Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-p9bg8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-24T07:03:06.642Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Foundations of Human Cooperation in Teaching and Imitation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 January 2017

Kevin N. Laland
Kevin N. Laland*
Affiliation:
University of St Andrews (UK)
*
*Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Kevin N. Laland. Centre for Social Learning and Cognitive Evolution. School of Biology. University of St Andrews. Harold Mitchell Building. St Andrews. Fife (UK). KY16 9TH. E-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Humans exhibit extensive large-scale cooperation, of a form unprecedented in the natural world. Here I suggest that this cooperation arises in our species alone because of our uniquely potent capacities for social learning, imitation and teaching, combined with the co-evolutionary feedbacks that these capabilities have generated on the human mind. Culture took human populations down evolutionary pathways not available to non-cultural species, either by creating conditions that promoted established cooperative mechanisms, such as indirect reciprocity and mutualism, or by generating novel cooperative mechanisms not seen in other taxa, such as cultural group selection. In the process, gene-culture co-evolution seemingly generated an evolved psychology, comprising an enhanced ability and motivation to learn, teach, communicate through language, imitate and emulate, as well as predispositions to docility, social tolerance, and the sharing of goals, intentions and attention. This evolved psychology is entirely different from that observed in any other animal, or that could have evolved through conventional selection on genes alone.

