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. Herrmann et al. (2007) present 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. Heyes & Frith (2014) instead argue that human mind-reading capacities are themselves socially learned, rather than necessarily an evolved mental module. 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, but ideally both.
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 watch Celia Heyes’ plenary at CogSci 2020.
Thinking about the following questions might help you as you read the papers and discuss with your tutorial group:
For Herrmann et al. (2007):
For Heyes & Frith (2014):
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