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  1. A Cultural Species and its Cognitive Phenotypes: Implications for Philosophy.Joseph Henrich, Damián E. Blasi, Cameron M. Curtin, Helen Elizabeth Davis, Ze Hong, Daniel Kelly & Ivan Kroupin - 2022 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 14 (2):349-386.
    After introducing the new field of cultural evolution, we review a growing body of empirical evidence suggesting that culture shapes what people attend to, perceive and remember as well as how they think, feel and reason. Focusing on perception, spatial navigation, mentalizing, thinking styles, reasoning (epistemic norms) and language, we discuss not only important variation in these domains, but emphasize that most researchers (including philosophers) and research participants are psychologically peculiar within a global and historical context. This rising tide of (...)
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  • The ritual stance does not apply to magic in general.Ze Hong - 2022 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 45:e258.
    Contrary to the author's proposed classification scheme, I argue that most magical practices are better viewed as “instrumental” rather than “ritualistic.” Much ethnographic and historical evidence shows that magicians and ritual experts often have elaborate causal theories regarding how magic actions lead to the putative outcome, and the “physical/mechanical” versus “supernatural” distinction in causal mechanisms needs serious reconsideration.
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  • The Cultural Evolution of Medical Technologies.Ze Hong - 2023 - Human Nature 34 (1):64-87.
    When people get ill, they naturally want to restore health through medical interventions. Here I model a situation in which individuals can psychologically entertain multiple potential treatments at once: when illness occurs, individuals would attempt one treatment first, and if it fails to produce an observable effect within a particular time period, a second treatment is attempted, and the eventual recovery is attributed to the treatment that is temporally closer. This creates population dynamics wherein the therapeutic power of the superior/effective (...)
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  • Ghosts, Divination, and Magic among the Nuosu: An Ethnographic Examination from Cognitive and Cultural Evolutionary Perspectives.Ze Hong - 2022 - Human Nature 33 (4):349-379.
    I present a detailed ethnographic study of magic and divination of the Nuosu people in southwest China and offer a cognitive account of the surprising prevalence of these objectively ineffective practices in a society that has ample access to modern technology and mainstream Han culture. I argue that in the belief system of the Nuosu, ghosts, divination, and magical healing rituals form a closely interconnected web that gives sense and meaning to otherwise puzzling practices, and such a belief system is (...)
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  • Dream Interpretation from a Cognitive and Cultural Evolutionary Perspective: The Case of Oneiromancy in Traditional China.Ze Hong - 2022 - Cognitive Science 46 (1):e13088.
    Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 1, January 2022.
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  • Combining Conformist and Payoff Bias in Cultural Evolution.Ze Hong - 2022 - Human Nature 33 (4):463-484.
    Most research on transmission biases in cultural evolution has treated different biases as distinct strategies. Here I present a model that combines both frequency dependent bias (including conformist bias) and payoff bias in a single decision-making calculus and show that such an integrated learning strategy may be superior to relying on either bias alone. Natural selection may operate on humans’ relative dependence on frequency and payoff information, but both are likely to contribute to the spread of variants with high payoffs. (...)
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  • Moral disciplining: The cognitive and evolutionary foundations of puritanical morality.Léo Fitouchi, Jean-Baptiste André & Nicolas Baumard - 2023 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 46:e293.
    Why do many societies moralize apparently harmless pleasures, such as lust, gluttony, alcohol, drugs, and even music and dance? Why do they erect temperance, asceticism, sobriety, modesty, and piety as cardinal moral virtues? According to existing theories, this puritanical morality cannot be reduced to concerns for harm and fairness: It must emerge from cognitive systems that did not evolve for cooperation (e.g., disgust-based “purity” concerns). Here, we argue that, despite appearances, puritanical morality is no exception to the cooperative function of (...)
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  • When instrumental inference hides behind seemingly arbitrary conventions.Edgar Dubourg, Léo Fitouchi & Nicolas Baumard - 2022 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 45:e256.
    We review recent evidence that game rules, rules of etiquette, and supernatural beliefs, that the authors see as “ritualistic” conventions, are in fact shaped by instrumental inference. In line with such examples, we contend that cultural practices that may appear, from the outside, to be devoid of instrumental utility, could in fact be selectively acquired and preserved because of their perceived utility.
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