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151Three Problems of InterdisciplinarityAvant: Trends in Interdisciplinary Studies 13 (1). 2022.Interdisciplinarity is widely promulgated as beneficial to science and society. However, there are three quite serious problems which can limit the success of any interdisciplinary research collaboration. The first problem is expertise (it takes years of effort to cultivate a deep knowledge of even one discipline). The second problem is comprehensibility (experts in different disciplines do not reliably understand each other). The third problem is service (in a given interdisciplinary endeavour,…Read more
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181Reciprocity and reputation: a review of direct and indirect social information gatheringJournal of Mind and Behavior 37 (3-4): 247-270. 2016.Direct reciprocity, indirect reciprocity, and reputation are important interrelated topics in the evolution of sociality. This non-mathematical review is a summary of each. Direct reciprocity (the positive kind) has a straightforward structure (e.g., "A rewards B, then rewards A") but the allocation might differ from the process that enabled it (e.g., whether it is true reciprocity or some form of mutualism). Indirect reciprocity (the positive kind) occurs when person (B) is rewarded by a third …Read more
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188Euphoria versus dysphoria: differential cognitive roles in religion?In Slim Masmoudi, Abdelmajid Naceur & David Y. Dai (eds.), Attention, Representation & Performance, Psychology Press. pp. 147-165. 2011.The original book chapter does not have an abstract. However, I have written an abstract for this repository: Religious life encompasses a wide diversity of situations for which the emotional tone is on a continuum from extreme euphoria to extreme dysphoria. In this book chapter, we propose the novel hypothesis that euphoria and dysphoria have distinctly separate functional consequences for religious evolution and survivability. This is due to the differential cognitive states that are created i…Read more
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199Three problems of interdisciplinarityAvant: Trends in Interdisciplinary Studies 1 (13): 1-19. 2022.Interdisciplinarity is widely promulgated as beneficial to science and society. However, there are three quite serious problems which can limit the success of any interdisciplinary research collaboration. The first problem is expertise (it takes years of effort to cultivate a deep knowledge of even one discipline). The second problem is comprehensibility (experts in different disciplines do not reliably understand each other). The third problem is service (in a given interdisciplinary endeavour,…Read more
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189Economic drivers of biological complexityAdaptive Behavior 23 315-326. 2015.The complexity that we observe in nature can often be explained in terms of cooperative behavior. For example, the major transitions of evolution required the emergence of cooperation among the lower-level units of selection, which led to specialization through division-of-labor ultimately resulting in spontaneous order. There are two aspects to address explaining how such cooperation is sustained: how free-riders are prevented from free-riding on the benefits of cooperative tasks, and just as i…Read more
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53What is Counterintuitive? Religious Cognition and Natural ExpectationReview of Philosophy and Psychology 4 (4): 715-749. 2013.What is ‘counterintuitive’? There is general agreement that it refers to a violation of previously held knowledge, but the precise definition seems to vary with every author and study. The aim of this paper is to deconstruct the notion of ‘counterintuitive’ and provide a more philosophically rigorous definition congruent with the history of psychology, recent experimental work in ‘minimally counterintuitive’ concepts, the science vs. religion debate, and the developmental and evolutionary backgr…Read more
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32How do you measure pleasure? A discussion about intrinsic costs and benefits in primate allogroomingBiology and Philosophy 28 (6): 1005-1020. 2013.Social grooming is an important element of social life in terrestrial primates, inducing the putative benefits of β-endorphin stimulation and group harmony and cohesion. Implicit in many analyses of grooming (e.g. biological markets) are the assumptions of costs and benefits to grooming behaviour. Here, in a review of literature, we investigate the proximate costs and benefits of grooming, as a potentially useful explanatory substrate to the well-documented ultimate (functional) explanations. We…Read more