Scott Atran - US grants

9319798 ATRAN This research will explore how people categorize animals and plants and reason about them. The focus is on how the structure of categories, such as the set of taxonomic relations that hold between DEER and MAMMAL or OAK and TREE, constrain inferences about the distribution of biological properties among the categories. For example, when people discover that both deer and cows have multi-chambered stomachs or hoof-and-mouth disease, to what extent do people then predict that other animals also have multi-chambered stomachs or hoof-and-mouth disease? More generally, to what extent does this categorical structure constrain inferences that causally relate biological taxa to one another, and to what extent are culturally-specific belief systems, or "theories," able to modify that structure and hence change the nature of biological reasoning? These interrelated issues of category formation and induction are central to a broader understanding of conceptual development both in everyday thinking and in science. This research will compare biological categorization and reasoning among groups of American folk and Itza, the last Maya native to Guatemala's rainforest. This comparison also will involve looking into the influences of science on American folkbiology as well as the effects of cultural expertise on Itza folkbiology. In particular, the studies will address three questions: 1) To what extent is there a universal folkbiological taxonomy? 2) How is this taxonomy used in reasoning? 3) Where, and how, do differences in theories and cultural belief systems affect folkbiological categorization and reasoning? The project will build on previous fieldwork and laboratory studies, bringing together recent theoretical and methodological innovations in anthropology and psychology to promote an interdisciplinary cognitive science. It will provide a way to measure levels of consensus in categorization and reasoning among individuals within cultures, be tween cultures, and between the folktaxonomies of different cultures and scientific taxonomies. Biological inventories of local flora and fauna provide crucial comparative data. The work will employ multidisciplinary techniques across cultures to analyze theoretically the relationship between category formation and category-based reasoning for a cognitive domain, biology, which is at the center of human knowledge and understanding of the natural world. Although this project is specifically designed to address issues in basic cognition, tasks involving categorization of living kinds and reasoning about biological properties and diseases can inform our broader understanding of environment, health, and science education. ***

This research explores how indigenous Maya Indians in Yucatan, Mexico, local immigrants and non-governmental organizations manage forest resource systems. The project focuses on the roles of information and communication in the use and governance of common-pool resources. Three questions will be studied: What is the structure and content of local ecological knowledge that enables successful commons management? What is the character of the communications networks that make possible assimilation, distribution and implementation of this information? and to what extent is loss of local knowledge and disruption of communication networks related to a breakdown of the commons? The general background issues are what lessons do micro-level approaches to increasingly threatened commons systems hold for the future of global commons such as the earth's forests, ranges, water and air? Methods will include ethnographic fieldwork in Campeche, Yucatan, Mexico. Field researchers will interview individuals for their cognitive models of resources using intensive open-ended interviews as well as close-ended questionnaires and psychological tests to study mental models, social networks, and the social distribution of ecological knowledge. Consensus analysis will be performed on local communities to study the distribution and patterning of ecological knowledge. In addition the range of biotic resources available to the community will be surveyed as a form of `ground-truthing`. This research is important because systematic analysis of local community-based knowledge and beliefs and the linkages between this knowledge and practices will help societies plan to conserve natural resources. This is the human dimension of both local and global change in the preservation or breakdown of common property resources.

This research by a cultural anthropologist, psychologists and linguists explores biological categorization and reasoning about ecological relationships. The investigators will ask where and how differences in cultural belief systems and experience with nature affect folk-biological categorization and reasoning. Using elicitation techniques from anthropology and psychology involving prepared stimulus materials as well as open-ended discussions and observations of people's interactions with their natural environment, the investigators will seek to show how the perceptual and morphological organization of living kinds, which is apparent in the folk taxonomies of cultures the world over, is integrated with a more causal and relational understanding of biology. Native Maya and Spanish speaking residents of Peten, Guatemala will be studied. The extent to which local knowledge of plants and animals represents the structure of ecological communities will be a special focus of the study. The project builds on prior fieldwork and laboratory experiments, using methods including consensus analysis and computational models of categorization and reasoning. This study is important because it will advance our understanding of how people categorize and reason about the living world, and will provide a cognitive baseline for understanding similarities and differences in the ways humans interact with nature.

The research analyzes the interaction of knowledge, behaviors and values in environmental decision making. Data are collected from two sites where Native American and majority culture populations share a habitat but conflict over resource use: the Wolf River area of Wisconsin and the Lowland Maya forest region of Guatemala. Studies integrate formal modeling techniques from psychology, anthropology and sociology to show that: (1) people share cultural models of the environment to a surprisingly detailed degree; (2) these mental models inform and predict actual behaviors, with measurable ecological consequences; and (3) individual and cultural differences in models are motivated by different patterns of resource valuation. Research findings are expected to establish: (4) a first approximation of ecological cognition across cultures, (5) a cognitive dimension to stimulate new research on how people decide to manage common resources; and (6) a comprehensive basis for conflict-resolution negotiation that involves understanding the relations between environmental cognitions, behaviors and values.

