Journal of Cognition and Culture

Gil-White, Francisco

doi: 10.1163/156853701753254387pmid: N/A

AbstractAs a result of a spate of studies geared to investigating Brazilian racial categories, it is now believed by many that Brazilians reason about race in a manner quite different to that of Americans. This paper will argue that this conclusion is premature, as the studies in question have not, in fact, investigated Brazilian categories. What they have done is elicit sorting tasks on the basis of appearances, but the cognitive models of respondents have not been investigated in order to determine what are the boundaries of their concepts. Sorting based on appearances is not sufficient to infer the boundaries of concepts whenever appearance is not a defining criterion for the concepts in question, as the case appears to be for racial and ethnic categories. Following a critique of the methods used, I review a terminological and theoretical confusion concerning the use of the terms 'emic' and 'etic' in anthropology that appears directly responsible for the failure so far to choose methods appropriate to parsing the conceptual domain of 'race' in Brazil.

Brown, William Michael

doi: 10.1163/156853701753254396pmid: N/A

AbstractGenomic imprinting may be implicated in the origin and maintenance of the cognitive architecture required for cultural transmission. Relatedness asymmetries are expected to lead to increases in the receptibility of matrilineally transmitted information. This may help explain why maternal genes contribute preferentially to the neocortex. That is, maternal genes could influence biases in the transmission and/or acquisition of information. This perspective is complementary to gene-culture coevolutionary approaches.

Barrett, Justin

doi: 10.1163/156853701753254404pmid: N/A

AbstractFour studies (two experiments, a journaling study, and a questionnaire) conducted with American Protestant college students explored intuitions concerning petitionary prayer. Since Protestant theology offers little teaching on through which modes of causation God is most likely to act, it was hypothesized that intuitive causal cognition would be used to generate inferences regarding this aspect of petitionary prayer. Participants in these studies favored asking God to act via psychological causation over the biological and mechanistic domains. Further, in fictitious scenarios participants reported being more likely to ask a supercomputer or Superman to solve a problem through mechanistic intervention than God. These results are consistent with two previous findings: that God is often intuitively represented as having a single physical location (and it is not nearby); and psychosocial agents (such as God) are expected to require physical contact to act on non-agents.

Baran, Michael; Sousa, Paulo

doi: 10.1163/156853701753254413pmid: N/A

doi: 10.1163/156853701753254422pmid: N/A