Are farmers and fishermen are more holistic than herders ?

In previous work, Richard Nisbett and his collaborators suggested convincingly that Eastern and Western population have different cognitive styles (holistic vs. analytic). In a new study published in PNAS, he and his collaborators show how "ecocultural factors" (living in a farming, fishing, or herding community) influence cognitive processes.

It has been proposed that social interdependence fosters holistic cognition, that is, a tendency to attend to the broad perceptual and cognitive field, rather than to a focal object and its properties, and a tendency to reason in terms of relationships and similarities, rather than rules and categories. This hypothesis has been supported mostly by demonstrations showing that East Asians, who are relatively interdependent, reason and perceive in a more holistic fashion than do Westerners. We examined holistic cognitive tendencies in attention, categorization, and reasoning in three types of communities that belong to the same national, geographic, ethnic, and linguistic regions and yet vary in their degree of social interdependence: farming, fishing, and herding communities in Turkey's eastern Black Sea region. As predicted, members of farming and fishing communities, which emphasize harmonious social interdependence, exhibited greater holistic tendencies than members of herding communities, which emphasize individual decision making and foster social independence. Our findings have implications for how ecocultural factors may have lasting consequences on important aspects of cognition.

Evolutionary Biology and Cultural Evolution

(an update on the last post)

Mesoudi, Whiten & Laland, in their 2006 paper, furthers the analogy--already present in Boyd and Richerson--between evolutionary biology and cultural evolution:


Mesoudi, A., Whiten, A., & Laland, K. N. (2006). Towards a Unified Science of Cultural Evolution. Behav Brain Sci, 29(4), 329-347; discussion 347-383.

Dual Inheritance Theory (over)simplified

According to Dual Inheritance Theory, or Gene-Culture Coevolution, cultural evolution and cultural learning mechanisms co-evolved; our innate psychology is biased toward social learning and cultural evolution is modulated by psychological mechanisms. Culture is a population process where innovations are gradually accumulated. Cognition is geared toward imitation thanks to many biases. First, we have content biases, i.e. biases that "cause us to more readily acquire certain beliefs, ideas or behaviors because some aspect of their content makes them more appealing" (Henrich & McElreath, 2007); some food preferences (e.g., cookies) for instance may be acquired partly because we have an innate preferences for sugar. Second, we have context biases, i.e., a sensibility to exploit cues not from "things being learned" but from "individuals who are being learned from" (Ibid.,), or "models" We are sensible to successful and prestigious models and to what other people do (conformist bias). Sometimes we change our beliefs (informational conformity), and sometimes we change our behavior in order to go along with a group (normative conformity). Others like Castro & Toro (2004) suggest that the capacity to approve or disapprove their offspring's learned behavior is as important as imitation.

References

• Boyd, R., & Richerson, P. J. (1985). Culture and the Evolutionary Process. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Boyd, R., & Richerson, P. J. (2005). The Origin and Evolution of Cultures Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Castro, L., & Toro, M. A. (2004). The evolution of culture: From primate social learning to human culture. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 101(27), 10235-10240.
  
• Henrich, J. and R. McElreath (2007) Dual Inheritance Theory: The Evolution of Human Cultural Capacities and Cultural Evolution. Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology, R. Dunbar and L. Barrett, eds., Ch. 38. Oxford: Oxford Univ Press.

The logic of investment and the logic of obligation in Maasai culture

In the last post, I reported a study that shows how a single sentence can promote fairness in the Dictaror game. Now another study shows how a single sentence reduces trust and fairness in the Trust Game. In this game, DM1s (Decision-Makers one) decide how much, if any, of a certain amount of money they would like to transfer to DM2s. The transferred money is tripled, and DM2s decide how much, if any, they give to DM1s. People tend to transfer and reciprocate a considerable amount of money, although orthodox game theory predicts that they would not.

Lee Cronk had Kenyan Maa-speaking individuals play the trust game. Half of them where not framed, while the other ones were informed that 'This is an osotua game." Osotua (literally, "umbilical cord") , in Maasai, refers to certain gift-giving relationships:

Osotua relationships are started in many ways, but they usually begin with a request for a gift or favor. Such requests arise from genuine need and are limited to the amount actually needed. Gifts given in response to such requests are given freely (pesho) and from the heart (ltau) but, like the requests, are limited to what is actually needed. Because the economy is based on livestock, many osotua gifts take that form, but virtually any good or service may serve as an osotua gift. Once osotua is established, it is pervasive in the sense that one cannot get away from it. Osotua is also eternal. Once established, it cannot be destroyed, even if individuals who established the relationship die.

So what happened when the trust game was presented as Osotua? Players transferred less money than in the regular, non-framed situation. Also, there is a correlation between the amount that DM1s were given and how much they expected to receive in the unframed, but not in the framed condition. The framing, according to Cronk,

shifts game play away from the logic of investment and towards the mutual obligation of isotuatin to respond to one another's genuine needs, but only with what is genuinely needed.

Hence a simple cue can trigger a complete shift in perspective and alter player's behavior.

• Cronk, L. (2007) The influence of cultural framing on play in the trust game: a Maasai example, Evolution and Human Behavior, 28, 5, pp. 352-358.