A cognitive account of manipulative sympathetic magic

Hong, Ze

doi:10.1080/2153599x.2021.2006294

Cited by 17 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 57 publications

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“…It should be reiterated that although the reporting bias is likely to be a general feature of information transmission in human societies, it is only one of the many factors that contributes to the persistence of ineffective technologies, such as fetal sex prognostication. For one thing, many sex prognostication methods may be intuitively plausible either due to our evolved psychology (Hong, 2022a; Miton, Claidière, and Mercier, 2015) or culturally transmitted background beliefs (Hong, 2022b). For example, in ancient China, the yin‐yang and the Five Phases principles were deeply ingrained into its culture (Zhou, 2020), so theories about fetal sex prognostication grounded in these established belief systems would appear more plausible.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The psychology and social dynamics of fetal sex prognostication in China: Evidence from historical data

Hong

Zinin

2023

American Anthropologist

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Fetal sex prognostication has been a common practice in many human societies, yet most of the prognosticative methods do not perform better than chance. Why do these ineffective prognostication practices recur across societies and persist for long periods of time? In this article, we use historical texts of four different genres in traditional China (oracle bone inscriptions, dynastic history, encyclopedia, and local gazetteers) to examine the social and cognitive factors that lead to the overestimation of the predictive accuracy of sex prognostication and place fetal sex prognostication into a more general framework to understand the persistence of ineffective cultural practices. In particular, we present a detailed historical analysis showing that individuals often entertain considerable uncertainty regarding the accuracy of sex prognostication and quantitative data demonstrating a significant bias toward selectively reporting successes in (fictionalized) historical texts. We conclude by discussing how such reporting bias combined with humans’ imperfect information processing may help explain the persistence of ineffective technologies, such as divination, and magic in general.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The psychology and social dynamics of fetal sex prognostication in China: Evidence from historical data

Hong

Zinin

2023

American Anthropologist

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“…Of course, as mentioned previously, there is no guarantee that attempts of theory construction always produce the right theory or even a good theory. At the population level, although payoff‐biased transmission based on genetically evolved preferences would disfavor wrong theories, humans may construct and transmit theories for other reasons, such as content bias (Henrich and McElreath, 2003): traditional theories of illness (Murdock, 1980) and principles of magic (Hong, 2022a) and divination (Hong and Henrich, 2021) may spread in human societies partly because of their intuitive plausibility. Additionally, constructing the right theory in certain domains may be objectively difficult and require cumulative progress; thus, if the initial construction of theories is more likely to be “wrong,” then it might present a significant barrier for eventually arriving at the right theory.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evolving payoff currencies through the construction of causal theories

Hong,

Henrich

2023

American Anthropologist

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Payoff‐biased cultural learning has been extensively discussed in the literature on cultural evolution, but where do payoff currencies come from in the first place? Are they products of genetic or cultural evolution? Here we present a simulation model to explore the possibility of novel payoff currencies emerging through a process of theory construction, where agents come up with “channels” via which different cultural traits contribute to some ultimate payoff and use such “channels” as intermediate payoff currencies to make trait‐updating decisions. We show that theory‐building as a strategy is mostly favored when the noise associated with the ultimate‐level payoff is high, selective pressures are strong, and the probability of arriving at the right theory is high. This approach provides insights into both the emergence of payoff currencies and the role of cognition for causal model building. We close by discussing the implications of our model for the broader question of causal learning in social contexts.

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“…That is, from the perspective of the observer, how magical actions achieve some worldly outcome has no knowable physical-causal pathway. This account of magic suffers from a major issue: Ample historical and ethnographic evidence shows that many magic practices are genuine instrumental efforts and the practitioners often believe that they possess the causal knowledge regarding how the putative outcomes are produced by their actions (Edmonds, 2019;Hong, 2022a). My study on Chinese rainmaking, for example, shows that ancient scholars have explicitly theorized the mechanisms of how specific "ritual" actions causes rain, and many rainmaking methods were the direct results of cosmological theories in a way not very different from modern engineers designing practical solutions to pressing problem based on their understanding of the causal nature of the problem (Hong et al, forthcoming).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tradition and invention: The bifocal stance theory of cultural evolution

Jagiello¹,

Heyes²,

Whitehouse³

2022

Behav Brain Sci

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Cultural evolution depends on both innovation (the creation of new cultural variants by accident or design) and high-fidelity transmission (which preserves our accumulated knowledge and allows the storage of normative conventions). What is required is an overarching theory encompassing both dimensions, specifying the psychological motivations and mechanisms involved. The Bifocal Stance Theory (BST) of cultural evolution proposes that the co-existence of innovative change and stable tradition results from our ability to adopt different motivational stances flexibly during social learning and transmission. We argue that the ways in which instrumental and ritual stances are adopted in cultural transmission, influence the nature and degree of copying fidelity and thus also patterns of cultural spread and stability at a population level over time. BST creates a unifying framework for interpreting the findings of otherwise seemingly disparate areas of inquiry, including social learning, cumulative culture, overimitation and ritual performance. We discuss the implications of BST for competing by-product accounts which assume that faithful copying is merely a side-effect of instrumental learning and action parsing. We also set out a novel ‘cultural action framework’ bringing to light aspects of social learning that have been relatively neglected by behavioural ecologists and evolutionary psychologists and establishing a roadmap for future research on this topic. The BST framework sheds new light on the cognitive underpinnings of cumulative cultural change, selection, and spread within an encompassing evolutionary framework.

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A cognitive account of manipulative sympathetic magic

Cited by 17 publications

References 57 publications

The psychology and social dynamics of fetal sex prognostication in China: Evidence from historical data

The psychology and social dynamics of fetal sex prognostication in China: Evidence from historical data

Evolving payoff currencies through the construction of causal theories

Tradition and invention: The bifocal stance theory of cultural evolution

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