Social cognition, evolved or learned?
This week’s reading and lecture were on the topic of the evolution of social cognition, and in particular the relationship between ‘mind reading’ and language. For the tutorial this week we’d like you to think a bit more about where the human capacity for mind reading, and social cognition more generally, come from. As we have attempted in previous weeks, we’ll run this as a debate. Team 1 are going to read a short paper presenting data which they interpret as showing that humans have “evolved some specialized social-cognitive skills (beyond those of primates in general) for living and exchanging knowledge in cultural groups: communicating with others, learning from others, and ‘reading the mind’ of others in especially complex ways” (Herrmann et al., 2007, p. 1365), i.e. that our social intelligence is underpinned by specialized biological adaptations in the mind. Team 2 are going to read a review article arguing that human mind-reading capacities are themselves socially learnt, rather than necessarily an evolved mental module. It’s up to you whether you frame this tutorial as an adversarial debate, or instead take it in turns to describe the paper you read in your team, describe it to the other group, and discuss strengths, weaknesses, and the issues raised more generally – I think the positions in these two papers aren’t necessarily conflicting, or not completely conflicting, but you might disagree.
The readings are below – as usual, these should be freely accessible from these links if you are on the University network. They are short, so read at least one team’s allocation. but ideally both.
Team 2: Heyes, C. M., & Frith, C. D. (2014). The cultural evolution of mind reading. Science, 344, 1243091. You can also to listen to a short podcast about this article., or Celia Heyes’ plenary at CogSci 2020.
All aspects of this work are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.