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 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.

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.

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 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.