Staging increases the value of homes on the market and they sell faster

Bhattacharya, Puja and Li, Sherry Xin and Wang, Yu and Wu, Cedric and Zheng, Xiang, Visual Cues and Valuation: Evidence from the Housing Market (December 07, 2025). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=5880062 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5880062

Abstract: We examine the economic impact of non-consumable visual cues through home staging on high-stakes housing transactions. Using hand-collected listing photos for 15,777 transactions and a machine-learning algorithm to detect furniture, we provide the first large-scale evidence that staged homes sell for roughly 10% more and one week faster than comparable homes without furniture. Our pre-registered online experiment establishes causality and uncovers mechanisms. We find that furniture clarifies spatial use, while decor enhances emotional attachment, jointly driving the higher willingness-to-pay. These findings demonstrate how visual cues impact high-stakes decisions and systematically shape valuations in the largest asset market for households.

The opening paragraphs:

Behavioral economics has advanced significantly in demonstrating how cognitive, psy- chological, and emotional factors systematically influence economic decision-making (Ra- bin (1998), Heath et al. (1999), Rabin and Schrag (1999), Kahneman (2003), Gneezy et al. (2014), Chang et al. (2016), and Hirshleifer (2020)). Yet, many foundational mod- els of consumer choice still presume a high degree of rationality in high-stakes environ- ments, where the sheer magnitude of the transaction, in theory, should discipline behavior and mitigate the impact of biases. This paper examines the economic impact of non- consumable visual cues through staging, a common practice in the U.S. housing market, on high-stakes housing transactions.

House staging is the practice of furnishing and decorating a property for sale to create visual cues that help potential buyers imagine themselves living in the space. Importantly, the furniture and decor are classified as personal property, which consists of movable items that are typically not included in the sale unless explicitly stated in the contract. Standard asset pricing theory dictates that the value of a residential asset is a function of its fundamental hedonic characteristics (e.g., location, size, school quality, and structural condition), discounted by the user cost of capital (Sirmans et al., 2005; Poterba, 1984; Himmelberg et al., 2005). Rational agents should not price movable, non-consumable personal property (furniture and decor) into the value of the fixed asset, especially when such items convey no transactional value. However, the popularity of home staging, a common industry practice costly to the sellers or their agents, suggests a possible discon- nect between theory and behavior. This disconnect gives rise to fascinating and largely unanswered economic puzzles (Yun et al., 2021): Do homebuyers pay for things that they know they cannot consume? If so, what is the magnitude of this staging premium? In addition, what underlying mechanisms do these visual cues activate that lead to a higher willingness to pay? This paper aims to answer these questions by exploring homebuyer behavior in the largest asset market for most households.

Later in the introduction, and reporting on a specific experiment within the larger study:

(1) Staging changes how potential buyers perceive the physical dimensions of the asset itself. Participants who viewed a staged room perceived it to be significantly wider and larger in total area (by an estimated 15-20 square feet, about 10% of the actual size) than the identical but empty room. (2) Staging reduces cognitive burdens by providing a practical demonstration of how a space can be used. Participants in both the Furniture Only and Furniture & Decor treatments were significantly more likely to agree that the “room layout is practical and usable” compared to those who saw an empty home. (3) Furniture alone is insufficient to trigger the full behavioral effect. While adding furniture made a home feel “warm and inviting” and “well-maintained,” it had no measurable impact on whether participants could “imagine myself living in this home” or whether they were more likely to “schedule a visit.” Only the addition of decor (e.g., plants, lamps, table settings) in the Furniture & Decor treatment produced a significant increase in these key measures of emotional connection and behavioral intent.

I wonder, do homes associated with famous people or celebrities sell for higher prices than equivalent homes without such associations?

H/t Tyler Cowen

Civil War Among Chimpanzees

Carl Zimmer, These Chimps Began the Bloodiest ‘War’ on Record. No One Knows Why. NYTimes, Apr. 9, 2026.

Near the end:

And the researchers are still trying to figure out what set off the conflict in the first place. “All of a sudden, yesterday’s friend becomes today’s foe,” said Dr. Mitani.

Within any group of chimpanzees, violence will flare from time to time — when apes converge on a tree full of fruit, for example, or when lower-ranked males vie to replace an old alpha male.

But this aggression can be dampened by the friendships that form over years. Some chimpanzees are especially social, jumping between many cliques. “They’re these important social bridges,” Dr. Sandel said.

In 2014, five adult males died, perhaps because of disease. Dr. Sandel speculated that these deaths ripped away some of the bridges that previously held the Ngogo groups together. Low-level conflicts blew up into something akin to civil war.

The Ngogo conflict could offer a glimpse at the kind of violence that might have flared up in our ancient forebears, given that chimpanzees and humans descend from common ancestors that lived about six million years ago.

“These findings tell us indeed that these civil-war-like types of conflicts were possible in the course of human evolution,” said Sylvain Lemoine, a primatologist at the University of Cambridge who was not involved in the study.

The Ngogo chimpanzees show how our ancestors could have gotten dragged into years of lethal fighting without ideology or cultural identity — let alone the language to talk about them.

Instead, shifting social bonds might have been enough to light the fire.

There's more at the link.

Romantic Love, Conversation, Biology, and Culture

[I'm bumping it yet again in 2024]

Once more I'm bumping this to the top of the queue. Why? It discusses a methodological problem that is of current interest to me.  [2021]

* * * * *

I'm bumping this to the top of the queue because it's one of my favorite posts. FWIW, this is the post that got me my monthly slot at 3 Quarks Daily.

Note: This post grew out of reflection on older earlier post on bundling.

When I was an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins I took a course in Medieval literature and was thoroughly gobsmacked when I learned that romantic love had been invented in 12th century France. Until then I’d believed it to be a human universal – one and only, forever and ever, that was just how it was, no? Well, not quite.

What arose in Medieval Europe is something called Courtly Love, a set of conventions used by high-born men in wooing their lovers. And these lovers were not their wives, nor wives to be. For aristocratic marriage had little to do with personal preference; it was politics. Powerful families would forge alliances by arranging marriages among their young.

In time, over the course of centuries, so the story went, romantic love was transformed from an aristocratic game into a set of conventions used to define the necessary, or at least the ideal, precondition for any marriage. This set of conventions was in place, at least among the middle class, by the time Jane Austen wrote her novels in the early 19th Century. Those conventions have remained more or less in place up to the present, though they’ve become a bit tattered in the last decade or three as a soaring divorce rate has made it abundantly clear that true love does not last forever. That, of course, is not exactly news – why, for example, did Flaubert write Madame Bovary? – but the myth is so attractive that it dies hard.

That was the state of things during my undergraduate years – which coincided with the emergence of feminist activism in the late 1960s. Whatever their personal experience, everyone gave lip service to one and only forever and ever and believed that it was human nature. In that context, then, the revelations of the learned scholars shook my world.

Counter-Revolution

Learned scholars, however, do not constitute a single tribe. Their tribes are many, and often contentious. Even as the literati were blissfully proclaiming the recent and Western origin of romantic love, other scholars set out to prove them wrong. In 1992, for example, W. R. Jankowiak and E. F. Fischer published “A cross-cultural perspective on romantic love” (Ethnology 31: 149-155). They defined romantic love as “any intense attraction that involves the idealization of the other, within an erotic context, with the expectation of enduring for some time into the future” and they contrasted this with “the companionship phase of love . . . which is characterized by the growth of a more peaceful, comfortable, and fulfilling relationship.” They examined ethnographic data on 166 societies from around the world and discovered romantic love in 88.5 percent of them, suggesting “that romantic love constitutes a human universal, or at the least a near-universal.”

