People follow adaptive taboos without any shared causal understanding of why

Evidence

We also looked for a shared underlying mental model of why one would not eat these marine species during pregnancy or breastfeeding—a causal model or set of reasoned principles. Unlike the highly consistent answers on what not to eat and when , women’s responses to our why questions were all over the map. Many women simply said they did not know and clearly thought it was an odd question. Others said it was “custom.” Some did suggest that the consumption of at least some of the species might result in harmful effects to the fetus, but what precisely would happen to the fetus varied greatly, though a nontrivial segment of the women explained that babies would be born with rough skin if sharks were eaten and smelly joints if morays were eaten. — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success, 332

Categorization

• XREF: Evidence bearing on reader’s coercion-vulnerability model: behavior follows the majority’s ‘what’ rules, not causal models, so conformist bias need not depend on understanding. — connects to: Humans shift collective preferences among arbitrary practices for no practical reason — W. David Marx, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for…, 14; People can hold prejudices without any conscious awareness of them — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 148; People often lack conscious access to having prejudiced beliefs at all (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• Food taboos induce meat sharing without anyone understanding they do so. #exemplifies (0.95) — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success, 515
• Rationality emerges from taboo rules rather than rules arising from rational reflection #corroborates (0.85) — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 135
• People widely absorb that ideas co-occur without knowing why they do #corroborates (0.83) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 1870
• People lack reliable introspective access to the causes of their own behavior #expands (0.82) — Anthony G. Greenwald and Mahzarin R. Banaji, Implicit Social Cognition, 41
• Moral rules cannot be created or altered by deliberate human enactment #expands (0.78) — HLA Hart, The Concept of Law (Clarendon Law…, 443
• People can hold prejudices without any conscious awareness of them #expands (0.75) — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 148
• People often lack conscious access to having prejudiced beliefs at all #expands (0.72)
• People can hold prejudiced beliefs they are unaware of having #expands (0.72)