Dr Emma Cohen

Associate Professor in Cognitive Anthropology
I am an Associate Professor within the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology (SAME) and a Tutorial Fellow in Human Sciences at Wadham College. My research studies social affiliation in everyday human behaviour, culture and health within a broad evolutionary framework. Current work explores how forms of collective physical activity build and benefit from social bonding and support among individuals. I have also researched the influence of accent and other social markers on children’s developing social preferences and cognitive factors influencing the transmission of culture.
For my lab website, see Social Body Lab.
After completing my PhD in Anthropology (Queen’s University Belfast, 2005), I held post-doctoral positions at the Institute of Cognition and Culture (Queen’s), the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology (Oxford), and the Research Group in Comparative Cognitive Anthropology (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Germany and Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Netherlands).
Contact
Email: emma.cohen@anthro.ox.ac.uk
Telephone: + 44 (0)1865 274704
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Moralizing gods, impartiality and religious parochialism across 15 societies.
March 2019|Journal article|Proceedings. Biological sciencesThe emergence of large-scale cooperation during the Holocene remains a central problem in the evolutionary literature. One hypothesis points to culturally evolved beliefs in punishing, interventionist gods that facilitate the extension of cooperative behaviour toward geographically distant co-religionists. Furthermore, another hypothesis points to such mechanisms being constrained to the religious ingroup, possibly at the expense of religious outgroups. To test these hypotheses, we administered two behavioural experiments and a set of interviews to a sample of 2228 participants from 15 diverse populations. These populations included foragers, pastoralists, horticulturalists, and wage labourers, practicing Buddhism, Christianity, and Hinduism, but also forms of animism and ancestor worship. Using the Random Allocation Game (RAG) and the Dictator Game (DG) in which individuals allocated money between themselves, local and geographically distant co-religionists, and religious outgroups, we found that higher ratings of gods as monitoring and punishing predicted decreased local favouritism (RAGs) and increased resource-sharing with distant co-religionists (DGs). The effects of punishing and monitoring gods on outgroup allocations revealed between-site variability, suggesting that in the absence of intergroup hostility, moralizing gods may be implicated in cooperative behaviour toward outgroups. These results provide support for the hypothesis that beliefs in monitoring and punitive gods help expand the circle of sustainable social interaction, and open questions about the treatment of religious outgroups. -
Consensus statement on placebo effects in sports and exercise: The need for conceptual clarity, methodological rigour, and the elucidation of neurobiological mechanisms.
November 2018|Journal article|European journal of sport scienceIn June 2017 a group of experts in anthropology, biology, kinesiology, neuroscience, physiology, and psychology convened in Canterbury, UK, to address questions relating to the placebo effect in sport and exercise. The event was supported exclusively by Quality Related (QR) funding from the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE). The funder did not influence the content or conclusions of the group. No competing interests were declared by any delegate. During the meeting and in follow-up correspondence, all delegates agreed the need to communicate the outcomes of the meeting via a brief consensus statement. The two specific aims of this statement are to encourage researchers in sport and exercise science to 1. Where possible, adopt research methods that more effectively elucidate the role of the brain in mediating the effects of treatments and interventions. 2. Where possible, adopt methods that factor for and/or quantify placebo effects that could explain a percentage of inter-individual variability in response to treatments and intervention.Humans, Exercise, Consensus, Placebo Effect, Research Design, Sports -
'Caution, this treatment is a placebo. It might work, but it might not': why emerging mechanistic evidence for placebo effects does not legitimise complementary and alternative medicines in sport.
July 2018|Journal article|Br J Sports Medethics, evidence based, intervention effectiveness, Complementary Therapies, Humans, Placebo Effect, Sports, Sports Medicine -
The development of human social learning across seven societies.
May 2018|Journal article|Nature communicationsSocial information use is a pivotal characteristic of the human species. Avoiding the cost of individual exploration, social learning confers substantial fitness benefits under a wide variety of environmental conditions, especially when the process is governed by biases toward relative superiority (e.g., experts, the majority). Here, we examine the development of social information use in children aged 4-14 years (n = 605) across seven societies in a standardised social learning task. We measured two key aspects of social information use: general reliance on social information and majority preference. We show that the extent to which children rely on social information depends on children's cultural background. The extent of children's majority preference also varies cross-culturally, but in contrast to social information use, the ontogeny of majority preference follows a U-shaped trajectory across all societies. Our results demonstrate both cultural continuity and diversity in the realm of human social learning.Humans, Social Behavior, Adolescent Development, Child Development, Cross-Cultural Comparison, Cultural Characteristics, Cultural Diversity, Social Environment, Adolescent, Child, Child, Preschool, Female, Male, Social Learning -
The cognitive and cultural foundations of moral behavior
May 2018|Journal article|Evolution and Human Behavior© 2018 Elsevier Inc. Does moral culture contribute to the evolution of cooperation? Here, we examine individuals' and communities' models of what it means to be good and bad and how they correspond to corollary behavior across a variety of socioecological contexts. Our sample includes over 600 people from eight different field sites that include foragers, horticulturalists, herders, and the fully market-reliant. We first examine the universals and particulars of explicit moral models. We then use these moral models to assess their role in the outcome of an economic experiment designed to detect systematic, dishonest rule-breaking favoritism. We show that individuals are slightly more inclined to play by the rules when their moral models include the task-relevant virtues of “honesty” and “dishonesty.” We also find that religious beliefs are better predictors of honest play than these virtues. The predictive power of these values' and beliefs' local prevalence, however, remains inconclusive. In summary, we find that religious beliefs and moral models may help promote honest behavior that may widen the breadth of human cooperation. -
Religiosity and resource allocation in Marajó, Brazil