More recently Jonathan Gottschall and Marcus Nordland published Romantic Love: A Literary Universal? (Philosophy and Literature 30: 450-470, 2006). They conducted a cross-cultural study of folktales from 79 cultures and found at least one reference to romantic love in 55 of those collections and multiple references in 39 collections. They assert that their study “offers staunch support to the existing evidence that romantic love is a statistical cultural universal. It would also seem to increase the probability that romantic love may be an absolute cultural universal offers staunch support to the existing evidence that romantic love is a statistical cultural universal.” “Statistical universal” is a term of art meaning that something is in a lot of places, but not everywhere, yet. It seems clear that if Gottschall and Nordland were to place a bet, they'd bet that further research would find that romantic love is a true cultural universal, present in every culture for which we have reliable records.

Still more recently, just yesterday in the time-scale of academic publishing, Brian Boyd has asserted, with the calm assurance of a senior scholar in command of wide learning, that “cross-cultural, neurological, and cross-species studies have demonstrated the workings of romantic love across societies and even species” (The Origin of Stories, Harvard 2009, p. 341). To this, Michael Bérubé has replied, with the calm assurance of a senior scholar in command of wide learning, but learning leavened with a dash of school-boy wit:

This just won’t wash. Other species might court and mate for life, but they do not engage in romantic love in the sense that humanists employ the term, save perhaps for the cartoon skunk Pepé Le Pew. “Romantic love” does not mean “mammals doing it like mammals”; it refers to the conventions of courtly love, which were indeed invented in the European middle ages and cannot be found in ancient literatures or cultures. Those conventions are culturally and historically specific variations on our underlying (and polymorphous) biological imperatives, just as the institution of the Bridezilla and the $25,000 wedding is specific to our own addled time and place.

What’s going on here? Who’s right?

Back to the Drawing Board: There's that pesky elephant

I don’t know. We don’t know. Not any more.

I’m inclined to invoke that hoary old story of the blind men who, upon examining a large beast, are unable to decided what beast it is, or even whether or not it is a beast at all. We, of course, know that they’re examining an elephant, but such different parts of the elephant – tusks, years, legs, tail – that they reach vastly different conclusions about the object under scrutiny.

In the case of romantic love, I believe we’re in much the same position as those blind men. But, in our case, there is no transcendent story-teller who actually knows what creature is under scrutiny. Rather, it is up to us to approximate that story-teller by making more and more sophisticated observations and examining them through richer concepts and models about human culture and behavior.

There is no point in continuing to argue using existing observations, methods, and theories. In light of the existing contretemps we would do well to consider such arguments to be ideological in nature and thus pointless, except, of course, to all-knowing ideologues. Meanwhile, let’s take a look around and see what else is there to be explained.

Companionship, Conversation, and the Novel

Let’s return to Jankowiak and Fischer, and their contrast between the romantic phase and the companionship phase of love, a distinction, I believe, that is common, and which I accept. This companionship, is it too universal?

Take those Medieval aristocrats who were playing courtship games on the side: Did they have a companionate relationship with their spouses? I’m guessing that in some cases, yes, and in other cases no. These marriages, after all, were arranged by parents for political ends. If companionship developed in the marriage, fine; if not, no big deal. For companionship was not the point, it was not part of the ideology.

And then we have my standard passage from John Milton's Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, Preface to Book 1:

God in the first ordaining of marriage taught us to what end he did it, in words expressly implying the apt and cheerful conversation of man with woman, to comfort and refresh him against the evil of solitary life, not mentioning the purpose of generation till afterwards, as being but a secondary end in dignity, though not in necessity: yet now, if any two be but once handed in the church, and have tasted in any sort the nuptial bed, let them find themselves never so mistaken in their dispositions through any error, concealment, or misadventure, that through their different tempers, thoughts and constitutions, they can neither be to one another a remedy against loneliness nor live in any union or contentment all their days…

That strikes me as an assertion of the need for companionship between spouses – cheerful conversation – and a rather emphatic assertion at that. Would Milton have made such an assertion if it had, in fact, been the common understanding of the day? That seems unlikely to me, though I could be wrong, as I am not a scholar of 17th century English family practices.

But the late Lawrence Stone was, and in 1977 he published a ground-breaking study, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800 (Harper & Row) in which he argued that, over a period of three centuries, family organization underwent a transition that started with the Open Lineage Family – permeable by outside influences, with strong “loyalty to ancestors and to living kind” (p. 4). It was succeeded by the Restricted Patriarchal Nuclear Family P. 7):

which saw the decline of loyalties to lineage, kin, patron, and local community as they were increasingly replaced by more universalistic loyalties to the nation state and its head and to a particular sect or Church. As a result, ‘boundary awareness’ became more exclusively confined to the nuclear family, which consequently became more closed off from external influences, either or the kin or of the community.

Finally, during the last half of the 19th Century, the Closed Domesticated Nuclear Family emerges among “the upper bourgeoisie and squirarchy” (pp. 7-8):

This was the decisive shift, for this new type of family was the product of the rise of Affective Individualism. It was a family organized around the principle of personal autonomy, and bound together by strong affective ties. Husbands and wives personally selected each other rather than obeying parental wishes, and their prime motives were now long-term personal affection rather than economic or status advantage for the lineage as a whole … Patriarchical attitudes within the home markedly declined, and greater autonomy was granted not only to children, but also to wives.

This was a family in which companionship between husband and wife was important, for that companionship was now the foundation of family organization. And this is the family structure that is at the heart of the British novel in the late 18th century and into the 19th century. The novel and the family structure had a reciprocal relationship (dialectical?) in which the demands of this family structure created an audience for the novel and the novel, in turn articulated the inner-workings and hidden designs of the family.

Out of what biological equipment did the novel help people construct their familial relations? Let us speculate, and freely – for what else can we do? If we’re to search for evidence, we’ve got to make a guess about what we’re looking for before there’s any point to setting out. However, we do want our speculation to be biologically plausible. So, calling on chess as a metaphor, let’s select our pieces from biology while our speculation will be the game play.

A virtual rodent predicts the structure of neural activity across behaviors.

Aldarondo, D., Merel, J., Marshall, J.D. et al. A virtual rodent predicts the structure of neural activity across behaviors. Nature (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07633-4  

Abstract: Animals have exquisite control of their bodies, allowing them to perform a diverse range of behaviors. How such control is implemented by the brain, however, remains unclear. Advancing our understanding requires models that can relate principles of control to the structure of neural activity in behaving animals. To facilitate this, we built a ‘virtual rodent’, in which an artificial neural network actuates a biomechanically realistic model of the rat in a physics simulator. We used deep reinforcement learning to train the virtual agent to imitate the behavior of freely-moving rats, thus allowing us to compare neural activity recorded in real rats to the network activity of a virtual rodent mimicking their behavior. We found that neural activity in the sensorimotor striatum and motor cortex was better predicted by the virtual rodent’s network activity than by any features of the real rat’s movements, consistent with both regions implementing inverse dynamics. Furthermore, the network’s latent variability predicted the structure of neural variability across behaviors and afforded robustness in a way consistent with the minimal intervention principle of optimal feedback control. These results demonstrate how physical simulation of biomechanically realistic virtual animals can help interpret the structure of neural activity across behavior and relate it to theoretical principles of motor control.

Note: I wonder if they named the simulation "Bostrom."

Self-medicating orangutans, and others

Douglas Main, Orangutan, Heal Thyself, NYTimes, May 2, 2024.

Scientists observed a wild male orangutan repeatedly rubbing chewed-up leaves of a medicinal plant on a facial wound in a forest reserve in Indonesia.

It was the first known observation of a wild animal using a plant to treat a wound, and adds to evidence that humans are not alone in using plants for medicinal purposes.

