 Hi everyone, it's a pleasure and honor to be here presenting alongside such illustrious scholars in a wide range of disciplines that investigate the mysteries of what it's like to be human. It's really a pleasure. So I'm Samuel Vissier. I'm an assistant professor in the division of social and transcultural psychiatry here at McGill, where I'm also affiliated with the Department of Anthropology and where I'm co-director of the culture mind and brain program, which brings together scholars from a really broad range of disciplines like philosophy, neuroscience, anthropology, public health and psychiatry among others. Again, to investigate lots of complex and interesting variables in human distress and wellness and what it's like to be human. So I'm here to present the outline of the cultural affordances model that we've been developing here with Professor Lawrence Kameyer, Maxwell Bramsted and different colleagues. I should perhaps begin by telling you a little bit about my own background as an anthropologist. So I trained as an anthropologist here at McGill. I got my PhD in 2007. I did a thesis in Northeast Brazil, examining the modes of resilience, survival strategies and cooperation of three children and sex workers of all people. And like many of my fellow presenters here, I have a complicated relationship with my own discipline and with interdisciplinary. So about five or six years after completing my PhD, I had something of an existential crisis about my identity as an anthropologist. So at that time I had been working between Northern Canada and the Brazilian Amazon in indigenous community development. I had also written a book stemming out of my PhD work, looking at how really marginalized social actors like three children and racialized women in Brazil came to understand their relationship with the social, cultural, economic, political and historical structures in which their lives were embedded. I had taught and developed a broad range of courses in anthropology and social theory. I taught a yearly seminar in Brazil, a PhD seminar in anthropological theory. And yet if I were to be completely honest with myself, I found that I would have been hard-pressed to explain what culture was, to anyone really, or to even formulate it to myself. So as an anthropologist, as Carol Werthman mentioned, I had been trained to critique everything to death. I was very good at pointing out that there were cultural differences. I had been trained to be particularly critical of science and of psychology especially. So I had nothing whatsoever, for example, to say about any possible psychological dimensions that might give rise to the general phenomenon of culture. So I had been trained to think of psychology as a really problematic discipline that was articulated around a set of concerns and realities that reflected perhaps something like Eurocentric, primarily white, upper-middle class, nuclear family kinds of realities, but that really did not have much to say about the broad variety of the human experience. So as I grew more disquiet and frustrated with basically my lack of understanding of my own discipline, I decided to retrain in cognitive and behavioral sciences. And I came here at McGill, where under the mentorship of Lawrence Kamair, Ian Gold, and Amir Raz, I began reinterpreting my work through a very, very different lens. So what I want to do today is basically walk you through this set of really important questions that perhaps many of us forget to ask, that perhaps many of us leave out of our research. And I want to walk you in particular through a set of questions about the puzzle, the mystery of what culture is. I'll be presenting the outline of this model of cultural affordances that we hope bears some promise to try to, if not fully answer the question of what it's like to be human, perhaps, pose the question in interesting and precise ways. And then I'll move on to present a different general theory of how cognition and culture interact and we'll conclude with a set of methodological considerations for what to look for, how to study culture. So in this workshop, we've talked a lot about the importance of context. Indeed, it has become something of a cliché now to say that, well, when we look at the biomedical sciences, when we look at public health, when we look at experimental psychology, things like randomized controlled trial or lab-controlled experiments lack ecological validity. They're not able to capture to apprehend, to comprehend any of the complex environmental factors that interact to produce context. But again, what is context? And I think that's a really pertinent question that we need to pose in detail. So when I query my students or colleagues on what their definition of context is, they often summon what I call the obvious dimensions. So people will mention environmental factors like, say, you know, whether people live in an urban or rural environment. They might mention a set of daily stressors, things like pollution, for example, or noise. When people are asked to define culture, they very often are quick to mention a set of demographic variables. So nationalities, socioeconomic status, gender, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, age, and so on and so forth. Okay. Now, some people who are perhaps a little more sophisticated are often attentive to factors that are a little less obvious, a little more difficult to pin down. Things like social norms, values. People sometimes call those cultural values. I'm not quite sure yet what those are. Now, to try to dig a little deeper, we might borrow distinction that was famously proposed by the French social scientist Pierre Bourdieu in his outline of a theory of practice where he said, well, you know, we could look at culture, cultural forms of life as comprising two dimensions. So one are these obvious dimensions, what may be called dogmas, so the set of rules and conventions that people know that they must do. So if you ask people, well, what are some things that you care about in your culture? How are you expected to behave? They might be able to tell you certain things like say, we're allowed to marry these people, we're not allowed to marry these people, etc. But there might be, we may think of this as the tip of the iceberg. So Pierre Bourdieu pointed our attention towards what he termed doxa. That is all that is taken for granted in any given context for society. This is also a definition of culture famously proposed by Professor Alain Young, a very distinguished scholar in medical anthropology, who studied among many other things post-traumatic disorder here at McGill, who likes to say that culture is everything that we take for granted. So that's really interesting, but again, what exactly are we talking about and how can we go about studying it? So if we look at all these different factors, all these different variables, they're interesting, they cluster together in interesting ways, but again, what does that mean? This reminds me of what in the medical sciences we call a syndrome, a constellation of symptoms that co-occur, that are bundled together in some way, the causality of which seems a little difficult to ascertain. In fact, in my own work, I have often toyed with the idea of what we call the self, being basically a bundle of symptoms, so culturally specific ways of being and a feeling in one's body. So I want to keep walking you through this mystery for a minute. We may now borrow a definition of society. Again, what is society proposed by the Cambridge anthropologist Keith Hart? And he points out that society is in fact quite mysterious because we've lived in it our whole life. It dwells inside of us in really interesting ways, but it's not ordinarily visible. Yet another, the last one, I promise, interesting allegory. This is from a graduation speech given by the American writer, David Foster Wallace, when he tells the story of two fish who meet one morning and the first fish asked the other one, hey, how's it going? How's the water today? And the other fish replies, well, what is water? So what I want us to investigate today together is precisely this, this invisible water in which we dwell and that lives inside us, but that we're somehow not able to notice. So yeah, it is really that taken for granted aspect that I want us to investigate. Now, for me, and this is really one of the key take-home points from my presentation today, is that the most important dimension of culture, the most important definition of culture, what it is that we must understand and look for is basically other minds. Whatever culture or context is, is something that comes about through our relationship with actual and imagined other minds. And I'm going to proceed to explain this through a variety of examples. If I were to give my presentation in under a minute, however, I would choose a Japanese haiku and I would choose this particular haiku written by Mayuzumi Madoka, who's a contemporary poetess. She's a female poet who now lives in Paris, who brings to our attention a really interesting moment in the genealogy of a love story perhaps. So she tells of a person who's choosing a swimsuit and starts imagining herself through the perspective of her lover. So I'll invite you to pause for a second and consider just how wonderfully