Having Late-Nite Mind Munchies... ? Try this

[Ed Jewett]

The Culture and Cognition blog covers the territory where culture and psychology meet, and they've just released their 'reader' which has a list of essential books and papers to cover the interface between anthropology and the cognitive sciences.

Many of the articles are available in full online and the list is a fantastic guide to the area.

It includes both popular and academic texts but the list works best as a reference, so bookmark it as I'm sure you'll be returning to it time and again if you're like me and interested in the cross over between culture and psychology.

Link to Cognition and Culture Reader:
http://cognitionandculture.net/index.php...&Itemid=78
Link to to Cognition and Culture home page:
http://cognitionandculture.net/index.php...e&Itemid=1

[URL="http://cognitionandculture.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=frontpage&Itemid=1"]Domains

[/URL]

• Arts and artifacts
  
• Cooperation (morality, norms, sympathy)
  
• Cultural transmission
  
• Emotions (expression, recognition, variation)
  
• Family (kinship, sex, gender relationships)
  
• Language
  
• Living beings (taxonomy, teleology, physiology)
  
• Mathematics and Physics (number, space, object, causality)
  
• Minds (agency detection, theory of mind)
  
• Religion, ritual and magic
  
• Social life (social norms, reputation managment, coalition formation)
  

more to follow...

[Ed Jewett]

Sample:

Does power increase hypocrisy?

News - Publications
09 January 2010
An article entitled "Power Increases Hypocrisy: Moralizing in Reasoning, Immorality in Behavior" by Joris Lammers, Diederik A. Stapel, and Adam D. Galinsky coming out in Psychological Science and available here illustrates how insights into 'power', a notion central in the standard social sciences, can be gained through a cognitive and experimental approach. Abstract under the fold.
Read more...

###



Decision Making for a Social World


The International Cognition and Culture Institute (Institut Jean Nicod and LSE) and the Philosophy, Politics and Economics Program at the University of Pennsylvania organize a virtual seminar Decision Making for a Social World.



The aim of this seminar is to bring together threads of research in decision making and related areas of psychology that show how deeply our decisions are influenced by our social context. Some of this research even takes the stronger stance that some of the mechanisms that are typically thought of as being within the purview of individual cognition actually have a social function.


It will begin in February 2011. Every two weeks a new paper will be posted and a moderated discussion will take place online among invited discussants and the public one the one hand, and the author on the other hand.



Here are some of the themes that will be explored:


Group decision making. This is the primary case of direct influence of the social context. Groups can allow people to solve more complex problems but they can also amplify their biases. Through which mechanisms is their influence exerted?
Accountability. The social context often exerts an influence on our decisions because we have-or at least we think we will have-to publicly justify our decisions.


Trust and advice taking. Many of our decisions have been influenced by the advice given by other people. Are we influenced by advice too much or too little? How do we calibrate the weight put on the advice as a function of who is offering it?

Pragmatics. Most decision making tasks use verbal material, yet they frequently ignore that such material will often lead to pragmatic implications that can influence participants' answers.


Evolution. Many scholars in the field of human evolution contend that social factors were the primary pressure in our evolution, yet the field of decision making has failed to draw all the implications from this suggestion.


These are only examples as many areas in decision making show that the social context exerts a huge impact on our decisions, from the study of norms to that of self-control.


We look forward to the opening of the conference and the discussions that will ensue!


Hugo Mercier

Tip of the cap to MindHacks

http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2010/03/an_introduction_to_c.html[/FONT] [/FONT]