The male orangutan, Rakus, lives in the Gunung Leuser National Park on the island of Sumatra and is thought to be around 35 years old. For years researchers have followed orangutans like him on his travels through the forest, threading his way through the canopy in search of fruits to eat. [...]

The plant Rakus used, known as akar kuning or yellow root, is also used by people throughout Southeast Asia to treat malaria, diabetes and other conditions. Research shows it has anti-inflammatory and antibacterial properties.

Other uses, other animals:

Primates have been observed appearing to treat wounds in the past, but not with plants. [...]

Orangutans have been spotted using medicinal plants in a different way: In 2017 scientists reported that six orangutans in Borneo rubbed the chewed-up leaves of a shrub with anti-inflammatory and analgesic properties onto their legs and arms, probably to soothe sore muscles. [...]

Examples of self-medication in primates remain uncommon and the behavior is incompletely understood. [...]

But that behavior is not unique to primates. Indian civets, a catlike mammal, also swallow whole leaves, most likely to be rid of worms. Various birds engage in a strange behavior, called anting, in which they rub themselves in ants, to help them treat feather mites or other parasites. Hundreds of species of bees also harvest flower extracts that prevent fungal and bacterial growth in their colonies, which could be considered a type of preventative self- or group-medication.

Presumably this is learned behavior that is passed on through observation – even among the bees?

One study shows that male bonobos engage in violence more often, though less intensely, than male chimpanzees

Phie Jacobs, Bonobos, the ‘hippie chimps,’ might not be so mellow after all, Science, April, 12, 2024.

Chimps (Pan troglodytes) and bonobos (Pan paniscus) are the closest surviving relatives of modern humans. That makes them interesting subjects for scientists studying how aggression evolved in our own species. But the two apes are very different in their behavior. Chimps are patriarchal, forming all-male coalitions that patrol their territory; they react violently when they happen upon an outsider or neighboring clan. “Chimpanzee intergroup encounters are not possible,” Mouginot explains. “They will kill each other.”

Bonobos—which some have called “hippie chimps”—are far more peaceful, says Brian Hare, an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke who wasn’t involved in the new research. Their societies are dominated by females, and amicable interactions between communities are commonplace—and frequently marked by displays of enthusiastic sexual activity. And although bonobos are no strangers to conflict, scientists who study the apes have never witnessed a lethal encounter. As far as we know, Hare says, “no bonobo has ever murdered another bonobo.” [...]

Field researchers tracked 12 male bonobos from three communities—from the moment they woke until they settled down for the night—at the Kokolopori reserve, located deep within the Democratic Republic of the Congo. They did the same with 14 male chimps from two communities at Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania. Every time an ape attacked or charged an adversary, or was on the receiving end of such aggression, a researcher was there to document it.

The results, Mouginot says, “really came as a surprise.” Overall, male bonobos turned out to be about three times as likely as chimps to engage in aggressive behavior. Although none of the encounters were lethal—and the team didn’t track the severity of injuries—bonobos weren’t afraid to push, hit, and bite their foes. Their aggression didn’t appear to be a turn-off for female bonobos, who actually preferred to mate with aggressive males. [...]

But whereas male chimpanzees frequently ganged up to or defeat rivals or bully females, bonobo males mainly participated in one-on-one fights and rarely attacked members of the opposite sex. In fact, males were far more likely to be on the receiving end of violence from groups of aggressive, dominant females.

There's much more at the link.

H/t Tyler Cowen. 

More –

• about the bonobos in the NYTimes. 
• The original research: Differences in expression of male aggression between wild bonobos and chimpanzees.

Further Impressions: Orgasm and Beyond

I'm bumping this to the head of the queue on general principle. This is from the first year of the blog (August 29, 2010). I'd completely forgotten about this. Nice to be reminded. Here's my first post on the book.

* * * * *

 

I’ve been now reading through The Science of Orgasm from the beginning, but lightly. It’s densely packed with information; real understanding would come slowly. Further, it’s information of different kinds, some technical, some not. And the technical information, well, for example, there’s a good deal about neurotransmitters and hormones, which are at the outer limit of my understanding the and nervous system and bodily regulation and activity. They don’t go into them too deeply, because they can’t. To get deeper, they’d start plunging into molecular biology and biochemistry, and that stuff gets very technical very quickly.

So that’s one thing.

Here’s another: I first started thinking about sexuality I was strongly influenced by a diffuse body of thinking that saw Western culture as suffering from sexual repression. What to do about that? Why let it all hang out. But that didn’t work out like it was supposed to.

Why do I mention this? Because there’s a fair amount of survey information in the book, mostly about attitudes and experiences of adults in Western societies, and I’d think most of these surveys were conducted in the USA or perhaps Western Europe; that’s not entirely clear. And there’s a part of me that seems to be saying: But what’s sex like in a state of nature? And as soon as I say that I have to say: but there is no state of nature, just different cultural experiences.

Thus sexuality is a good test case for what’s known as evolutionary psychology these days. On the one hand, there can be no doubt that sexual behavioral is biologically necessary. On the other hand, there’s the orgasm, the biology and psychology of which are as yet obscure and perhaps beyond the reductive wing of EP.

With that, let’s return to the passage I quoted in the addendum to my first post. It’s from page 12:

However, there is a big difference between the physical act of ejaculation and the feeling of orgasm. While seminal emission and ejaculation are essential to pregnancy, the feeling of orgasm is not. There is no inherent imperative that the feeling of orgasm must be linked to ejaculation. Indeed, ejaculation of viable, pregnancy-producing sperm can occur in men with spinal cord injury who do not experience the feeling of orgasm.

So, at this early point in the book the authors have distinguished between ejaculation and orgasmic feeling. In chapter 19, “Atypical Orgasms,” they come very close to thinking of sexual orgasm as a family of experiences within a larger class of experiences sometimes known as peak experiences, the term Abraham Maslow gave to them:

Peak experiences are described by Maslow as especially joyous and exciting moments in life, involving sudden feelings of intense happiness and well-being, wonder and awe, and possibly also involving an awareness of transcendental unity or knowledge of higher truth (as though perceiving the world from an altered, and often vastly profound and awe-inspiring perspective). They usually come on suddenly and are often inspired by deep meditation, intense feelings of love, exposure to great art or music, or the overwhelming beauty of nature.

Before going there, however, let’s return to more mundane matters for a moment. It would be nice to have a behavioral reference point for female sexual behavior that is as specific as ejaculation is for male sexual behavior. As far as I can tell, there isn’t one, which is why, I suspect, that female sexual experience has seemed more problematic than male. Because men ejaculation, we can say, ‘yeah, it’s happened,’ whenever a man ejaculates. Without that marker, it’s harder for a woman to know whether or not it’s happened. If by ‘it’ we mean orgasm, and male orgasm isn’t equivalent to ejaculation, then perhaps it is as elusive, or not, for men as for women. Which is where I began over thirty years ago.

It turns out that the physiology of that marker is elusive. In Chapter 3, “Bodily Changes at Orgasm,” we learn (p. 24):

In a review published in 2005, Levin stated that “remarkably, a detailed, non-disputed physio-anatomical description of the mechanism of human ejaculation has still to be produced.” Two main questions have evidently not been resolved. How exactly are the spurts of semen produced? And, is the pleasurable sensation of orgasm a consequence of the sensory activity produced by the ejaculation mechanics, or is it primarily a brain phenomenon that is additively and pleasantly enhanced by the sensory activity generated by the expulsive flow of semen at ejaculation?

On the first question, I’d think that one day we’ll have an answer. The second question, involving pleasure as it does, is rather more interesting. Given my own belief that pleasure is a function of overall activity in the nervous system I think their second alternative is more likely correct.