April 2018|Journal article|Religion, Brain and Behavior© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Current research suggests that certain features of religion can harness our sociality in important ways, curbing selfish behavior and/or boosting prosocial behavior. If this is the case, embodied symbols of religious devotion should induce these effects. To test the claim that religious symbolism has an effect on sociality, we conducted the Random Allocation Game with a symbolic prime in Pesqueiro, on the island of Marajó, Brazil, among Christians. Our prime–a Bible and a crucifix pendant–appears to have influenced the allocations made toward distant co-religionists; people who played the game in the prime condition allocated more coins to the distant co-religionist. Additionally, self-reported beliefs about God’s knowledge and punishment had strong effects on fair gameplay across games. -
The evolution of religion and morality: a synthesis of ethnographic and experimental evidence from eight societies
April 2018|Journal article|Religion, Brain and Behavior© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Understanding the expansion of human sociality and cooperation beyond kith and kin remains an important evolutionary puzzle. There is likely a complex web of processes including institutions, norms, and practices that contributes to this phenomenon. Considerable evidence suggests that one such process involves certain components of religious systems that may have fostered the expansion of human cooperation in a variety of ways, including both certain forms of rituals and commitment to particular types of gods. Using an experimental economic game, our team specifically tested whether or not individually held mental models of moralistic, punishing, and knowledgeable gods curb biases in favor of the self and the local community, and increase impartiality toward geographically distant anonymous co-religionists. Our sample includes 591 participants from eight diverse societies–iTaukei (indigenous) Fijians who practice both Christianity and ancestor worship, the animist Hadza of Tanzania, Hindu Indo-Fijians, Hindu Mauritians, shamanist-Buddhist Tyvans of southern Siberia, traditional Inland and Christian Coastal Vanuatuans from Tanna, and Christian Brazilians from Pesqueiro. In this article, we present cross-cultural evidence that addresses this question and discuss the implications and limitations of our project. This volume also offers detailed, site-specific reports to provide further contextualization at the local level. -
Synchrony and social connection in immersive Virtual Reality.
February 2018|Journal article|Sci RepSynchronising movements in time with others can have significant positive effects on affiliative attitudes and behaviors. To explore the generalizability of synchrony effects, and to eliminate confounds of suggestion, competence and shared intention typical of standard laboratory and field experiments, we used an Immersive Virtual Reality (VR) environment. Participants, represented as virtual humans, took part in a joint movement activity with two other programmed virtual humans. The timings of the co-participant characters' movements were covertly manipulated to achieve synchrony or non-synchrony with the focal participant. Participants in the synchrony condition reported significantly greater social closeness to their virtual co-participants than those in the non-synchrony condition. Results indicate that synchrony in joint action causes positive social effects and that these effects are robust in a VR setting. The research can potentially inform the development of VR interventions for social and psychological wellbeing.Adolescent, Adult, Female, Humans, Male, Social Behavior, Surveys and Questionnaires, Virtual Reality, Young Adult -
The Effects of Social Support on Strenuous Physical Exercise.
January 2018|Journal article|Adaptive human behavior and physiologyIn humans, socio-environmental cues play an important role in determining adaptive psychophysiological states and behaviours. In sport and exercise, cues to cohesive groups and close, supportive relationships are ubiquitous, possibly because of their effects on neurobiological mechanisms underlying physical performance. Clinical research has shown that the presence of supportive others can lead to reductions in perceptions of pain, while research from sport and exercise science has shown that pain and physical fatigue occupy ranges on a single spectrum of physical discomfort, which works to regulate outputs during strenuous physical exertion. Given the similar neurobiological underpinnings of pain and fatigue, the involvement of both in the self-regulation of strenuous physical outputs, and the effects of social support on perceptions of pain and neurophysiological stress responses more generally, we hypothesised that perceptions of social support affect outputs during strenuous physical exercise by altering activity in self-regulatory mechanisms involved in perceptions of pain and fatigue. We used a between-subjects experimental design to test this hypothesis, varying participants' social support and measuring physical outputs and perceptions of physical discomfort and exertion during a series of maximum-effort cycling bouts. Analyses showed that participants in the social support condition produced greater initial outputs and steeper declines over time, compared to controls. This effect was moderated by participant neuroticism; an important predictor of how individuals react to social support. We discuss these findings in terms of proposed causal mechanisms linking supportive, cohesive social environments with self-regulation and physical performance. -
Interpersonal movement synchrony facilitates pro-social behavior in children's peer-play.
January 2018|Journal article|Dev SciThe emergence of pro-social behaviors and social interaction skills is a major focus of research on children's development. Here, we consider one important feature of human social interactions, interpersonal movement synchrony, and explore its effects on pro-sociality among young children. Coordinated movements are a crucial part of mother-infant interactions, with important social effects extending well into childhood. Musical interactions are also known to facilitate bonding between infants and caretakers and pro-sociality among peers. We specifically examine the pro-social effects of interpersonal movement synchrony in a naturalistic peer-play context among 4- to 6-year-old children. We assessed the amount of helping behavior between pairs of children following an activity that they performed synchronously or non-synchronously. Children who engaged in synchronous play, as compared with non-synchronous play, showed significantly more subsequent spontaneous helping behavior. Further, more mutual smiling and eye contact were observed in the synchronous condition and amounts of mutual smiling and eye contact during the movement task correlated with amount of helping behavior observed. Neither measure mediated the condition-wise effects on helping, however. These results are discussed in terms of their contribution to existing literature and their broader implications for the development of pro-sociality and coordinated movements in early childhood.Child, Child Development, Child, Preschool, Female, Humans, Infant, Interpersonal Relations, Male, Mother-Child Relations, Movement, Peer Group, Periodicity, Social Behavior