The Enigma of Reason: A New Theory of Human Understanding
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1. “Geography of Uzbekistan,” Wikipedia, available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geography_of_Uzbekistan; “Uzbekistan,” Wikipedia, available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uzbekistan.
2. The first part of this chapter relies on Mercier 2011a and the second on Mercier 2011b.
3. Luria 1934.
4. Luria 1976, p. 107.
5. Ibid., pp. 108–109.
6. Lévy-Bruhl 1910, p. 22.
7. “Individualistic” in the relatively coarse sense in which this term is used in cross-cultural psychology and in particular in East-West comparisons.
8. Henrich, Heine, and Norenzayan 2010.
9. Cole 1971; Scribner 1977.
10. Gordon 2004.
11. Blurton Jones and Konner 1976.
12. Luria 1976, p. 109.
13. Dias, Roazzi, and Harris 2005.
14. Dutilh Novaes 2015.
15. “Japan’s Well-Placed Nuclear Power Advocates Swat Away Opponents,” NBC News, March 12, 2014, available at http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/fukushima-anniversary/japans-well-placed-nuclear-power-advocates-swat-away-opponents-n50396.
16. Suzuki 2012.
17. All three citations from ibid., p. 179; see also Suzuki 2008.
18. Becker 1986. The citation that follows is drawn from this article.
19. Nakamura 1964, p. 534.
20. Lloyd 2007, p. 10.
21. Liu 1996.
22. Combs 2004.
23. Branham 1994, p.131.
24. “Prince Shotoku’s Seventeen-Article Constitution” [Jushichijo Kenpo], SaruDama, available at http://www.sarudama.com/japanese_history/jushichijokenpo.shtml.
25. Mercier, Deguchi, et al. 2016.
26. Boehm et al. 1996; Ostrom 1991.
27. Chagnon 1992. For the record, The Yanomamö are not hunter-gatherers but horticulturalists.
28. Ibid., p. 134.
29. Hutchins 1980.
30. Gluckman 1967, p. 277.
31. Castelain et al. 2016.
32. These topics were actually debated at the 2014 Durham Open debating competition: http://www.debate-motions.info/other-tournament-motions/durham-open-2014/.
33. For the notions of proper domain, actual domain, and their relevance to the study of culture, see Sperber 1994; Sperber and Hirschfeld 2004.
34. Gigerenzer 2007.
35. Barrett 2000; Boyer 2001.
36. Comtesse de Ségur, Les Malheurs de Sophie, 1858, available at http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Les_Malheurs_de_Sophie/3; our translation.
37. Dunn and Munn 1987.
38. Ibid., p. 795.
39. Grusec and Goodnow 1994, p. 5.
40. Mercier, Bernard, and Clément 2014; see also Corriveau and Kurkul 2014; Koenig 2012.
41. Castelain, Bernard, and Mercier submitted.
42. “Conservation Task,” YouTube, February 10, 2007, available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtLEWVu815o.
43. Doise, Mugny, and Perret-Clermont 1975; Doise and Mugny 1984; Perret-Clermont 1980.
44. Silverman and Geiringer 1973.
45. Miller and Brownell 1975.
46. Ames and Murray 1982.
47. Slavin 1996, p. 43.
48. Slavin 1995.
49. Ibid.
50. Kuhn, Shaw, and Felton 1997.
51. Mercier et al. in press; Willingham 2008.
52. Pronin, Gilovich, and Ross 2004.
53. Kuhn and Crowell 2011.
17. Reasoning about Moral and Political Topics
1. Schnall et al. 2008.
2. Danziger, Levav, and Avnaim-Pesso 2011; but see Glöckner 2016 for a skeptical interpretation of these results.
3. Haidt 2001.
4. Snyder et al. 1979.
5. Chance and Norton 2008.
6. Rust and Schwitzgebel 2013.
7. And there are many others: see, e.g., Uhlmann et al. 2009; Valdesolo and DeSteno 2008.
8. “Property” on the Jefferson Monticello website, available at http://www.monticello.org/site/plantation-and-slavery/property.
9. Thomas Jefferson to John Wayles Eppes, June 30, 1820, Founders Early Access, available at http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/founders/default.xqy?keys=FOEA-print-04-02-02-1352.
10. Stanton 1993, pp. 158–159.
11. Letter to Thomas Mann Randolph, June 8, 1803, in Betts 1953, p. 19. This specific citation only refers to one slave.
12. On their distortion of the historical record, see Finkelman 1993.
13. All quotes are from Query XIV, which is available from many online sources; see, for instance, http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/jefferson/ch14.html.
14. All quotes from Query XIV (including the flowing hair).
15. This was a rejection that led both to his own failure to free more than a handful of slaves and to the advice given to other people not to free their slaves either. That was, at any rate, the advice given by Thomas Jefferson to Edward Coles in a letter written on August 25, 1814; see American History: From Revolution to Reconstruction and Beyond, available at http://www.let.rug.nl/usa/presidents/thomas-jefferson/letters-of-thomas-jefferson/jefl232.php.