And, by the time Chapter 11, “The Effects of Medication,” rolls around, Komisaruk, Beyer-Flores, and Whipple are singing the holistic song (p. 123):

Kinsey and his colleagues stated in 1953 that sexual arousal and orgasm involve the entire nervous system and thus all parts of the body. Although this statement may seem exaggerated, recent studies of brain activity by functional magnetic resonance imaging . . . and positron emission tomography . . . indicate that in both men and women, a large number of brain structures are activated, others inactivated, during orgasm. This reveals the complexity of the neural circuits participating in orgasm and the many neurotransmitters and neuromodulators that could be involved.

Now we’re ready to look at atypical orgasms, by which the authors mean “orgasms that occur under atypical conditions, apparently independent of genital stimulation (which generates ‘typical orgasms’)” (p. 199). They consider orgasmic feelings while dreaming, orgasmic feelings in people with spinal cord injuries, and orgasmic feelings as the result of electrical and chemical stimulation of the brain and electrical stimulation of the spine. And then there’s epilepsy (p. 214):

Much of what is known about how the brain produces orgasms is based on studies of epileptic seizures. There are numerous reports of men and women who describe orgasmic feelings just before the onset of an epileptic seizure. This experience has been termed an “orgasmic aura.”

After discussing several cases we get to this key paragraph (p. 216):

The reports that epileptic seizures can generate orgasmlike feelings suggest a basic commonality between the two phenomena. Epileptic seizures are characterized by abnormal synchronous activation of large numbers of neurons, followed by their synchronous inactivation, then shortly by the synchronous reactivation. It is likely that the rhythmical and voluntary movement-generated timing of genital stimulation that ultimately generates orgasm also produces synchronous activation of large numbers of brain neurons, although in a more precisely regulated pattern. . . . Thus, the mass neuronal activation that characterizes an epileptic seizure bears a resemblance to the mass neuronal activation that characterizes orgasm. It is perhaps this similarity that can generate the orgasmlike feeling during epileptic seizures.

Makes sense to me. But then, I didn’t need to be convinced. Discussion of epileptic seizures is common in the literature on altered states of consciousness, as is the similarity between sexual orgasm, epileptic auras, and altered states.

I’m not quite done with this topic, nor the book, but I don’t quite know where I’m going to go next. For now, let me end this post with a statement from my post on sexual metaphysics:

While ecstasy and transcendence are available anytime, anywhere, while doing anything — so sayeth the Zen masters ZAP! — they’re most likely to sneak up on us during sex. If so, then, one would like to know why.

That WHY? is as much a question about the nervous system in general, and its curious relationship to the mind, as it is about sex.

The Busy Bee Brain

With artificial neural nets (ANNs) all over the place these days, this post from March, 2013, warrants a bump to the top of the queue. Perhaps the chief difference between real brains and ANNs is the fact that each neuron in a real brain is a living agent, albeit of a very small scope, hence the metaphor, the brain as a bunch of busy bees within the skull. The neurons of ANNs are passive bits of data.

Ordering Mark Moffett’s Adventures Among Ants got me to thinking about a science fiction novel that knocked my socks off when I was 12 or 13: Man of Many Minds, by E. Everett Evans. It’s about George Hanlon, a man who had the ability to project his mind into other creatures. At a critical point in the book, when – I believe – Hanlon is about to be tortured, he projects his whole mind, every last bit of it, into a swarm of bees, thereby escaping the pain of torture. [See excerpt below.]

I thought that was pretty neat.

But what does it have to do with Moffett’s book? That’s pretty simple. Ants, like bees, live in groups, and it’s not unusual to think of such groups as being some kind of superorganism – a notion that, according to this blog entry, Moffett subjects to a critical workout. That swarm of bees in Man of Many Minds is such a superorganism.

But when it “absorbed” Hanlon’s mind, what did it become then? The question is a rhetorical one; after all; it’s about something never really happened. It’s just fiction. But a very suggestive fiction.

Could the human brain be something like a hive of bees?

Yes.

There is now a pretty strong consensus that the cerebral cortex (which is, by no means, the entire brain, but it is likely that this is where culture is carried) is organized into small columns of neurons. In a 1978 essay Vernon Mountcastle called these minicolumns and suggested that they have about 100-300 neurons each. He estimated that the neocortex consists of 600,000,000 of these minicolumns. He also suggested that these minicolumns are organized into macrocolumns, about 600,000 of them -- implying that there are hundreds of minicolumns per macrocolumn. (Mountcastle was clear that these numbers were just order of magnitude estimates & that is all I need for my purposes.) That makes these macrocolumns roughly the size of a typical invertebrate nervous system of 10K to 100K neurons. So, here’s my metaphor: Your neocortex consists of 600,000 buzzing bees going about their business.

 

The point of the metaphor is that, just as individual bees are autonomous agents (which must, nonetheless, feed and reproduce in a group), so the macrocolumns are autonomous agents (which are physically coupled to many other such agents). Bees go about their business by sensing optical and chemical gradients and features and by moving their bodies and excreting chemicals. The macrocolumns are not directly connected to the external world, but they have extensive inputs and outputs to other macrocolumns and to other regions of the brain and nervous system. From a purely information processing point of view, they are as capable of action as are bees. They “sense” neurochemical gradients in the intersynaptic space and act on their sensations by excreting chemicals into that space.

This loose metaphor really gets interesting, however, when we begin to think about human interaction, which of course implies interaction between brains. Some interactions are pretty loose, such as those between people strolling the aisles at a supermarket. Other interactions are tighter, such as people having a conversation over a meal. And some interactions are very tight, such as musicians making music with one another. And that brings us back to insects, fireflies in particular.

Allow me to quote a passage from Chapter 3 of Beethoven’s Anvil:

Physicists do understand one element of dance, simple repetitive rhythm. This understanding has been applied to many biological systems, one of which is male fireflies in Southeast Asia. These fireflies gather in large groups on river banks, flashing on and off in unison to signal their availability to females. When they begin gathering around sunset their flashings are uncoordinated. But, as dusk darkens into night, regions of synchronized flashing emerge and spread until whole trees are cloaked in fireflies flashing in synchrony.

That is to say, in some sense, the nervous systems of those flies have become temporarily coupled together into a single physical system where some some signals are transmitted within nervous systems through electro-chemical means while other signals are transmitted from one nervous system to another by energy transduction (sending: chemicals → photons, and receiving: photons → chemicals) and light (i.e. photons). I go on to say:

There is no reason to believe that this activity is directed in the way that a conductor directs an orchestra. There is no lead firefly setting the pace of the others. The flashing simply emerges; it is self-organized. Each firefly is making his own decisions about when he’ll flash, influenced by the activities of his neighbors. This activity has been analyzed as a system of coupled oscillators, a phenomenon first noticed by the seventeenth century Dutch physicist Christiaan Huygens, who invented the pendulum clock—the pendulum being a prime example of an oscillator. One day Huygens saw that the pendulums of two clocks on the same wall were swinging in perfect synchrony. He disturbed one of them so that the synchrony dissolved, but it returned within half an hour. After a bit of experimentation he concluded that the clocks were affected by the vibrations each transmitted to the wall behind them. These vibrations led them to synchronize their periods and thereby minimize their collective energy expenditure.

Any phenomenon common to systems as different as pendulum clocks and fireflies must be very general.

I then go on to develop an argument that music works like that as well. As I say in my review of Steven Mithen’s The Singing Neanderthals, “what musicking does is bring all participants into a temporal framework where the physical actions - whether dance or vocalization - of different individuals are synchronized on the same time scale as that of neural impulses, that of milliseconds. Within that shared intentional framework the group can develop and refine its culture. Everyone cooperates to create sounds and movements they hold in common.” While making music, I argue, we may consider the nervous systems of individuals as being physically coupled together so as to constitute a single dynamical system that is distributed across separate individuals. When the music-making stops, the distributed system dissolves into its individual components; individuals, that is to say, their brains, are free once again to operate independently of one another.

