Archive Electronique - Institut Jean Nicod
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1997 research outputs found
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The cultural evolution of love in literary history
No full textInternational audienceSince the late nineteenth century, cultural historians have noted that the importance of love increased during the Medieval and Early Modern European period (a phenomenon that was once referred to as the emergence of ‘courtly love’). However, more recent works have shown a similar increase in Chinese, Arabic, Persian, Indian and Japanese cultures. Why such a convergent evolution in very different cultures? Using qualitative and quantitative approaches, we leverage literary history and build a database of ancient literary fiction for 19 geographical areas and 77 historical periods covering 3,800 years, from the Middle Bronze Age to the Early Modern period. We first confirm that romantic elements have increased in Eurasian literary fiction over the past millennium, and that similar increases also occurred earlier, in Ancient Greece, Rome and Classical India. We then explore the ecological determinants of this increase. Consistent with hypotheses from cultural history and behavioural ecology, we show that a higher level of economic development is strongly associated with a greater incidence of love in narrative fiction (our proxy for the importance of love in a culture). To further test the causal role of economic development, we used a difference-in-difference method that exploits exogenous regional variations in economic development resulting from the adoption of the heavy plough in medieval Europe. Finally, we used probabilistic generative models to reconstruct the latent evolution of love and to assess the respective role of cultural diffusion and economic development
Do perceived control and time orientation mediate the effect of early life adversity on reproductive behaviour and health status? Insights from the European Value Study and the European Social Survey
No full textInternational audienceAn association between early life adversity and a range of coordinated behavioural responses that favour reproduction at the cost of a degraded health is often reported in humans. Recent theoretical works have proposed that perceived control—i.e., people’s belief that they are in control of external events that affect their lives—and time orientation—i.e., their tendency to live on a day-to-day basis or to plan for the future—are two closely related psychological traits mediating the associations between early life adversity, reproductive behaviours and health status. However, the empirical validity of this hypothesis remains to be demonstrated. In the present study, we examine the role of perceived control and time orientation in mediating the effects of early life adversity on a trade-off between reproductive traits (age at 1st childbirth, number of children) and health status by applying a cross-validated structural equation model frame on two large public survey datasets, the European Values Study (EVS, final N = 43,084) and the European Social Survey (ESS, final N = 31,065). Our results show that early life adversity, perceived control and time orientation are all associated with a trade-off favouring reproduction over health. However, perceived control and time orientation mediate only a small portion of the effect of early life adversity on the reproduction-health trade-off
Les bases incarnées de l’institution monétaire
No full textInternational audienceMoney is a fundamental and ubiquitous institution in modern economies. It has the distinctive characteristic of being at the same time a complex social phenomenon and a very easily manipulated object in everyday life. By bringing together works carried out both in cognitive sciences and in philosophy of mind, and while continuing certain classical authors’ ideas, this article proposes to conceive money as a cognitive institution whose study would anchor in the paradigm of embodied cognition and extended cognition. Including the study of this artefact into embodied cognition and extended cognition would imply a refusal of any cerebrocentrism, and more broadly, to approach its multiple facets such as its affective dimension in relation to the embodiment of value. Moreover, presenting money as a cognitive institution would mean not only that it would be an extension of certain cognitive processes but also a condition of possibility for others. The cognitive processes in question relate to the objectivation of value in a market society, in order to orient the desire of agents and to the structuring of certain inter-individual actions.La monnaie est une institution fondamentale et omniprésente dans les économies modernes. Elle a la particularité d’être à la fois un phénomène social complexe and un objet très facilement manipulé au quotidien. En rapprochant des travaux réalisés en sciences cognitives d’une part et en philosophie de l’esprit d’autre part, tout en prolongeant certaines idées d’auteurs classiques, cet article propose de concevoir la monnaie comme une institution cognitive dont l’étude s’ancrerait dans le paradigme de la cognition incarnée et de la cognition étendue. Inscrire l’étude de cet artefact dans la cognition incarnée et la cognition étendue impliquerait un refus de tout cérébrocentrisme, et plus largement d’aborder ses multiples facettes comme sa dimension affective en relation avec l’incarnation de la valeur. En outre, présenter la monnaie comme une institution cognitive signifierait non seulement que celle-ci serait un prolongement de certains processus cognitifs mais aussi une condition de possibilité pour d’autres. Les processus cognitifs en question ont trait à l’objectivation de la valeur dans une société marchande afin d’orienter le désir des agents et à la structuration de certaines actions interindividuelles