intricate, complex, but also poetic this is, and how this in many ways exemplifies what it is like to be human. This ability that we as a species have to project ourselves through the perspective of others, to see through the eyes of other people, to feel through the feelings of others. So here we're beginning to see, we're beginning to paint the picture of a really complex, intersubjective, embodied, affective kind of reality that comes about through the relationship that we form with one another and in particular through one expectations that we come to form about one another. So a more precise definition of context in cultural context might be, well, something to do with expectations about other minds and in particular how expectations come to be shared. So I unfortunately lack the time to give you the full story of the intellectual genealogy of the cultural affordances model and the many intellectual traditions on which we draw, but we're in particular interested in opening up a conversation between different fields of inquiry on the human experience that typically investigate the same questions, but don't read the same books and don't use the same language. So on the one hand there are schools of phenomenology in the philosophy of mind, phenomenology being of course the investigation of lived experience, in particular more recent an activist or 4EA accounts of the philosophy of mind. So understanding of the mind as being embodied, enacted, extended, and embedded. We draw, as we will see in a minute, on ecological psychology. So we also try to bring this embodied, extended, affective mind into a broader ecology, into a broader environment. We draw a lot on the cultural phenomenology pioneered, well here in this very department by Professor Kumair and colleagues, but unlike many of our colleagues in the an activist phenomenological camps, we're also very interested in the analytic, what the analytic tradition might bring to the table, in particular what developmental psychology and cognitive anthropology in particular through recent cultural evolution models might bring to the table. So in doing so, we also borrow or revisit Grysian approaches in the philosophy of mind that are very interested in the idea of meaning coming about through intentions, the idea of social intentions, meaning coming about through what we can pick up on what others intend to convey. And a final rather recent body of work in computational neuroscience and theoretical biology that we also bring to the table is the recent understanding of the brain as basically being a prediction machine, being a Bayesian statistical prediction machine to be more precise or from another language that we borrow from theoretical physics, the mind and living systems in particular having something to do with attempting to minimize surprise and to save energy. So I like the time to go in detail in these really interesting predictive processing and variational dimensions of our model, but suffice it to say that these models, however complex they may sound, they basically bring a little bit of mathematical precision to a very, very old philosophical story. A philosophical story I might point out which is found in many different cultural traditions. So the idea that reality is basically an illusion. So this is of course a story that we find in Vedic, Indic and Buddhic philosophies. We also find it in Platonic, Western philosophies, famously epitomized in Plato's allegory of the cave. So what we see and take in hold to be real is a mere illusion, a mere projection. The psychoanalytic and psychodynamic story on this is also that well reality is a projection of our own fears and our own desires, but suffice us to say here that we don't encounter the world as it is, but as we expect it to be. And on this the predictive processing and variational free energy models have a lot to say. What is often missing, or so we find in these recent predictive processing accounts, is precisely the intersubjective dimension. In particular the role of other people. These models may be a little too individualistic. So how we outsource our expectation to other people around us is a really important picture that we need to slowly draw out together. So when we talk about, when we get to the mythological part of this talk, when we talk about well how do we go about studying culture, particularly if people themselves don't even know how and why they are enculturated, what it is, what is it that we must look at, well expectations, in particular the process of outsourcing expectations and cultural information to relevant others. And we'll talk about dimensions of salience, how things become in a sense automatic, how there are some aspects of the world that people attend to automatically, and valence. So valence is a way to talk about phenomenology, what it feels like to be human in a particular context, but also well simply how good or how bad does it feel. And as we will see, thinking of cultural affordances in terms of salience and valence isn't very interesting, we hope productive way to think about wellness and distress, for example. So let's proceed and now certainly moving away from anthropological definitions that simply list off a set of differences. We may borrow a definition of culture from the biological sciences. So we know, we can speak of culture when we can notice that members of the same species develop different ways of doing things, different ways of doing things that are durable over time and that are widely shared. So within one group, people do things differently from the other group. And when we have every reason to believe that these differences are not caused by biologies, simply, but arise through social learning, then we may speak of culture. So this is just, again, that definition we're pointing out. We know that culture does that. How does it come about is a very, very complicated question. So here I'll briefly mention some of the basic mechanisms, the cognitive mechanisms in particular, that have been posited to play a key role in how culture comes about. Well, joint intentionality, sometimes referred to as theory of mind. The ability that humans have, and we have every reason to believe more so than any other species, to make inferences about what other people expect of them, to infer, care about other people's mental states, other people's needs. So from this, from this ability that we have to make inferences about what we, what each other want and desire, rises the ability to form joint goals and to engage in very large-scale, coordinated, patterned, meaningful action. But the question, of course, is still, how exactly does that come about? Because if you think about different cultural groups acquiring different beliefs, different preferences, different tastes, without explicit instruction, without ever being told, you must believe X, or you must like X, with very limited possibilities of direct imitation and interaction with one another. Yet, people come to adopt very culturally, historically, context-specific ways of feeling, ways of thinking, and ways of doing things that are rather similar, eerily similar to those of others around them. How does that come about? So perhaps another very pertinent question would be, well, where is culture? How deep does it run exactly? And again, is it out there in the world? Is it in the head? Is it in the body? These are such fascinating questions that we often forget to ask. So what we should do now is try to consider in ourselves just how deep culture runs and how deeply our very assumptions and intuitions are permeated by culturally specific dimensions that we ourselves are not very aware of. So this is a famous task in social psychology where participants are shown three faces. One of them is described as black, the other one is ambiguous, and the third one is described as white. Now, in the next moment, participants are asked to identify the person with the darkest shade of skin. You won't be surprised when I tell you that most people identify this person right there on your left as the people with the darkest shade of skin. It appears obvious, doesn't it? It so happens, however, that all three pictures have exactly the same shade, same color, same shading. So what's going on? So look again. I suspect that many of you here continue to perceive the forehead of the person on your left as much darker than the other three. So what's going on? It seems that simply by being primed, by being, what is it? Is it the word black? Is it the fact that we come to associate a set of phenotypic features, perhaps a slightly larger nose with the skin that we associate to be darker, and then again on the predictive processing account, your brain basically predicts what comes next and produces an image that appears darker to you. So this may appear to be only a benign optical illusion. However, as decades of research in the psychology of implicit bias has shown, there's an entire set of ethical and social problems that are embedded in what we just saw. So this is a reference to the famous doll experiment pioneered by Richard and Mammy Clark in the 1960s at the time of the Civil Rights Trials where, and I encourage you to try this tragic experiment at home, but when children older than four or five are shown these two babies