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Researchers have long argued that ritual plays a crucial role in marking social identities and binding individuals together in a system of shared actions and beliefs. The psychological processes underlying how and why ritual promotes group bonding and influences in- and out-group biases have not yet been fully elucidated. The research presented in this thesis was designed to examine the social and cognitive developmental underpinnings of conventional/ ritualistic behavior. Because learning cultural conventions is essential for participation in group behavior and for signaling group membership and commitment, I propose that conventional/ ritualistic learning is motivated by a drive to affiliate. Experiment 1 investigated the affiliative nature of ritualistic learning by examining the effects of third-party ostracism on imitation of an instrumental versus ritual action sequence and prosocial behavior. Individuals who do not participate in shared group conventions often face the threat of ostracism from the group. Given that attempting re-inclusion is an established response to ostracism, I predicted that the threat of ostracism increases affiliative motivations and thus will increase imitative fidelity, especially in the context of conventional learning. Experiment 2 examined the effects of first-person ostracism in the context of in- and out-groups on children’s imitation of a ritualistic action sequence and pro-social behavior. I predicted that the experience of ostracism by an in-group versus an out-group has important implications for the construal of social exclusion and affiliative behavior. I hypothesized that children would be motivated to re-affiliate by imitating the model and acting pro-socially towards the group, especially when ostracized by in-group members. Based on the findings of this research and insight from anthropology, and social and developmental psychology, I will present a picture of how children acquire the conventions of their group and how these conventions influence social group cognition.

Essa pesquisa tem como foco da investigação as classificações dos índios Wajãpi do Amapari (AP) sobre as plantas cultivadas, denominadas na língua nativa de temitãgwerã. A descrição e análise das formas de classificação das temitãgwerã são feitas a partir de dois grandes arcabouços teóricos: de um lado os estudos sobre taxonomias nativas, empreendidos pelo viés da antropologia cognitiva; de outro as proposições sobre um pensamento ameríndio, empreendidas pela etnologia propriamente. Essas duas linhas teóricas são convocadas a dialogar uma vez que se objetiva demonstrar que as classificações não são elaborações isoladas do pensamento, nem são elementos exclusivamente abstratos e intelectuais, mas fazem parte da experiência cotidianamente vivenciada. Assim, busca-se evidenciar as relações entre alguns sistemas de classificação wajãpi e aspectos cosmológicos, aspectos sociais, formas de transmissão de conhecimentos e formas de manejo agrícola. / The focal point of this research is the study of the systems that the Wajãpi Indians from Amapari (AP -Brazil) utilize to classify the plants that they cultivate, which are known as temitãgwerã in their language. The descriptions and analyses of these folk taxonomies are made with the support of two theoretical frameworks: from one hand the studies of folk taxonomies from a cognitive anthropology perspective and, from the other hand, taking into account the propositions about the Amerindian thought derived from the ethnology itself. In fact, these two theoretical lines should complement each other once it is intended to demonstrate that taxonomies are not isolated from others aspects of thought, neither are exclusively abstract or intellectual elements, but part of the experiences of the daily life. Therefore the major goal of this investigation is to show that folk taxonomies keep relations with cosmology aspects, sociology aspects, manners of knowledge transmission and agricultural management.

Essa pesquisa tem como foco da investigação as classificações dos índios Wajãpi do Amapari (AP) sobre as plantas cultivadas, denominadas na língua nativa de temitãgwerã. A descrição e análise das formas de classificação das temitãgwerã são feitas a partir de dois grandes arcabouços teóricos: de um lado os estudos sobre taxonomias nativas, empreendidos pelo viés da antropologia cognitiva; de outro as proposições sobre um pensamento ameríndio, empreendidas pela etnologia propriamente. Essas duas linhas teóricas são convocadas a dialogar uma vez que se objetiva demonstrar que as classificações não são elaborações isoladas do pensamento, nem são elementos exclusivamente abstratos e intelectuais, mas fazem parte da experiência cotidianamente vivenciada. Assim, busca-se evidenciar as relações entre alguns sistemas de classificação wajãpi e aspectos cosmológicos, aspectos sociais, formas de transmissão de conhecimentos e formas de manejo agrícola. / The focal point of this research is the study of the systems that the Wajãpi Indians from Amapari (AP -Brazil) utilize to classify the plants that they cultivate, which are known as temitãgwerã in their language. The descriptions and analyses of these folk taxonomies are made with the support of two theoretical frameworks: from one hand the studies of folk taxonomies from a cognitive anthropology perspective and, from the other hand, taking into account the propositions about the Amerindian thought derived from the ethnology itself. In fact, these two theoretical lines should complement each other once it is intended to demonstrate that taxonomies are not isolated from others aspects of thought, neither are exclusively abstract or intellectual elements, but part of the experiences of the daily life. Therefore the major goal of this investigation is to show that folk taxonomies keep relations with cosmology aspects, sociology aspects, manners of knowledge transmission and agricultural management.

