Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

Good Ideas 337rule is a contract, an exchange of benefits. In those circumstances,showing that the rule is false is equivalent to finding cheaters. A contractis an implication of the form "If you take a benefit, you must meet arequirement"; cheaters take the benefit without meeting the requirement.Beer in a bar is a benefit that one earns by proof of maturity, andcheaters are underage drinkers. Beer after chili peppers is mere causeand effect, so Coke drinking (which logically must be checked) doesn'tseem relevant. Cosmides showed that people do the logical thing wheneverthey construe the P's and Q's as benefits and costs, even when theevents are exotic, like eating duiker meat and finding ostrich eggshells.It's not that a logic module is being switched on, but that people areusing a different set of rules. These rules, appropriate to detectingcheaters, sometimes coincide with logical rules and sometimes don't.When the cost and benefit terms are flipped, as in "If a person pays $20,he receives a watch," people still choose the cheater card (he receivesthe watch, he doesn't pay $20)—a choice that is neither logically correctnor the typical error made with meaningless cards. In fact, the very samestory can draw out logical or nonlogical choices depending on thereader's interpretation of who, if anyone, is a cheater. "If an employeegets a pension, he has worked for ten years. Who is violating the rule?" Ifpeople take the employee's point of view, they seek the twelve-year workerswithout pensions; if they take the employer's point of view, they seekthe eight-year workers who hold them. The basic findings have beenreplicated among the Shiwiar, a foraging people in Ecuador.The mind seems to have a cheater-detector with a logic of its own.When standard logic and cheater-detector logic coincide, people act likelogicians; when they part company, people still look for cheaters. Whatgave Cosmides the idea to look for this mental mechanism? It was theevolutionary analysis of altruism (see Chapters 6 and 7). Natural selectiondoes not select public-mindedness; a selfish mutant would quicklyoutreproduce its altruistic competitors. Any selfless behavior in the naturalworld needs a special explanation. One explanation is reciprocation:a creature can extend help in return for help expected in the future. Butfavor-trading is always vulnerable to cheaters. For it to have evolved, itmust be accompanied by a cognitive apparatus that remembers who hastaken and that ensures that they give in return. The evolutionary biologistRobert Trivers had predicted that humans, the most conspicuousaltruists in the animal kingdom, should have evolved a hypertrophiedcheater-detector algorithm. Cosmides appears to have found it.L-