Testosterone promotes abstract thought

Testosterone levels during development has been associated with increased risk taking, various physical abilities, and digit length ratios.  This new research also find it also correlates with capacity for abstract thought (measured with Raven's Progressive Matrices).

Organizing Effects of Testosterone and Economic Behavior: Not Just Risk Taking
http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0029842

Danger and Creativity

Mueller et al demonstrate in a couple of experiments that

People often reject creative ideas, even when espousing creativity as a desired goal.

This makes sense.  According to Read Montague, brain scans of our reactions to familiar things have the same signal as when we react to actually good things. In a risky environment this seems powerfully adaptive to me. On the other hand, a capacity take unnecessary risks indicates a biological surplus so should be a plus in the sexual selection stakes provided it doesn't happen to kill you.

For example, this lad is demonstrating a biological surplus.  Of course, he may not describe it like that.  

The evolution of overconfidence (abstract)

The evolution of overconfidence

Dominic D. P. Johnson & James H. Fowler

Nature 477,317–320(15 September 2011)

Abstract

Confidence is an essential ingredient of success in a wide range of domains ranging from job performance and mental health to sports, business and combat. Some authors have suggested that not just confidence but overconfidence—believing you are better than you are in reality—is advantageous because it serves to increase ambition, morale, resolve, persistence or the credibility of bluffing, generating a self-fulfilling prophecy in which exaggerated confidence actually increases the probability of success. However, overconfidence also leads to faulty assessments, unrealistic expectations and hazardous decisions, so it remains a puzzle how such a false belief could evolve or remain stable in a population of competing strategies that include accurate, unbiased beliefs. Here we present an evolutionary model showing that, counterintuitively, overconfidence maximizes individual fitness and populations tend to become overconfident, as long as benefits from contested resources are sufficiently large compared with the cost of competition. In contrast, unbiased strategies are only stable under limited conditions. The fact that overconfident populations are evolutionarily stable in a wide range of environments may help to explain why overconfidence remains prevalent today, even if it contributes to hubris, market bubbles, financial collapses, policy failures, disasters and costly wars.

Essentialism and Evolution

Bloom’s idea is that we are all essentialists. That is, we pay special attention to the history of an object – where it has been, what it has touched, and who has touched it. As Bloom explains, we subscribe to “the notion that things have an underlying reality or true nature that one cannot observe directly and it is this hidden nature that really matters.” And, moreover, “the pleasure we get from many things and activities is based in part on what we see as their essences.”

Why are we essentialists?

McNerney: Is there an evolutionary advantage of being an essentialist?
Bloom: I think the case is most obviously made about other people. If I want to safely interact with you, I must be cautious of your history. For example, it is advantageous for me to know how you’ve treated me in the past, who your friends are, who you know and what you know. There is a long list of things that are invisible but are part of you, and they could be important for, say, my survival.

McNerney: So you could say that when we assess others we look at them physically, but we also examine their “resumes,” if you will.
Bloom: Exactly, that’s right. And the same is true with animals. You want to know more than just the physical – the history is important too. For example, is it dangerous? Does it tend to move quickly? Likewise for food, you want to know its history and what it has touched before you eat it.

McNerney: So evolution did not favor people who weren’t able to think as essentialists?
Bloom: Yes, think about what a disadvantage it would be if you only assess things as they are. Here’s the interesting part, you could argue that humans have taken it too far. We are so caught up in history that we collect irrelevant things. We care about the difference between an original and a forgery.

[from http://whywereason.wordpress.com/2011/09/17/the-psychology-of-pleasure-interview-with-paul-bloom/]

The Jolly Captain of Fate

Itzhak Fried, Roy Mukamel and Gabriel Kreiman have extended earlier work of Freid et al into the relationship between intention and consciousness:

Some researchers have literally gone deeper into the brain. One of those is Itzhak Fried, a neuroscientist and surgeon at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Tel Aviv Medical Center in Israel. He studied individuals with electrodes implanted in their brains as part of a surgical procedure to treat epilepsy4. Recording from single neurons in this way gives scientists a much more precise picture of brain activity than fMRI or EEG. Fried's experiments showed that there was activity in individual neurons of particular brain areas about a second and a half before the subject made a conscious decision to press a button. With about 700 milliseconds to go, the researchers could predict the timing of that decision with more than 80% accuracy. "At some point, things that are predetermined are admitted into consciousness," says Fried. The conscious will might be added on to a decision at a later stage, he suggests.

http://www.cell.com/neuron/abstract/S0896-6273%2810%2901082-2?script=true

The psychology of dealing with things going wrong

Over the weekend I auditioned for a pantomime, and narrowly missed out on the role of the pantomime dame. Unfortunately, a friend of mine got another lead role, leading to more jealousy than I am comfortable with, and my thoughts have gone to the psychology of dealing with things going wrong: something we all have to be familiar with in the course of our careers when we fail to get a promotion, or are beaten onto a good project by someone else.

According to Zuckerman (1979) we take credit for our successes but deny blame for our failures. I’ve certainly been doing that today – I have preferred to blame the heat of the rehearsal room, when in fact in all likelihood I just wasn’t right for the role. This is the same reason we attribute luck to someone else beating us.

There is a huge amount of fascinating reading out there about how we cope with failures, and one of the areas I find particularly interesting is the effect of self-esteem. People with high self-esteem will follow the pattern above.

Conversely, people with low self-esteem will typically enter a cycle of self-blame, reinforcement and repetition. The phrase “I must have done something wrong” comes into their heads.