and are told which one is the good baby, which one is the bad baby, or which one is the smart baby, or which one is the dumb baby, invariably children who are raised in the West point to the white baby as being the good one and as being the smart one. Worryingly, even minority children, so children who are socially constituted as adopting a minority position largely based on social conventions, also identify the white baby as being the good ones. So now we're beginning to understand the mystery of how people acquire beliefs and tastes in perhaps a more sophisticated matter. It is as though there's a set of values that are ultimately arbitrary. I mean we know certainly from biological sciences that race is only a social construct. There is no relationship, as we know, between skin color, say, and intelligence. However, people make a set of automatic assumptions based on these traits that symbolically come to acquire meaning. And people, what is more worrying, come to internalize their own position vis-à-vis this dominant cultural convention. So if you grow up as a white child, it's all good, right, because you can associate yourself with being the smart and good one. But what if you grow up, what if you're socially, historically, economically constituted as a minority? But now let's recap. So there are certain cues, things like skin color, for example, that are automatically assigned with meaning, so expected attributes, and valence, goodness or badness. And these cues, they seem to trigger fully embodied, affective and enacted schemas. Now the question, again, how are these learned? Let's go briefly through a few more examples to appreciate just how deeply culture permeates our assumptions and then we'll be able to together build a kind of a model to understand how that works. So this is another famous task in social psychology. Ask yourself, how many of each kind of animal did Moses take on the ark? I'm sure many of you are guessing that you're being tricked right now. The answer, of course, is none. It was not Moses, but it was Noah who took the animals on the ark, or so it goes in the biblical story. Now what exactly does this have to do with culture? The task, the Moses question, is a known measure of analytical reasoning and intuitive errors known as the one item Moses task illusion. Something that I endlessly find fascinating is when I assign this particular question as a bonus exam question in a large class of undergraduates, I often find that Chinese students get it right. So at first I used to ask myself what's going on? Why do the Chinese students get it right? Is it because they're raised with a set of specific values about education that make them pay more attention? That's probably not it. Imagine that growing up in a place where you're not very familiar with Abrahamic stories and you have to invest conscious effort in remembering wait a minute, who was this Moses guy again? It would probably be obvious to you that it was not Moses, but Noah who brought the animals on the ark. So the idea here is that whatever, and this is a very well-studied bias in cognitive psychology, whatever comes to mind automatically, whatever is easily retrievable in memory, does not involve any kind of effortful cognitive mechanism. It does not involve any kind of conscious mental effort. So cognitive psychologists study this as the ways in which intuitive errors come about. That's very interesting, but cognitive anthropologists have a different take on the matter. They tend to understand this as what they call the frequency bias. So ideas that come to mind automatically, well, they don't come out of nowhere. They don't come out of a vacuum. They tend to reflect ideas, assumptions, expectations as we will see that are culturally widespread. So this is interesting. The idea of culturally widespread intuitions and expectations is something we will return to towards the end of the talk when we discuss methodological ways of studying culture, of studying shared expectations in particular. So yeah, we've already posed the questions in many ways. How is it that people develop similar beliefs, similar tastes, and worryingly or not, beliefs and tastes that however arbitrary they might seem, people care about to such a dramatic extent that they would easily be ready to kill or die in the name of these socially constituted beliefs. So we now get to the very interesting notion of affordances and we're going to start talking about culture as affordances. So what is an affordance? The notion of affordance was made famous by the psychologist James Gibson in his work on the ecology of visual perception. The idea of affordance is an interesting way to explore again and old philosophical questions about for example meaning. So say Aristotle, the philosopher used to say, things in and of themselves have no meaning. Language has meaning, but they have attributes. They have properties. Okay, so an affordance is a way to think about the properties of things in the environment and what the environment makes possible. So simply put an affordance is a property that a thing or a feature of the environment might readily offer without needing to learn, without needing to have in particular as we will see social learning. That was the traditional idea about affordances. So a cup for example has the property drinkability, potability. A cup affords drinking. A chair affords sitting. A wall affords not going through. Of course a perhaps more sophisticated take on affordances is that things don't just have direct properties for everyone and anyone. They have interactional properties based on the dispositions of the organisms that interact with different things. So a cup affords drinking, sure, but it affords drinking for agents or for organisms that have well a hand to be able to pick up the cup. So with opposable thumbs of course you also need a mouth, you need a stomach, you need to be an organism that needs water, etc. And indeed a chair affords sitting well for bipedal organisms. So for humans, for some apes it might, but it does not afford sitting for, I don't know, for an amoeba or for a plane. So yeah affordances describe possibilities for action in an ecological niche. So we can think of an environmental niche as being co-constructed between organisms and things and features of the environment. The thing about affordances is that they were left out of the anthropological literature, of the cognitive anthropological literature, and largely of the psychological literature, because it was assumed that affordances were simply things that could be readily discovered by organism and their environment, but that did not really apply to culture. Because culture, by definition, requires symbolic conventions, requires things that need to be learned from others, so not affordances. In the developmental psychology literature, for example, there's a small debate on the extent to which chimpanzees and bonobos exhibit forms of culture. So chimpanzees and bonobos have been observed using different kinds of rudimentary tools, like sticks to obtain termites and different termite mounds. And the consensus errs on the size of non-social affordances. Basically these are things that chimpanzees from generation to generation can individually rediscover. There's not much of a need for teaching or social learning. So affordances, or so it was thought, don't really apply to humans, because humans learn things conventionally and symbolically. We don't really understand how that happens, but they're not affordances. But let's just examine briefly, for example, with this picture, with this image of fords. So when I ask a group of undergraduate students, what does this afford? People will say, well, it affords respect. A student tie is a widely recognized symbol of a status symbol. Okay, sure. But as we will see, if you introduce, say, different cues, different indices, then it might afford something else altogether. So with the presence of, say, these two glasses, now the status, the affordance status of the person wearing a suit seems to shift to something a little more subordinate. This affords being served. But now, examine again if you're bringing something like, say, a walkie-talkie. This, what does this afford? So it affords maybe a sense of safety for some people. But then again, and this is crucial, and we're going to keep brainstorming these examples together, depending on how one is socially positioned, the affordance there will be very different. So say, let's think back to this really tragic experiment in the psychology of implicit bias. Suppose that you are from a minority group that is very, very tragically used to experiencing systematic discrimination. This might afford fear. You might pick up on an affordance of danger. And so it goes even for a suit and tie neutrally. Depending on your own social positioning, you might feel that this is something of a conspecific, a colleague, or you might feel intimidated. So it appears as though these different symbolic affordances are stable enough for some people, depending on how they are positioned. But the question of how they are learned and how they come to hold with something of a pattern precision for different groups of people remains. It's an important question. We need to keep posing it. So we should