First the paper on imitation. Now you might think that human infants, being smarter than chimpanzee infants, would be much more willing to figure things out for themselves and not just blindly copy what they're shown. In fact, the opposite is true.
This fact has been known for a long time, and was widely assumed to be a social effect - young kids just wanting to please adults. What Frank Keil (Yale University) showed was that in fact it's because they genuinely believe that what they are copying is essential to the task at hand - even if it seems ridiculous.
What they did was set up simple puzzles, like the one pictured. Then they showed the kids how to open it, using a mix of relevant actions and irrelevant, 'magical' ones (like pushing the rod with a wand, rather than pulling it out with their hand).Not only did they copy the adults faithfully, but they persisted even when they were told that some of the actions were irrelevant, and even after they thought the experiment was over. In fact, the only thing that could shake their conviction was physically separating the magical action from the puzzle box (young kids have a built-in predisposition to think that causally connected objects must be physically connected).
What Keil concludes is that children have built-in tendency to assume that whatever adults do must be sensible and necessary, even if they can't figure out why. This probably is down to the fact that kids have to survive in an enormously complex human culture, in which things are often done for reasons that are not readily apparent.
But the consequence is that, once aberrant behaviour creeps in (perhaps in a manner similar to that of Skinner's pigeons), it can be incredibly difficult to shake.
So what of Harris' study? Well, what he showed was that young kids are able to estimate the reliability of adults as informants. What's more, they then are highly likely to believe what these trusted adults tell them.
What these results mean is that the religious beliefs and behaviours of kids (and possibly adults) are a lot more to do with culture and a lot less to do with some kind of innate psychological predisposition that is often claimed.
In a later paper, Harris takes aim at the idea that we a 'born to believe'. Although he concedes that there is some evidence for this, he thinks that the power of testimony in forging the world-view of even the very young has been underestimated.
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Lyons, D., Young, A., & Keil, F. (2007). The hidden structure of overimitation Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104 (50), 19751-19756 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0704452104
Koenig, M., Clement, F., & Harris, P. (2004). Trust in Testimony. Children's Use of True and False Statements Psychological Science, 15 (10), 694-698 DOI: 10.1111/j.0956-7976.2004.00742.x
Harris, P., & Koenig, M. (2006). Trust in Testimony: How Children Learn About Science and Religion Child Development, 77 (3), 505-524 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8624.2006.00886.x
What an awesome blog. My goodness, it has citations!
ReplyDeleteTom, just a few days ago I came back from a conference on human behaviour and evolution in St Andrews and talked there to Claudio Tennie, one of the doctoral students from the Tomasello lab. We talked about the difference between non-hunam primates and humans and he explained to me the line that only humans actually imitate while the others emulate - the difference being that emulation only involves trying to reproduce the end product without necessarily coping how it was produced. The downside of this is that anything more complex it beyond non-human primates. From this comes the claim that there is no non-human culture. The upside is that this also means there can not be any culturally-inherited superstitions among non-human primates. That's the first part of the story - non-human primates don't imitate as much because, if you buy the line, they're incapable of it.
ReplyDeleteThe second part of the story is that there were also a number of papers considering under what circumstances it makes sense to imitate rather than innovate, the upshot of it seems to have been that 'in most cases' is the basic answer. Taken together, this suggests that human children are doing the rational thing by imitating. And, before you ask, yes, the experiments I'm talking about took into account the possibility of imitating behaviour that was maladaptive.
Having said all that, I am not sure to what degree I would agree with your conclusion that any of what you say shows that religious beliefs have a lot more to do with culture than with inate predispositions. It isn't that I disagree with the point that culture is very important but that there is nothing that says that it is a matter of either/or. People have a predilection for particular kinds of nonsensical beliefs. The degree to which these predilections find an outlet in some sort of religious faith is, of course, a matter of the culture in which they live. The two sides of the story interact. So, I would only conclude that Boyer and Co. do not have as much of the story as they think they do. Not that their part of the story isn't that important.
Hi Konrad, thanks for that. I'm going to have to read Tomasello's latest paper in Trends. I also have been meaning to take a look at Barbara King's book Evolving Religion (she's a primatologist).
ReplyDeleteRegarding you final point, it's Harris' work that suggests learning is more important than generally believed. That isn't to say that cognitive biases aren't important - they surely are. But Harris in his 2006 review points out an array of evidence which shows that the beliefs of even very young children are influenced in culture.
The implication is that the some of the cognitive experiments in young children should be treated cautiously.