Ignorance of the costs and benefits of actions, like aiding someone in distress without thinking twice, is a reliable moral signal of altruism and trustworthiness-such actions, performed while ignorant, risk incurring costs with little or no benefit. Why care? First, this paper contributes to the literature applying signaling theory to moral issues. Second, it highlights some moral benefits of ignorance. And finally, it stresses how reliable self-signals increase the likelihood that those who are benevolent, in the present, will act comparably in the future-moral identity motivates future moral action, and reliable signals shape that identity.
Mnemic Neglect (MN) is a well-established finding within Western culture; individuals selectively retain the memory of positive rather than negative self-relevant information in the service of self-enhancement/protection (Sedikides et al., 2016). There have, however, been no cross-cultural investigations of MN, despite an ongoing debate about the universality of self-enhancement motivations. A study with American and Chinese participants was conducted to examine cross-cultural differences in MN. Evidence of MN was found for both American and Chinese participants, and there was no indication that it was more pronounced among the former group. This research, with its use of an indirect measure, contributes to the debate on the relative prevalence of self-protection and self-enhancement in both Western and East Asian cultures.
To examine cultural differences in beliefs about social categories, two studies examined whether there are differences between Northern Ireland and the US in the strength of essentialist beliefs about eleven social dimensions including culturally salient dimensions of religion and race. In both studies religion categories were essentialized more by participants in Northern Ireland who viewed them as more natural but no more cohesive than US participants. Essentialist beliefs about race categories did not differ cross-culturally. In general, these findings suggest that-as in the case of belief about religion categories in Northern Ireland-social categories may be essentialized because they are culturally salient or in the absence of salience-as in the case of beliefs about race categories in Northern Ireland-because of more general conceptual proclivities. These findings also suggest a potentially important role for ontological beliefs about religion categories in the formation of religious prejudice.
The aim of this paper is to explore the possible collaboration between the cognitive and evolutionary human sciences and ethnography. My purpose is to show that certain kinds of behaviour and attitudes that can be observed by means of the ethnographic method can also be properly explained from an evolutionary perspective. Iwill explore the plausibility of an evolutionary point of view on ethnographic material by means of a case study: the analysis of the religious beliefs and practices of an Irish family. The theoretical proposal of this paper is twofold: first, that in this case we do not have one but two modes of religiosity, doctrinal and experiential; second, that ethnography can reveal the existence of the forms of popular religiosity that originate in the experiential mode of religiosity while an evolutionary perspective can explain their persistence.
Dual models of art processing propose two pathways for aesthetic liking: an early, perceptual route, and a higher order elaborative route. The aim of this study was to explore the effect of accompanying verbal information (descriptive vs. interpretive) and its relationship with the perceptual and elaborative routes in art appreciation, by systematically varying the way it was presented (simultaneous vs. sequential). While there was no difference under the sequential condition, when both the artwork and its accompanying information were presented at the same time descriptive texts were associated with lower liking scores in comparison with interpretive texts. Additionally, the positive effect of interpretive information was partially mediated by perceived comprehension. Overall, these results suggest that verbal information can influence aesthetic liking in a way consistent with the two-route explanation.