also pause to examine the ways in which different environments, different contexts, different objects, as we have seen, they have different, they may have different affordances for different people. But in fact, there's a wide, perhaps infinite possibility of affordances that they also might hold. They might also change over time. And there might be some patterning in this picture. So how does this work? So we've seen a chair of Ford sitting. Okay, you need to be a bipedal person or agent or organism. But what about specific kinds of chairs? What about a chair like this, a throne? A throne of Ford's not sitting for all but the monarch. But if you think about it, whether it's a throne or a chair, a chair, say in a lecture hall, they also afford doing lots of things. I could get up on the chair and do a back flip. I could pick up the chair and throw it in one of my colleagues' face. Or I could just stand up on the chair the whole time. My body and the chair have combinatorial possibilities that make this affordance possible. Yet none of us do that. For the most part, most of us know how to use chairs in moment-specific, context-specific, ritual-specific, even gender-specific ways of sitting. So people come, they enter a lecture hall and they know how to sit in ritually appropriate way, how to listen, how to not throw the chair in my face, how to not get up and sit on the chair from which I am lecturing. But then again, suppose I'm lecturing and all of a sudden I leave for five, 10 minutes. The students grow a little disquiet. Most of them leave. Then what happens to the affordance status of the chair on which I was sitting? Well, some of them might actually sit on it. So the affordance status will change. As we will see, perhaps it has something to do with the people, be they actual or imaginary, who are around, the people who are likely to enforce a social rule. So we'll return to that. So we've already briefly visited some of these examples, but I want you to keep considering, again, how the same environment might afford very different things to different people depending on how they are socially positioned. So here this is another iteration on the status symbol scenario. So what does a university afford, for example? What is walking through a university on a Sunday afternoon afford? Well, for one person, say, S1 here might be a high status person, a high status university educated person. S2 here might be a person who did not have access to university education, who is largely perceived by others in his or her society as having a low status based on some markers like symbolic markers, of course, like dress, forms of speech, accent, and so on and so forth. So for the university educated subject number one, the university might afford a sense of pride, a sense of comfort, a sense of communion, a sense of being among her peers. For the second subject, walking through the university might afford a sense of anxiety, a sense of shame. So for both subject number one and subject number two, the instant neurobiological response to interacting with the university will be very different. One of them might have a stress response, perhaps even a fight or flight, and the other one might have, I don't know, an oxytocin release. So again, how does that come about? Why does the same world have radically different affordances for different people? And is there some patterning? Is there a rule in how are those rules learned? I want to keep drawing your attention to the dimension of salience. Salience being whatever jumps to mind automatically, whatever we attend to automatically. As I'm going to keep arguing and attempting to explain, cultural affordances being encultured has something to do with the selective patterning of attention, and in particular the outsourcing of salience to people from our own groups. So now we're beginning to define a cultural group as a group of people united by shared expectations and a group of people who largely implicitly, largely automatically will attend to the same features of the environment and who will derive an embodied response and modes of action readiness that are roughly similar, roughly patterned based on the groups to which they belong. So here briefly, a final social status scenario. We have our subject number one, high status or subject number two, low status, who are walking in a dark alley, perhaps at night. So subject number one first automatically attends to the presence of subject number two. Subject number one may not think of herself as being particularly racist. However, as social psychology demonstrates, she has internalized a set of implicit biases whereby she automatically associates the symbolic markers that are wrapped around the low status subject number two as signaling some kind of threat or danger. She thinks, oh, that person might mug me, but rather subliminally, rather subconsciously. So automatically, the first subject sees the low status person, gets an instant reaction of fear, and then scanning the environment notices the presence of the policeman and feels reassured. So implicitly, subject number one has assumed, okay, now I'm safe. So the affordance status of the dark alley has changed based on the presence of the policeman. Now, subject number two, who is used to being the recipient of all kinds of discrimination, who is used to being read as signaling some kind of threat, even though she herself might be completely inoffensive, does not even notice subject number one. The first feature of the environment of the dark alley that she notices is the policeman and her instant reaction, again, is fear. Oh, that person is probably out to get me. What have I done? So in order to understand how that comes about, in order to better understand this really strange, but as we will see, pattern process of outsourcing our expectations to others, be they real, like for example, I see the policeman there or imagined, people generalized like me, others will return to this, we need to examine a little more how ordinary consciousness and cognition works. How does the mind work? This is a really, really fascinating question that we're all trying to wrap our heads around, no pun intended. So the question I might ask you now is, well, what goes down in people's minds from moment to moment and from context to context? And these are, as we have seen, really, really, really difficult questions to study. So we might attempt to answer these questions by looking at a few proxy examples. In particular, the emerging literature on daydreaming and mind wandering, dreaming as well as one particular working of the unconscious, as it were, and also a few examples about delusion. So the mind, when it's not working very well, might actually give us some clues about how it works when it works well. So whether mind wandering is good or bad for you, adaptive or maladaptive is a hotly debated question. There are people who think that mind wandering is great. It's a way for you to replenish your cognitive resources. Others understand it as a form of distraction. But still, mechanistically, how does it work? We're not sure. However, neuroscientists and phenomenologists are becoming more and more aware that most of the time our mind is wandering. And by a wandering mind, I mean when our mind is not actually paying attention to the task at hand or to what's going on. So right now, many of you are listening to me. Most of you are not or most of you are only half listening to me. Most of you are thinking about your grocery list or your next camping trip as we'll see. So this is an example that Zachary Irving, a mind wandering researcher says, let's say you're walking to the grocery store. At first, your mind wanders to a plethora of ideas. You think about your new shirt, a joke you heard, an upcoming ski trip. Then your thoughts become automatically constrained. You start to worry about a looming work deadline. And then you realize that your worries are making you miserable. So you deliberately constrain your thoughts and you force your mind back to grocery shopping. This seems a fairly plausible depiction of a series of mind moments that we've all experienced. Now, I would like us to carefully examine this micro phenomenology of mind moments. So the person is walking, attempting to think about the grocery list, her mind gets distracted, thinking about a new shirt, a joke she heard, her next trip, a work deadline, and a grocery list. Okay, but a new shirt. And now let's think back to this beautiful haiku poem of trying on a bathing suit through the eyes of our lover. So it is quite possible it is likely that in thinking about buying a new shirt, the person might also think, oh, well, how would so-and-so like me wearing this particular shirt? A shirt bought with whom, for whom, for whose eyes projected through the eyes of whom? A joke you heard, yeah, from whom. Or you may also be practicing, rehearsing, how you're going to tell a joke. To whom? Your next trip, with whom? Looming work deadline, well, that's obvious, owed to whom. And again, note here the status of the person. This idea of monitoring, this idea of outsourcing our expectation to people who have some kind of authority, which is a really important part of this picture that we're going to keep returning to. The grocery list, again, for