After the APRU talk
Gave the talk at Goldsmiths (I’ve uploaded the PowerPoint presentation). The people at the research unit, and the audience in general, were a great bunch. Not surprisingly, most of the audience was made up of psychologists. It was very interesting for me to see the differences in how they received the talk and the kinds of questions they focussed upon. Philosophers would have probably focussed upon the question of the relationship between rationality and superstition but the psychologists were more interested in the nitty gritty of how cognitive illusions may be related to individual kinds of superstitions. I was forced to somewhat sheepishly own up to the fact that, thus far, I have not thought about how to identify such links nor how to empirically examine them (never mind actually doing any empirical work). I guess this will the kind of thing that I will have to think about when I get to Vienna, though I hope that I might get some advice in this area from the APRU people. Another difference between philosophers and the psychologists (or this group of psychologists, at least) that I noticed is that philosophers tend to be far more negative in their comments – trying to think of all possible problems and to push them as hard as possible – whereas the psychologists are a lot more collaborative, their questions mostly aiming at suggesting ways of developing what one is doing. Obviously both kinds of questions have their place but it is certainly very pleasant not to have an audience which does its best to see if it can misconstrue your position.
One particular question that an number of them returned to was the role of developmental processes in the acquisition of superstitious beliefs. I forgot to mention the work done in this area by Bruce Hood in Bristol but I suspect that many of them would be familiar with it. While I’m more than happy to allow that the developmental aspect is important, I think that it shouldn’t be seen as giving the whole answer to why we are superstitious. I made the point that the fact that we learn most superstitions while children does not explain why we are succeptible to the particular superstitions that we are succeptible to. After all, it is not the case that as children we will accept anything and everything we are told by adults.
In the end, we kept on talking at the pub and then the restaurant for so long that I only just made it for my train to Cambridge. If only all talks were as pleasant as this one was.
Dear Konrad,
I’m glad to hear you enjoyed your time at Goldsmiths. There were a number of points which I would have like to have raised, but did not find the opportunity to do so. Perhaps another time!
We were introduced briefly, before your lecture – I was videotaping the presentation, which is one of the reasons for my comment here. I am currently editing the tapes and should hopefully be finished by the end of today. If you’d like a copy, I’d be more than happy to send one to you. Equally, I was wondering if you’d mind me making you lecture slides available through the APRU website, to compliment the video. I noticed you uploaded the PowerPoint presentation here, but cannot seem to access them. Please do feel free to email me, rather than commenting here, if you wish.
Anyway, thanks for the very interesting talk. I’ll be researching some aspects of it, in time to come!
I hope to hear from you soon.
Cheers,
Mark Williams.
The link to the file has been fixed. I hope.
Dear Konrad,
The developmental theory I am proposing does not negate the role of culture in determining which superstitions emerge but rather points to the underlying basis for why superstitions in general are prevalent. Also, I think that illusions demonstrate some of the bounded rationality of the human mind but there has to be a more explanatory model. Best Bruce
Bruce, I think that you are right that simply saying that human rationality is bounded is not much of an explanatory model. Bounded rationality is valuable in helping us get away from some of the assumptions that have been standardly made in past and, instead, helping us to apply what we have learned about evolutionary processes (which in general lead to capabilities which are limited in scope and power) to the nature of human reason. In other words, it is more about viewpoints than models. Any actual model of cognition that is bounded (such as heuristics in the Kahneman/Tversky or Gigerenzer sense) will have to take development into account to be fully satisfactory.
As for the role of culture, I suspect that we might have got our wires crossed somewhat. I certainly did not think that developmental approaches ignore cultural factors. In fact, when I raised the point that children are not susceptible to any and all possible superstitions, I had in my mind cognitive rather than cultural factors. In particular, I was thinking about the research on young monkeys which showed that they only learned the fear response when shown adult monkeys reacting with fear to certain stimuli such as snakes and not to innocuous objects. Of course, the point is only relevant to fairly simplistic developmental accounts such as “children are superstitious because their parents teach them to be superstitious” that do not take the cognitive side into consideration. In essence this adds up to little more that saying that human minds, even when young, are not completely pliable. But, I am sure that Bruce would agree with that. The relevance of my comments is that certain well-known critics of superstition such as Richard Dawkins have put forward ‘developmental stories’ of the type I’ve outlined. Given what Dawkins often says it would seem likely that there should be no inter-cultural similarities between superstitious beliefs.
In the end, I think that developmental aspects will have to be an integral element of any account of superstition. Indeed, given my interest in evo-devo work in biology and dynamical approaches to functions and representation (both traditionally well represented at the Konrad Lorenz Institute) it would be quite peculiar if I thought otherwise.