Publications of Heintz, Christophe

Methods for studying cultural attraction

Cultural attraction theory (CAT) describes a general evolutionary process, cultural attraction, by which the spread and stability of cultural items (beliefs, practices, artifacts, etc.) result not just from differential reproduction, but also from transformations that systematically favor the reconstruction of cultural items of specific types. In this way, CAT aims to provide a general framework for the study of cultural evolution. In a thoughtful critical analysis, Buskell questions the ability of CAT to provide methodological guidance for research in cultural evolution. Can CAT be used to develop the sort of mid‐range theories and models that often drive empirical work? Here we argue that CAT can indeed be used in this way, and we outline the methodological practices that students of cultural attraction have used and are currently developing.

Four misunderstandings about cultural attraction

Cultural attraction theory (CAT) is a research agenda the purpose of which is to develop causalexplanations of cultural phenomena. CAT is also an evolutionary approach to culture, in thesense that it treats culture as a population of items of different types, with the frequency oftokens of those types changing over time. Now more than 20 years old, CAT has made manypositive contributions, theoretical and empirical, to the naturalization of the social sciences. Inconsequence of this growing impact, CAT has, in recent years, been the subject of critical dis-cussion. Here, we review and respond to these critiques. In so doing, we also provide a clearand concise introduction to CAT. We give clear characterizations of CAT's key theoreticalnotions, and we outline how these notions are derived from consideration of the natural charac-ter of cultural phenomena (Box 1). This naturalistic quality distinguishes CAT from other evolu-tionary approaches to culture.

{Scaffolding on Core Cognition}

Cognitive flexibility can be achieved via a scaffolding process that harness the inferential power of core cognitive abilities.

{What can't be inferred from cross-cultural experimental games}

People from different cultures will interpret the experimental game they play differently; they will form different beliefs about what their partners will play and expect. I argue that the variations observed in experimental games ran across cultures might very much result from framing effects–-cultural framing effects–-rather than variations in pro-social preferences.

{Les fondements psychiques et sociaux de la cognition distribuée}

Après avoir présenté et expliqué la notion de cognition distribuée, je situerai l'analyse qu'elle permet au sein des sciences cognitives et de la sociologie. Mes buts sont de montrer en quoi la théorie de la cognition distribuée contribue aux théories de la psychologie et de la sociologie, et réciproquement comment les théories de la sociologie et de la psychologie peuvent être recrutées pour expliquer l'existence de systèmes de cognition distribuée. La troisième section de ce chapitre est centrée sur les relations entre psychologie et théorie de la cognition distribuée. Elle montre que la sociologie de la cognition distribuée béné à être une sociologie cognitive de la cognition distribuée. La quatrième partie continue cet argument, mais en soulignant les phénomènes typiquement sociologique qui interviennent dans la constitution et l'évolution des systèmes de cognition distribuèe

{Presuming placeholders are relevant enables conceptual change}

Placeholders enable conceptual change only if presumed to be relevant (e.g., lead to the formation of true beliefs) even though their meaning is not yet fully understood and their cognitive function not yet specified. Humans are predisposed to make such presumptions in a communicative context. Specifying the role of the presumption of relevance in conceptual change would provide a more comprehensive account of Quinian bootstrapping.

{Ethnographic cognition and Writing Culture}

I suggest that one of the best ways to pursue and go beyond the programme of Writing Culture is to do cognitive anthropology of anthropology. I will situate Writing Culture with regard to this field of research and I will argue that Writing Culture can contribute to the development of the cognitive anthropology of anthropology. This is because it is sensible to start the anthropological study of anthropology with an analysis of the cultural product – in our case, the ethnographic texts. The analyst can then pick up relevant properties of the cultural product and track down what caused them. Among these causes stand the cognitive processes of actual practitioners, namely working ethnographers. Thus, starting with textual analysis, I argue that some rhetoric conventions analysed in Writing Cultures are informing the reader about the cognitive genesis of the ethnography. These conventions, far from being misleading, are in fact relevant to the reader: in particular information about the cognitive genesis of an ethnographic text enables the reader to evaluate its ethnographic account. This gives me the occasion to briefly specify some cognitive processes at work in the production of ethnographies. These include, I argue, a reflexive and critical cognition that is distributed among the community of anthropologists, and ``mind-reading'' – a cognitive process much studied by cognitive psychologists that enables ethnographers to make sense of the behaviour of indigenous people by attributing mental states to them (beliefs, intentions, desires, feelings).