whom? We'll return to this. Now, in a recent experience sampling study of daydreaming, researchers found that a broad majority of participants' daydreaming scenario were basically dedicated to rehearsing social scenarios, like imaginary conversations, for example. And one of the conclusions from this review was that this mechanism served an important purpose for social and emotional adjustment. So that's one of the hypotheses, because if our mind wanders so much, if it wanders most of the time, is it that, A, our minds are poorly designed and that mind wandering is maladaptive? Or is it rather that mind wandering serves a very adaptive function? And if so, which? So let's keep thinking a little more about this idea of social rehearsal, this idea that an ordinary consciousness and cognition were constantly rehearsing, being social beings were constantly rehearsing our affective relationships with others. Let's look briefly then as evolutionary theories of dreaming. Why do we dream? It's a really complicated question that I'm not competent myself to answer. However, there have been different theories. One of them, which is, I should point out somewhat outdated now, is the idea of threat rehearsal. So if we have so many nightmares, if our dreams are so emotionally charged, is because we need to rehearse complicated survival related scenarios. From another more psychoanalytic angle, we might note that a lot of the scenarios that are rehearsed in dream are, well, they involve other people invariably, and they're very affectively often but not always sexually charged. So we may also be rehearsing courtship. We may be rehearsing basically reproduction. So these are all interesting candidate theories for the evolutionary purpose of dreaming. We might, at this point, still be honest and remain agnostic about the precise function. We may simply note that dreams almost invariably offer social scenarios. So we may also simply posit a general social rehearsal theory of dreaming. So the unconstrained mind, the unconstrained unconscious mind at play in dreaming, what does it do? It rehearses different social scenarios. Let's look now briefly at the feeling of being watched, which as we know, when it becomes over excited, we may speak of as being psychopathological, like say in delusions, more about which in a minute, or in schizophrenia. But one of the hypotheses, for example, and this may seem far-fetched, but you will see the connection about the origins of religion in particular and beliefs in spirits and beliefs in gods, is that the feeling of being watched is completely normal. So there's a large body of literature in the cognitive science of religion that looks at the human ability to project intentionality and mental features to things that don't actually have minds. So this is why we have animism in some cultures or why we have things like spirits and gods that are assumed to basically think like humans. So according to the supernatural monitoring hypothesis in the cognitive science of religion, well, we fashion our gods and spirits to better flesh out the imaginary agents that guide our ordinary cognition, consciousness, and action. So it becomes a really convenient, really effective way, for example, for systems of morality and social norms to be internalized by a large group of people. If you feel like God has a certain set of expectations about you and is watching you all the time, well, then it makes it easier for people to coordinate large scale. So recently, my colleague Mariah Stendel and I wrote a review of why we are addicted to smartphones in social media in particular, and we proposed a social monitoring hypothesis in a hypernatural social monitoring hypothesis. So why are most people addicted to cell phones? We claim, well, because they afford a hungry platform for social monitoring, for watching others and for being watched by others. And our hypothesis is that it's completely absolutely normal, desirable, indeed necessary for humans to feel like they're being monitored, watched, judged, appraised by others. So we may think of posting selfies and obsessively monitoring the amounts of likes we're getting on Instagrams as a little pathological, but we may also think of it as a fundamentally normal propensity without which we would be completely incapable of deriving meaning and value and an identity in our lives. So what happens online, I lack the time to tell you the full story now, is simply a question of scale, a question of speed, a question of intensity. We do it too much and too often, and of course, well, to make a long story short, it can stress us out. I lack the time to tell you this full story. But why I mentioned this particular story is again to think about this idea of ordinary thinking and the basic building mechanisms of the mind having something to do with constantly rehearsing a relationship with others with constantly rehearsing social scenarios. So very briefly now, this is taken from our colleague Ian Gold's brilliant book on how culture shapes madness written with his brother Joel Gold, who's a psychiatrist at Bellevue in New York, where they propose a general evolutionary theory of delusions. So when the mind is not working very well, and they attempt to reclassify all the known kinds of delusions that have been documented to occur across cultures. So briefly there are delusions of grandeur, erotomaniac delusions, delusions of controls, somatic delusions, and so on and so forth. Briefly put, what Ian and his brother point out is that the field conductors, the common thread across and between all these delusions, is that they're always about other people. They're always about the relationship between the self and other people. So from this, my colleagues and I are attempting to articulate what we call a general social rehearsal theory of ordinary cognition. This idea that over the course of development, which is cognitive but also social, because we learn to become social in general ways, we cannot exist as humans, we cannot, we cannot even have language, we cannot develop an identity and a sense of self-worth without others, without being social. We learn to see the world through the perspective of other people, like our poetic lover in the haiku, learning to see herself through the eyes of her lover. And we, in order to derive, to know what to do from context to context, to know whether we're supposed to sit on the chair, stand up on it or do a backflip from it, we intuitively imagine context-relevant people or agents that guide us through our everyday action. So the very, very simple formula to explain this is in the back of our minds, and we have every reason to believe completely subconsciously, we have something of a script that goes like this, what would so and so expect me to do? What would so and so think, feel or expect me to do? Or perhaps, because we're going to need to return to this question of whom do we outsource our expectations to? What kinds of people? Is it just from anyone or is there a hierarchy? Are there people who have more authority? So I often like to summarize the formula as something like, well, what would mommy want me to do? Because it is very likely that over the course of cognitive and social development, we initially learn to outsource the most relevant and salient expectations to our primary caregivers and then to other authority figures, as we will see. So from this, we get our general formula of how cultural affordances come about in development, but also how they come about from moment to moment and from context to context. And the formula is three orders of automatic intentionality. So intentionality, again, has something to do with the aboutness of a thought, the capacity of the mind to have propositional attitudes, to think about, to be about something. And here we think it is social through and through, and it involves three orders of intentionality. So the formula is something like, I think, they think, I think. What would others want me to do in this particular context? Of course, I like the time, again, to tell you the full story. There is indeed a lot of room for improvisations. So we need to leave the improvisation picture out for a second. We should now talk a little more about the process of outsourcing expectations to relevant people and ask, again, well, to whom do we outsource expectations? Because it seems, again, that people, depending on how they're socially constituted, tend to acquire a similar set of expectations that yield similar affordances based on their group, large group, and subgroup affiliation. So we should now pause to think a little about the in-group and out-group dynamics that are also very, very well documented in evolutionary and social psychology. So as you know, and Carol Werthman talked a bit about this in her presentation, one of the things that humans are really, really skilled at doing, even human children without explicit instruction, is identifying who are people from my group and who are people from the other group. And one thing that is very efficient in terms of information processing, but that may be ethically problematic in lots of scenarios, is that humans are also very good at intuitively liking people that they associate with the in-group and having strong dislike, even disgust at times