Japan

Magic is of longstanding interest to researchers studying the cultural evolution of religion, philosophy, and even science. Recent research supports that magical thinking tendencies affect individuals&#39; susceptibility to modern day misinformation, which suggests insights on the cultural evolution of magic may have policy applications today. Using newly collected survey and comparative datasets, I test three leading hypotheses for the cultural evolution of magic, 1) unilineal replacement of magic first by religion and then by science, 2) magic functioning to provide market goods that are distinct from religion or science, and 3) magic arising from long-evolved cognitive tendencies that constrain human psychology. I find empirical support for all three hypotheses but in differing contexts. Thus, rather than evolving through any single process, magical beliefs and practices appear to be induced through multiple processes of cultural evolution. Greater awareness of the contexts in which magical thinking operates, and when it may be adaptively useful, may allow people to better guard against misfiring of magical thinking that can result in the spread of scientific and journalistic misinformation.

Cultural Evolution Society 2021

Multiple socio-cognitive processes lead to the cultural evolution of magic

The purpose of the International Conference on Computer-Human Interaction Research and Applications (CHIRA) is to bring together professionals, academics and students who are interested in the advancement of research and practical applications of interaction design & human-computer interaction. Five parallel tracks will be held, covering different aspects of Computer-Human Interaction, including Interaction Design, Human Factors, Entertainment, Cognition, Perception, User-Friendly Software and Systems, Pervasive Technologies and Interactive Devices.


CHIRA 2019

The purpose of the International Conference on Computer-Human Interaction Research and Applications (CHIRA) is to bring together professionals, academics and students who are interested in the advancement of research and practical applications of interaction design & human-computer interaction. 

Magic is of longstanding interest to researchers studying the cultural evolution of religion, philosophy, and even science. Recent research supports that magical thinking tendencies affect individuals' susceptibility to modern day misinformation, which suggests insights on the cultural evolution of magic may have policy applications today. Using newly collected survey and comparative datasets, I test three leading hypotheses for the cultural evolution of magic, 1) unilineal replacement of magic first by religion and then by science, 2) magic functioning to provide market goods that are distinct from religion or science, and 3) magic arising from long-evolved cognitive tendencies that constrain human psychology. I find empirical support for all three hypotheses but in differing contexts. Thus, rather than evolving through any single process, magical beliefs and practices appear to be induced through multiple processes of cultural evolution. Greater awareness of the contexts in which magical thinking operates, and when it may be adaptively useful, may allow people to better guard against misfiring of magical thinking that can result in the spread of scientific and journalistic misinformation.

technical paper

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The paper attempts to contribute to an ongoing debate in the cognitive science of religion and cultural evolution concerning factors responsible for the emergence of moralizing religions. Scholars propose either social complexity or economic prosperity as the key forces in these cultural processes and often refer to the religious history of the ancient Mediterranean in their arguments. In this paper, we mainly explore the so called Affluence Hypothesis, which suggests that the emergence of moralizing religions was caused by shifts in life-history strategies in response to the increase in economic prosperity. We evaluate this hypothesis by analyzing economic, demographic and religious dynamics of the ancient Mediterranean. In particular, we employ the methods of Distributional Semantic Modeling to analyze temporal trends in moralizing religions motifs in a large corpus of ancient Greek texts and compare these trends with the dynamics of social complexity and economic prosperity as captured by various archaeological proxies.

Social Complexity, Affluence, and the Emergence of Moralizing Gods in the Ancient Mediterranean

Obtaining reliable, musically interpretable representations of sound in standardized notation is essential for cross-cultural analysis of the cultural evolution of music. However, musical transcription is usually conducted manually by ear, which is time-consuming and subjective, and its reliability for non-Western songs is largely unknown. In this study, we examine the reliability of 3 human and 10 automated transcriptions of 32 song excerpts from diverse cultures around the world taken from the Natural History of Song dataset (Mehr et al. 2019) and the Cantometrics songs dataset (theglobaljukebox.org; cf. Wood et al., this conference). The degree of agreement is evaluated by comparing pairs of human-human and human-machine transcriptions. We found that human transcription can be sufficiently reliable (κ ~.6-.9, ~80-90% agreement), but current state-of-the-art automated methods are not (κ <.4, <60% agreement). No automated method clearly outperformed others. As the agreement between human transcriptions could reach much higher agreement than the pairs of human and machine transcriptions, there is still room for improvement in developing the computational tools for analyzing the pitch structure of traditional music. Reliable automatic music transcription methods can broaden the scope of cross-cultural analysis of music, which is challenging to tackle with conventional manual transcription. Establishing objective, reliable methods for cross-cultural music transcription is critical for diversifying studies of the cultural evolution of music.

