research
Myths, music, memes, writing, virtual reality, mathematics, serotonergic hallucinogens, prayer and collective rituals are cognitive technologies. They emerge and function by drawing from and altering our psychology. Many of them recur across human societies and seemingly appear nowhere else in the biosphere.
My research program aims to understand how and why human cultures uniquely develop these artifacts and techniques. Drawing from ideas and methods across the biological and social sciences, I ask two main questions to explore the nature of cognitive technologies:
1. What constraints do cognition and culture impose on each other – and conversely, what sorts of opportunities do they offer?
Current questions of interest include:
-
Why do humans so easily develop beliefs that ignore or contradict empirical evidence?
-
Is musicality an evolutionary adaptation, or a byproduct of other cognitive processes?
-
Why do humans consistently invent origin stories to explain the roots of their social and biological worlds?
-
Why is ancestor worship so common across human societies?
2. Which unique aspects of human cognition produce the unique characteristics of human culture, and which aspects are shared among other living things?
Current questions of interest include:
-
Do organisms other than humans – and closely related species – develop spurious associations in response to random reinforcement?
-
Is hierarchical cognition unique to human beings? If so, can it explain why human cultures are uniquely open-ended?
Below, you can find my publications and (where relevant) attached PDFs.
Elster, E.S., & Singh, M. (2025). "Strategy and experience required: Social learning cannot explain the varieties of supernatural belief. Religion, Brain and Behavior.
Combette, L.T., Emmons, N.A., Elster, E.S., & Kelemen, D. (2025). "Cats, Bats, and People: Cultivating Children's Understanding of Genes and Trait Inheritance." Journal of Cognition and Development.
Elster, E.S., & Glowacki, L. (2024). " We are one people": Group myths also draw cues from self-concept formation. Behavioral & Brain Sciences, 47.
Elster, E. S., Leshinskaya, A., & Ranganath, C. (2022). Patterns of Causal Judgements Diverge from Patterns of Recall: a Test of the Outcome Density Effect. In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (Vol. 44, No. 44).