Book contents
- The Cognitive Science of Belief
- The Cognitive Science of Belief
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures and Tables
- Contributors
- Chapter 1 Introduction
- Part I Understanding Belief
- Part II Domains of Beliefs
- Part III Variation in Beliefs
- Pathological Beliefs
- Individual Differences in Beliefs
- Environmental Effects on Beliefs
- Chapter 23 Belief in Human Rights: An Opportunity for Cross-Cultural Cognitive Science
- Chapter 24 The Belief–Action Gap in Environmental Psychology: How Wide? How Irrational?
- Toward Better Beliefs
- Index
- References
Chapter 23 - Belief in Human Rights: An Opportunity for Cross-Cultural Cognitive Science
from Environmental Effects on Beliefs
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 November 2022
By
Book contents
- The Cognitive Science of Belief
- The Cognitive Science of Belief
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures and Tables
- Contributors
- Chapter 1 Introduction
- Part I Understanding Belief
- Part II Domains of Beliefs
- Part III Variation in Beliefs
- Pathological Beliefs
- Individual Differences in Beliefs
- Environmental Effects on Beliefs
- Chapter 23 Belief in Human Rights: An Opportunity for Cross-Cultural Cognitive Science
- Chapter 24 The Belief–Action Gap in Environmental Psychology: How Wide? How Irrational?
- Toward Better Beliefs
- Index
- References
Summary
Whether it concerns moral attitudes across cultures or claims about what people deserve, human rights, in theory and practice, involves beliefs. Yet, inquiries about belief, such as community-wide dispositions toward human rights claims and (more importantly for legal and cultural systems of rights) what it means to support human rights and how that support is increasing worldwide, are often marginalized. That marginalization is due, in part, to the reluctance of some social scientists to consider the concepts of universality or belief, since these have often been considered western concepts that are wrongfully imposed on others. As this chapter shows, however, the prospective universality of human rights, or what advocates typically describe as an overlapping consensus, remains a critical issue in the field. Moreover, skepticism about belief across cultures is usually grounded in misconceptions about the very concept of belief. All of this entails that belief in human rights is an important topic that is open to research in the brain and behavioral sciences. This chapter considers how human rights beliefs relate to the transdisciplinary study of belief and offers opportunities for cross-cultural cognitive science.
Keywords
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cognitive Science of BeliefA Multidisciplinary Approach, pp. 515 - 535Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2022
References
American Anthropological Association. (1947) Statement on human rights. American Anthropologist, 49(4), 540–541.Google Scholar
Anthony, D. (2019) The world conference on human rights: still a guiding light a quarter of a century later. Australian Journal of Human Rights, 23(13), 411–427.Google Scholar
Baron-Cohen, S. (1997) Mindblindness: an essay on autism and theory of mind. MIT Press.Google Scholar
Barrett, H. C. (2005) Enzymatic computation and cognitive modularity. Mind and Language, 20(3), 259–287.Google Scholar
Barrett, H. C. (2020) Towards a cognitive science of the human: cross-cultural approaches and their urgency. Trends in Cognitive Science, 24(8), 620–638.Google Scholar
Barrett, H. C., & Kurzban, R. (2006) Modularity in cognition: framing the debate. Psychological Review, 113(3), 628–647.Google Scholar
Bendaña, J. & Mandelbaum, E. (2021) The fragmentation of belief. In Kindermann, D., Borgoni, C., & Onofri, A. (Eds.). The fragmentation of mind. Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Bettinger-Lopez, C. (2018) The long arc of human rights: a case for optimism. Foreign Affairs, 97 3, 186–190 (April 17, 2018). May/June 2018, University of Miami Legal Studies Research Paper No. 18-18, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3164566Google Scholar
Carchidi, V. J. (2020) The nature of morals: how universal moral grammar provides the conceptual basis for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Human Rights Review, 21(1), 65–92.Google Scholar
Clarke, K. (2009) Fictions of justice: the international criminal court and the challenge of legal pluralism in Sub-Saharan Africa. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Connors, M. H. & Halligan, P.W. (2015) A cognitive account of belief: a tentative road map. Frontiers in Psychology, 5(1588), 1–14.Google Scholar
Cosmides, L. & Tooby, J. (1992) Cognitive adaptations for social exchange. In Barkow, J., Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. (Eds.). The adapted mind: evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture (pp. 19–136). Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Council on Foreign Relations. (2009) U.S. opinion on human rights. www.cfr.org/backgrounder/us-opinion-human-rightsGoogle Scholar
Council on Foreign Relations. (2011) Public opinion on global issues. www.cfr.org/thinktank/iigg/pop/Google Scholar
