plausible as many other phenomena observed by, e.g. field biologists, are of equal complexity. We suggest that the phenomena described above may be of help here. The goal of ethnographic work is (among other possible ones) to provide a cogent description of local theories or folk-models. There are two difficulties with that goal. First, as we suggested, it is by no means certain that such cultural theories actually exist. People may have organised behaviors towards spirits without a consistent model of spirits. Second, the only raw material that an anthropologist can use consists in [a] observation of behaviors - which do not provide a transparent window to thoughts and norms, [b] some anecdotal evidence concerning other people’s intuitions, and [c] a lot of explicit statements whereby people describe and explain their intuitions. That is indeed the main material of most cultural anthropological monographs. If our model is valid, one can see why this material is extremely difficult to delineate. To take a simple example, most Fang people readily assert that ghosts can “send” people diseases (Boyer 1990). Conversations then show that some people take this as something that is generally said and may well be true; others think it is highly probable, as a good explanation of illness; others find it quite certain, on the basis of actual cases that were diagnosed as coming from spirits and treated and cured as such. This often makes reflective beliefs often seem more similar than they are. It makes sense (at least as s short-cut) for an anthropologist to describe the statement “ghosts can 'send' you some disease” as an instance of “Fang beliefs”, because the proposition is what is heard often and the attitudes are complicated and difficult to ascertain. This also has an effect on cultural transmission, to the extent that people are likely to overestimate the degree of similarity between other people's beliefs and their own, and as a result the degree of consensus in their group.
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5.3. Why most anthropological categories are misleading One major theme of cultural anthropology in the last eighty years has been a constant and consistent critique of the terms generally used to describe the social world, such as “politics”, “power”, “marriage”, “religion”, “ritual”, and so on. As many anthropologists have argued over decades, the use of such terms, if perhaps convenient to roughly convey what anthropologists work on, is ultimately misleading. There is no special reason to think that such terms denote natural kinds of social phenomena. These common terms for social phenomena were extracted from the folk- and scholarly lexicons of European societies and gradually extended to other places, so that they generally refer to “polythetic categories” with or without strong family resemblance (Needham 1975). For instance, the term “ritual” comprises two diametrical ways of organising behavior, which may be glossed as routinization on the one hand and highly scripted, compelling and attention-grabbing sequences on the other – and they have virtually nothing in common (Lienard and Boyer 2006). The same applies to “religion”. There is a great, and quite understandable, social demand for a general account of “religion” and corresponding attempts to explain it in terms of neural processes (Newberg and D'Aquili 1998), specific genes (Hamer 2004), or human evolution (Bering 2010). This however seems misguided. The term “religion” does not denote a coherent set of social phenomena. Disparate notions, behaviors and institutions are traditionally grouped together in a “religious” domain, in Western scholarship, because in most state societies there emerged specialized groups of priests, doctrinal scholars and ritual officers. These groups all claimed that there had to be some unique and integrated domain they were in charge of (Gellner 1989; Whitehouse 2004). But similar beliefs, norms and behaviors are found outside institutional “religion” in most human groups, particularly in the tribal and band societies of the kind we evolved in (Boyer 2010). There is no reason to group them together, unless of course one accepts the institutions’ ideological claim (“there is a domain that we are specialists of”) as a fact. So there is certainly no specific evolutionary path for “religion”, or a specific set of cognitive processes engaged in “religion”, no more than there are specialized modules or specific evolutionary paths for sport, taxation, cuisine or medicine. All these are institutions that only appeared in some places at some times.
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By contrast, the framework proposed here should allow us to delineate cultural phenomena that are proper natural kinds, because they are triggered and shaped by the same mental systems. Consider psychological essentialism, which is both a constant feature of our intuitive understandings of living kinds, and a recurrent feature of reflective beliefs about persons, or social and ethnic groups (Gelman and Hirschfeld 1999). There is probably no unified domain of “social cognition”, of beliefs about social groups. That is, intuitions and reflections about social interaction and groups stem from different intuitive systems, and my take highly different reflective routes. But essentialism is one such route – and a phenomenon amenable to general hypotheses, predictions and empirical tests. In the same way, beliefs in non-physical agents with specific interests in people's actions may well be another such natural kind, as it seems to be based, the world over, on activation of the intuitive psychology and intuitive morality systems (Boyer 2001). Pursuing causal models of cultural phenomena will certainly lead to a new taxonomy, where such terms as “religion” or “marriage” are either discarded or precisely re-defined.
6. Cultural knowledge in an integrated social science 6.1. Explaining cultures with population thinking Throughout this paper, we have proposed a naturalistic account of culturally widespread beliefs. This account relies on the human ability to have representations about abstract representations, what we have called here “reflections”. This ability allows human to reflect on their intuitions and elaborate mental representations whose meaning is open and who can represent all sort of contents human may not grasp intuitively. In the last section, we have shown that although reflective beliefs departs from intuitions, their cultural forms are nonetheless clearly constrained by intuitive systems for, in order to be culturally successful, reflections need to be intuitive enough to be communicated by individuals and retrieved by their audiences. In this perspective, the fact that some mental representations are “cultural” is obviously a matter of degree. What is meant by that term is simply that some version of some representations is held in roughly similar form by many individuals in a group of interest. Representations that become “cultural” are
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not special in any sense. They simply are winners in a particular set of selection events constitute by communicative interactions in that group. It follows that there is no special human capacity for acquiring “culture”, beyond the human capacities for acquiring vast amounts of information from conspecifics – most of which will never become widespread in a group. This view of human cultures is simply the application of population thinking, that originated in evolutionary biology, to our understanding of cultural knowledge. In biology, there are no essential species, no type of e.g. “the tiger” that would be intrinsically different from other types – what we find are populations of reproductively compatible organisms, and the populations temporally or spatially merge with other aggregates (Williams 1966). In the same way, anthropology can dispense with its convenient but misleading assumption that there are such things as human “cultures”, when all it studies are stabilized distributions of individual representations.
6.2. Segregation or integration? Traditional social science relied on what could be called a “segregation” ontology, where social and cultural phenomena were seen as essentially different from natural ones. This assumed division between “levels of reality” implied that naturalistic explanations, e.g. in terms of biological and psychological processes, were only allowed up to a particular glass ceiling, as it were. One was allowed to assume that evolution had resulted in similar psychological dispositions in all normal humans, but these dispositions were not allowed as explanations of anything beyond very vague and basic drives (Tooby and Cosmides 1992). Progress in cognitive psychology and evolutionary biology has made this position untenable. As we explained above, we now have empirical evidence for a variety of specific mental systems, geared to the solution of recurrent fitness problems, whose output consists partly in intuitive expectations about the natural and social world. The output of these systems and their reflective elaborations are the raw material of cultural transmission and intuitive systems also constrain the way we acquire, remember and communicate those shared representations we usually call “cultural”. This framework is only one part, albeit a major one, in the emerging “integrated social science” that results from the convergence of findings and methods from evolutionary biology, micro-economics, neuroscience, experimental psychology and anthropology. 27
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