for people that they associate with the out-group. And, of course, social psychologists have amply documented this effect in the, in fact, arbitrary ways in which in-group and out-group dynamics can be created very quickly experimentally. So for example, if participants are given, are sorted into two groups, and one group wears blue t-shirts and the other group wears red t-shirts, it is very easy quickly to create a sense of solidarity among the blues and among the reds and a sense of rivalry and a sense of competition. So it is very likely then that in outsourcing a set of expectations, what would other want me to do? What would others want me to feel? In the background somewhere, we're also thinking, well, how am I supposed to not behave like the out-group? Another formula that I'm fond of talking about is that cognition is already fake news. What do I mean by this? Well, the mind is already not just very skilled but extraordinarily hungry at and about outsourcing large chunks of nested information without having to invest any kind of conscious effort to people that they can associate with their in-group. So it seems that the information in the world that we will come to trust is extremely effectively charged in his valence. It's either good or bad. It feels good or it feels bad, and it's either associated with people with trust or with people we don't trust. So there's an extensive body of literature now using such paradigms as natural pedagogies or cultural evolution. The works of the cognitive anthropologist Joe Henrick in particular is really interesting in terms of thinking of this process of how humans intuitively figure out and learn not just what to learn, not just how to behave from others, but also whom to learn from. So here we're thinking about, we're still talking about these mechanisms of salience. We have been describing a culture, a cultural group as people united by shared expectations, people who have their attention selectively patterned in particular ways, a group of people who selectively will tend to attend to the same kind of stimulus and not attend to other things like say the high status subject who attends to the low status subject in the dark alley and the low status subject who attends first to the police person. So the mind's ability to zero in on relevant cues and then to just stop processing and to completely act automatically. So one of the notions that we have been articulating with Lawrence Kamair and Maxwell Ramstead is what we like to call an epistemic authority. So epistemic having something to do with knowledge, the kinds of knowledge, the kinds of information as it were that we will tend to trust. So we like to define epistemic authority as a person, a cue or even a culturally available memory association, something that'll come to mind automatically, that is again assigned automatic salience. It just jumps to mind automatically and then it directs action automatically. So a cue or person or an imaginary association with a person as we will see again that possesses the power to prescribe meaning and action. We're very interested in fleshing out different types, different typologies, different hierarchies perhaps of epistemic authorities, but it seems to me that there are not that many. So in trying to understand what it is that our minds will jump to, what it is that will prescribe action, it has something to do with salience, it has something to do for humans because as we have seen, we have been painting a social picture, it has something to do with status. So one of the things and here we need to turn to developmental psychology again to try to understand what it is for example that children seem intrinsically motivated to learn, intrinsically interested in, children, what will they attend to, wealth status. This is something that across cultures, across ages, we're all very, very good at identifying people who in any given context have some kind of status. Now I understand that particularly in an age of political correctness where we might normatively want for the world not to come prepackaged in hierarchies, we might be normatively interested in how we, we all ought to be the same, we all ought to be equal. I should point out that this is not a moral story and if it is the moral aspect of the story that worries you, status does not have necessarily something to do with dominance and certainly not with sheer physical dominance. So Joseph Hanrick again has written very, very eloquently about the evolution of status and the evolution of prestige among humans and he points out that unlike our distant cause in the apes, prestige and status for humans is symbolically conferred. It is not necessarily and in fact very often not conferred through sheer physical force. So Joe Hanrick likes to say look at Stephen Hawkins for example. Many of us like to outsource our understanding of cosmology and the physics of the universe to Stephen Hawkins. He does not need to beat his chest and beat us into submission to get us to believe this. There are other mechanisms that get us to trust certain sources of information and not others. So sure the prestige, the prestige associated with certain universities with certain forms of speech with certain academic journals but these are symbolically conferred in the sense that we all implicitly agree to abide by a social convention that assigns more prestige to say one form of dress over another, one style of speech over another whereby in the grander scheme of things from a natural ontological perspective there is nothing better or higher about say you know wearing a blazer and a suit to wearing a cut-off tank top. These are just symbolic conventions. So status and prestige for humans is mostly symbolically assigned, symbolically ascribed but humans even children are usually unusually skilled, usually unusually, are very skilled at knowing in any given context who's cool, who's in, who's fashionable, who has expertise. So there might be a few evolutionarily older proxies for prestige but what I'm trying to explain here is that in order to function in any given cultural setting and we can think of the example of moving across cultures going to a new country, learning a language, learning a set of conventions, we need to identify high fidelity, high quality information and in order to do that we need to associated with specific people who have a higher kind of status, who have more prestige. So one evolutionarily older proxy might be age often but as we will see not always people who are older, elders are known to be repositories of useful knowledge so we will often tend to trust someone who is older as opposed to someone who is younger but that depends on the cultural domains and it has been shown experimentally that say when people are asked to learn a new task together to figure out how to do some things they might tend to intuitively trust the person who's older but if they notice that another person is better at doing something has more skill then they will trade age for expertise. So again notice the ways in which a six-year-old going to a party will be able to tell you who's a good dancer and who's a bad dancer even in a style of music or a style of dance that the child knows almost nothing about and so here we might think of the predictive processing brain again the ability of the brain to pick up on patterns of statistical regularities and to pick up on the ones that flow best. Okay so I have begun to paint a little bit more of a precise picture of what culture is culture being for all intents and purposes a set of affordances that are very varied depending on who you are depending on how you're socially positioned but that are patterned in particular ways and I have attempted to describe the psychological mechanisms the intersubjective mechanisms through which these affordances come to hold. So and by intersubjective mechanisms I mean in particular the ability that we have to outsource relevant information to relevant authoritative others who may be able to teach us how to enforce a particular social rule. So let's examine briefly again a few more scenarios just so you can appreciate how wonderful how strange how mysterious it is but also how patterned and how ultimately understandable it all is. So we've talked a lot about how affordances differ by social group depending on your group affiliation but let's talk a little bit about how the similar environment might also yield and offer different affordances over time even throughout the course of a day or even throughout the course of an hour for one particular agent and so based on the kinds of social conventions as well that the agents might have internalized and here by social convention I am pointing to the doxastic I'm pointing to the not so much the dogma not so much the social conventions that people are able to talk about like say I am expected to marry someone of my own kind or I'm expected to become a doctor but the ones that are taken for granted but that may however be best described as social conventions. So here I am interested in cross-cultural differences in child behavior cross-cultural differences in fussiness in particular and I'm in particular interested in what I like to call the bedtime ritual and the anxiety that surrounds the bedtime ritual. Now why is