Council on Foreign Relations (2012) The global human rights regime. www.cfr.org/report/global-human-rights-regimeGoogle Scholar
Council on Foreign Relations (2021) Annual report from the council on foreign relations. https://www.cfr.org/annual-report-2021Google Scholar
D’Andrade, R. (1995) The development of cognitive anthropology. Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Delaet, D. L. (2015) The global struggle for human rights: universal principles in world politics. Cengage Learning.Google Scholar
Dembour, M. B. (2010) What are human rights? Four schools of thought. Human Rights Quarterly, 32(1), 1–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Doyal, L. (2001) The moral foundations of the clinical duties of care: Needs, duties and human rights. Bioethics, 15(5–6), 520–535.Google Scholar
Dwyer, S. (2006) How good is the linguistic analogy? In Carruthers, P., Laurence, S., & Titch, S. (Eds.). The innate mind: culture and cognition (pp. 237–256). Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Fariss, C. J. (2019) Yes, human rights practices are improving over time. American Political Science Review, 113(3), 868–881.Google Scholar
Geertz, C. (1985) The uses of diversity. In Borofsky, R. (Ed.), Assessing Cultural Anthropology (pp. 454–465). New York: McGraw-Hill.Google Scholar
Gragl, P. & Fitzmaurice, M. (2019) The legal character of Article 18 of the Vienna Convention on the law of treaties. International and Comparative Law Quarterly, 68(3), 699–717.Google Scholar
Gready, P. & Robins, S. (2020) Transitional justice and theories of change: towards evaluation as understanding. International Journal of Transitional Justice, 14(2), 280–299.Google Scholar
Gu, X., Lohrenz, T., Salas, R., et al. (2015) Belief about nicotine selectively modulates value and reward prediction error signals in smokers. PNAS, 112(8), 2539–2544.Google Scholar
Holbraad, M. (2012) Truth in motion: the recursive anthropology of Cuban divination. University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Holbraad, M. & Pedersen, M. A. (2017) The ontological turn: an anthropological exposition. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Hubálek, M. (2021) A brief (hi)story of just-so stories in evolutionary science. Philosophy of Social Sciences, 51(5), 447–468.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hyafil, A. & Baumard, N. (in press) Evoked and transmitted culture models: Using Bayesian methods to infer the evolution of cultural traits in history.Google Scholar
Kalyuga, S. (2006) Assessment of learners’ organized knowledge structures in adaptive learning environments. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 20(3), 333–342.Google Scholar
Kentridge, R. W. & Heywood, C. A. (2000) Metacognition and awareness. Consciousness and Cognition, 9(2), 308–312.Google Scholar
Klosko, G. (1993) Rawls’s “political” philosophy and American democracy. American Political Science Review, 87(2), 348–359.Google Scholar
Koinova, M. & Karabegović, D. (2017) Diasporas and transitional justice: transitional activism from local to global levels of engagement. Global Networks, 17(2), 212–233.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Leicester, J. (2008) The nature and purpose of belief. Journal of Mind and Behavior, 29(3), 217–237.Google Scholar
Lewis, R. (2018) What actually is a belief? And why is it so hard to change? Psychology Today (October 7, 2018). www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/finding-purpose/201810/what-actually-is-belief-and-why-is-it-so-hard-changeGoogle Scholar
Malinowski, B. (1961) Argonauts of the Western Pacific. Waveland Press (Original work published in 1922).Google Scholar
Matthias, R. (2015) Handbook of research methods and applications in environmental studies. Edward Elgar Publishing.Google Scholar
McFarland, S. (2011) The slow creation of humanity. Political Psychology, 32(1), 1–20.Google Scholar
McFarland, S. (2015) Culture, individual differences, and support for human rights: A general review. Peace and Conflict, 21(1), 10–27.Google Scholar
McFarland, S., Hackett, J., Hamer, K. et al. (2019) Global human identification and citizenship: a review of psychological studies. Political Psychology, 40(1), 141–171.Google Scholar
McKay, R. T. & Dennett, D. C. (2009) The evolution of misbelief. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 32(6), 493–561.Google Scholar
Mercier, H. (2006) Some ideas to study the evolution of mathematics. In Gontier, N., Van Bendegem, J. P., & Aerts, D. (Eds.). Evolutionary Epistemology, Language and Culture (pp. 351–377). Springer.Google Scholar
Mikhail, J. (2007) Universal moral grammar: theory, evidence and the future. TRENDS in Cognitive Science, 11(4), 143–152.Google Scholar
Mikhail, J. (2012) Moral grammar and human rights: some reflections on cognitive science and enlightenment rationalism. In Goodman, R., Jinks, D., & Woods, A. K. (Eds.). Understanding social action, promoting human rights (pp. 160–202). Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Moyn, S. (2014) The Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 in the history of cosmopolitanism. Critical Inquiry, 40(4), 365–384.Google Scholar