{Epistemic Vigilance}

Humans massively depend on communication with others, but this leaves them open to the risk of being accidentally or intentionally misinformed. To ensure that, despite this risk, communication remains advantageous, humans have, we claim, a suite of cognitive mechanisms for epistemic vigilance. Here we outline this claim and consider some of the ways in which epistemic vigilance works in mental and social life by surveying issues, research and theories in different domains of philosophy, linguistics, cognitive psychology and the social sciences.

{Cognitive history and cultural epidemiology}

Cultural epidemiology is a theoretical framework that enables historical studies to be informed by cognitive science. It incorporates insights from evolutionary psychology (viz. cultural evolution is constrained by universal properties of the human cognitive apparatus that result from biological evolution) and from Darwinian models of cultural evolution (viz. population thinking: cultural phenomena are distributions of resembling items among a community and its habitat). Its research program includes the study of the multiple cognitive mechanisms that cause the distribution, on a cultural scale, of representations and material cultural items. By a detailed analysis of the social cognitive causal chain that occurred in the past, one can find out and specify which are the factors of attraction that account for cultural stability as well as historical cultural change. After reviewing recent research and developments in cognitive history, I present the concept of cultural attractor and explain why cultural attractors are historically variable. In doing so, I emphasize the role of historically constituted cognitive mechanisms, which account for much of historical cultural developments. I argue that the framework of cultural epidemiology can better account for these important historical phenomena than either evolutionary psychology accounts of culture or dual inheritance theory. I conclude that describing and explaining the history of cultural attractors is a good research goal for historians.

{Institutions as Mechanisms of Cultural Evolution: Prospects of the Epidemiological Approach}

Abstract Studying institutions as part of the research on cultural evolu- tion prompts us to analyze one very important mechanism of cultural evolution: institutions do distribute cultural variants in the population. Also, it enables relating current research on cultural evolution to somemore traditional social sciences: institutions, often seen as macro-social entities, are analyzed in terms of their constitutive micro-phenomena. This article presents Sperber's characterization of institutions, and then gives some hints about the set of phenomena to which it applies. Culture evolves through the advent of cognitive causal chains, which span across individuals and their environment, and which distribute mental representations and public production in the population and its habitat. Institutions are characterized by the specific causal chains that distribute representations. These chains include representations that cause the recurrence of a series of events and thus regulate the distribution of a set of representations to which they themselves belong. Saying that some cultural phenomenon is an institution is, in this theoretical framework, explaining that some representations that are part of the cultural phenomenon cause it to endure. This technical characterization applies to what is usually understood as institutions, from marriage to money. It also opens the way for the analysis of complex phenomena in cultural evolution, such as themaintenance of cultural niches and the distribution of labor.

{Web search engines and distributed assessment systems}

I analyse the impact of search engines on our cognitive and epistemic practices. For that purpose, I describe the processes of assessment of documents on the Web as relying on distributed cognition. Search engines together with Web users, are distributed assessment systems whose task is to enable efficient allocation of cognitive resources of those who use search engines. Specifying the cognitive function of search engines within these distributed assessment systems allows interpreting anew the changes that have been caused by search engine technologies. I describe search engines as implementing reputation systems and point out the similarities with other reputation systems. I thus call attention to the continuity in the distributed cognitive processes that determine the allocation of cognitive resources for information gathering from others.