Fixation in Teorema

The long version of “Fixation of superstitious beliefs” should be coming out in Teorema relatively soon. It develops the ideas contained in the short version that I put on this blog a while ago. I’m linking to a draft version of the long article in pdf format:

My aim in this paper is to sketch a broadly Peircean account of religious and superstitious beliefs.

I begin by examining the relationship between Malinowski’s view that superstitions arise in circumstances in which people experience a lack of control and Peirce’s view that it is doubt that leads to inquiry. Taken together, the views suggest that superstitions arise in situations in which doubt cannot be readily assuaged. Instead of continuing to alter the beliefs, superstitions act to protect them from counterevidence.

This is done in three different ways. Firstly, the content of the beliefs can be such as to minimise the opportunity for testing. Secondly, social attitudes can be such as to make testing unlikely. And, thirdly, the methods available for testing can be constrained. Both religious and superstitious beliefs make use of the full range of these mechanisms, the contrast class being provided by scientific beliefs for which maximum testability is sought.

The untestability of religious and superstitious beliefs does not render them meaningless, however. This is because they still remain capable of motivating human behaviour. Indeed, once empirical considerations are guarded against it is this non-cognitive role of beliefs that determines whether they become generally accepted. This role can be understood in terms of the adaptive function the beliefs come to have. Investigation of this role, however, will undermine it. What is more, a comparison of the actual desirability of religious beliefs with scientific ones requires that a scientific attitude be taken.

The annual Filipino visit

It is the start of June and time for the thus-far-unexplained glut of Filipino visitors to arrive at my blog (previously mentioned here and here). Indeed, over the last day or two, the same pattern has begun with the Philippines accounting for the greatest number of hits and with nearly all of the visits being to my Fixation of superstitious beliefs entry. Well, dear Filipino visitors, welcome and hope you find whatever you were looking for.

Abstract for Knowledge, Value, Evolution

In November this year the Czech Academy of Science is organising a conference that seeks to bring together life sciences with philosophy. The list of key-speakers includes a number of familiar faces. Not surprisingly, I am hoping to attend. In fact, I am sending my abstract today. The paper develops and clarifies some of the ideas I presented last year in the “Fixation of superstitious beliefs” paper.

The desirability of religion and the function of non-cognitive beliefs

Beliefs have the capacity to guide human behaviour regardless of their truth. In particular, false beliefs can motivate behaviour that is adaptive. Disconfirmation of the beliefs is a threat to their stability, however. The beliefs can be protected from disconfirmation by having content that minimises potential empirical consequences as well as existing in a context that discourages investigation of them or provides only very limited access to the methods that might be used to investigate them. Due to their disconnection from the truth, the plausibility of such beliefs must be explained in terms of human psychology, primarily in terms of a variety of cognitive by-products (Boyer, Atran). Properly understood, such beliefs may be termed non-cognitive as their truth or falsehood is irrelevant to their function – they only appear to be assertions. The paradigmatic example of such non-cognitive beliefs is provided by religious traditions: Their content appears to refer to unobservable entities, and they are protected by social rules surrounding the treatment of the sacred as well as having often opposed the development of science.

The persistence and potentially adaptive nature of non-cognitive beliefs does not indicate that their effects are such as we might desire. This is the case for two reasons. Firstly, they may only be adaptive for themselves, as suggested by some memeticians (Blackmore, Dawkins). Secondly, even if they are adaptive for believers (Stark) or groups of believers (D. S. Wilson), being adaptive does not necessary equate with furthering actual human well-being. This means that to determine whether religious and other non-cognitive beliefs are desirable we have to investigate their evolutionary function.  The proper theoretical framework to examine this question is gene-culture co-evolution theory (Boyd & Richerson) as it is complex enough to allow for and distinguish between all of the alternatives considered above. Ironically, however, the close investigation necessary to determine the desirability of individual non-cognitive beliefs is anathema to their maintaining their plausibility and, therefore, their functionality.

Before Supersense – Supersense and Simon’s scissors

As I write this I am on the train to Lublin, where I teach. For the last couple of weeks I have been carrying around in my bag a particular book that I had been very much looking forward to reading for quite a while – Bruce Hood’s Supersense. As it is, however, I have hardly cracked open the cover thus far and only read the first couple of chapters. I find that I simply do not have the time to get into it because of all of my commitments. I could read it on the fly but I want to concentrate on it properly as it is discussing many of the issues that are central to my own research. Bruce’s approach is very similar to mine in many ways – he also bases a lot of his conclusions upon evolutionary considerations, in particular his claim that being superstitious is an unavoidable human trait. One claim that I find extremely interesting is that, I gather, he thinks that there is a profound link between being superstitious and human values. As part of reading the book, I want to blog my impressions of it, chapter by chapter, same as I did for Vyse’s and Jahoda’s books that I saw as the classics in the area. Bruce and his publisher keep talking about Supersense as a popularisation but, given the profound ideas contained within it, that may well be selling it somewhat short, I suspect. Definitely, once I am lining up a publisher for my yet to be finished inclined book, I’ll have to consider Bruce’s book as falling within the same broad area. Which makes me all the more anxious that it does well.

