Atran, S., and Douglas Medin (2008). The native mind and the cultural construction of nature. Cambridge, MA, The MIT Press.

<esr330>

pg 1- "There is an increasing sense of diminished human contact with nature, a phenomenon some refer to as the "extinction of experience" (Nabhan and St. Antoine 1993) and others as "Nature-deficit disorder" (Louv, 2006).

pg 3 - "We will argue that biology represents a distinct module of mind that is associated with universal patterns of categorization and reasoning"

• "robustly universal
• "more that modest contact with nature
• "Yet others are highly dependent on particulars of cultural models and associated values.

pg 17 - ""extinction of experience" and what we call "devolution"

"evidence demonstrating that cultrual support fo attention to nature has been diminishing since the onset of the industrial revolution

classifying animals and plants "Such groupings are primary loci for thinking about biological causes and relationships (Mayr 1969).

pg 19 - everybody classify plants and animals into specieslike groups that are adapted to their ecological niche

pg 21 - "There is a commonsense assumption that each generic species has an underlying causal nature, of essence, ..."

pg 22 - "Even contemporary Americans who undergo heart transplants show evidence of believing that at least some aspects of essence have been transmitted from the donor to the recipient (Sylvia and Novak 1997."

"Vitalism is the folk belief that biological kinds - and their maintaining prarts, properties, and processes - are teleological, and hence not reducible to the contingent relations that govern inert matter.

"In cognitive science, a belief that biological systems, such as the mind/brain, are not wholly reducible to electronic circuitry, like computers, is a pervasive attitude ..."

pg 23 - "folkbiological groups, or taxa, are organized into hierarchially organized ranks."

hierarchies - "structures of inclusive classes"

"artifacts are treated differently from natural kinds"

"Modern systematics - the branch of biology that concerns scientific taxonomy - is currently in the process of divesting itself of ranks in favor of unranked phylogenetic lineages (clades), ..."

pg 24 - biological taxonomies ..."provide powerful inductive framework for making systematic inferences about the likely distribution of organic and ecological properties among organisms."

<!-- inductive - etc

induction is inference of general laws from specific instances

deduction is the inference of particular instances from general laws

-->

pg 27 bird, reptile, dinosaur, turtle problem

from Diamond - plants are likely to be characterized by associations

pg 28/29 "Western biological theories emerged by decontextualizing nature: by tearing out water lilies from water so that they could be dried, measured, printed, and compared with other living forms detached from local ecology and most of the senses. For Itza', folkbiological taxonomy appears to hearken to somewhat different colling in human life and cognition, one that is more embedded in the local environment."

folk kingdom is plant or animal

pg 32 - "generic species usually encompass single biological species

80% of tree genera of Chicago are monospecific

158 of 229 in Peten are

pg 33 - generic species is where morphology, behavior, ecology covaries the most

pg 36 - "Even with the social order and cosmological system sundered, the folkbiological structure would persist as a cognitive basis for cultureal survival under three conditions.

First, there must be signficant biological continuity in the ecological distribution of species.

Second, there must be significant linguistic continuity with the dialect that first encoded the knowledge.

Third, there must be sustained interaction between people and living kinds where knowledge of the various species matters."

"... Itza' folkbiology (...) fulfills all three conditions, whereas the folkbiology of majority-culture Americans (...) fails to meet the third condition."

""in globally mobile, technolgically oriented societies there is a marked deterioration in commonsense understanding of the everyday living world. This impairment affects people's practical ability to sustainably interact with the environment: "

pg 37 - "anthropologists studying traditional societies of note with concern the loss of indigenous language and a lessening of knowledge about the natural world ..."

"In technological oriented cultures, contact with biological kinds may be so minimal that researchers can demonstrate significant differences in children's biological reasoning as a function of whether they do or do not have goldfish as pets (....)."