Reliability of Human and Automated Transcriptions of Global Songs


Musical scales, defined as a set of discrete pitches from which melodies are constructed, are one of the most universal features of music. Some important analogies can be drawn between the evolution of scales and biological evolution: they both entail evolution of a linear sequence of discrete units; their study is focused on extant species; they exhibit large variations in mutation rates (e.g. vocal scales vs. metallophone scales). In comparison to the seemingly infinite space of biological sequences, however, the space of possible scales (typically 7 or fewer notes, just-noticeable-differences of at least ~5 cents) is comparatively tiny; and little is known the relative effects of drift and selection in scales. Despite these properties of scales, quantitative studies of the evolution of scales are scant.

To study of the evolution of scales, we first create a sample of extant scales, by scouring the ethnomusicological literature of the last century to assemble a cross-cultural database of scales. This allows us to first consider the ‘drift’ forces inherent due to imperfections in both vocal production, and pitch perception. We then consider a set of selection biases, and test which hypotheses may best predict the distributions of extant scales. Finally, we think about how the different forces (physical, perceptual, cultural) involved in drift and selection, in comparison to biological evolution, may vary considerably across populations and histories in what sometimes may appear an arbitrary fashion.

Evolution of musical scales

Variation is the universal: Making cultural evolution work in developmental psychology

Overimitation is defined by a tendency to copy all actions executed by a model, even the clearly irrelevant ones. The motivational mechanisms and functionality of overimitation are still not well understood, but its possible adaptive meaning could be related to causal opacity of a great part of socially learned behaviors. This phenomenon has been widely replicated in several contexts and has been observed in the behavior of children over 2 years of age and even in adults. Studies have shown that overimitation is sensitive to some characteristics of the model observed such as age, familiarity, proficiency, and reputation. Our work intended to investigate the effect of information about the competence of an adult model on the copying of irrelevant actions by preschool children (5 years old) in a task. We tested the influence of self-declared information about the model competence and of the same kind of information given by third parties in a conversation about the model. Our results reveal no effect of both ‘‘self-declared competence” and ‘‘reputation” biases on overimitation. We discuss that this result may have occurred because other information available to participants, and not manipulated by us, was used to infer model competence such as the model’s age and success in the task directly observed by the participants. Another potential explanation is that children use a ‘‘copy all, correct later” strategy in a context where only one model is available.

Biases on social learning: the effect of model's competence on children's overimitation

Living in a social group confers an individual many advantages, one being the possibility to obtain relevant information from others. However, one must be able to discriminate what is useful. For instance, human and non-human primates must know who and what to learn from. Here, we investigated the opportunities to obtain visual information from the face of others, which we call VAF (Visual Access to Faces) in a wild population of capuchin monkeys from Brazil. We looked at four infants, aged two and nine months old and aimed at testing the hypothesis that both the identity of the individual the infants were having VAF from and the infants’ age influenced the duration of these opportunities to obtaining information from others’ faces. We looked at 323 VAF events (mean=2.539 seconds±0.489). We used a GLMM (infants as a random factor) including duration of VAFs as dependent variable and individual with whom the VAF occurred and month (2nd or 9th) as fixed factors. We found that the identity of the other monkey was not significant, neither its interaction with month. However, month alone was significant (p=0.016), with a higher mean for the 2nd (3.296±0.653) than the 9th (1.415±0.560) month. From these results it appears that whom the infant is looking at is not relevant, however "when", if earlier or later in infancy, is critical for the acquisition of this sort of social information. That is, accessing and processing this type of visual information provided by faces may be an initial social development pattern. 