it that in some cultures some children are able to go to bed well late or early or some people are able to go to bed easily and in others not so. So again could it be that it's universal is it that children are universally afraid of the dark and this is why they find it difficult to go to sleep or are there ways in which fussiness might be culturally patterned might be a doxastic implicit taken for granted cultural convention. So what does a child's bedroom afford and here let's assume a western upper middle class suburban vanilla kind of setting with one bedroom per child sort of thing so in the middle of the afternoon on a Sunday the room affords play so the child is in her room and she's playing with her blocks that's what the room affords. So again there's all kinds of implicit and explicit cultural conventions about the kinds of toys that a child might pick but that's what the room affords. Now imagine the same bedroom at a similar time when the parents are completely out of earshot. Now depending on a few different personality traits for example depending on the child's disposition that may not be entirely cultural of course the same room might afford transgressive play say if the child can reasonably infer that her parents cannot see her or cannot hear her they might do things that they know they're not allowed to do. So the affordance in the room changes based on the assumptions and the inferences that the child can make about the authoritative agents that are likely to enforce a social norm namely say you're not allowed to watch your iPad or you're not allowed to throw your Lego up in the air. The same room of course once the beginning of the bedtime ritual becomes enacted might certainly afford fussiness fear not wanting to go to bed this is also learned pattern behavior and there if the parents are out of earshot. Now again granted a set of dispositional differences and so on and so forth if the parents are within earshot and say if the child has reasonably learned that crying works then the room at night might afford crying loudly and then the parents will keep coming back and then they'll keep begging and they'll keep saying no you have to go to sleep but the child will get to see her parents more. This is also a stable enough pattern affordance of the room based on the inferences that can be made about in this case actual authoritative agents that are likely to enforce a social rule. An example that we've given several times in our papers is the one of a red light so red light affords stopping for sure but for some people and there might be cultural and individual differences of red light at four in the morning when there's absolutely no one around you know that no one's watching it might actually afford go through with caution you don't actually have to obey the affordance. So here what I'm trying to say is that the the actual presence of the other minds in the classes of agents and their authority and epistemic authority status around is really important in modulating the status of affordances but there are also of course and we're going to get there very soon imaginary agents. Sometimes we simply summon a general generalized imaginary audience without needing to actually think is there someone watching me right now. In order to problematize it a little more I want to talk now a bit about individual differences and individual personality differences but also affective differences going through of course too easy but easy to think with examples of psychopathology. So let's try to think about our affective baseline what it feels like to be in a particular body how we feel our moods and our emotions from moment to moment and how those two might play a really strong modulating role in yielding different affordances. So I borrow this picture from a famous paper by Dahan, Reid, Veldt and Colleague. So imagine an ecology of cues and you are and these could be I don't know let's let's say they're buildings in a city you're walking through a city and you're not feeling particularly your mood is neither high nor low so there's not a whole lot of valence it doesn't feel good or bad it feels kind of neutral you're an autopilot this is what the city looks like to you but now imagine a depressed person going through anhedonia sustained low mood and inability to experience pleasure all the clues might seem flattened and the valence there might be well negative it might it might feel quite bad. Now entropy is something that we're very interested in particularly looking at the variational free energy dimensions of the model and didn't have time to talk about it very much but entropy in information theoretic terms simply has something to do with the amount of possible states in an environment in any given context or environment so this is a very interesting dimension very important crucial dimension of understanding culture and ecologically in terms of affordances because we need to think of the amount of possible things that we can do things that we can feel and things that we can imagine in an environment so here again for an anhedonic depressed person there's very low entropy there's very few possible states and there's this negative valence so the world affords very different things but now say if you're in a different kind of depressed state you're constantly ruminating thinking about negative affect everything might seem dark and threatening so the valence is low again is negative it feels bad and the entropy is also low there's very few possible states and they're all bad obsessive compulsive a different kind of rumination now one cue might be made highly salient at the expense of other cues you notice obsessively to one thing you attend obsessively to one thing like say whether it's clean or not and you're completely oblivious to the rest so here we have low entropy again now if we think of the psychotic and schizotypal spectrum so having to do on recent accounts with making too many inferences about other minds so if we're correct in assuming that the world and how we make sense of the world has something to do with other minds well on the schizotypal or schizophrenic end of that spectrum we might do it a little too much so a schizophrenic person walking through this the same city might see all kinds of hidden and dangerous cues everywhere all kinds of intentions from others to harm him or her so there this entropy there's many many more possible states but they also don't feel very good what we may call the ADHD trait so high risk taking high novelty seeking very flexible attentional shifting attending to many different things at the same time there the ADHD trait person might attend to many salient cues in a rapid fashion in no particular order so there again we have high entropy many more possible states the valence can be positive or negative other things like passionate love definitely a form of obsession pathological by many accounts so misleadingly seeing cues about the loved interest everywhere everything you see reminds you of the person or you you think it's some kind of a message a cosmic message about the person so here we have my apologies they should be low entropy and positive valence now the final example that I'll give let's go back to the sustain low mood they let's go back to the depressive mood and how it might yield different affordances in the environment and let's problematize it a little so far I have been presented these different and we can be agnostic about whether they're traits or states but these different modes of affect as somehow being belonging to different individuals and I have left out the inter subjective component I have left out the ways in which affect emotions and moods might also in many ways be outsourced to others might also become meaningful become predicted become projected through our relationship with others so let's go back to our an hedonic person subject number one who wakes up in the morning a many days in a row experiencing sustained low mood now how will that person create meaning out of that experience how how will that person know what to expect what does it mean to have low mood what will happen next so invariably as a social being subject number one will draw on her experience and her knowledge of actual others who also experience sustained no mood widespread cultural beliefs so we live in a day and age where increasingly we're talking about depression as as a chemical condition as a disorder we have a set of expectations about what it means what it entails how we're supposed to feel and and we are validated in our belief in depression as a chemical condition that will make us remain sad for a very long time through our interaction with actual and and generalized others so this is an interesting way to think about what philosopher Ian hacking calls looping effects which is how the beliefs that we hold about particular socially constructed categories have a way to loop back and affect our experience now I like the time to get into a full debate on the ontological status of depression it's a really really complicated question but we may briefly mention one parentheses says so some of you might recall that in 2008 the Harvard psychologist Irvin Kirch elicited quite a large controversy when he under the freedom of information act applied for