Moyn, S. (2018) Not enough: human rights in an unequal world. Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Needham, R. (1975) Polythetic classification: convergence and consequences. Man, 10(3), 349–369.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Oyowe, A. (2014) An African conception of human rights? Comments on the challenges of relativism. Human Rights Review, 15(3), 329–347.Google Scholar
Petersen, M. B. (2012) Is the political animal politically ignorant? Applying evolutionary psychology to the study of political attitudes. Evolutionary Psychology, 10(5), 802–817.Google Scholar
Petersen, M. B. (2015) Evolutionary political psychology: on the origin and structure of heuristics and biases in politics. Advances in Political Psychology, 36(1), 45–78.Google Scholar
Porot, N. & Mandelbaum, E. (2021) The science of belief: a progress report WIREs Cognitive Science 12(2), 1–17.Google Scholar
Prati, F. & Loughnan, S. (2017) Imagined intergroup contact promotes support for human rights through increased humanization. European Journal of Social Psychology, 48(1), 51–61.Google Scholar
Quilty-Dunn, J. (2020) Rationalization is irrational and self-serving, but useful. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 43, e42. doi: 10.1017/S0140525X19002218.Google Scholar
Rawls, J. (1985) Justice as fairness: political not metaphysical. Philosophy & Public Affairs, 14(3), 223–251.Google Scholar
Rawls, J. (1987) The idea of an overlapping consensus. Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, 7(1), 1–25.Google Scholar
Robbins, J. (2007) Continuity thinking and the problem of Christian culture: belief, time, and the anthropology of Christianity. Current Anthropology, 48(1), 5–17.Google Scholar
Robertson, G. (2012) Crimes against humanity: the struggle for global justice. The New Press.Google Scholar
Schwitzgebel, E. (2006) Belief. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Zalta, N. (Ed.). (Fall 2019 Edition). https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/belief/#AcaGoogle Scholar
Sen, A. (1997) Human Rights and Asian values. Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs.Google Scholar
Shue, H. (2020) Basic rights: subsistence, affluence, and U.S. foreign policy. Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Sibeud, E. (2012) A useless colonial science? Practicing anthropology in the French Colonial Empire, circa 1880–1960. Current Anthropology, 53(S5), S83–S94.Google Scholar
Sikkink, K. (2011) The justice cascade: how human rights prosecutions are changing world politics. W.W. Norton.Google Scholar
Sikkink, K. & Kim, H. J. (2013) The justice cascade: the origins and effectiveness of prosecutions of rights violations. Annual Review of Law and Social Science, 9, 269–285.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Soysal, N. (1994) Limits of citizenship: migrants and postnational membership in Europe. University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Sperber, D. (2009) Culturally transmitted misbeliefs. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 32(6), 534–535.Google Scholar
Stolwijk, S. & Vis, B. (2020) Politicians, the representativeness heuristic and decision-making biases. Political Behavior, 43(1), 1411–1432.Google Scholar
Streeter, J. (2020) Should we worry about belief? Anthropological Theory, 20(2), 133–156.Google Scholar
Stremlau, N. (2019) Developing bottom-up indicators for human rights. The International Journal of Human Rights, 23(8), 1378–1394.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Téson, F. (1992) International human rights and cultural relativism. In Claude, P. & Weston, B. H. (Eds.). Human rights in the world community. University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Tooby, J. & Cosmides, L. (1992) Psychological foundations of culture. In Barkow, J., Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. (Eds.). The adapted mind: evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture (pp. 19–136). Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Torney-Putra, J. & Barber, C. (2011) Fostering young people’s support for participatory human rights through their developmental niches. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 81(4), 473–481.Google Scholar
United Nations. (2000) Principles Relating to the Status of National Institutions (The Paris Principles). www.un.org/ruleoflaw/files/PRINCI~5.PDFGoogle Scholar
Van Leeuwen, N. (2017) Two paradigms for religious representation: the physicist and the playground. Cognition, 164(July), 206–211.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Von Hippel, W. & Trivers, R. (2011) The evolution and psychology of self-deception. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 34(1), 1–56.Google Scholar
Willard, A. K. & Norenzayan, A. (2013) Cognitive biases explain religious belief, paranormal belief, and belief in life’s purpose. Cognition 129(2), 379–391.Google Scholar
Wittgenstein, L. (2009) Philosophical Investigations, 4th Ed. (Hacker, P. M., & Schulte, J., Eds.) Wiley-Blackwell.Google Scholar