The Devolution Hypothesis

"reduced contact could lead to declines in knowledge, but not necessarily" the effects of reduced exposure may be offset by sufficient amounts of indirect experience with the natural world, through a culture's media, talk, and values." they refer to this as cultural support

pg 54 - "There is no theoretically neutral way to define culture."

pg 55 - triangulation - "The third group should resemble the first group in some potentially important ways and the second group in other ways."

pg 61 - "Thus many different people, observing many different exemplars of dog under varying conditions of exposure to those exemplars, may nonetheless generate more or less the same concept of dog. In other cases, especially involving groups having little direct contact with the natural world, we find striking group; differencs. The patterning of universal and experience-dependent performances not only reveals the texture of the folkbiological module but also brings into relief the cognitive consequences of diminished contact with nature."

pg 63 - "We hypothesize a folkbiological system (FBS) of the human mind that discriminates and categorizes parts of the flux of human experience as "biological," and develops complex abilities to infer and interpret this core cognitive domain."

pg 64 - "Humans and their ancestors undoubtedly depended for their survival on initmate interaction with plants and animals, which likely required anticipatory knowledge of at least some plant and animal species.

"there are cognitive mechanisms for

• tracking humans by facial recognition
• syntactic and semantic structures
• social game strategies
• others

pg 65 - "We hypothesized that there is a naturally selected set of cognitive processes targeted on the biological world, which we call a "biological module" of the mind."

pg 67 - "Standard populations (e.g., undergraduates) may use impoverished default categorization and reasoning strategies (e.g., abstract similarity judgement) relative to those used by most of humanity (e.g., content-rich strategies). <eel> <stuff-trumps-process>

"Categorization tasks are of independent theoretical interest and self-contained, but they are also designed to provide the inferential framework for category-based reasoning."

pg 72 - "Itza' clearly reject a context-free use of the diversity principle in favor of context-sensitive reasoning about likely causal connections."

pg 73 - "the smell of animal excrement so crucial to Maya hunters, or the texture of bark, so important to their recognition of trees in the dark forest understory, simply have no place in a generalized and decontextualized scientific classification (Atran 1990)." <dms>

pg 78 - "Their correlations with science are reliable but quite low, in no case accounting for more 16 percent of the variance. We take this as evidence that the structure of nature is not nearly so transparent as previous researchers have suggested...."

pg 89 - "Novices relied very heavily on familarity or typicality as the basis of their choices on both the typicality and diversity trials. Neither the Itza' nor the U.S. experts ever gave typicality as a justification for either type of probe."

pg 91 - "All else equal, it is easier for them to retrieve knowledge about nonpasserines and when they do so, this retrieved knowledge has greater consequences."

"Undergraduates, in contrast, have little knowledge to bring to bear on the sorts of reasoning tasks we have used and consequently it is not suprising that they rely heavily on more abstract reasoning strategies."

pg 92 - "A key notion in the psychology of categorization is goodness of example or typicality effects."

pg 93 - "Work on typicality judgements among Itza' shows that inductively useful notions of typicality may be driven more by considerations of idalness than central tendency (Atran 1999a).

"The best predictor of undergraduate typicality ratings was word frequency" <teaching with structure> <work-frequency>

pg 100 - "In summary, we consistently find that among people knowledgeable about a domain, typicality judgements are based on ideals. Only undergraduates appear to rely on central tendency or word frequency. "

"The traditional interpretation of typicality as central tendency across from a general and well-established approach to concepts and categories, in which the formation, representation, and use of concepts are understood to be determined largely by a domain's intrinsic structure (similarities and dissimilarities among its members, clusters of correlated features, and so on)."

"... we think it is very unlikely that category learning is pa passive, bottom-up process that reflects intrinsic structure without bias. It is much more likely that the most relevant (and ideal) examples are learned first and that these initial representations guide further learning ..." <eel> <my-text>

pg 101 - linguistic anthropology - "the name given to the best example of a category is also the term used for the entire category

<--! metonym, see metaphors we live by - Lakoff and Johnson 1999 or objects/metaphors.html (synecdoche a smaller part, represents the whole) -->

pg 102 - "basic level" in category hierachies of "naturally occuring objects" such as "taxonomies"

the basic level

• many common features
• consistent motor programs afre employed for the interaction with or manipulation of category exemplars
• have similar enough shapes for recognition

"instead of maple and trout, Rosch et al. found that tree and fish operated as basic-level categories for American college students."