The point of this exercise is that, by (the reductive step of) insisting on thinking of brains as physical systems, and therefore insisting that interactions between brains is physical interaction, we can arrive at a concept of a very special human group – one engaged in music-making – as a single distributed nervous system. That is possible only because the fundamental coupling requirements are very simple, simple enough that fireflies and neurons can meet those requirements.

If fireflies can teach us about how we can make music, than surely ants have much to teach us as well. I look forward to reading Moffett’s book.

Virtual Fly Brain

If you're at all curious about what a bee brain might actually be like, well Nature Precedings has something similar, an account of the brain of the fruit fly:

Virtual Fly Brain: An ontology-linked schema of the Drosophila Brain

David J. Osumi-Sutherland1, Mark Longair & J. Douglas Armstrong

Abstract:

Drosophila neuro-anatomical data is scattered across a large, diverse literature dating back over 75 years and a growing number of community databases. Lack of a standardized nomenclature for neuro-anatomy makes comparison and searching this growing data-set extremely arduous.

A recent standardization effort (BrainName; Manuscript in preparation) has produced a segmented, 3D model of the Drosophila brain annotated with a controlled vocabulary. We are formalizing these developments to produce a web-based ontology-linked atlas in which gross brain anatomy is defined, in part, by labeled volumes in a standard reference brain.

We have developed new relations that allow us to use this well-defined gross anatomy as a substrate to define neuronal types according to where they fasciculate and innervate as well as to record the neurotransmitters they release, their lineage and functions. The resulting ontology will provide a vocabulary for annotation and a means for integrative queries of neurobiological data.

The ontology and associated images, queries and annotations will be integrated into the Virtual Fly Brain website. This will provide a resource that biologists can use to browse annotated images of Drosophila neuro-anatomy and to get answers to questions about that anatomy and related data, without any need for ontology expertise.

Man of Many Minds

 

8.31.20: It turns out that the Evans book is available on Project Gutenberg. And that I mis-remembered the incident. Such is memory. It turns out that he sent most of his mind into pigeons:

Hanlon didn't struggle when they bound him firmly in the chair with manacles on hands and feet. He knew it would be useless anyway. He let his body slump into his chair, and again directed his mind through that vent. He must not let them defeat him! He had to survive—to get word—to the Corps!

Then his searching mind contacted another—a weak, primitive one, but a mind. Avidly he fastened onto it, merged with it ... and found himself inside the brain of one of those Simonidean pigeons.

Ah! This is wonderful! Pigeons seldom fly alone. Where you find one you almost always find a number. Activating the bird's brain he sent out a call to others of its kind that it had found food in abundance. Soon more and more of them flew down to where the now enslaved pigeon was standing, and as each one came, Hanlon sent into its brain all of his mind it would hold.

He summoned the birds to his aid, to no avail. One of them was shot. He had to withdraw his mind from it and then...

The other parts of his mind were flying all about the enclosed park that was a part of the great palace, searching, desperately seeking some other form of life that could be used as a housing for the dying part of Hanlon's mind.

Suddenly one of them uttered a cry that drew the rest to it on swift pinions, to see attached to one of the trees a huge swarm of Simonidean bees.

"Will the queen do?" the one mind-portion asked anxiously.

There was a convulsive shudder in all the minds, for the birds knew—and Hanlon had heard—how deadly poisonous these native bees were; how they were hunted down and exterminated when found. They were twice the size, and many, many times more vicious and deadly than Terran bees. Even now two gardeners were running toward the tree with a great metal net and flame-throwers.

But Hanlon was desperate. "She will have to do," the aggregate mind decided.

And he got the queen to relieve him of his torturers.

The human voice is the most fearsome sound on the African savanna

Lesley Evans Ogden, Watch How Animals React to the Scariest Sound on the Savanna, NYTimes, Oct. 5, 2023. The article opens:

Panting after chasing the impala now in its jaws, a leopard drags its prey to a shady spot beside a water hole. Before it can sit down to feast, a voice, seemingly out of nowhere, begins speaking calmly. “It is very difficult to talk in Afrikaans …,” begins the bodiless voice. The leopard pauses, glances toward the source of the sound and then drops its hard-earned quarry and runs.

This leopard has unwittingly abandoned its lunch in the service of science. Researchers analyzed thousands of video recordings to reveal a hierarchy of fear in a suite of mammals living in and around Kruger National Park in South Africa. While lions have been nicknamed the king of beasts, the videos show that for wild mammals on the savanna — from tiny antelopes to massive elephants — the scariest, most lethal predator of all is us.

The sound of human voices, the researchers found, evokes more fear than the sounds of snarling and growling lions. This underlines that our species is recognized as uniquely dangerous, “because we are super lethal,” said Michael Clinchy, a conservation biologist at Western University in London, Ontario.

The researchers hope that understanding this universal fear of humans could assist the goal of preventing wildlife poaching.

Elephants charge lions:

Like the other mammals on the savanna, elephants fled when they heard human voices.

“They just high-tail it out of there,” Dr. Clinchy said.

But when it came to their response to lion sounds, the elephants were a notable exception. Instead of fleeing, elephants ran toward the source of the sounds, in some cases smashing into the devices violently.

What about odors?

Chris Darimont, an ecologist at the University of Victoria in British Columbia who was not involved in the study but reviewed the paper for the journal, praised it while noting that its focus on sounds was a limitation. He hoped future research would incorporate olfactory cues.

There's more at the link.

A phylogenetic approach to the neural basis of behavior

It provides a much better way to think about all this than simplistic shorthand notions like the "lizard brain" pic.twitter.com/ixVspsdCHZ

— Kevin Mitchell @WiringtheBrain@ mstdn .social (@WiringTheBrain) May 4, 2023

Abstract of the linked article, Resynthesizing behavior through phylogenetic refinement:

This article proposes that biologically plausible theories of behavior can be constructed by following a method of "phylogenetic refinement," whereby they are progressively elaborated from simple to complex according to phylogenetic data on the sequence of changes that occurred over the course of evolution. It is argued that sufficient data exist to make this approach possible, and that the result can more effectively delineate the true biological categories of neurophysiological mechanisms than do approaches based on definitions of putative functions inherited from psychological traditions. As an example, the approach is used to sketch a theoretical framework of how basic feedback control of interaction with the world was elaborated during vertebrate evolution, to give rise to the functional architecture of the mammalian brain. The results provide a conceptual taxonomy of mechanisms that naturally map to neurophysiological and neuroanatomical data and that offer a context for defining putative functions that, it is argued, are better grounded in biology than are some of the traditional concepts of cognitive science.

Cf. Benzon and Hays, 1988, Principles and Development of Natural Intelligence. Note as as well that Cisek has been influenced by William Powers.

The measurement, evolution, and neural representation of action grammars of human behavior

The measurement, evolution, and neural representation of action grammars of human behaviorhttps://t.co/r7Ki6oqZSH

— James Winters (@replicatedtypo) July 3, 2021

Abstract for the linked article:

Human behaviors from toolmaking to language are thought to rely on a uniquely evolved capacity for hierarchical action sequencing. Testing this idea will require objective, generalizable methods for measuring the structural complexity of real-world behavior. Here we present a data-driven approach for extracting action grammars from basic ethograms, exemplified with respect to the evolutionarily relevant behavior of stone toolmaking. We analyzed sequences from the experimental replication of ~ 2.5 Mya Oldowan vs. ~ 0.5 Mya Acheulean tools, finding that, while using the same “alphabet” of elementary actions, Acheulean sequences are quantifiably more complex and Oldowan grammars are a subset of Acheulean grammars. We illustrate the utility of our complexity measures by re-analyzing data from an fMRI study of stone toolmaking to identify brain responses to structural complexity. Beyond specific implications regarding the co-evolution of language and technology, this exercise illustrates the general applicability of our method to investigate naturalistic human behavior and cognition.

