fair point,

In my post I'm not comparing identical situations. In my defense I do try to aim for brevity.

furthermore my experience is largely 'snap shop' with cheating in business largely being seen in tourist areas where most foreigners are once only customers, hence there is potentially an advantage since the concept or rather opportunity of repeat sale is minimal, whereas my experience with poor communities is in remote mountain areas where there is no tourism and my presence unusual. Similarly I set out to create relationships in those remote areas whereas I don't in cities. So I was being a bit defensive as the word poor conjures an image in my mind of the mountain people I have a great fondness for ... for your pleasure I've posted a couple of pictures... hopefully you will see why...

regards

GM23

"The greatest downfall, however, is that the mental evolution of humanity is so complex that scientists often fall back on such blatantly unscientific concepts as the "meme" -- a concept better left to 4chan."

i don't get the impression from this statement that you're familiar with some of the more arduous attempts to utilize the concept of the meme in talking about culture. aunger's books are a good place to start. dan dennett also employs the concept throughout his works. blackmore's work was brilliant and pioneering, but overreaching a bit, and certainly a little over-enthusiastic.



"One thing that gets me about evolutionary psychology in particular is that it proposes problems; but not solutions. Honestly, I'd expect such a science to help us evolve as a species, or at least as individuals."

i agree, but we need to recognize the bind that scientists are placed in. the scientific method is in large part about trying to ferret out bias and agenda and get to what actually is. of course we can't be naive that there aren't values expressed in funding, emphasis, framing, and the like, but nonetheless a guiding principle behind science is that we try to get to what's actually going on regardless of what we want the answer to be.

that puts scientists in a double-bind when it comes to applying their work in changing the world. if they start drawing applications from their work, they will quickly get accused that their results are biased toward the application. this is fine when the application is technological, but when it comes to implementing social change, whoa nelly, everyone has hemorrhoids and starts throwing tomatoes. it sucks.

it's my feeling that we need more scientific applications for well-being, and that scientists should engage in this work and not be stigmatized for it -- the place for questioning research is in peer review and replication, not in what a scientists might do in applying her or his work!

as far as deception goes, unfortunately what evolutionary psych is likely to conclude is that so long as their is more of a benefit for deception, someone is going to be deceptive, and that strategy/trait will remain or even increase in the population. my personal strategy is one of radical honesty, but it sure gets me in a fuckload of trouble sometimes. i humbly share a blog post on the notion of honest communication for your review:

jeffharmon.blogspot.com/2006/1...th.html

part of my claim there is that 100% honesty is an incoherent concept.

Fooling yourself is an ancient and useful trait
02 November 2007
From New Scientist Print Edition.
Dan Jones


WE ALL tend to rationalise our bad decisions and try to hide our mistakes, even from ourselves. Now it turns out that the psychological machinery to do this exists even in young children, and evolved a surprisingly long way back in our primate ancestry.

When things go wrong for us, we have a choice - give up on a cherished self-image ("I'm irresistible to women," say), or keep it and play down the situation ("I didn't really like her anyway..."). Over the past 50 years, hundreds of studies have revealed the many tools at our disposal which cope with this "cognitive dissonance" - from selective memory to the biased framing and retelling of events. These allow us to live with our choices and, ultimately, ourselves, yet their origins are poorly understood.

“Selective memory and the biased framing and retelling of events allow us to live with our choices and, ultimately, ourselves”
To explore the evolutionary and developmental roots of cognitive dissonance, and how we resolve it, Louisa Egan and colleagues at Yale University designed tests to elicit conflicting thoughts in 4-year-old children and in capuchin monkeys. The children were initially asked how much they liked a variety of animal-shaped foam stickers. Each child was then shown three stickers which they had rated as equally desirable. Two of these were available for them to take home, while the third was not, and the child was asked to decide which one of the two to keep. Having made their choice, they were told they could also take either the unchosen sticker of the original pair, or the third sticker.

For the monkeys, stickers were replaced by 20 differently coloured M&M sweets - each monkey's colour preferences having been determined by how quickly they retrieved the sweets from a testing chamber. Like the children, the monkeys were then offered a choice between two M&Ms out of a set of three of the same desirability, followed by another choice between the rejected and previously unoffered sweet.

These tasks generate cognitive dissonance in a subtle way. Ordinarily we choose according to our preferences, but being forced to choose arbitrarily between equally preferred options sets up a conflict with this approach. One way to resolve this dissonance is to update your preferences to accord with the choice you make by devaluing the rejected option, so that in retrospect it seems non-arbitrary. What's more, the devalued option should, if the brain is stepping in to resolve internal conflict, subsequently seem less desirable than a previous equal.

This is exactly what Egan's group found: both the children and the monkeys appeared to update their preferences. When presented with the second choice, they were more likely to reject what had previously been an equally preferred option in favour of the third sticker or sweet, revealing cognitive dissonance and its resolution in action. In control groups, where the first sticker or sweet was randomly allotted, there was no subsequent revaluing of options.

This, says Egan, is the first evidence for decision rationalisation in children and non-human primates (Psychological Science, vol 18, p 978).

The work challenges the popular notion of cognitive dissonance as a complex process requiring sophisticated self-awareness, says Eddie Harmon-Jones, a psychologist at Texas A&M University, College Station. "This beautiful study conclusively demonstrates dissonance processes in 'minimal' cognitive situations," he says.

The findings also contribute to a growing emphasis on the similarities between human, ape and monkey minds. "They're part of a growing body of research demonstrating fundamental commonalities in the way human and non-human primates process, and even interpret and evaluate information from their physical and social worlds," says Michael Tomasello, an expert on primate cognition at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

Egan and colleagues now intend to take their approach into more challenging domains. "We're planning to explore the development of moral hypocrisy and the rationalisation of moral behaviour in children and primates," she says.

From issue 2628 of New Scientist magazine, 02 November 2007, page 14