One thing that Bruce talks about a lot that I have been thinking about recently is that people prefer originals to what, they are told, are exact physical replicas. The conclusion that Bruce draws is that we implicitly think things have some sort essence in addition to their physical properties and I have found his argument very convincing. Yet, I am not so sure any more and I might as well express my doubts before reading his book and having the doubts dissolve in the face of his detailed argumentation in much the way that fog dissolves in the hard light of day. After all, blog posts are supposed to be all about poorly informed opinions!

My worry goes back to Simon’s metaphor of the scissors, where one blade is our mental abilities and the other is the environment we use them in, the scissors only working if the two fit with each other. The thing is that our notions of identity and the related ways in which we value items have been formed in the very particular environment in which we have lived. This is an environment in which the creation of physical duplicates in actually impossible. Even things that appear at first to be exactly the same, never are. Therefore, we are living in a world in which it is perfectly rational to assume that an item that seems identical to something we value actually is not identical. This realisation may be conscious and expressed in the way that I have or it may implicit in our various instinctual responses. In particular, it may be implicit in what Bruce sees as our essentialist thinking.

A couple of examples may be of use here.

Let’s first consider a physical duplicate of my daughter, exactly the same down to atomic scale. I think that in such a case, I would and I should treat that girl as my daughter and am actually glad that such a thing is impossible as the extra kindergarden costs might be prohibitive. The intuition that people have that such a child would be a doppelganger (consider all those horror movies!) comes from the intuition that such a child could not be the same, no matter what someone tells them – a very reasonable thought given what the reality of creating duplicates is, I stress. Of course, the theoretical child would not have to be an exact duplicate to create an issue. Indeed, a less than exact duplicate creates a morally more complex problem.

To make things simpler, it may be useful to consider a less than perfect copy of a treasured item – let us say a wedding ring – that is functionally the same. This is something that is actually perfectly possible, unlike the previous example. Why do people prefer the original, in such a case, to the functionally equivalent item? Again, I think the reason may be found in understanding the circumstances under which our cognitive abilities have formed. In this case, the relevant fact is that in our environment there is no incorrigible source of information so, when told that something is functionally the same, we will intuitively discount that claim given the possibility that our source of information is incorrect.

In the case of the wedding ring, we may consciously understand that we are considering a fictional scenario and be able to appreciate on that level that there is no reason to distinguish between the rings, given that they do not actually carry their history around with them like an ephemeral tail. However, the intuitive evaluation of the situation need not be completely overridden by the conscious evaluation. And the intuitive evaluation is made on the basis of simpler heuristics (I am not running a dual process account of cognition here, just distinguishing between different kinds of heuristics). The heuristics in this case may be something like – do not readily accept exchanges of valuable items, even if they appear the same, as they might not be.  This is really reminiscent of loss aversion, as that seems to me to be a case where much the same mechanism as may be working here has already been identified by Johnson-Laird and Gigerenzer. Significantly, prior to their work, it used to be thought that people’s loss aversion was irrational. The same basic strategy is at work here – when it looks like people are being silly, think about the other blade of the scissors.

I am very curious to see whether Bruce says anything concerning this issue in his book – it may well be that he’s heading toward a somewhat similar conclusion – and, if not, I hope he might comment on this blog as he sometimes does. As for me, I had better quit writing about a book I have not yet read before I make myself look silly (even if there is a good evolutionary reason for me doing it!)

Cultural success of ineffective treatments

Apart from the work on emulation and imitation mentioned in the previous post, at least two other things from St. Andrews struck me as highly relevant to own research. The first of these was a poster by Tanaka, Kendal and Laland on how non-effective medical treatments might be perpetuated. Since I’ve returned, I’ve had the opportunity to read the actual paper – thanks to Tom Rees who mentions it on his blog I didn’t even have to chase it up. The basic idea is that, under a set of relatively plausible assumption about how treatments come to be adopted by people, it seems that ineffective treatments come to be passed on thanks to their ineffectiveness. The reason is that, being ineffective, they may continue to be used by someone for a longer period of time, making it likelier that someone else will come to notice and adopt the same treatment. A lovely result in that while it is originally counter-intuitive it becomes obvious once understood:

Complementary medicines, traditional remedies and home cures for medical ailments are used extensively world-wide, representing more than US$60 billion sales in the global market. With serious doubts about the efficacy and safety of many treatments, the industry remains steeped in controversy. Little is known about factors affecting the prevalence of efficacious and non-efficacious self-medicative treatments. Here we develop mathematical models which reveal that the most efficacious treatments are not necessarily those most likely to spread. Indeed, purely superstitious remedies, or even maladaptive practices, spread more readily than efficacious treatments under specified circumstances. Low-efficacy practices sometimes spread because their very ineffectiveness results in longer, more salient demonstration and a larger number of converts, which more than compensates for greater rates of abandonment. These models also illuminate a broader range of phenomena, including the spread of innovations, medical treatment of animals, foraging behaviour, and self-medication in non-human primates.