Where's kitty's mirror neurons?

The king is confused! 😂😂pic.twitter.com/InX4eAujhp

— Figen.. (@TheFigen) June 14, 2021

Animal gait and oxygen consumption

"Animals appear to switch gait at approximately the speed where the oxygen consumption curves of the two gaits cross." https://t.co/IZtRNUu5qe pic.twitter.com/pAwjymgyRA

— Theo Honohan (@theohonohan) January 26, 2021

How intelligent is an octopus, or a (giant) squid?

How intelligent is a cephalopod?
🤔Perhaps, not as much as claimed
👉Their renowned behavioural flexibility could be explained by putatively simpler mechanisms, instead of by a truly complex cognitionhttps://t.co/acjAPO3rnv pic.twitter.com/0dus9J37cS

— A.Benítez-Burraco (@abenitezburraco) September 27, 2020

Abstract from the article:

The soft‐bodied cephalopods including octopus, cuttlefish, and squid are broadly considered to be the most cognitively advanced group of invertebrates. Previous research has demonstrated that these large‐brained molluscs possess a suite of cognitive attributes that are comparable to those found in some vertebrates, including highly developed perception, learning, and memory abilities. Cephalopods are also renowned for performing sophisticated feats of flexible behaviour, which have led to claims of complex cognition such as causal reasoning, future planning, and mental attribution. Hypotheses to explain why complex cognition might have emerged in cephalopods suggest that a combination of predation, foraging, and competitive pressures are likely to have driven cognitive complexity in this group of animals. Currently, it is difficult to gauge the extent to which cephalopod behaviours are underpinned by complex cognition because many of the recent claims are largely based on anecdotal evidence. In this review, we provide a general overview of cephalopod cognition with a particular focus on the cognitive attributes that are thought to be prerequisites for more complex cognitive abilities. We then discuss different types of behavioural flexibility exhibited by cephalopods and, using examples from other taxa, highlight that behavioural flexibility could be explained by putatively simpler mechanisms. Consequently, behavioural flexibility should not be used as evidence of complex cognition. Fortunately, the field of comparative cognition centres on designing methods to pinpoint the underlying mechanisms that drive behaviours. To illustrate the utility of the methods developed in comparative cognition research, we provide a series of experimental designs aimed at distinguishing between complex cognition and simpler alternative explanations. Finally, we discuss the advantages of using cephalopods to develop a more comprehensive reconstruction of cognitive evolution.

AI, robots, and imitation

Posted to the Humanist list:

Might I hazard a somewhat contrary response to François Lachance [Humanist 34.222]?

This thread on machines and imitation makes me wonder what is being imitated. I know the focus has been on intelligence. But is there not a gamut: reflex, tropism, instinct, intelligence, personhood (as in agent for speech act)? What value might there be in approaching the problematic from alternative categories: to what extent might we speak of a machine-reflex?

It’s not always about imitation. Take chess for example. Chess is a classic domain for AI investigation and, as far as I know, the primary objective has almost never been to play chess like a human. Oh, psychologists have investigated how humans play chess and that work may well have been employed in programming chess into computers, but the objective was not to play chess like humans, but to beat humans at chess. Determining whether or not a player has won a game, or at least forced a draw, is easily done, so the question of whether or not humans are being imitated is at best only a secondary issue. In the case of the recent AlphaZero, I believe it has been remarked that it exhibits stylistic traits unlike any exhibited by humans, and yet it always wins.

I presume that AI investigators settled on chess in part because it is a game known to enable displays of great intelligence (for want of a better term). So, the reasoning would seem, if a computer can beat a human at chess, that computer must be intelligent. Does anyone think of these chess-playing computers as being intelligent? Does anyone care? I’m told, by the way, that the most exciting chess in the world these days is that played by teams involving humans and computers. Do the human members of these teams regard their computers as being highly intelligent, of do they think of them as very useful, nay indispensable, aids? [BTW, John McCarthy is said to have remarked that if geneticists treated drosophila like AI have treated chess, that we’d have a lot of very fast house flies but scant knowledge of genetics.]

Now, Frederik Schodt has remarked, Inside the Robot Kingdom: Japan, Mechatronics, and the Coming Robotopia (1988), that, back in the early days of industrial robotics, a Shinto ceremony would be performed to welcome a new robot to the assembly line. Industrial robots look nothing like humans nor do they behave like humans. They perform narrowly defined tasks with great precision, tirelessly, time after time. How did the human workers, and the Shinto priest, think of their robot compatriots? One of Schodt’s themes in that book is that the Japanese have different conceptions of robots from Westerners. Why? Is it, for example, the influence of Buddhism?

It was the Japanese who introduced the Tamagotchi back in 1996. As you may recall these are small hand-held devices that function as virtual pets. Wikipedia says (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamagotchi):

Upon activating the toy, an egg appears on the screen. After setting the clock on the device, the egg will wiggle for several minutes, and then hatch into a small pet. In later versions, inputting the player's name and birthday is also required when setting the clock, and at birth, the player can name the pet and learn of its family group and/or gender. The player can care for the pet as much or as little as they choose, and the outcome depends on the player's actions. The first Tamagotchis could only be paused by going to set the clock, effectively stopping the passage of time in the game, but in later models a pause function was included.

Pets have a Hunger meter, Happy meter, Bracelet meter, and Discipline meter to determine how healthy and well behaved the pet is. There is also an age and weight check function for the current age and weight of the pet. […] The pet goes through several distinct stages of development throughout its life cycle. Each stage lasts a set amount of time, depending on the model of the toy, and when it reaches a new stage, the toy plays a jingle, and the pet's appearance changes. The pet can "die" due to poor care, old age, sickness, and in a few versions, predators. The pet's life cycle stages are Baby, Child, Teenager, and Adult. Later Tamagotchi models have added a Senior model. Usually the pet's age will increase once it has awakened from its sleep time.

And so forth.

The Tamagotchi doesn’t look like a dog, a cat, a hamster, a turtle, a gold fish, or any other animal people use as pets, and yet serves as a pet for those who have them. Is there any imitation involved?

It’s not only that imitation would seem to require conscious intention, as Jim Rovira has argued (Humanist 34.218), but that the terms of imitation must be defined as well. In the visual arts, caricature is a kind of imitation; the subject of the caricature must be recognizable in the image. At the same time, the image is never a realistic portrayal; there is always an element of exaggeration. What are the terms of correspondence between the caricature and its subject? The same can be asked of those comedians who do impressions of others: What are the terms of correspondence between the impression and the subject?

And so we can ask of the Tamagotchi, what are the terms of correspondence between the Tamagotchi and a real (live) pet? What affordances must the Tamagotchi exhibit in order to be taken for a pet?

It’s but a step from Tamagotchis to “companion robots” (do a search on the term), robots designed as companions for humans, particularly the elderly and young children. The Japanese have pioneered here as well and are using companion robots. Some of these companions are cute and fuzzy, but are not designed to imitate real cute and fuzzy animals (thus avoiding the uncanny valley? – a Japanese conception by the way). Others look more sleekly robotic but still somehow companionable.

As for machine-reflex, what about Roomba, the autonomous robot vacuum cleaner? When it bumps into a wall it backs away and changes direction. Is that a reflex? By what criteria? What about photo-tropism in flowers, flowers changing their orientation during the day so as to follow the sun? Reflex or not? What are the criteria?