This project will study children's acquisition knowledge in the domain of biology. The goal is to understand better what biological knowledge children bring to the classroom and how this knowledge is organized to support reasoning and explanation. Although children's understanding of biology has been examined in quite a few studies, little attention has been directed at the question of how biological knowledge might vary in children being raised in different cultural settings and among adults with different levels of experience. Since the existing work in the area suggests that adult conceptions of biological kinds and ecological relationships varies with culture and experience, children's understandings of nature likely also varies with culture and experience. Identifying cross-cultural differences and commonalities in biological knowledge is important if we are to meet the educational goals of the 21st century. It is also important to build theories that reflect accurately the diversity in knowledge and experience of people around the world. The project will include a number of under-studied populations, including urban and rural majority culture children, urban Mexican immigrant children, rural Native American children, rural Yukatek Maya and Ladino children. Children and adults will be given a variety of tasks to probe their underlying biological concepts (e.g. "alive"), processes, and relationships. In addition, the research will examine parent-child dyads and other sources of information that help to shape children's conceptions of biology. The research will test specific theories about which aspects of biological knowledge are likely to be universal, which aspects vary with culture and experience, and how these variations interact with formal instruction. This research is directly relevant to science education. It is important to engage the understandings that children bring to the classroom in order to build on their real world experience and to address misconceptions when they arise. To ignore real world experience would risk failure to understand the educational possibilities for learning about science in general, and biology in particular.

Researchers have shown that different cultural groups, exploiting a common environment, have very different cognitive models of animal-plant-human interactions, and that these mental models are strongly correlated with, and perhaps cause strikingly different environmental behaviors. This research focuses on how different Lowland Maya cultural groups respond across generations to conditions of radical change, including language loss, environmental degradation, spatial displacement and dislocation. The project studies the mental models of the environment, and the values and behaviors associated with environmental and health-related decision making, of Lowland Maya people in the Guatemalan Department of El Peten. The research will document similarities and differences in folk-ecological models, environmental values and behaviors within and across cultures; will examine the flow of information within and across Indian and Ladino (Mestizo) groups; and will determine how relations between cognitive models and their transmission promote or undermine successful solutions to resource dilemmas and related conflicts. The research will study how Lowland Maya notions of illness are embedded and sustained within a vestigial cosmological framework of relationships involving humans, spirits and the surrounding social and material environment; and will contribute to a reliable cross-cultural methodology for understanding folk mental models of illness and behaviors that result from them.

Methods include experiments that integrate modeling techniques from anthropology, psychology, sociology and market research including the cultural-consensus model, mental models and social network models. The research is designed to assess within and between-population agreement on knowledge of plants, including principles of classification, on values, and on types of causal reasoning that drive decisions about how to tend the environment and treat human health disorders.

The broader impacts of the new knowledge to be created relate to environmental planners and decision makers who deal with "the Tragedy of the Commons" and related social dilemmas pertaining to resource use. This research will also show how environmental and human health are integrally related among Lowland Maya, which will be important for health planners.

This Small Grant for Exploratory Research is a preliminary investigation of the role of devotional values in cultural conflicts. The focus is on interviewing operatives from Islamic Jihadist organizations that sponsor suicide attacks in order to evaluate the contribution of devotional values (DVs) in motivating suicide terrorism. The hypothesis is that devotional values - which encompass aspects of what political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists and psychologists call non-instrumental, sacred or protected values - are critical in generating and sustaining seemingly intractable cultural conflicts. Interviews with captured and freely-operating militant Islamic Jihadists in Israel / Palestine, Turkey, Singapore, the Philippines and Indonesia will probe the nature of extreme devotional values. The interviews will elicit information that permits a more comprehensive and longer-term study, involving a more a pointed set of questions that can be analyzed for patterns showing tradeoff reluctance, quantity insensitivity, immunity from free rider concerns, framing effects, evidence of moral outrage and, more generally, which sorts of cognitive entailments make a suicide terrorist action difficult to carry out and perhaps even not worthwhile to do at all.

Intellectual Merit. This research helps to provide the theoretical framework and empirical information needed to understand the point at which commitment becomes absolute and non-negotiable, in order to find out what is needed to reach people before they come to it. It furnishes a cross-cultural methodology for eliciting devotional values from Jihadist militants, which can be readily transferred to other populations of religiously and ideologically-driven actors. It informs how cognition and emotional judgments interact in devotional values to affect decision making and risk. More generally, the work makes clear how important understanding the mental and motivational structure of players in a given situation is for predicting and understanding their behavior.

Broader Impacts. Current risk assessment approaches for resolving ethnic conflicts, or for countering religiously motivated terrorism, often assume that adversaries model the world through rational choices that are commensurable across cultures. Such assumptions are prevalent in conflict and risk modeling by U.S. diplomatic, military and intelligence services. This research suggests that culturally distinct value frameworks constrain preferences and choices in ways not readily translatable across frameworks. This research enables a better of assessment of the motivations of religiously-motivated suicide terrorism - the most deadly, destabilizing and rapidly developing form of terrorism. The results will be of immense interest to policy makers, officials and members of the public seeking to better understand the nature of homicidal political acts.