Clearly, the main significance of the paper really is in identifying the kinds of conditions that make the adoption of ineffective treatments more likely. These are recurrent illnesses, that often tend to disappear of their own accord and that are not normally deadly. In other words, just the kinds of colds and other minor ailments that seem to attract the greatest number of quack medicines. While this is an interesting result, there are some problems with it. The first is whether the apparent connection between quack medicine and these ailments is due to the kind of effect Laland and others are considering or, whether, it is simply due to such ailments being very common and, therefore, a large potential market. The second issue is that susceptibility to magical thinking seems to be correlated with particularly dangerous situations and minor ailments do not seem to fit this category as well as, for example, cancer – another category of illness that seems to have a lot of quack treatments connected to it, of course.

Causal opaqueness, imitation and emulation

I am very glad that I went to the St Andrews meeting. In the days since I’ve returned I’ve found myself thinking back to a number of the things discussed there and realising their significance for my own work. As an example of completely non-magical synchronicity, Tom Rees has recently blogged on a couple of papers that cover some of the same ground from a somewhat different angle. The basic issue is that of the mechanisms of the cultural transmission of superstitions.

Among the people I met at EHBE was Claudio Tennie, who is currently finishing his PhD with Michael Tomasello in Leipzig. He is doing comparative research with non-human primates and argued for the Tomasello view that culture is uniquely human – a position which is not actually all that popular among comparative psychology people due to the discovery of numerous examples of what appear to be cultural differences among several non-human animal species. The view is based upon a distinction between imitation and emulation where imitation involves a precise copying of the behaviour of a conspecific while emulation only involves the copying of whatever the final product is. According to Tomasello non-human primates only emulate, with imitation being solely the province of humans. Thus, the seemingly counterintuitive result that human children will ‘parrot’ the way that an adult opens a box, including actions that are unnecessary, while a chimp will generally learn to open the box in the most efficient way.

Both emulation and imitation have their strengths and weaknesses. The important point about imitation is that it makes it possible for children to learn how to interact with objects that are causally opaque – ones that emulation would not be capable of helping us with. So, humans are not only capable of opening a simple box but, after someone has shown them how, they are capable of interacting with a computer running Windows. There is a downside to this, however, that may be obvious from the above example of imitation. Imitation does not necessarily differentiate between relevant and irrelevant actions so that non-effective actions may be imitated along with the significant ones so long as they are part of the behaviour that is being imitated.

This is the issue that is pursued by one of the articles mentioned by Tom Rees. The research, conducted by Lyons, Young and Keil examines the degree to which children imitate irrelevant behaviour. In particular, it tries to distinguish between this thesis and the previously significant thesis that overimitation is due to children’s desire to please the adults they are imitating.

Young children are surprisingly judicious imitators, but there are also times when their reproduction of others’ actions appears strikingly illogical. For example, children who observe an adult inefficiently operating a novel object frequently engage in what we term overimitation, persistently reproducing the adult’s unnecessary actions. Although children readily overimitate irrelevant actions that even chimpanzees ignore, this curious effect has previously attracted little interest; it has been assumed that children overimitate not for theoretically significant reasons, but rather as a purely social exercise. In this paper, however, we challenge this view, presenting evidence that overimitation reflects a more fundamental cognitive process. We show that children who observe an adult intentionally manipulating a novel object have a strong tendency to encode all of the adult’s actions as causally meaningful, implicitly revising their causal understanding of the object accordingly. This automatic causal encoding process allows children to rapidly calibrate their causal beliefs about even the most opaque physical systems, but it also carries a cost. When some of the adult’s purposeful actions are unnecessary—even transparently so—children are highly prone to mis-encoding them as causally significant. The resulting distortions in children’s causal beliefs are the true cause of overimitation, a fact that makes the effect remarkably resistant to extinction. Despite countervailing task demands, time pressure, and even direct warnings, children are frequently unable to avoid reproducing the adult’s irrelevant actions because they have already incorporated them into their representation of the target object’s causal structure.