How groups of animals make decisions

Elizabeth Preston, Sneezing Dogs, Dancing Bees: How Animals Vote, NYTimes, March 2, 2020:

Any animal living in a group needs to make decisions as a group, too. Even when they don’t agree with their companions, animals rely on one another for protection or help finding food. So they have to find ways to reach consensus about what the group should do next, or where it should live. While they may not conduct continent-spanning electoral contests like this coming Super Tuesday, species ranging from primates all the way to insects have methods for finding agreement that are surprisingly democratic.

Preston discusses meerkats, honeybees, African wild dogs, rock ants, and baboons:

Primates, our closest relatives, have provided lots of material for researchers studying how groups make decisions. Scientists have seen gibbons following female leaders, mountain gorillas grunting when they’re ready to move and capuchins trilling to each other.

Sometimes the process is more subtle. A group may move across the landscape as a unit without any obvious signals from individuals about where they’d like to go next. To figure out how wild olive baboons manage this, the authors of a 2015 paper put GPS collars on 25 members of one troop in Kenya. They monitored the monkeys’ every step for two weeks. Then they studied the movements of each individual baboon in numerous combinations to see who was pulling the group in new directions.

The data showed that any baboon might start moving away from the others as if to draw them on a new course — male or female, dominant or subordinate. When multiple baboons moved in the same direction, others were even more likely to come along. When there was disagreement, with trailblazing baboons moving in totally different directions, others would eventually follow the majority. But if two would-be leaders were tugging in directions less than 90 degrees apart, followers would compromise on a middle path. No matter what, the whole group ended up together.

Ariana Strandburg-Peshkin, an animal-behavior researcher at the University of Konstanz in Germany who led the baboon study, points out that unlike in humans, no one authority tallies up baboon votes and announces the result. The outcome emerges naturally. But the same kind of subtle consensus-building can be part of our voting process, too.

“For instance, we might influence one another’s decisions on who to vote for in the lead-up to an election, before any ballots are cast,” she said.

Reading The Human Swarm 6: The Great Chain of Being

In his fourteenth chapter Moffett covers one of my hobby horses, though I’m sure that’s not why he did it: The Great Chain of Being. What’s that:

We see our society and those of other people as falling into a hierarchy along with other living things, a notion codified in the Middle Ages as the Great Chain of Being. Typically the royal We surmounts the chain (surpassed only by God and the angels). Other humans follow in a descending order, some of them, Aristotle announced, “as much inferior to their fellows...as beasts are to men.” This hierarchy continues its plumet through the natural world, with “some animals,” as Orwell wryly wrote in Animal Farm, “more equal than others.”

The scale wasn’t fashioned in an ancient Greek ivory tower; people intuited the universe this way before words were scratched on parchment. More than likely it’s a basic feature of our psychology. Researcher shows that children think of people as superior to animals, and of outsiders as closer than their own group to animals. Furthermore the proneness of hunter-gatherers and tribal peoples to describe themselves as human suggests this type of thinking is typical even among societies that are small and have much in common with their neighbors (far more in common than you, with your wider knowledge of the world, likely share with a Tibetan yak herder today). Their use of epithets meaning nonhuman or animal also suggests those people felt entitled to treat at least some outsiders categorically as other species, an outlook that would naturally affect their relationships. [pp. 185-186]

Moffett is correct, the Great Chain IS fundamental to our way of conceptualizing the world and there is a significant literature on the subject [1].

What’s important here, and it seems obvious now that Moffett has pointed it out, is that the Great Chain is linked to the psychological systems that organize social behavior. We think of the social Other as some kind of creature lower on the chain than we are, something Moffett discusses on the following pages. Earlier Moffett had observed it only takes a tenth of a second for us assess a person’s face in terms of “emotional state, sex, race, and ... ethnicity and society, too” (p. 170. Psychologists have recently shown that people make a determination about whether or not something is animate or inanimate – a basic ‘break point’ on the Great chain – in only 250 milliseconds [2]. So, we use the Great Chain to make a quick and dirty assessment of other beings and we use it, at greater leisure, as a way of organizing the world.

Moffett goes on to observe, “Male macaques readily associate troop members with fruit and foreign monkeys with spiders in a simian version of the Implicit Association Test”, thus suggesting: “our ranking of societies and ethnic groups in the Great Chain emerged out of the dominance hierarchy that organizes the relationships of individuals within the societies of many animals” (p. 191). I can offer some suggestively similar examples from the behavior of chimpanzees raised among humans.

Consider Vicki, perhaps the first chimpanzee to be raised among humans. As a youngster she was given the task of sorting photographs into two piles, “human” and “animal.” She placed her own photograph in the human pile while she put her chimpanzee father’s picture went into the animal pile (Eugene Linden, Apes, Men, and Language, 1974, p. 50). Was she expressing aggression against her father? Possibly, but not likely. Her father was a chimpanzee and so she placed his picture in the pile for animals, where it belonged. He looked like other animals, more or less. But why did she think her picture belonged in the pile with humans? After all, she didn’t look like humans, and least not as humans judge these things.

Lucy is another chimpanzee who was raised among humans (Temerlin, “My Daughter Lucy”, Psychology Today 9, 1975: 103). When she reached puberty she made sexual advances toward traveling salesmen and masturbated while looking at pictures of nude men in Playgirl, showing particular interest in their penises. Washoe, raised by Allen and Beatrice Gardner and taught the rudiments of Ameslan (American Sign Language), referred to other chimpanzees as “black bugs” when she first came in contact with conspecifics after years of life among humans (Linden, p. 10).

These chimpanzees, in a sense, “thought” of themselves as people. They were used to social interaction with human beings, not with other chimpanzees. Thus we might interpret Vicki’s two piles of photographs as “appropriate social other” and “inappropriate social other” rather than as “human” and “animal.” The fact that the physical resemblance between chimpanzee and chimpanzee is greater than that between human and chimpanzee is overridden by the fact that, for these apes, there is no social resemblance between themselves and other chimpanzees while such social resemblance does hold with humans. Social structure trumps physical appearances as a way of organizing the world.

More later.

References

[1] I’ve got a post that lays this out, The Great Chain of Being as Conceptual Structure (August 10, 2011), with references: https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2011/08/great-chain-of-being-as-conceptual.html.

I’ve got a good many posts on the general topic of ontological cognition: https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/search/label/ontological%20cognition.

I’ve collected a number of those into a working paper, Ontological Cognition, a Working Paper, November 12, 39 pp.: https://www.academia.edu/7931749/Ontological_Cognition.

[2] See my post, Quick takes: detect animate vs. inanimate in 250 msec, November 29, 2019, https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2016/11/quick-takes-detect-animate-vs-inanimate.html.

* * * * *

Reading the Human Swarm, a sporadic series about Mark W. Moffett. The Human Swarm: How Our Societies Arise, Thrive, and Fall. Basic Books 2019.

Zombie ideas alive and well in psychology

Lisa Feldman Barrett, Zombie Ideas, Observer,Ooctober 2019, (APS, Association for Psychological Science):

According to the economist Paul Krugman (2013), a zombie idea is a view that’s been thoroughly refuted by a mountain of empirical evidence but nonetheless refuses to die, being continually reanimated by our deeply held beliefs.

Zombie ideas abound in our culture, nibbling away at the brains of their victims. The mistaken belief that vaccinations cause autism — a celebrated zombie idea — is responsible for rising rates of vaccine-preventable diseases. The belief that a person’s personality type, assessed by the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), predicts job performance is another zombie idea that continues to lure otherwise capable managers into making decisions that benefit neither employees nor their companies. [...]

