Supernatural punishment beliefs as manipulated explanations of misfortune

Why do humans develop beliefs apparently well-suited to promote prosociality, such as beliefs in moralistic supernatural punishment? Leading hypotheses regard such beliefs to be group-level cultural adaptations, shaped by intergroup competition to facilitate cooperation. We present a complementary model in which cognitive mechanisms and strategic interactions produce and stabilize such beliefs. People incentivize others’ cooperation through behaviors such as punishment, moralistic narratives, and, we suggest, claims of supernatural punishment. These overcome mechanisms of epistemic vigilance by posing as explanations of misfortune and containing threatening information, as well as potentially appealing to justice intuitions and aligning with signaling incentives. Explaining religious belief requires considering both people’s motivations to invest in the production of supernatural narratives and the reasons others adopt them.

Definite Descriptions in the Light of the Comprehension vs. Acceptance Distinction: Comparing Self-Paced Reading with Eye-Tracking Measures

This paper presents two experiments on the processing of informative definite descriptions in plausible vs. implausible contexts. Experiment 1 is a self-paced reading task (with French native speakers, n = 69), with sentences containing a definite vs. indefinite NP, each preceded by plausible or implausible contexts. Our study replicated Singh and colleagues’ findings, namely that definite descriptions are significantly costlier when they occur in implausible contexts. The translation of the original stimuli from English to French did not affect the results, suggesting that the phenomenon applies cross-linguistically. Experiment 2 consists in an eye-tracking task, designed to measure the participants’ (n = 44) gaze patterns on complete sentences with the same four conditions (definite vs. indefinite NP; implausible vs. implausible contexts). A mixed effect model analysis revealed that (a) the total gaze duration on target segments and (b) the processing of the complete sentence were significantly longer in implausible conditions. These results show that implausible contexts predict a marked increase in the offline processing costs of definite descriptions. However, no significant difference was found for online processing measures (i.e., first fixation duration, first-pass reading time and regression path time measures) across all experimental conditions. These results suggest that it is only once the sentence is fully processed that implausible contexts increase processing costs. Furthermore, these results raise methodological issues related to the study of the online processing of definite descriptions, to the extent that self-paced reading and eye-tracking methods in the present study lead to incompatible results. With respect to the eye-tracking results, we suggest that the contrast between online and offline processing is likely to reflect the fact that participants first adopt a stance of trust to understand utterances before filtering the information through their epistemic vigilance module.

Buckets of steam and left-handed hammers. The fool’s errand as a signal of epistemic and coalitional dominance

In various professional groups, experts send rookies on absurd tasks as a prank. The fool’s errand appears in factories and hospitals, in elite schools and scout camps, among soldiers, sailors, and airmen. Why are newcomers deceived and humiliated and why are fool’s errands similar in structure despite various contexts and remarkably persistent over time? Here I propose that the cultural success of this social institution and its recurrent features across history and cultures are based on evolved cognitive mechanisms activated by apprenticeship as social learning and group induction. I will show that evolved mechanisms of epistemic vigilance explain how novices are reliably deceived by experts using opaque statements erroneously perceived as pedagogical. Furthermore, evolved capacities for coalition building explain why insiders use the prank as strategic signaling of hierarchies based on epistemic asymmetry. The intersection of cognitive mechanisms and patterns of professional recruitment create a tradition where insiders coordinate to humiliate newcomers to assert epistemic and coalitional dominance.

A French History of ‘Most Shamefull Villanie’

By the 1580s, fragments of individual suffering in France’s Wars of Religion were being pieced together to form a larger picture within English cultural memory. A significant contribution came from Anne Dowriche’s The French Historie (1589), ostensibly based on the testimonies of Huguenot exiles. The French Historie reverses the villain–hero pairing of Chantelouve’s tragedy (Chapter 11): Charles IX becomes a consummate dissembler, while Coligny (in keeping with Protestant polemical discourse) becomes a blessed martyr. However, Dowriche’s underlying concern is to promote a selective kind of epistemic vigilance (in Relevance Theory, an ‘alertness to error’) in her readers: they must not be blind to the presence of ‘a strange Italian weede’—the villainy of Machiavelli and Catherine de’ Medici—proliferating like a rhizome across European culture.

