Tag: anthropology
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The Universality of Happiness
Or not. Research looking at how different cultures (specifically, Americans and Japanese) perceive the concept of happiness has shown that it’s not a universal constant, at least in terms of how we define it. [The researchers] systematically analyzed American and Japanese participants’ spontaneously produced descriptions of [happiness and unhappiness] and observed, as predicted, that whereas Americans…
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How Language Affects Thinking
Linguistic relativity is the idea that language differences alone can affect how we perceive world experiences and thus can cause us to behave differently. In an Edge essay, Lera Boroditsky discusses some of her research into linguistic relativity and how language use (grammar, word choice and language itself) vastly alters our perceptions and thought processes, offering…
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Adoption and Abandonment of Tools and Ideas
Jason’s post discussing economist Lant Pritchett’s thoughts on how people perceive ‘game-changing ideas’ over time Crazy. Crazy. Crazy. Obvious. Or, more eloquently: Silly, controversial, progressive, then obvious. reminded me of research on the rise and fall of an item’s popularity that found the fall mirrored the rise. According to the results, the quicker a cultural…
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Benjamin Kunkel on The Information Age
In an essay looking at the changing roles technology takes in our lives and how this changes us, Benjamin Kunkel articulates what many journalists have tried and failed to do in recent times: produce an expressive piece about the ‘information age’ without resorting to tired analogies and scaremongering. Critiques, as opposed to mere descriptions, of…
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The Culture of Alcohol
Realising that “drinking alcohol is one of the most socially meaningful and richly symbolic activities in [British] culture”, Vaughan of Mind Hacks offers a short introduction to what could be an interesting topic; the cultural ‘benefits’ of binge drinking. There’s more to alcohol than getting pissed but you’d never know it from the papers. In…
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What Beliefs Will Appall Future Generations
“Many of our grandparents were racist, and some of our parents are homophobes. Which of our own closely held beliefs will our own children and grandchildren be appalled by?” That’s a question being posed on Reddit and the majority of responses are thought provoking and intriguing. Phil Dingra selects a few of his favourite replies,…
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Unintuitive Interfaces
Expanding on Jared Spool’s thoughts on learning cycles and so-called ‘intuitive’ interfaces, Vicky Teinaki discusses the ‘knowledge matrix’ and makes this interesting point that I feel almost embarrassed to have not thought about previously: Digital devices can never be inherently ‘intuitive’, as the fact that they deal in abstraction automatically means that actions must be arbitrary.…
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The Truth About Markets
My current read, The Truth About Markets/Culture and Prosperity (UK/US title respectively), is a thoroughly enjoyable—if occasionally dense and dry—introduction to economic theories and applications. Published in 2003, it’s aged fairly well. I felt the need to share this two-paragraph excerpt from a section discussing “large models purportedly descriptive of entire economic systems” (pp. 193-194): The…
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Gluttony and Adultery
Are our evolving social and cultural judgments about sex and food related? Mary Eberstadt, fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institute, believes so. Pulitzer Prize-winning op-ed columnist George Will discusses Eberstadt’s theory, stating that nowadays we judge people more for their food choices than their sexual behaviours, whereas a generation ago these moral poles would have…
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The Evolution of Art Appreciation
The appreciation of art is not culturally learned, but is in fact an evolved trait, or at least that’s the view of Denis Dutton as elaborated in his latest book, The Art Instinct. In a generally positive review of the book, Newsweek points out the many limitations of Dutton’s conjecture as well as summarizing it’s main…