16. Ibid.; see also Finkelman 1993.
17. From Query XIV again.
18. Letter from Thomas Jefferson to Edward Coles, August 25, 1814.
19. Finkelman 1993, p. 186. More generally, on the development of racism as a justification for slavery when confronted with egalitarian ideals, see Davis 1999; Fields 1990.
20. Franklin 1799; emphasis added.
21. Jefferson is also another example of how awareness of a bias doesn’t reduce it. As he said, “the moment a person forms a theory, his imagination sees, in every object, only the traits which favor that theory” (Jefferson 1829, p. 235).
22. Haidt 2001, p. 823.
23. Although see Haidt and Bjorklund 2007.
24. Haidt 2001, p. 814; see Haidt, Bjorklund, and Murphy 2000.
25. On the limits of the moral dumbfounding effect, see Royzman, Kim, and Leeman 2015.
26. Drawn from Piaget 1932, adapted by Leman and Duveen 1999, p. 575.
27. Leman and Duveen 1999.
28. Huntington 1993, p. 9.
29. Unless one counts voting with one’s feet; see Conradt and Roper 2005.
30. Sen 2003.
31. Mandela 1994, p. 21.
32. E.g., Bessette 1980; Cohen 1989.
33. E.g., Fishkin 2009; for more references, see Landemore 2013; Mercier and Landemore 2012.
34. Luskin et al. 2014.
35. Drescher 2009, p. 207.
36. Ibid., p. 224.
37. Richard Miles, quoted in Sanderson 1972, pp. 68, 71; see also Hochschild 2006.
38. Long 1774; see also Perry 2012.
39. Hochschild 2006, p. 223.
40. Perry 2012, p. 95.
41. Ibid., p. 90.
42. Cited in Swaminathan 2016.
43. Drescher 2009, p. 213.
44. See Carey 2005, pp. 85ff.
45. Drescher 1990, p. 566.
46. Wilberforce 1789.
47. Ibid., p. 52, cited in Perry 2012.
48. Long 1744, p. 437, cited in Perry 2012.
18. Solitary Geniuses?
1. Heisenberg 1952, p. 30.
2. Cited in Shapin 1991, p. 194.
3. Planck 1968, pp. 33–34, cited in Kuhn 1962.
4. Mahoney and DeMonbreun 1977.
5. Mahoney 1977.
6. Dunbar 1995.
7. Kuhn 1962, p. 152.
8. Cohen 1985, p. 468.
9. Studies reviewed by Wray 2011, who concludes that “Planck’s principle is a myth. Older scientists are not especially resistant to change” (p. 190).
10. Cohen 1985, p. 468.
11. Cited in Cohen 1985, p. 472.
12. Rorty 1991.
13. Hull, Tessner, and Diamond 1978; Kitcher 1993; Levin, Stephan, and Walker 1995.
14. Oreskes 1988; for other examples, see Kitcher 1993; Wootton 2006.
15. Citations from Thomas 1971.
17. Cited in Steven and Schaffer 1985.
18. Ibid., p. 75.
19. Dunbar 1995, p. 380.
20. Csikszentmihalyi and Sawyer 1995, p. 347.
21. Kahneman 2011, p. 40.
22. Beller 2001, pp. 103–104.
23. Ibid., pp 65–102.
24. See also Zamora Bonilla 2006.
25. Azzouni 2007.
26. Mancosu 1999.
27. Gessen 2009.
28. Westfall 1983, p. x.
29. See Fara 2002.
30. Priestley 1786, p. 346.
31. Cited in Hall 1996, p. 188.
32. Cited in ibid., p. 187.
33. Here Newton talks about book 3 of his Principia. The quotes are from the introduction to book 3.
34. Hall 1996, p. 196.
35. At least that’s what he seems to have admitted to a colleague; cited in Hall 1996, p. 184.
36. Hall 1996, p. 199.
37. Principe 2004.
Conclusion
1. Pronin 2007.
2. Mercier, Trouche, et al. 2015.
3. For instance, the data show that group discussion allows the perfect or nearly perfect spread of the correct solution to manageable logical or mathematical problems (Claidière, Trouche, and Mercier submitted; Laughlin 2011; Trouche, Sander, and Mercier 2014). It allows group members to reach a better collective answer than that reached by the best group member individually for some inductive problems (Laughlin 2011). It allows pupils and students to do better on a wide variety of school tasks (Johnson and Johnson 2009; Slavin 1995). It allows jurors to deliver better verdicts (Hastie, Penrod, and Pennington 1983). It allows scientists to discard mistaken hypotheses and form new ones (Dunbar 1997). It allows citizens to reach better-informed opinions (Fishkin 2009). It allows doctors and medical students to make better diagnoses (Kesson et al. 2012; Reimer, Russell, and Roland 2016). It allows forecasters to make better political and economic forecasts (Mellers et al. 2014). It allows group members to make more rational strategic decisions (Kugler, Kausel, and Kocher 2012). It allows investors to make better investments (Cheung and Palan 2012). And it allows good ideas to spread among scientists and in the general public (Chanel et al. 2011; Kitcher 1993; Wootton 2015).
4. For instance, Boyd et al. 2003; Sober and Wilson 1998. For an alternative view, see Baumard, André, and Sperber 2013.
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