期刊
AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST
卷 125, 期 3, 页码 519-531出版社
WILEY
DOI: 10.1111/aman.13848
关键词
China; cultural evolution; cognition; divination; fetal sex
类别
This article uses historical texts from traditional China to examine why ineffective fetal sex prognostication practices persist across societies and overestimated in their predictive accuracy. The authors discuss the uncertainty and reporting bias in historical texts and how imperfect information processing contributes to the persistence of ineffective technologies like divination and magic.
Fetal sex prognostication has been a common practice in many human societies, yet most of the prognosticative methods do not perform better than chance. Why do these ineffective prognostication practices recur across societies and persist for long periods of time? In this article, we use historical texts of four different genres in traditional China (oracle bone inscriptions, dynastic history, encyclopedia, and local gazetteers) to examine the social and cognitive factors that lead to the overestimation of the predictive accuracy of sex prognostication and place fetal sex prognostication into a more general framework to understand the persistence of ineffective cultural practices. In particular, we present a detailed historical analysis showing that individuals often entertain considerable uncertainty regarding the accuracy of sex prognostication and quantitative data demonstrating a significant bias toward selectively reporting successes in (fictionalized) historical texts. We conclude by discussing how such reporting bias combined with humans' imperfect information processing may help explain the persistence of ineffective technologies, such as divination, and magic in general.
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