the right to look at lots of unpublished randomized controlled trials on the efficacy of serotonin inhibited SSRI medications for depression and he found that SSRIs barely did better than placebo's across most trials so the conclusion was well why are we using SSRIs if for people with moderate mild and depressive disorder it doesn't appear to work more than placebo now they do appear to work for people with severe depression that's that's a different story so there was there's been quite controversy the controversy is ongoing but now 10 years later some interesting things have been found so SSRIs have actually become more effective by about 20% but the placebo response has also become more effective so what's going on anthropologists people like Dan Moriman the medical anthropologist say well it appears that something has changed in the past 10 years or so people increasingly come to take for granted that depression is a chemical illness that requires a chemical treatment these this is the expectations that we hold 10 20 certainly 30 years ago the idea that you could take a pill and that it would make you feel happier was really counterintuitive it's something that people would have had to think very carefully about like what do you mean what is it gonna do something in my brain where what how does it work now people routinely talk about their brains children talk about their brain won't let them concentrate so things have changed things have crystallized in different ways but here and I'm also drawing on on many years of work by my colleague and mentor Lawrence Kermire on on on somatization metaphor meaning mechanism you know and the cultural mediation of bodily experience the way in which in attending interoceptively to what we feel we we cannot help but attribute meaning based on what we expect other people to also believe and in this meaning there's a set of predictions about how we're supposed to feel and what what will happen next and this not entirely but to a very large extent shapes the quality of our experience so I'm going to conclude briefly because I know that we're running over time I wanted to simply I apologize problematize the notion of expectations a little more and point you in some directions to study people's implicit expectations if what you want to do is study culture or the culture of a particular groups in particular so we should point out that expectation is kind of a filler word to describe a broad range of responses from the fully automatic to the fully deliberate so again we may have some dogmatic expectations I was expected to become a medical doctor I was expected to marry a lawyer and we may have some completely implicit expectations like say when we embody or exhibit an implicit bias response and and against our explicit expectations we find ourselves scared of a person because of what she's wearing because of the color of her skin so there there's an automatic process also that we could also call an expectation so yeah if if I eat a chewing gum and my I'm chewing a gum and then my stomach expects that food is coming and prepares a digestive response that's a very completely implicit expectation so I've talked already at length about how we don't just expect anything from anyone we are good at outsourcing expectations to authoritative others people with epistemic authority that we associate with our in-group but now the the next question that I will point you towards is well what is the relevant in-group what is the relevant cultural groups because we might outsource some of our expectations to some groups some to others and some might change over time so for example I grew up in and out of Europe my first language is French from France but I spent a large part of my life in in Latin America different parts of of North America identified with a community of of of academics of cognitive and social scientists I have some political preferences so so to whom do I outsource my taste my values and my beliefs I mean are these shaped in early childhood and infancy or do they change later this is a very very very interesting question very difficult question but what we should not do as social scientists or as cognitive scientists is assume that the very the what I call the obvious demographic markers like nationality ethnicity age and so on and so forth constitute a base rate class of the relevant expectations that are being outsourced for people who belong to that group rather we should investigate in different ways in ways that probe at the implicit that probe at the automatic the kinds of expectations that people really care about so one way to do this and I sadly will need to conclude soon so I cannot spend too much time on this thankfully our colleague Jeffrey snodgrass's presentation on field methods will discuss cultural domains analysis cultural consonants and the free listing method even more but I'm simply now redirecting you to the the moses example and this idea of the frequency bias that ideas that come to mind automatically will tend to reflect ideas that are culturally widespread and again here let's be a little more than agnostic on whether or not people are always in every domain authoritative about their own experience and let's also accept that a lot of what people do is taken for granted a lot of the cultural norms that people outsource their behavior to might be implicit in that they may not know but we there may be some methods to elicit to bring those out of their mind to bring those out of their mind so as it turns out it's not difficult to do that and the free listing method that comes out of cultural domain analysis is a very easy way to find out what people are thinking so pick any cultural domain things like romantic life or family life social support career materialism for example and simply ask people well say in your culture what are the kinds of things that you're supposed to have in order to be a full member of of your culture so that would be one way to do one way to ask something like this or if you want to find out people's ideas about gender for example ask them well when you think about a man what are the common attributes of the man describe what a man does for example now once you have picked a particular cultural domain a particular subject that you're interested in studying ideally you will bring together you know a big enough focus group but first you will query people individually the reason for this is that focus groups are really interesting for generating conversations and to see if a consensus might arise or might already exist but they also tend to flatten out individual differences so first simply ask people list the first items that come to mind about this particular x so say about the things you're supposed to have in the house now when you compare people's answers if you find that one particular item keeps recurring in particular if that item is really high on the list so if every person you talk to first tells you right away you have to have a tv in the house now you may accept that you're onto something that you're picking up on an item on an idea on a value on a norm as it were that is culturally widespread so that's it in a nutshell the free the free listing method and then there are other ways there are other dimensions to this method that my colleague jeffree snodgrass will talk about more eloquently than i can and at greater length such as pile sorting for example so once people have individually given items once you have an idea that some items are more salient than others well feed them back to your informants as a group and tell them sort them into piles and let's see if you can all agree which one which ones are the most or the most important and from there you might arrive at some kind of a cultural consensus and and you might even discover a new cultural domain so okay well it seems that i've spoken enough so i'm going to have to close very soon these are um wanted to show you a few of our recent publications applying the cultural affordances model so this was in 2016 frontiers in psychology our first iteration of the cultural affordances model we've also used it briefly and modestly to examine the questions of how depression might present itself around the world and broader questions about the phenomenology of psychiatric disorders this is from our very brilliant colleague max wall ramstead uh applying uh rather the free energy dimension of of this model to the question of life and the dynamics of living system having something to do with the outsourcing of expectations informations and minimizing surprise laurence kemeyer's comments on max wall's paper my own modest comment attempting to understand how societies uh as they change and become more complex over time need to maintain some kind of homeostatic simplicity there the recent paper that i mentioned earlier on the hyper social dimensions of of smartphone dimension and also description of the social rehearsal account of cognition here another application to niche construction more generally and now a paper currently in review which we hope will be out soon where we really present a lot more nuance a lot more detail uh the many different dimensions of cultural affordances um summing it up as well thinking through other minds i think i will close here thank you