"As familiarity with the biological work decreases, there is a gradual attrition of folkbiological knowledge up the hierachy, with the basic level devolving from the generic-speices to the life-form levels."

pg 103 - "both industrialized and small-scale populations prefer the same folktaxonomic rank for induction

"Inductive inference allows people to extend knowledge beyond their immediate experience and beyond the information they are given, and it is a crucial part of category formation and use (...)."

"Inductive inference must be a mainstay of any such search for underlying causal principles and its focus should be at the generic-species rank."

pg 105 - "For the Americans, the preferred level of perceptual identification (life form) apperared to have a secondary effect on inference, whereas for Itza', the life-form level seems to carry no inductive privilege."

pg 109 - "There is now considerable evidence for perceptual learning (...) in general as well as evidence that the basic level on perceptual tasks becomes more specific expertise (...)."

pg 111 - "We believe that people who have serious commerce in a domain rarely approach it in a content-neutral manner.."

"Consequently, models of categorization need to be sensitive to the likelihood that the most releveant and best examples of a category will tend to be learned first, and that later learning will be affected by and bulid on earlier learning (...)."

pg 112 - "use of ideals in reasoning is indirect rather than direct. That is, idealness per se plays no role in the rationale for responses. Instead, it is the implicit organization of knowledge organized around goals that both creates category ideals and drives category-based inference."

pg 113- "our category-based induction experiments showed that people from diverse societies build topologically similar biological taxonomies that guide inferences about the distribution of biological and ecological properties."

pg 115 - "... the world itself is neither in chaos nor flux; species are often locally self-structuring entitites that are reproductively and ecologically isolated from other species through natural selection.

<!-- clade - group of organisms believed to come from common ancestor, cladistics - classification based on the proportion of measurable traits they have in common -->

pg 116 - "One characteristic of an evolved congitive disposition is eveident difficulty in inhibiting its operation (...). Consider beliefs in biological essences. Such beliefs greatly help people expore the world by prodding them to lok for regularities ...

"But in other circumstances, such as wanting to know is correct or true for the cosmos at large, such intuitively ingrained concepts and beliefs my hinder more than help.

"Human cultures favor the rapid selection and stable distribution of ideas that

1. readily help to solve relevant and recurrent environmental problems
2. are easily memorized and processed by the human brain ... and
3. facilitate the retention and understanding of ideas that are more variable (e.g., religion) or difficulty to learn (e.g., science) but contingently useful of important

<eel>

pg 118 - "totemism uses representations of generic species to represent groups of people: ... persuasive metarpresentational inclination arguable owes its recurrence to its ability to ride piggy-back on folkbiological taxonomy. Generic species and groups of generic species are inherently well structured, attention-arresting, memorable and readily transmissible across minds. As a result, the readily provide effective pegs on which to attach knowledge and behavior of less intrinsically well-deterimined social groups.

"The sort of cultural information most susceptible to modular processing is the sort of information most easily transmitted from individual to individual, most apt to surviv e within a cjulture over time, and most likely to recur independently in different cultures and at different times.

"evolutionary constrained learning landscape

"folkbiology plays a special role in cultural evolution in gneeral

pg 119 - "inputs naturally cluster in causually redundant ways inasmuch as that is the way of the world is

"dedicated mental modules selectively target these inputs for processing by domain-specific inferential structures

"The full expression of folkbiology module may require natural environmental triggering conditions (akin to those of ancestral environments) and cultural support perhaps lacking for certain groups in industrialized societies, ...

Chapter 6: Culture as Notational, Not Natural, Kind

pg 144 - "Intuitively, one might define culture as the shared knowledge, values, beliefs, and practices among a group of people living in geographic proximity who share a history, a language, and a cultural identification (...).