Explicating agency: the case of visual attention
No full textInternational audienceHow do individuals guide their activities towards some goal? Harry Frankfurt once identified the task of explaining guidance as the central problem in action theory. An explanation has proved to be elusive, however. In this paper I show how we can marshal empirical research to make explanatory progress. I contend that human agents have a primitive capacity to guide visual attention, and that this capacity is actually constituted by a sub-individual psychological control-system: the executive system. I thus illustrate how we can explain exercises of individual-level guidance by appeal to its sub-individual constitution. This opens up a new avenue for explicating agency
Variations on familiarity in self-transcendent experiences
No full textInternational audienceIn both literature and science, descriptions abound of so-called "self-transcendent" experiences, which seem to deeply alter the boundaries between oneself and the rest of the world. The subjects of these experiences often report that they feel extended to the world, united with it, or on the contrary retracted from it, as if they were tiny or insignifcant. Sometimes, they report the disappearance of the very distinction between themselves and the world (ego-dissolution). The aim of the present essay is to give an account of self-transcendent experiences and identify the level of self-consciousness to which they belong. The main claim to be defended is that self-transcendent experiences involve special instances of metacognitive feelings of familiarity or unfamiliarity. Theoretical and empirical research on the latter can then be used to shed light on the former
Disjunctive discourse referents in French Sign Language
No full textInternational audienceDisjoined noun phrases, like indefinites, may introduce indeterminate discourse referents. Disjunction provides more flexibility in some respects than indefinites, though, as the two disjuncts may bear different morphological features, and a disjunctive discourse referent may have a split antecedent. Sign language, too, has been shown to bear on arguments pertaining to discourse anaphora. Notably, discourse referents may be established at locations in the signing space (loci), closely paralleling the use of variables in dynamic semantics. Here, we compare several theories of disjunctive anaphora and of space in sign language with new data from French Sign Language (LSF). We argue that loci must be mediated by a featural layer that iconically preserves mereological properties
Simple questionnaires outperform behavioral tasks to measure socio-emotional skills in students
No full textInternational audienceRecent empirical research has shown that improving socio-emotional skills such as grit, conscientiousness and self-control leads to higher academic achievement and better life outcomes. However, both theoretical and empirical works have raised concerns about the reliability of the different methods used to measure socio-emotional skills. We compared the reliability and validity of the three leading measurements methods - a student-reported questionnaire, a teacher-reported questionnaire, and a behavioral task - in a sample of 3,997 French students. Before analyzing the data, we polled 114 experts in cognitive development and education economics; most experts in both fields predicted that the behavioral task would be the best method. We found instead that the teacher questionnaire was more predictive of students' behavioral outcomes and of their grade progression, while the behavioral task was the least predictive. This work suggests that researchers may not be using optimal tools to measure socio-emotional skills in children
Ethnographies des mondes à venir
No full textInternational audienceAu cours d’une conversation très libre, Alessandro Pignocchi, auteur de BD écologiste, invite Philippe Descola, professeur au Collège de France, à refaire le monde.Si l’on veut enrayer la catastrophe écologique en cours, il va falloir, nous dit-on, changer de fond en comble nos relations à la nature, aux milieux de vie ou encore aux vivants non-humains. Mais qu’est-ce que cela signifie concrètement ? Dans quels projets de société cette nécessaire transformation peut-elle s’inscrire ? Et quels sont les leviers d’action pour la faire advenir ?En puisant son inspiration dans les données anthropologiques, les luttes territoriales et les combats autochtones, ce livre esquisse la perspective d’une société hybride qui verrait s’articuler des structures étatiques et des territoires autonomes dans un foisonnement hétérogène de modes d’organisation sociale, de manières d’habiter et de cohabiter.Des planches de BD, en contrepoint de ce dialogue vif, nous tendent un miroir drôlissime de notre société malade en convoquant un anthropologue jivaro, des mésanges punks ou des hommes politiques nomades et anthropophages en quête de métamorphoses
Seeing Circles: Inattentive Response-Coupling
No full textInternational audienceWhat is attention? On one influential position, attention constitutively is the selection of some stimulus for coupling with a response. Wayne Wu has proposed a master argument for this position that relies on the claim that cognitive science commits to an empirical sufficient condition (ESC), according to which, if a subject S perceptually selects (or response-couples) X to guide performance of some experimental task T, she therein attends to X. In this paper I show that this claim about cognitive science is false. Cognitive science allows for inattentive selection-for-task, or inattentive response-coupling. This means that Wu's account is without independent support