For example, evolutionary psychologists have argued for years that waist-to-hip ratio is a phenotypic cue to reproductive success. [...] there is no evidence that healthy women with larger waist-to-hip ratios are less fecund or fertile than women with smaller ratios (Bovet, 2019). It’s a zombie idea. Ditto for the “body symmetry” hypothesis, which survives despite the empirical evidence (Jennions & Møller, 2002; for cogent analysis, see Prum, 2017). [...]

Alison Gopnik, a developmental psychologist, nominated “the nature/nurture distinction” as an undead idea that will not expire. “It’s commonplace in both scientific and popular writing to talk about innate human traits, ‘hard-wired’ behaviors or ‘genes for’ everything from alcoholism to intelligence,” writes Gopnik, in an aspirational obituary (Gopnik, 2015). She points to growing evidence, including the research of neurologist Michael Meaney, for the many complex ways that environmental factors govern gene expression and protein construction (i.e., epigenetics). [...]

Joshua Buckholtz, a clinical neuroscientist, nominated the “hydraulic model of self-control,” the idea that within each of us lurks ancient brain circuits that, when triggered, cause us to do stuff that we later regret (more colorfully referred to as the four Fs — fighting, fleeing, feeding, and . . . sex). Our prodigious prefrontal cortex allegedly puts the brakes on our inner beast, protecting us from worst selves, and impaired self-control in psychological disorders is thought to result from a faulty brake. [...]

I believe that one can be traced back to Plato's metaphor of the charioteer trying to control his horses.

The hydraulic model of self-control is a close cousin to another zombie, the triune brain, the idea that evolution laid down brain circuitry like sedimentary rock, with reptilian, limbic, and neurocortical layers. It has been known since the 1970s in evolutionary and developmental neuroscience that this story is a myth (Striedter, 2005). Think about this the next time you read that emotions erupt from neurons in the amygdala and other parts of the fabled limbic system, or that rational thought emerges in the neocortex, with one struggling to regulate the other.

I'm rather fond of that one, though I've never thought of it as any more than a metaphor. I believe I was introduced to it in Arthur Koestler's The Ghost in the Machine. He, of course, got it from its originator Paul MacLean. Continuing one with our zombie parade:

Here’s a shocker from APS Fellow Sari van Anders, social neuroendocrinologist: It’s time to bury the idea that “male” and “female” are genetically fixed, nonoverlapping categories (i.e., natural kinds). Evidence from numerous disciplines fundamentally disconfirms this common-sense view (Hyde, Bigler, Joel, Tate, & van Anders, 2019). [...]

Our final example of a dead idea that continues to roam the psychological landscape is that people can read emotions in other people’s faces, because certain configurations of facial movements, commonly called “facial expressions,” reliably and specifically signal a specific emotional state. A team of five senior scientists (including myself) met weekly for over 2 years, reviewing more than 1,000 publications related to this topic. We began with starkly different priors, but nonetheless came to consensus over what the data show, and we published our conclusions in the July 2019 issue of Psychological Science in the Public Interest (Barrett, Adolphs, Marsella, Martinez, & Pollak, 2019).

I've got a number of posts that mention Barrett's work.

H/t Mark Liberman @ Language Log.

Should there be a limit on how much income a wealthy person can hold?

Ingrid Robeyns asks that question at Crooked Timber, The most blasphemous idea in contemporary discourse?, Sept. 21, 2019:

I have no idea how he found it, but George Monbiot read an (open access) academic article that I wrote, with the title “What, if Anything, is Wrong with Extreme Wealth?’ In this paper I outline some arguments for the view that there should be an upper limit to how much income and wealth a person can hold, which I called (economic) limitarianism. Monbiot endorses limitarianism, saying that it is inevitable if we want to safeguard life on Earth.

As Monbiot’s piece rightly points out, there are many reasons to believe that there should be a cap on how much money we can have. Having too much money is statistically highly likely to lead to taking much more than one’s fair share from the atmosphere’s greenhouse gasses absorbing capacity and other ecological commons; it is a threat to genuine democracy; it is harmful to the psychological wellbeing of the children of the rich, and to the capacity of the rich to act autonomously when it concerns moral questions (which includes the reduced capacity for empathy of the rich); and, as I’ve argued in a short Dutch book on the topic that I published earlier this year, extreme wealth is hardly ever (if ever at all) deserved. And if those reasons weren’t enough, one can still add the line of Peter Singer and the effective altruists that excess money would have much greater moral and prudential value if it were spent on genuine needs, rather than on frivolous wants.

Monbiot wrote: “This call for a levelling down is perhaps the most blasphemous idea in contemporary discourse.”

I agree that mainstream capitalist societies operate on the assumption that the sky is the limit. But it is important to point out that the idea that there should be a cap on how much we can have, is not at all new. Historically, thinkers from many corners of the world and writing in very different times, have either given reasons why no-one should become excessively rich, or have proposed economic institutions that would have as an effect that no-one would become superrich (I suppose Marx would be in that latter category). Matthias Kramm and I have joint research on this that I’ll happily post on this blog once it is published. But to give a flavour of the range of support for the view that there should be upper limits, here are three very different sources. (I’ll leave out any comments on Socrates and Plato, since John and Belle are the obvious experts on those thinkers).

And so forth.

I posted the following comment:

A book that has influenced my thinking quite a bit is David Boehm's Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior (1999). Boehm is interested in accounting for the apparent egalitarian behavior of hunter-gatherer bands, the most basic form of human social organization. While individuals can assume a leadership role for specific occasions, e.g. a hunt, there are no permanent leaders in such bands. Boehm does not argue that such bands are egalitarian utopias; on the contrary, primitive egalitarianism is uneasy and fraught with tension. But it is real. Boehm finds this puzzling because, in all likelihood, our immediate primate ancestors had well-developed status hierarchies. Boehm ends up adopting the notion that the hierarchical behavioral patterns of our primate heritage are overlain, but not eradicated or replaced, by a more recent egalitarian social regime. Other than suggesting that this more recent regime is genetic Boehm has little to say about it.

What I like about this is the idea that our social behavior is mediated by (at least) two behavioral systems, which are organized on very different principles: hierarchy and dominance vs. equality and anarchy (in the sense of self-organizing w/out orders from above). So let's accept that as a premise. That is in our 'nature'. I'm also going to postulate our 'nature' has no way of giving priority to one of these systems. Rather, than is something that is done by 'culture' according to local social circumstances.

In this view, one of the things we're working out over the course of history, then, is the relationship between these two systems. The (phylogenetically older) hierarchical system is perfectly happy with extreme wealth because the resulting inequality is consistent with it. But the (phylogenetically newer) system doesn't like it at all. I don't see any inherently 'right' way to resolve this interaction, but I note that neither system is going to disappear. Both 'make demands' on our behavior.

So, it's all well and good for the economists to tell us that a rising tide floats all boats. But there's going to be a point where the peasants in the little rafts and zodiacs are going to be angry with the plutocrats and oligarchs in their megayachts sailing around the sea like they own it.

* * * * *

We can see this two-systems dynamic on display in Shakespeare. Consider Much Ado About Nothing. We've got two couples. Claudio and Hero interact through the hierarchical system. How does Claudio pursue Hero? Without speaking to Hero at all, he approaches his military commander to broach the matter with her father. Her father accepts on her behalf, all without conferring with her. Beatrice and Benedick, on the other hand, confront one another as equals, and one of the joys of this play is their wit combats. While both are aristocrats (as are all the principals in Shakespeare's plays), neither is rigidly fixed in the aristocracy. And so the play moves back and forth between the stories of these two couples. Of course, the play has a happen ending; both couples are to be married. But that ending has required the interaction of both of these plot lines.