<!-- see "Culture Matters" for their definition-->

It is not easy to escape from this intuitive notion ...

relates culture to biology, and that species are historical and not natural kinds

"we believe that modern cultural research must be able to overcome intuitive notions of culture in order to focus on causal processes associated with stability change.

pg 153 - "ecological management of networks of religious water temples (Lansing and Kremer 1993).

pg 155 - In the norms-and-rules approach (...) there is a basic assumption that memory and transmission mechanisms are reliable enough for standard Darminian selection to operate over cultural traits....

"On this view, inheritable variants (of ideas, artifacts, behaviors) are copied (imitated, reproduced) with high enough fidelity so that they resemble one another more than they do unrelated forms.

"We believe that these arguments are limited

"We propose to look at cultures in terms of mental representations (and attendant behaviors) taht are reliably but diversely distributed across individuals in a population (...).

"We focus on the stabilizing role of cognitive structures in the production and transmission of ideas (and attendant behaviors)

<!-- what are these cognitive structures? -->

in Table 6.1, different views of culture are compared including, what is culture?, cultural change, within-culture variabilty, cognitive processes and their relevance, role of domain-specific processing

pg 158 - "We suggest that much of the cultural transmission and stabilization of ideas (artifacts and behaviors) involves the communication of poor, fragmentary, and elliptical bits of information that manage to trigger rich and prior inferential structures.

"What may be relatively novel in our approach is the focus on variability as the object of study

"the cultural epidemiology view is most similar to the agent-based and situated cognition views. It differs from both these views in its focus on inference. Specifically, we suggest that these preexisting and acquired inferential structures account for the cultural recurrence and stabilization of many complexly integrated ideas and behaviors (...) and set the parameters on allowable cultural diversification (...).

Chapter 7: Folkecology and the spirit of the commons: Garden experiments in Mesoamerica

pg 162 - "The Lowland Maya region faces environmental disaster, owing in part to a host of nonnative actors having access to the forest resources (...). A central problem concerns differential use of common-pool resources, ... we will analyze what is know as the "tragedy of the commons".

"Itza' Maya informants consistently appealed to ecological relations on category-based induction tasks. That observation, coupled with the Itza' Maya record of sustainable agroforestry, suggested to us that there may be a conection between folkecological models and behaviors. In preliminary studies we also found that Spanish-speaking Ladino and Q'eqchi' Maya immigrant populations in the area practice agroforestry in a much less sustainable manner (Atrans and Medin 1997).

pg 172 - "The "tragedy of the commons" and other similar social and ecological dilemmas are basically variants of a deep problem in decision and game theories known as the "prisoner's dilemma"

"field and laboratory studies

"indicate that individual calculations of a rational self-interest collectively lead to a breakdown of a society's common resource base unless institutional or other normative mechanisms are established to restrict access to cooperators: it is irrational to continue to act to sustain a diminishing resource that other increasingly deplete.

pg 174 - "Difference in burn frequency produces differences in destuctiveness, independently of need for income

"by this measure, Q'eqchi' destroy more than five times as much forest, but Ladinos less than twice as much, as Itza'

details of the use of the plots

Q'eqchi' clear contiguous plots leving little untouched

Ladinos leave some trees between plots

Itza' ring plots with trees, clear firebreaks, change plots in non-contiguous patterns - in part because they want to have the birds help the forest regenerate

pg 180 - "Itza' practices encourage a better balance between human productivity and forest maintenance"

"In this context, Itza' appear to behave "irrationally" insofar as their restraint subsidizes another group's profligacy: the more cooperators produce for free-riders, the more the free-riding population is able to expand and lay waste.

pg 190 - "These findings suggest a complex Itza' folkecological model of the forest, wherein different animals affect different plants, and relations among plants and animals are reciprocal.

