Memory and Belief in the Transmission of Counterintuitive Content

Willard, Aiyana K.; Henrich, Joseph; Norenzayan, Ara

doi:10.1007/s12110-016-9259-6

Cited by 64 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 49 publications

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“…If memory were truly important to its function, its images should be under selection for their clarity, as signals with a highly visual nature are recalled easier than those with lower (Slone et al 2007). A 'minimally counter-intuitive' (MCI) content -subjects that are not entirely prosaic but neither ludicrously illogicalwould further improve the memorisation of its signal (Gonce et al 2006. Willard et al 2016 as MCI content does for religious belief (Atran and Norenzayan 2004).…”

Section: Palaeolithic Cave Art; Group Signal Individual Signalmentioning

confidence: 99%

Is Palaeolithic cave art consistent with costly signalling theory? Lascaux as a test case

Gittins

Pettitt

2017

World Archaeology

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Several proponents of Costly Signalling Theory have noted its potential for understanding Prehistoric art. We use the Late Upper Palaeolithic art of Lascaux Cave (Dordogne, France) as a test case as to whether we may be able to identify an assertive, individual style in Palaeolithic art. The cave's abundant images represent one of the most stunning examples of European Upper Palaeolithic cave art, and in terms of the material provisioning of the cave, demonstrable artistic skill, and difficulties accessing decorated areas, it represented a huge cost to its hunter-gatherer creators. But does it represent group cost, or can any CST element be identified? We approach this question using several characteristics we regard to be central to costly signalling, and explore the various ways by which this occurred within the cave. We conclude that it is best viewed as a group signal, and that no CST component can be identified.

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Section: Palaeolithic Cave Art; Group Signal Individual Signalmentioning

confidence: 99%

Is Palaeolithic cave art consistent with costly signalling theory? Lascaux as a test case

Gittins

Pettitt

2017

World Archaeology

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“…Finally, dual inheritance models highlight the cultural learning processes (Kline, 2015;Rendell et al, 2011) underpinning religious beliefs (Evans, 2001;Lane et al, 2012;Richert et al, 2017;Willard et al, 2016) and disbelief, and largely predict that context-biased social learning -especially CREDs (Henrich, 2009)would be strongly associated with degrees of religious belief (Gervais & Najle, 2015). Our dual inheritance approach predicts that CREDs would be most important, followed by other factors such as cognitive reflection, mentalizing, and perhaps existential security.…”

Section: Divergent Predictionsmentioning

confidence: 73%

The Origins of Religious Disbelief: A Dual Inheritance Approach

Gervais¹,

Najle²,

Caluori³

2019

Preprint

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Widespread religious disbelief represents a key testing ground for theories of religion. We evaluated the predictions of three prominent theoretical approaches in a nationally representative (USA, N= 1417) dataset with preregistered analyses, and found considerable support for a dual inheritance (gene-culture coevolution) perspective. We found that witnessing fewer credible cultural cues of religious commitment is the most potent predictor of religious disbelief, β=0.28, followed distantly by reflective cognitive style, β= 0.13, and less advanced mentalizing, β= 0.05. Low cultural exposure to faith predicted about 90% higher odds of atheism than did peak cognitive reflection. Further, cognitive reflection predicted reduced religious belief only among individuals who witness relatively fewer credible contextual cues of faith in others. This work empirically unites four distinct literatures addressing the origins of religious disbelief, highlights the utility of considering both evolved intuitions and cultural evolutionary processes in religious transmission, emphasizes the dual roles of content- and context-biased social learning, and sheds light on the shared psychological mechanisms that underpin both religious belief and disbelief.

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“…On the other hand, Willard, Henrich, and Norenzayan (2016) investigated the relative strength between a specific content bias thought to be relevant for religious beliefs and credibility-enhancing displays (a context bias) and found the context bias to be substantially more important in shaping the participants' level of belief in the experimental material.…”

Section: Practical Implications: Correcting Inaccurate Folkeconomic Bmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sense or non-sense? a critical discussion of a recent evolutionary–cognitive approach to “folk-economic beliefs”

Bendixen

2019

EMB

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Laypeople hold beliefs about economics and policy issues—so-called folk-economic beliefs (FEBs)—that are often wrong or misleading according to professional economists. Here, I critically discuss a recent evolutionary–cognitive approach to understanding folk-economic beliefs. According to this approach (Boyer & Petersen 2018a), some economic beliefs are more prevalent than others, because such beliefs (i.e., folk-economic beliefs) resonate with evolved features of the human mind. I refer to this as the “FEB hypothesis”. A central challenge to the FEB hypothesis, with its heavy reliance on universal cognitive features, is to explain individual and cultural differences in economic beliefs and behavior. This challenge is the starting point for the discussion. Overall, the conclusion of this paper is that the FEB hypothesis relies on unnecessarily strong and controversial theoretical assumptions (e.g., “massive modularity” and the “Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness”), and that it overlooks important findings from adjacent fields, but that the FEB hypothesis, following some modifications inspired by Dual Inheritance Theory, can be integrated with robust findings from the rest of the evolutionary, cognitive, and anthropological sciences, as well as standard political psychology. Based on this discussion, the paper ends with brief reflections on how to correct inaccurate folk-economic beliefs.

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Memory and Belief in the Transmission of Counterintuitive Content

Cited by 64 publications

References 49 publications

Is Palaeolithic cave art consistent with costly signalling theory? Lascaux as a test case

Is Palaeolithic cave art consistent with costly signalling theory? Lascaux as a test case

The Origins of Religious Disbelief: A Dual Inheritance Approach

Sense or non-sense? a critical discussion of a recent evolutionary–cognitive approach to “folk-economic beliefs”

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