The methodology seems particularly careful to me and I find the results very convincing. The overimitation appears to be very robust even in situations where the social pressure appears to be unequivocally against imitating non-effectual actions. The relevance for superstitions is fairly obvious as this seems to provide a possible mechanism by which superstitious practices are perpetuated. Even so, a number of questions have to be asked. The first is to what degree what it true of children is also the case with adults? Clearly, adults are more capable of distinguishing effective and non-effective actions. The dimension of causal opaqueness of whatever is being interacted with is going to be key here, it seems. The experiments were actually carried out with set-ups that were unfamiliar but not causally opaque to children of the age that was tested. This is known as controls were able to open the boxes without adult instruction and with fewer non-effective actions. Not surprisingly, superstitions appear to involve situations that are causally opaque – a notion that appears to be potentially connected to loss of control that is also known to be correlated with superstitious responses.

There is a further issue raised by the article, however. The researchers found that the overimitation effect was affected by the non-effective actions being performed on objects that were not physically connected to the box that was to be opened. So, it seems that some general ideas from folk psychology place a limit upon what is seen as relevant. The question for me is how this interacts with the postulation of supernatural causes that is part and parcel of superstitions proper. The relevant experiment seems to be relatively easy to do. One could simply check if priming with stories of the magical affects this as well as checking if being presented with such a situation changes responses to tests of supernatural beliefs such as the Tobacyk scale.

Opposite the collection point

This semester I am teaching Philosophy of Science to students who are doing psychology in English at Warsaw University. This has meant that I have been lecturing within the building in which the Psychology Department is located. Indeed, as I write this I am seated in the office I use within this building.  Significantly,  the building has a history that makes me think about the work on essentialist thinking that Bruce Hood has been doing. During World War II it housed the headquarters of the Gestapo for the Warsaw Ghetto. Umschlagplatz, from which hundreds of thousands of Jews were taken to Treblinka, is just across the street. There is no counting the horrors that the walls of this building must have witnessed. Very often while inside the building I imagine people being dragged down the very same corridors in which I now pass laughing students.  Surely, if any building could be thought to be cursed by its history or, perhaps, made sacred by the suffering  people underwent within it, this would be one. Of course, it is impossible to think about this the whole time but, when I forget and concentrate on what I am teaching, I find that remembering again is painful, startling and brings a feeling of shame that even for a moment I was not conscious of what had happened here. My rational awareness that the place can not be considered to hold the experiences of the past in anything but a metaphorical way and that no buildings are either cursed or sacred, doesn’t even touch the profound discomfort I feel while here. Indeed, were it not for my understanding of my feelings I might question my views about the substantiality of evil. On his blog Bruce wrote once about a house in whose cellar a body of a Roman soldier was said to have been found. Many people found the idea of living in that house unpleasant but I thought it a bonus – an interesting story one could tell about where one lived. The scale of what had happened here, however, renders any rational response inadequate. In this building, I just feel a quiet horror.

The St Andrews poster

I’m back from Scotland. The conference was quite useful in a number of ways, including the discussions concerning my own work that I had with several people, ideas and references from which I will have to pursue. It was interesting the differences in the mood of such empirical meetings as opposed to philosophical ones. I guess that I was already somewhat used to them but this was the first one where I was virtually the only philosopher around (I mostly have attended interdisciplinary meetings where philosophers have represented a significant percentage of the overall group). The poster that I showed in St Andrews is below – a bit illegibile due to the small size but hopefully enough to give an idea.

Gothenburg

Stuck at Gothenburg airport waiting for my connecting flight to Glasgow.  The place is tiny, a shed in the middle of some boulder-strewn fields, the one and only cafe not to open till some time that even the woman at the information window can not predict. Given that the name of the airport is actually Gothenburg City airport, the place sounds like the boondocks. That is not what one finds out on the web, though: Sweden’s main western port, two universities, etc. You wouldn’t guess it when you get off the plane and walk across the tarmac to a building that looks smaller than most supermarkets.

Off to St. Andrews, with some trepidation

This Sunday I’m off to the European Human Behaviour and Evolution Conference in St. Andrews. It’ll be the first time that I go to a conference on human behaviour and I am sure that I will have a lot to learn. In true science conference fashion, I will not be giving a talk but putting up a poster (the first time I’ve done that). The poster is on the relationship between Boyer’s account of religion and that put forward by D.S. Wilson – a topic I have blogged about on numerous occassions. Being forced to put the ideas into a poster format has been a particularly valuable experience for me. As with any exercise which forces you to make ideas concrete, the result is that the ideas become clearer.  There is also the fact that this is a brand new experience for me, never having to present my ideas in this format. At the same time, I have become very much aware of the fact that I rely upon the empirical work done by Boyer and Wilson, merely reinterpreting what they have done. Given a philosophical, non-empirical background I do not know how uncomfortable I should be about that, and that makes me uncomfortable. I guess the meeting will be a learning experience. Hopefully, a positive one. It definitely takes me out of my comfort zone – it would have been much easier to simply ply philosophers with my ideas. Much easier but a lot less constructive.