The Cultural Evolution of Medical Technologies

Abstract

When people get ill, they naturally want to restore health through medical interventions. Here I model a situation in which individuals can psychologically entertain multiple potential treatments at once: when illness occurs, individuals would attempt one treatment first, and if it fails to produce an observable effect within a particular time period, a second treatment is attempted, and the eventual recovery is attributed to the treatment that is temporally closer. This creates population dynamics wherein the therapeutic power of the superior/effective medical treatments is misattributed to inferior/ineffective treatments. Through both analytic formulation and agent-based simulation, I show that the equilibrium frequencies of different treatment variants depend on their natural variability in the effect timing, the level of individual patience, and the number of cultural models sampled by the naive individual. Both ineffective and effective medical treatments may stably coexist in the population under a range of parameter settings.

Accordance and conflict between religious and scientific precautions against COVID-19 in 27 societies

“…Nevertheless, the tendency to practice religious precautions may correlate with the tendency to embrace scientific precautions such as those recommended by public health authorities. If threat-mitigating behaviors are stimulated by threat-avoidance motivations, individuals may pursue multiple avenues of precaution as a form of bet-hedging or threat-mitigation maximization (Hong, 2023), even when the epistemic rationales for those various precautionary domains conflict. The correlation between engaging in religious precautions and practicing public health precautions could thus be either negative or positive.…”

Prosocial religions as folk-technologies of mutual policing

“…First, policers exploit uncertainties about the causes of misfortunes. Across cultures, people are more likely to accept supernatural beliefs when trying to explain events that are fitnessconsequential (e.g., deadly illness) yet difficult to explain by natural causation (Barrett & Lanman, 2008;Hong, 2023;Singh, 2021). This includes explaining why someone suddenly became ill or why a fatal accident happened to this particular person at this particular time (Boyer, 2019;Evans-Pritchard, 1937;Legare et al, 2012; see also Jackson et al, 2023).…”

“…When such misfortunes happen, people consider many cognitively plausible explanations, several of which do not involve supernatural punishment (Singh et al, 2021). If Maria is seriously ill, the reason may be that she has been attacked by sorcery (Singh, 2021), or that she has violated a non-moral taboo (Hong, 2023), or that she has failed to perform the appropriate sacrifices to some capricious ancestor spirit (see Boyer, 2022). Another possible explanation, however, is that Maria's illness is a supernatural retribution for her previous failures to cooperate-an explanation which, as by-product theories put forward, accords with immanent justice intuitions (see sect.…”