Mental illness is a complex phenomenon that is social and psychological as well as biological. But since the creation of the DSM-III in the 1980s, the landscape of mental health research and treatment in the United States has been heavily influenced by the biomedical model. The thoughts and beliefs of the lay public about mental illness are often ignored despite the push for greater cultural understanding among biomedical professionals. This disconnect, coupled with the poor mental health infrastructure, has left Mississippi with an inadequate ability to help Mississippians address mental illness. This research uses cognitive anthropological methods and biocultural theory to begin to address this disconnect. A shared cultural model of mental illness by causes, symptoms, and treatments was found. There were systematic differences between the two groups’ knowledge of causes of mental illness. Understanding these will assist in providing more culturally appropriate care for the mentally ill.

This thesis intends to revise and update devoted actor theory (DAT) by introducing a neglected dataset—female suicide bombers. DAT provides one such theoretical framework for understanding extremist group behavior and, to a lesser extent, suicidal bombing. DAT is largely satisfying: its claims and conclusions address relevant issues and provide compelling answers to critical questions. However, it is not without its analytical and empirical gaps. Crucially, DAT does not explicitly account for the narratives and characteristic motives of female suicide bombers—which often differ in logic, content, and tone from those of their male counterparts. In addition, DAT assumes that people who are fused with extreme groups are willing to self-sacrifice for their group, but the theory does not account for how this fusion process transpires. Therefore, I propose two amendments to DAT that not only address theoretical issues, which arise partially from the lack of female terrorist accounts, but also creates a narrative that bridges the gap that would explain how an individual progresses from bonding to a group to making the decision to die for it. Accordingly, I also propose to theorize a psychosocial process that links the way in which individuals, specifically females, become fused to a group and edge closer to the most extreme of extremist decisions: to annihilate their bodies and selves, while at the same time annihilating or wreaking havoc upon the lives of others whom they have deemed enemies of themselves or their group.

Pascal Boyer’s theory of counterintuitive cultural representations asserts that concepts that violate developmentally natural intuitive knowledge structures demand more attention and are more transmittable than other concepts (Boyer and Ramble 2001: 535-64). Grounded in an empirically justified framework of ontological domain knowledge, counterintuitive representations have been identified across human cultures as consistently prevalent in religious beliefs and widely known folktales. Indeed, the ubiquity of counterintuitive representations of supernatural agents in world religions has led some to reason that its presence is a defining factor of “religion” (Atran 2002; Boyer 1994, 2001; Brown 1991; Pyysiäinen, Lindeman and Honkela 2003). The theory has attracted considerable attention from scholars. Boyer discussed and predicted the mnemonic advantages of culturally “familiar” counterintuitive representations (Boyer 2001: 58-105), yet this integral aspect has been poorly investigated, especially because subsequent free-recall studies have focused on novel representations that similarly violate assumptions about our intuitive ontologies. These studies have suffered from a variety of other shortcomings: small sample sizes that poorly represent population demographics and age ranges (most recruited university students); limited investigation of different modes of cultural transmission (most centred on written stimuli); emphasis on free recall at the expense of other measures of memory; and incomplete research into interactions of schema-level effects (e.g. positive and negative emotion, imagery, humour, and inferential potential) on the memorability of counterintuitive ideas. Although the theory claims universality across human cultures, purported differences between holistic and analytic types of cognition suggest that it is likely that East Asians process counterintuitive ideas differently from Westerners. But until this dissertation no data had yet been collected in East Asia. Hence, a large age-representative sample (N = 940), for three studies in both the UK and China, was used to investigate the interaction of template- and schema-level effects for wider forms of transmission biases endemic to cultural groups. The investigation comprised the interaction of the mnemonic effects of familiarity and counterintuitiveness and the impact of schema-level effects, employing a mixing of presentation media (Study #1), template-level preferences when generating schema-level ideas (Study #2), and transmission advantages for supernatural agents (Study #3). Study #1 consisted of two free-recall experiments: a minimal condition (subject-predicate statement) and elaborated condition (additional descriptive elements) of stimuli structure. The results were analysed by hierarchical linear model (HLM), with familiarity, counterintuitiveness, and delay as 2-level fixed factors, and age and schema-level effects as covariates. The findings revealed mixed support for predictions of the typical formulation of Boyer’s hypothesis. However, subsequent analyses revealed a significant interaction of counterintuitiveness x age and of counterintuitiveness x familiarity, for all conditions and cultural sites. Schema-level effects were also found to predict recall rate. Study #2 investigated template-level biases in a statement generation task. An analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) considering counterintuitiveness and the covariate of age revealed that children are significantly more likely to author counterintuitive ideas than older adults, in both UK and China. Study #3 (comparable in design to Study #1) found a significant interaction of counterintuitiveness x ontological category, revealed to be due to participants’ better recall rates, at both locations, for counterintuitive concepts belonging to the ontological category PERSONS. In summary, it appears that the counterintuitive effect is not as straightforward as it has been thought to be, and requires further theoretical development and empirical research to improve understanding about the interactive role of age, schema-level effects, and ontological category in the transmission and cultural epidemiology of such representations.