This research probes human behavior that seems motivated "independently of its prospect of success," that is, by Sacred Values that often involve ethical or religious beliefs. The hypothesis is that sacred values - which encompass aspects of what philosophers, political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists and psychologists call moral, non-instrumental or protected values - are critical in generating and sustaining culturally distinct and often conflicting political and resource-management systems that people deem essential to cultural survival. To better understand and deal with this issue, the research: 1) provides a comprehensive theoretical framework and wide-ranging empirical analysis of the role of sacred values in judgment and decision making, and 2) shows how sacred values inform issues relating to cultural conflict. Results are geared to: 3) further possibilities for negotiation and adjudication of conflicting values over transcultural boundaries, and 4) reduce the threat of violence as people attempt to implement these values in an increasingly global competition for political, social and economic resources.

Current risk management approaches to resolving resource conflicts or countering terrorism often assume adversaries model the world on the basis of rational choices that are commensurable across cultures. Such assumptions are prevalent in risk assessment and modeling by foreign aid and international development projects run by institutions such as the World Bank and many NGOs, and by U.S. diplomatic, military and intelligence services as well. Psychological experiments, anthropological fieldwork and political science surveys relating to social conflicts over natural resources and terrorism encourage exploration of whether culturally distinct value frameworks constrain preferences and choices in ways not readily translatable (fungible, substitutable) across frameworks. Planning and acting in ignorance or disregard of different value frameworks may exacerbate conflict, with grievous loss of national treasure and lives.

This research investigates the way political conflicts are influenced by sacred values, which are values that incorporate ethical or religious beliefs and are associated with human behavior that seems motivated independently of its prospect of success. Past research has approached the study of political conflicts as though they were between instrumental actors -- people and groups aiming to maximize their instrumental gains and minimize losses. Indeed, rational actor models have long dominated strategic thinking at all levels of government policy. However, many key components of decision-making vary with context, across social relations and domains, and as a function of whether or not a choice has ethical or moral entailments. The guiding hypothesis of this research is that people in political conflicts make non-instrumental judgments and decisions when they conceptualize the issues under dispute as sacred values, such as when groups of people transform land from a simple resource into a "holy site." Previous research carried out by this interdisciplinary team of investigators has advanced theoretical understanding of sacred values, developed novel methods of studying their impact on political decision-making and negotiations, and demonstrated their role in non-instrumental and often violent choices in political contexts. However, scientific investigation of sacred values is still in its infancy and more needs to be done. Specifically, this research: 1) investigates biological and cultural antecedents of sacred values and the social identity functions of sacred values across cultures, 2) probes the role of sacred values in influencing violent and seemingly intractable political conflict, and 3) uses this knowledge to investigate possibilities of reducing political and cultural conflict. The methodology integrates basic and applied research, combining brain imaging studies with laboratory and field experiments, surveys and interviews in order to provide "real-world" relevance for policymakers as well.

Common approaches to resource and political conflicts often assume adversaries understand the world on the basis of rational choices. Given this assumption, one can predict the behavior of potential allies and adversaries by analyzing the costs and benefits of a given action from their perspective. In prior research involving psychological experiments, anthropological fieldwork and political science surveys relating to political and resource conflicts, the PIs have found that that when sacred or protected values (e.g.
"My values are not for sale"; "Do the right thing regardless of the consequences") are in play, the assumption that the values people place on different actions is simply the sum of the values of their consequences may be wrong. As a result, the practice of providing incentives to increase the attractiveness of certain courses of action and/or penalties to make other courses of action less attractive to try and achieve a desired outcome in a conflict may backfire. Planning and acting in ignorance of or disregard for non-consequentialist value frameworks may exacerbate conflict, with grievous loss of treasure and lives.

In the proposed research, the PIs examine how different moral frames, with different types and uses of sacred values, shape personal and collective identity, influence cultural and political decision making, and sustain inter-group conflict. The studies will broaden theoretical and empirical analyses of moral cognition, including how protected or sacred values (SVs) affect people's lives and play out in diverse cultural contexts. SVs are distinct from secular values because of their association with transcendental beliefs, relative immunity to tradeoffs with instrumental values, emotional salience, and significance for personal and collective identity. The project will examine how SVs operate in real-world contexts, identifying those circumstances where they result in decision makers ignoring material consequences and distance in time or place and produce paradoxical results as well as those where they produce outcomes that track those that follow from the consequentialist assumption. The methodology integrates basic and applied research, combining laboratory and field experiments, surveys and interviews in a number of different cultural settings (North America, the Middle East, and India) in order to provide "real-world" relevance.

The results will contribute to a comprehensive theoretical framework and wide-ranging empirical analysis of the psychological and cultural mechanisms underlying moral reasoning and decision making, the formation of cultural identity, and the nature of sacred values.