Big Effects, Big Causes
Monumental achievements — the pyramids, Nazca, Stonehenge — routinely attract explanations that displace human agency onto hidden or external causes, despite documented evidence that ordinary people built them. This paper diagnoses why, drawing on proportionality bias, institutional distrust, and the psychology of pseudoarchaeology.
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Part of the DSSM corpus — 113 open-access papers spanning cognitive archaeology, symbolic systems theory, and civilizational analysis.
Full framework, timelines, and field protocol at dssm.academy
Full framework, timelines, and field protocol at dssm.academy