"In sum, Itza' show awareness of ecological complexity and reciprocity between animals, plants, and people, and Itza' agroforestry favors forest regeneration. Q'eqchi' acknowledge few ecological dependencies and Q'eqchi' agriculture is insensitive to forest survival.

pg 195 - "Our tentative line of resoning is that Itza', and perhaps other native peoples with a long history of ecological maintenance, might not treat resources as traditional decision and game theory suggests - that is, as objects of a payoff matrix (extensional items substitutable along some metric, such as one that assigns monetary value to every object). Instead, some people may treat resources, such as species, as intentional, relational entities, like friends or enemies.

<viewers-network> <viewers-games>

pg 197 - how Itza' think - what is their "theory of mind", what is "the ability to correctly anticipate the mental state of other intelligent agents"

pg 198 - "To date, rational-decision and game-theoretic accounts involving human use of nonhuman resources generally have not considered nonhuman resources (e.g., the forest) and humans both as "players" in the same game

"resources are treated as inert objects in a game, not as interacting agents

<!-- some bluring here with games against nature, where nature is uncertain, in part, because its complex, interacting sub-unit characteristics -->

pg 199 - concerning Itza --"Especially for men, the spirits are intermediaries or "spokesmen" for the forest species. This has intriguing implications for eclogical decision theory and game theory in that individial Itza' may be basing their cognitive and behavioral strategies for sustaining the forest more by playing a game (i.e., negotiating costs and benefits of mutual cooperation) with spirits than by playing a game with other people ..

pg 205 - One conclusion from these finding is that sacred values, per se, are not enough for sustainability. At the very least, a combination of rich ecological models and sacred values may be required.

<!-- see sustainability/complex-vision/extremely-difficult-path.html -->

pg 207 - "The puzzle for decision theory is: How do people manage limited resourcers in a sustainable manner without apparent institutional or other obvious normative constraints to encourage and monitor cooperation? Multiple factors are involved in explaining the stability of representations within and across our study populations."

"the prevailing view - at least in economics and political science - has been that human behavior in society is driven by self-interest, mitigated by institutional constraints.

pg 208 - "We find that content-structuring mental models are pertinent to environmental decision making. They not only predict behavioral tendencies and stated values, but also correlate reliable with the measurable consequences of those behaviors and vales - even down to the level of soil composition and the number of variety fo trees found on people's land (...).

Itza' ... "seems to recognize nature as a player with a stake in its own future

"Our work casts a different light on the tragedy of the commons and associated game-theoretic analysis. Fires, individual dcognitions or mental models of resources are not irrelevant to environmental decision making as assumed by content-free framing in terms of utilities. Second, differing conceptions of a common resource may require different abstract analyses, as we saw in teh caswe of teh Itza' belief in the forest spirits

Chapter 8: Cultural Epidemiology

pg 209 - "The goal was to trace varations in knowledge and beliefs with variations in social distance from others, including experts

social network analysis

pg 212- "A relatively closed corporate structure that channels information focused on internal needs and distant places may function to impede acces to ecological information relevant to commons survival

<Net Work>

"Representations of the Itza' network indicates that node Y is the best socially connected individual.... also cited as the top Itza' forest expert

pg 213 - "For Itza', diffusely interconnected social and expert networks suggest multiple social pathways for individuals to gain, and for the community to assimilar and store, information about the forest.

"cultural models and social transmission

"The general idea is that a person's cultural upbringing primes that person to (1) pay attention to certain observable relationships at a given level of complexity, and (2) connect these observations through certain inferences (e.g., that animals and plants have reciprocal relations).

pg 215 - "In line with evolutionary models of social learning, one may assume tha, when in doubt or ignorance about a certain domain of activity vital to evergyday life, people will look to those with knowledge in order to emulate them."

<!-- when to copy and when to innovate -->

"evidence suggesting Ladinos may be acquiring knowledge through different isolated examples that trigger inferential structures to support generalizations.

pg 217 - "A key constraint on inductive inferences is the interpretation of the base event itself. In the above scenario, if the Ladino observer lacks a cultural propensity for conceiving of species relationships reciprocally ...

"inference in addition to any effects of direct instruction, imitation, or invocation of norms

pg 219 - "We believe that social learning involves inferential proceeses that are mobilized according to several factors:

1) domain-specific cognitive devices (e.g., taxonomy for biological kinds),

2) prior cultural sensitivity to certain types of knowledge ..

