Representation and understanding in music across cultures Samuel Mehr The Music Lab and Department of Psychology, Harvard University Discovering the universal features of human musicality is a prerequisite for explaining the biological and cultural evolution of music. What is universal about our psychology of music, and what varies? In this talk I will present analyses […]
Why divination? A salient cultural attractor, an explanatory model, and some lessons for how to understand the generation of culture Pascal Boyer Professor of Sociocultural Anthropology and Psychology and Henry Luce Professor of Collective and Individual Memory, Washington University in St. Louis Divination is a good example of a cultural attractor - almost all human […]
Hidden talents in harsh conditions Willem Frankenhuis Department of Psychology, Utrecht University, the Netherlands It is well established that people living in adverse conditions tend to score lower on a variety of social and cognitive tests. However, recent research shows that people may also develop ‘hidden talents’, that is, mental abilities that are enhanced through […]
Impression management as signaling Hugo Mercier Evolution and Social Cognition and Collective Intelligence Teams, Institut Jean Nicod, CNRS, Paris I claim that impression management can be usefully understood as signaling. One consequence is that impression management should be mostly honest, that is, it should benefit on average both senders (i.e. those who are managing the […]
What is theory of mind? Implications for mind, brain and culture Rebecca Saxe McGovern Institute and Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT Nearly all research on "theory of mind" has focussed on three kinds of inference: (i) explaining observed behaviour in terms of inferred mental states (given she did that, what did she want?); […]
Citizen scientific racism: White nationalist appropriations of genetic research Aaron Panofsky UCLA Institute for Society and Genetics, Public Policy, and Sociology This talk presents research from a study about white nationalists and their efforts to appropriate genetics research for their own ideological and identity projects. Using historical sources and online data and interpretive methods, I […]
The human language system in the mind and brain Evelina Fedorenko McGovern Institute for Brain Research and Department of Brain & Cognitive Sciences, MIT The goal of my research program is to understand the computations and representations that enable us to share complex thoughts with one another via language, and their neural implementation. A decade […]
A metaphysical mapping problem for race theorists and human population geneticists Quayshawn Spencer Robert S. Blank Presidential Associate Professor of Philosophy and Race, Science, & Society Working Group, University of Pennsylvania In this talk, I identify and clarify a metaphysical mapping phenomenon that’s almost twenty years old. The phenomenon is that the populations at a […]
Becoming human: A theory of ontogeny Michael Tomasello Duke University and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology Humans are biologically adapted for cultural life in ways that other primates are not. Humans have unique motivations and cognitive skills for sharing emotions, experience, and collaborative actions (shared intentionality). These motivations and skills first emerge in […]
The development of decision-making across diverse cultural contexts Dorsa Amir Boston College Department of Psychology The human behavioral repertoire is uniquely diverse, with an unmatched flexibility that has allowed our species to flourish in every ecology on the planet. Despite its importance, the roots of this behavioral diversity — and how it manifests across development […]