Psychological research suggests that children acquire cultural concepts through early developing cognitive mechanisms combined with specific cultural learning. An understudied area of cultural acquisition is children’s understanding of non-human minds, such as God. This thesis gives evidence that young children need not anthropomorphize non-human minds in order to understand them. Instead, children have a general “theory of mind” that is tailored through experience to accommodate the various important minds in their cultural environment. The intuitive default is toward super-attributes, making children naturally inclined or “prepared” to acquire god concepts. Four empirical studies were conducted with 75 British and 66 Israeli preschool-aged children. In Study 1, children participated in an ignorance-based theory-of-mind task and were asked to consider the mental states of human and supernatural agents. Children at all ages attributed correct knowledge to the supernatural agents and ignorance to the human agents. In Study 2, children participated in two perception-based theory-of-mind tasks and were asked to consider the perspective of two super-perceiving animals, God, and two human agents. Three-year-olds attributed knowledge to the animals and God and, by age four, children could distinguish among agents correctly. Also, by age four, children recognized that aging limits the perception of human agents but not God’s. In Study 3, children participated in a memory-based theory-of-mind task in which they were asked to consider the memory of God and differently aged agents Children at all ages responded that God would remember something that the children themselves had forgotten. By age five, children responded that a baby and granddad would have forgotten. These results propose that preschool-aged children regard individual constraints when considering mental states. Study 4 focused on children’s notions of immortality. Cultural differences were found. British children attributed immortality to God before correctly attributing mortality to human agents, and Israeli children attributed immortality to God and mortality to humans more consistently than did British children. Collectively, these studies indicate that children do not have to resort to anthropomorphism to reason about non-human agents but instead have the cognitive capacity to represent other types of minds because of early cognitive capacities. It appears that concepts vary in their degree of fit with early-developing human conceptual systems, and hence, vary in their likelihood of successful cultural transmission.

