The Many Manipulations of Morty Mouse: Children\u27s Stories and the Parental Encouragement of Altruism

Most analyses of children\u27s stories share the assumption that stories are told to children to influence their behavior. This paper explores how the analysis of stories can provide insight into social strategies used by people interacting within their cultural context. To demonstrate the potential of this approach, we created multiple versions of an original children\u27s story to explore attitudes of college students toward the form of social interaction known as reciprocal altruism. Some versions portrayed the protagonist of the story as following a tit-for-tat strategy, while in other versions the protagonist was altruistic toward all the other characters regardless of their past behavior. Subjects read one of the versions and rated it in terms of how likely they would be to read it to a child of the appropriate age. The highest rated version involved the protagonist being altruistic even to characters that had cheated in the past. We discuss this finding and suggest future applications of this methodology

Cultural traits as units of analysis

Cultural traits have long been used in anthropology as units of transmission that ostensibly reflect behavioural characteristics of the individuals or groups exhibiting the traits. After they are transmitted, cultural traits serve as units of replication in that they can be modified as part of an individual's cultural repertoire through processes such as recombination, loss or partial alteration within an individual's mind. Cultural traits are analogous to genes in that organisms replicate them, but they are also replicators in their own right. No one has ever seen a unit of transmission, either behavioural or genetic, although we can observe the effects of transmission. Fortunately, such units are manifest in artefacts, features and other components of the archaeological record, and they serve as proxies for studying the transmission (and modification) of cultural traits, provided there is analytical clarity over how to define and measure the units that underlie this inheritance process

Insights into Past Ritual Practice at Yikpabongo, Northern Region, Ghana

Varied interpretations have been provided for the figurine mound sites located in Koma Land and in the Mogduri District, Northern Region, Ghana, including that they represent burial mounds or shrines. In particular, the producers or affiliates of the mounds are unknown, as the traditions of the present inhabitants of the archaeological region dissociate themselves from the mounds. Current excavations of the mounds have provided considerable contextual information, leading the excavation team to hypothesise that the mounds are best understood within a shrine context and that the figurines, possibly representing ancestors or other beings, were used in ceremonies aimed at communicating with the supernatural world for healing or other purposes

Cultural Niche Construction: An Introduction

Niche construction is the process whereby organisms, through their activities and choices, modify their own and each other’s niches. By transforming natural-selection pressures, niche construction generates feedback in evolution at various different levels. Niche-constructing species play important ecological roles by creating habitats and resources used by other species and thereby affecting the flow of energy and matter through ecosystems—a process often referred to as “ecosystem engineering.” An important emphasis of niche construction theory (NCT) is that acquired characters play an evolutionary role through transforming selective environments. This is particularly relevant to human evolution, where our species has engaged in extensive environmental modification through cultural practices. Humans can construct developmental environments that feed back to affect how individuals learn and develop and the diseases to which they are exposed. Here we provide an introduction to NCT and illustrate some of its more important implications for the human sciences.</p