3) awareness of lak of knowledge and motivation to aquire it

4) selective attention

5) preexisting values

pg 222 - "We found that statistically consensual cultural cognitions and practices - or "cultures" for short - involve complex causal chains that go both inside and outside the mind. These chains irreducibly link individual minds and their internal representations with psychophysical interactions between individuals and their external environmnet (including interactions with other individuals).

pg 223 - "a unified approach to culture and cognition that takes us from individuals' evolved congitive aptitudes to historically contingent collective practices (such as managing a rainforest) in a systematic and reliable way.

pg 234 - "The visible results - the maintenance of the forest in light of large-scale deforestation in the surrounding as well as constant economic incentives to the contrary - are quite impressive and provide a literal ground-truthing of Menominee respect for nature. Perhaps the critical element is not values per se but rather what happens when one set of values come into conflict with another (refs..).

Menominee demonstrated "time after time that they are unwilling to trade their forest, lakes, and rivers for money

pg 240 - Menominee fishermen tend to take an ecological orientation to conceptualizing fish. They also commonly express the attitude that every fish has a role to play and are less likely that majority-culture fishermen to think of fish in terms of positive (gamefish) or negative ("garbage fish")

Menominee have a strong "do not waste"

Majority-culture experts focus on catch-and-release

pg 248 - "these data indicate that majority-culture fishermen hold strong, incorrect expectations concerning Menominee attitudes and values

pg 250 - "The better the majority experts knew Menominee rankings, the less stereotyping they displayed

pg 251 - "very modest actual differencs in goals, values, and attitudes are accompanied by massive peceived differences

"We suggest that these misperceptions are mediated by differencs in specific goals and associated knowledge organization, reinforced by patterns of media coverage

pg 254 - "Just as the Itza', Q'eqhi', and Ladino differences, theMenominee and majority-culture differences reflect different framework theories that direct observations and dictate values and attitudes. It is these complexes or systems that must be understood in order to gain insight into cultural contributions to environmental decision making.

pg 256 - "people's misconceptions about culture are like people's misconceptions about species

pg 261 - Steyvers and Tenenbaum 2005, Love et al 2004 <!-- link these to the teaching_with_structure/complex_learning/draft1.htm and in particular the idea of "negative transference" in which learning one particular concept first can make it harder to learn other concepts -->

"Previous models of induction have assumed that participants employ (abstract) similarity relations in reasoning. Our work suggest that this is more likely to be a strategy of last resort, used only when more relevant information is unavailable ("last resort" happens rarely for biologically informed people, like the Itza' Maya, but almost all the time for undergraduates). We need models of induction that describe not just this default condition, but also the range of ecological and causal knowledge that is brought to bear from a richer base of biological knowledge.

pg 262 - "kinds" of decisions

"Our research on environmental decision makeing suggest that decisions are part of a system of knowledge and beliefs and that these mental models inform and direct decision making....

"This suggests that taking a semantic approach to human decision making can yield some insights inton decision making

<!-- semantic = relating to meaning in language or logic -->

making decisions is making meaning and communicating that meaning

pg 263 - sacred or protected values <viewers-choice>

pg 268 - Decision making and transcending utility

pg 269 - "generalizing our concerns for resource conflicts to cultural (including political) conflicts

methodological tools aimed at exploring the ways cognition and emotional judgements might interact in sacred values to affect decision making and risk among individuals and groups

pg 270 - "indicating that instrumental approaches to resolving political disputes are suboptimal (and may even backfire) when protagonists transform the issues or resources under dispute into essential moral values

pg 272 - These experiements .... reveal that in political disputes where sources of conflict are cultural, such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or emerging clashes between the Muslim and Judeo-Christian world, violent opposition to compromise solutions may be exacerbated rather than decreased by insisting on instrumentally driven trade-offs, while noninstrumental symbolic compromises may reduce support for violence.