This dissertation explores some applications of statistical mechanics and information theory tools to topics of interest in anthropology, social sciences, and economics. We intended to develop mathematical and computational models with empirical and theoretical bases aiming to identify important features of two problems: the transitions between egalitarian and hierarchical societies and the emergence of money in human societies. Anthropological data suggest the existence of a correlation between the relative neocortex size and the average size of primates\' groups, most of which are hierarchical. Recent theories also suggest that social and evolutionary pressures are responsible for modications in the cognitive capacity of the individuals, what might have made possible the emergence of different types of social organization. Based on those observations, we studied a mathematical model that incorporates the hypothesis of cognitive costs, attributed for each cognitive social representation, to explain the variety of social structures in which humans may organize themselves. A Monte Carlo dynamics allows for the plotting of a phase diagram containing hierarchical, egalitarian, and intermediary regions. There are roughly three parameters responsible for that behavior: the cognitive capacity, the number of agents in the society, and the social and environmental pressure. The model also introduces a modication in the dynamics to account for a parameter representing the information exchange rate, which induces the correlations amongst the cognitive representations. Those correlations ultimately lead to the phase transition to a hierarchical society. Our results qualitatively agree with anthropological data if the variables are interpreted as their social equivalents. The other model developed during this work tries to give insights into the problem of emergence of a unique medium of exchange, also called money. Predominant economical theories, describe the emergence of money as the result of barter economies evolution. However, criticism recently shed light on the lack of historical and anthropological evidence to corroborate the barter hypothesis, thus bringing out doubts about the mechanisms leading to money emergence and questions regarding the inuence of the social configuration. Recent studies also suggest that money may be perceived by individuals as a perceptual drug and new money theories have been developed aiming to explain the monetization of societies. By developing a computational model based on the previous dynamics for hierarchy emergence, we sought to simulate those phenomena using cognitive representations of economic networks containing information about the exchangeability of any two commodities. Similar mathematical frameworks have been used before, but no discussion about the effects of the social network configuration was presented. The model developed in this dissertation is capable of employing the concept of cognitive representations and of assigning them costs as part of the dynamics. The new dynamics is capable of analyzing how the information exchange depends on the social structure. Our results show that centralized networks, such as star or scale-free structures, yield a higher probability of money emergence. The two models suggest, when observe together, that phase transitions in social organization might be essential factors for the money emergency phenomena, and thus cannot be ignored in future social and economical modeling. / Nesta dissertação, utilizamos ferramentas de mecânica estatística e de teoria de informação para aplicações em tópicos significativos ás areas de antropologia, ciências sociais e economia. Buscamos desenvolver modelos matemáticos e computacionais com bases empíricas e teóricas para identificar pontos importantes nas questões referentes à transição entre sociedades igualitárias e hierárquicas e à emergência de dinheiro em sociedades humanas. Dados antropológicos sugerem que há correlação entre o tamanho relativo do neocórtex e o tamanho médio de grupos de primatas, predominantemente hierárquicos, enquanto teorias recentes sugerem que pressões sociais e evolutivas alteraram a capacidade cognitiva dos indivíduos, possibilitando sua organização social em outras configurações. Com base nestas observações, desenvolvemos um modelo matemático capaz de incorporar hipóteses de custos cognitivos de representações sociais para explicar a variação de estruturas sociais encontradas em sociedades humanas. Uma dinâmica de Monte Carlo permite a construção de um diagrama de fase, no qual é possivel identificar regiões hierárquicas, igualitárias e intermediárias. Os parâmetros responsáveis pelas transições são a capacidade cognitiva, o número de agentes na sociedade e a pressão social e ecológica. O modelo também permitiu uma modificação da dinâmica, de modo a incluir um parâmetro representando a taxa de troca de informação entre os agentes, o que possibilita a introdução de correlações entre as representações cognitivas, sugerindo assim o aparecimento de assimetrias sociais, que, por fim, resultam em hierarquia. Os resultados obtidos concordam qualitativamente com dados antropológicos, quando as variáveis são interpretadas de acordo com seus equivalentes sociais. O outro modelo desenvolvido neste trabalho diz respeito ao aparecimento de uma mercadoria única de troca, ou dinheiro. Teorias econômicas predominantes descrevem o aparecimento do dinheiro como resultado de uma evolução de economias de escambo (barter). Críticas, entretanto, alertam para a falta de evidências históricas e antropológicas que corroborem esta hipótese, gerando dúvidas sobre os mecanismos que levaram ao advento do dinheiro e a influência da configuração social neste processo. Estudos recentes sugerem que o dinheiro pode se comportar como uma droga perceptual, o que tem levado a novas teorias que objetivam explicar a monetarização de sociedades. Através de um modelo computacional baseado na dinâmica anterior de emergência de hierarquia, buscamos simular este fenômeno através de representações cognitivas de redes econômicas, que representam o reconhecimento ou não da possibilidade de troca entre duas commodities. Formalismos semelhantes já foram utilizados anteriormente, porém sem discutir a influência da configuração social nos resultados. O modelo desenvolvido nesta dissertação foi capaz de empregar o conceito de representações cognitivas e novamente atribuir custos a elas. A nova dinâmica resultante é capaz de analisar como a troca de informações depende da configuração social dos agentes. Os resultados mostram que redes hierárquicas, como estrela e redes livres de escala, induzem uma maior probabilidade de emergência de dinheiro dos que as demais. Os dois modelos sugerem, quando considerados em conjunto, que transições de fase na organização social são importantes para o estudo de emergência de dinheiro, e portanto não podem ser ignoradas em futuras modelagens sociais e econômicas.

Excerpt: In the latter half of 2012 the communication discipline lost two pioneering scholrs when H.L. "Bud" Goodhall, Jr., and Nick Trujillo died within months of each other.