Manipulative Shallow Processing Induced by Presuppositions and Topics: Theoretical Perspectives and Experimental Evidence

The paper shows that implicit strategies for questionable contents are frequent in persuasive texts, as compared to texts with other purposes. It proposes that the persuasive and manipulative effectiveness of introducing questionable contents implicitly can be explained through established cognitive patterns, namely that what is felt by addressees as information coming (also) from them and not (only) from the source of the message is less likely to be challenged. These assumptions are verified by showing examples of “implicitness of evidential responsibility” (essentially, presuppositions, and topics) as triggers of lesser attention in advertising and propaganda. A possible evolutionary path is sketched for three different pragmatic functions of presuppositions, leading to their availability for manipulation. The distraction effect of presuppositions and topics is also explained in relation with recent developments of Relevance Theory. Behavioral evidence that presuppositions and topics induce low epistemic vigilance and shallow processing is compared to recent neurophysiological evidence which does not confirm this assumption, showing greater processing costs for presuppositions and topics as compared to assertions and foci. A proposal is put forward to reconcile these apparently contrasting data and to explain why they may not be in contrast after all. Also due to natural language quick processing constraints (a “Now-or-Never processing Bottleneck”), effort devoted to accommodation of presupposed or topicalized new contents may drain resources from concurrent epistemic vigilance and critical evaluation, resulting in shallower processing.

Listeners’ perceptions of the certainty and honesty of a speaker are associated with a common prosodic signature

The success of human cooperation crucially depends on mechanisms enabling individuals to detect unreliability in their conspecifics. Yet, how such epistemic vigilance is achieved from naturalistic sensory inputs remains unclear. Here we show that listeners’ perceptions of the certainty and honesty of other speakers from their speech are based on a common prosodic signature. Using a data-driven method, we separately decode the prosodic features driving listeners’ perceptions of a speaker’s certainty and honesty across pitch, duration and loudness. We find that these two kinds of judgments rely on a common prosodic signature that is perceived independently from individuals’ conceptual knowledge and native language. Finally, we show that listeners extract this prosodic signature automatically, and that this impacts the way they memorize spoken words. These findings shed light on a unique auditory adaptation that enables human listeners to quickly detect and react to unreliability during linguistic interactions.

Epistemic Vigilance in Early Ontogeny: Children’s Use of Nonverbal Behavior to Detect Deception

This study examines the development of children’s ability to modulate their trust in verbal testimony as a function of nonverbal behavior. Participants included 83 children (26 four-year-olds, 29 five-year-olds, and 28 six-year-olds) that were tasked with locating a toy hidden in one of two boxes. Before deciding the location, participants watched a video of an adult providing verbal and nonverbal cues about the location of the toy. We hypothesized that older children would display epistemic vigilance, trusting nonverbal information over verbal information when the two conflict. Consistent with our expectations, when sources were consistent, all children trusted the verbal testimony. By contrast, and as predicted, when they were inconsistent, only 6-year-olds distrusted verbal testimony and favored nonverbal cues; 4- and 5-year-olds continued to trust verbal testimony. Thus, 6-year-old children demonstrate an ability to modulate their trust in verbal testimony as a function of nonverbal information. Younger children's inability to do this is not due to their being unaware of non-verbal behavior; indeed, when nonverbal information was offered exclusively, children of all ages used it to find the object.

Borderline personality disorders: from the developmental theory of the "self" and mentalizing to "systems"

In the last fifty years the thinking around borderline personality disorder (BPD) shifted from an intra-psychic to a psychoanalytically oriented relational model. The latter described the difficulties associated with this presentation as arising from a disorganisation of the "self" structure in the context of an early caregiving relationship. The concept of inaccurate, or inconsistent "social biofeedback parental affect mirroring" has been pivotal to explain the characteristic failure to mentalize and the interpersonal difficulties associated with a diagnosis of BPD. Nevertheless, far from being the result of a sole linear relationship, these difficulties appear linked to communicative and emotional feedback loops that are reminiscent of cybernetic principles. Furthermore, recent claims have suggested that the communication feedback loops characteristic of the carer–child attachment style represent nothing less that the communication styles of the wider social environment in which the dyad is located. These claims have recently prompted a further shift from mentalizing to epistemic trust and epistemic vigilance, hence departing from a relational model towards a more systemic one. The difficulties associated with BPD are now suggested to be linked to a disorder of social learning, impacted by the rigid nature of the person's information-processing systems. This article reviews this journey.

The epistemics of narrative performance in conversation

This article investigates the flow of information in conversational narrative performance in light of research on the epistemics of talk in interaction and epistemic vigilance on the part of story recipients. Based on examples from a range of corpora, it reassesses the relationship between storytellers and recipients consistent with recipient design, and investigates cases of too little and too much information in narrative. Viewing narrative performance as sharing territories of knowledge provides new insights into the notions of telling rights and tellability as well as teller competence and credibility. The narrative performance may contain gaps and discrepancies along with clusters of copious information from which recipients must pick and choose to construct a dynamic narrative model to be tested against further information. In the communal presentation of family narratives, territories of knowledge merge, shared events are illuminated from separate perspectives, gaps in knowledge are filled, and evaluations are enriched.