Keywords: Sapajus libidinosus, social behaviour, social cognition, social regulation, visual processing 

Funding: Fapesp

Looking at others’ faces may be more important in early infancy

Humans have adapted well to diverse environments in part because of their ability to efficiently acquire information from their social environment. However, we still know very little as to how young children acquire cultural knowledge, and in particular the circumstances under which children prioritize social over asocial learning. In this study we ask whether children will selectively adopt either a majority-biased or a payoff-biased social learning strategy in the presence or absence of asocial learning. Three- to 5-year-old children (n = 117) were first shown a video in which four other children took turns in retrieving a capsule housing a reward from one of two boxes. Three of the children (the ‘majority’) retrieved a capsule from the same box and a single individual (the ‘minority’) retrieved a capsule from the alternative box. Across four conditions we manipulated both the value of the rewards available in each box (equal or unequal payoff), and whether children had knowledge of the payoff before making their own selection. Results show that children adopted a majority-biased learning strategy when they were unaware of the value of the rewards available, but adopted a payoff-biased strategy when the payoff was known to be unequal. We conclude that children are strategic social learners who use both social and asocial learning to maximize personal gain.

The ontogeny of selective social learning: Young children flexibly adopt majority or payoff-based biases depending on task uncertainty

Modern human culture relies on copying of behavioural forms beholden to past cultural evolution. It remains debated whether such ‘action copying’ underlies any wild ape culture. It is unclear whether this ability was present in the last common ancestor or whether it first appeared after their divergence. Evidence of untrained apes spontaneously copying novel action forms, under controlled conditions, would favour the ‘copying hypothesis’, this data is lacking. Given that majority influence appears to affect ape social learning, we hypothesised that the dearth of evidence, in untrained apes, could be due to a lack of majority demonstrations in research. If evidence were found, in such a population, this would lend credence to the argument that wild apes and even the last common ancestor, had the capacity to spontaneously copy novel actions. Here, we performed the first controlled, action copying study that incorporated majority-bias with untrained non-human great apes (all species; n=19). Our results show a total lack of copying ability, all untrained mother-reared apes failed to copy, or approximate, the demonstrated action forms, despite majority demonstrations. Our findings reinforce the view that apes do not spontaneously copy action forms - not even majority demonstrations changed this empirically-grounded picture. Our finding also adds to increasing evidence that wild ape cultures are never, or very rarely, based on action form copying. This also means that action form copying likely arrived in the human lineage - after the divergence from the last common ancestor.

Can apes ape? What about with the addition of biases?

It has become increasingly clear that culture and social learning play a vital role in species ecology. While much attention has been paid to its presence in vertebrates such as primates and cetaceans, which often have complex social structure, it also occurs in a broad and diverse variety of animal communities including reptiles, fishes, and insects. As we learn more about the breadth of species that utilise social learning, it has expanded the scope of what social learning and culture can tell us beyond a single species. This is particularly relevant as the conservation value of culture and social complexity becomes more established. Here I review social learning across species with varying community structures, providing an overview of how culture can manifest across animal societies and the different ecological roles it may play as a result. Such a review is critical to how studies across different species and community structures may inform one another. It further illustrates the intrinsic value of animal culture in practice as well as theory. When these separate pieces are brought together, they will provide the necessary infrastructure to move the field of animal culture forward in how it can be both understood and applied.

The diversity of animal culture across community structures

Envy-based magic beliefs, including witchcraft, are prevalent in societies around the world. These beliefs can create distrust due the belief that one’s misfortune can be magically caused by others in their community. We examined the relationship between witchcraft rituals, motivation, and distrust in a sample of 428 Hindus Mauritians. Despite these beliefs being largely taboo, Hindu Mauritians have a pervasive belief in witchcraft and evidence of the performance of witchcraft rituals is readily found throughout Mauritius. Participants were shown a picture of fruits claimed to be purchased for a religious or witchcraft ritual or to be eaten, and given one of three motivations for the purchaser (envy, selfishness, or neutral). Participants in the witchcraft and envy conditions rated the purchaser as less trustworthy and more harmful to the community than in the other conditions. Participants who were told the purchaser was envious or selfish were more likely to accuse the purchaser of witchcraft even when told he was buying fruit for a religious ritual or to eat. Free list questions confirmed that envy as a motivation increased participants willingness to see this person as less trustworthy and to claim his actions will have negative reputational impacts and cause harm. This work suggests that a belief that others are practicing magic decreases trust and is believed to cause harm across motivations. Further, the claim that a person is envious or selfish can increase the willingness to make a witchcraft accusation.

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Social Complexity, Affluence, and the Emergence of Moralizing Gods in the Ancient Mediterranean

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