In real life, of course, we don’t have “high” or “low” self-esteem, we sit somewhere on a spectrum. And there are advantages to different positions – lower self-esteem will at least open ones eyes to the opportunity of learning from mistakes (and as an introvert with not especially high or low self-esteem, I self-reflect regularly) while higher self-esteem leads us to taking care of ourselves better (see Harris and Napper, 2005).

http://www.setsights.co.uk/2011/09/11/i%E2%80%99m-good-you%E2%80%99re-lucky/

Dutton's cross-cultural cluster criteria for art

1. Direct pleasure - valued as a source of immediate experience
2. Skill and Virtuosity - demonstrates specialized skills
3. Style - made according to rules of form, composition and expression (while usually allowing or  celebrating departures)
   
4. Novelty or Creativity - Valued and praised for originality.  Kitsch and craft use the style in an uncreative way.
   
5. Criticism - artistic forms exist with parallel discourses of appreciation and judgement.
   
6. Representation - In wildly varying degrees of naturalism, art objects represent real or imaginary experiences of the world.
   
7. Special focus - art is bracketed off from ordinary life, "made special" by location, time,appurtenance, rituals, e.g. art gallery, opening, picture frame.
   
8. Expressive individuality - potential to express individual personality through the work.
   
9. Emotional saturation - not only the emotion of the content but the emotional tone of the work or performance.
   
10. Intellectual challenge - utilize the combined variety of perceptual and intellectual capacities at a high level.
    
11. Art traditions and institutions - works of art gain value from positions in the history of their traditions.
12. Imaginative experience - (most importantly) artworks provide an imaginative experience for their makers and their audience.

Not all artwork will have all characteristics but they will generally show most.

from Denis Dutton's The Art Instinct

Dutton/Carrol on Darwinian literary theory

Interesting review from Denis Dutton of Joseph Carroll's Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature.

Taster:

Carroll holds that the only way to attain a general theory of literature is through an account of human nature that builds from the ground up, from the most basic conditions for the evolution of the human species. A Darwinian literary theory first needs a Darwinian psychology. Once we have a basic Darwinian psychology in place, we can see that the narrative proclivities of human beings, far from being an incidental by-product of the evolved mind, are central to some of its most human functions. The structures of basic motives and dispositions are what would be appropriate for a species, as Carroll describes it, that “is highly social and mildly polygynous, that displays concealed ovulation, continuous female receptivity, and post-menopausal life expectancy corresponding to a uniquely extended period of childhood development, that has extraordinary aptitudes for technology, that has developed language and the capacity for peering into the minds of its conspecifics, and that displays a unique disposition for fabricating and consuming aesthetic and imaginative artefacts.” Such a list alone, he contends, would make it impossible to imagine a blank-slate view of the mind, in which the mind evolves in a vacuum, goes onto produce culture, which then gives back to the mind all content and structure. 

http://denisdutton.com/carroll_review.htm

Supernatural Policing

Jeffrey Schloss and Michael Murray examine the idea that belief in supernatural agents is adaptive because these agents are punishers: supernatural policeman if you will. This policing can have two effects. First, belief in supernatural punishment can enhance within group cooperation. Second, it can reduce cheating or free-riding.

However :

Aguair and Cronk observe that judgmental gods or policing spirits are historically recent: “Considerable evidence exists that such beliefs are rare among hunter-gatherer, smallscale, and egalitarian societies, and common among food producing, large-scale, and hierarchical societies.”

We cannot simply assume that because supernatural watchers-punishers exist and have utility in post-Neolithic or complex societies, the same was true during the Paleolithic. Although the ethnographic and ethnohistoric hunter-gatherer record is an imperfect guide, it strongly suggests that supernatural watching-punishing is a recent invention.

Teratoma associated encephalitis

Health Report 2011-06-06:

A mysterious and often life threatening disease affects the lives of mostly young women. These patients often end up in psychiatric hospitals misdiagnosed or in intensive care units with bizarre behaviour and metabolic meltdown. It's been discovered that these patients had a benign tumour in the ovary called teratoma. A teratoma can contain teeth, hair and most significantly for the women suffering from this condition, brain tissue. The body sees this tumour like a foreign type of tissue and mounts an attack, an immune response against these brain cells that are in the tumour. However, the immunological system is also attacks the brain of the patients.

The Artist of Bullshit

“If you can lie, you can act,” Brando told Jod Kaftan, a writer for Rolling Stone and one of the few people to have viewed the footage. “Are you good at lying?” asked Kaftan. “Jesus,” said Brando, “I’m fabulous at it.”

http://moreintelligentlife.com/content/ideas/ian-leslie/are-artists-liars?page=full
Book:  Born Liars: Why We Can’t Live Without Deceit Ian Leslie

Evolution and Argument

[From www.edge.org]

One of the papers "Why Do Humans Reason? Arguments for an Argumentative Theory," published by Behavioral and Brain Sciences, was by Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber. "The article,” Haidt said, "is a review of a puzzle that has bedeviled researchers in cognitive psychology and social cognition for a long time. The puzzle is, why are humans so amazingly bad at reasoning in some contexts, and so amazingly good in others?"

"Reasoning was not designed to pursue the truth. Reasoning was designed by evolution to help us win arguments. That's why they call it The Argumentative Theory of Reasoning. So, as they put it, "The evidence reviewed here shows not only that reasoning falls quite short of reliably delivering rational beliefs and rational decisions. It may even be, in a variety of cases, detrimental to rationality. Reasoning can lead to poor outcomes, not because humans are bad at it, but because they systematically strive for arguments that justify their beliefs or their actions. This explains the confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, and reason-based choice, among other things."

 I've probably wasted a lot of breath while suffering from the illusion that arguments were a search for the truth...