Keywords

cooperationgene-culture co-evolutionimitationlanguageteaching
Type
Research Article
Information
The Spanish Journal of Psychology , Volume 19 , 2016 , E100
Copyright
Copyright © Universidad Complutense de Madrid and Colegio Oficial de Psicólogos de Madrid 2017 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Alexander, R. D. (1987). The biology of moral systems. New York, NY: Aldine de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Bell, A. V., Richerson, P. J., & McElreath, R. (2009). Culture rather than genes provides greater scope for the evolution of large-scale human prosociality. Proceeding of the National Academic of Science, 106, 17671–17674. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0903232106 Google Scholar
Boyd, R., & Richerson, P. J. (1985). Culture and the evolutionary process. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press.Google Scholar
Boyd, R., & Richerson, P. J. (1992). Punishment allows the evolution of cooperation (or anything else) in sizable groups. Ethology and Sociobiology, 13, 171–195. https://doi.org/10.1016/0162-3095(92)90032-Y Google Scholar
Brosnan, S. F., Wilson, B. J., & Beran, M. J. (2012). Old world monkeys are more like humans than New World monkeys when playing a coordination game. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 279, 1522–1530.Google Scholar
Byrne, R. W. (1994). The evolution of intelligence. In Slater, P. J. B. & Halliday, T. R. (Eds.), Behaviour and evolution (pp. 223–265). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Call, J., & Tomasello, M. (1998). Distinguishing intentional from accidental actions in orangutans Pongo pygmaeus, chimpanzees (Pan-troglodytes) and human children (Homo sapiens). Journal of Comparative Psychology, 112, 192–206. https://doi.org/10.1037/0735-7036.112.2.192 Google Scholar
Call, J., & Tomasello, M. (2008). Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind? 30 years later. Trends in Cognitive Science, 12, 187–192. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2008.02.010 Google Scholar
Call, J., Hare, B., Carpenter, M., & Tomasello, M. (2004). ‘Unwilling’ versus ‘unable’: Chimpanzees’ understanding of human intentional action. Developmental Science, 7, 488–498.Google Scholar
Caro, T. M., & Hauser, M. D. (1992). Is there teaching in nonhuman animals? The Quarterly Review of Biology, 67, 151–174. https://doi.org/10.1086/417553 Google Scholar
Castro, L., & Toro, M. A. (2004). The evolution of culture: From primate social learning to human culture. Proceeding of the National Academic of Science, 101, 10235–10240. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0400156101 Google Scholar
Carpenter, M., Uebel, J., & Tomasello, M. (2013). Being mimicked increases prosocial behaviour in 18- month-old infants. Child Development 84, 1511–1518.Google Scholar
Chartrand, T. L., & Bargh, J. A. (1999). The chameleon effect: The perception-behavior link and social interaction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 766, 893–910. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.76.6.893 Google Scholar
Chartrand, T. L., & van Baaren, R. (2009). Human mimicry. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 41, 219–274.Google Scholar
Chudek, M., & Henrich, J. (2011). Culture-gene coevolution, norm psychology and the emergence of human prosociality. Trends in Cognitive Science, 15, 218–226. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2011.03.003 Google Scholar
Cooper, R. W. (1999). Coordination games: Complementarities and macroeconomics. Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Csibra, G. (2010). Recognizing communicative intentions in infancy. Mind & Language, 25, 141–168. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0017.2009.01384.x Google Scholar
Fehr, E., & Fischbacher, U. (2003). The nature of human altruism. Nature 425, 785–791. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature02043 Google Scholar
Fehr, E., & Gachter, S. (2002). Altruistic punishment in humans. Nature 415, 137–140. https://doi.org/10.1038/415137a Google Scholar
Fogarty, L., Strimling, P., & Laland, K. N. (2011). The evolution of teaching. Evolution, 65, 2760–2770. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1558-5646.2011.01370.x Google Scholar
Gergely, G., & Csibra, G. (2005). The social construction of the cultural mind: Imitative learning as a mechanism of human pedagogy. Interaction Studies, 6, 463–481.Google Scholar
Gergely, G., Egyed, K., & Király, I. (2007). On pedagogy. Developmental Science, 10, 139–146. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7687.2007.00576.x Google Scholar
Gintis, H. (2003). The hitchhiker’s guide to altruism: Gene-culture coevolution, and the internalization of norms. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 220, 407–418. https://doi.org/10.1006/jtbi.2003.3104 Google Scholar
Haun, D. B. M., Rekers, Y., & Tomasello, M. (2012). Majority-biased transmission in chimpanzees and human children, but not orangutans. Current Biology, 22, 727–731. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2012.03.006 Google Scholar
Henrich, J. (2004a). Demography and cultural evolution: Why adaptive cultural processes produced maladaptive losses in Tasmania. American Antiquity, 69, 197–221.Google Scholar
Henrich, J. (2004b). Cultural group selection, coevolutionary processes and large-scale cooperation. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 53, 3–35. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0167-2681(03)00094-5 Google Scholar
Henrich, J. (2015). The secret of our success . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Henrich, J., & Boyd, R. (1998). The evolution of conformist transmission and between-group differences. Evolution and Human Behavior, 19, 215–242. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1090-5138(98)00018-X Google Scholar
Herrman, P. A., Legare, C. H., Harris, P. L., & Whitehouse, H. (2013). Stick to the script: The effect of witnessing multiple actors on children’s imitation. Cognition, 129, 536–543. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2013.08.010 Google Scholar
Heyes, C. M. (2005). Imitation by association. In Hurley, S. & Chater, N. (Eds.), Perspectives on imitation: From mirror neurons to memes (pp. 157–176). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Heyes, C. M. (2012). What can imitation do for cooperation? In Calcott, B., Joyce, R., & Sterelny, K. (Eds.), Signalling, commitment & cooperation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Hill, K. R., Walker, R. S., Božičević, M., Eder, J., Headland, T., Hewllett, B., … Wood, B. (2011). Co-residence patterns in hunter-gatherer societies show unique human social structure. Science, 331, 1286–1289. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1199071 Google Scholar
Hoppitt, W., & Laland, K. N. (2008). Social processes influencing learning in animals: A review of the evidence. Advances in the Study of Behavior, 38, 105–165. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065-3454(08)00003-X Google Scholar
Hoppitt, W., & Laland, K. N. (2011). Detecting social learning using networks: A user’s guide. American Journal of Primatology, 73, 834–844. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajp.20920 Google Scholar
Kinzler, K. D., Shutts, K., DeJesus, J., & Spelke, E. S. (2009). Accent trumps race in guiding children’s social preferences. Social Cognition, 27, 623–634.Google Scholar
Kline, M. A., Boyd, R., & Henrich, J. (2013). Teaching and the life history of cultural transmission in Fijian villages. Human Nature, 24, 351–374. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-013-9180-1 Google Scholar
Laland, K. N. (2017). Darwin’s unfinished symphony: How culture made the human mind. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Laland, K. N., & Bateson, P. P. G. (2001). The mechanisms of imitation. Cybernetics & Systems, 32, 195–224.Google Scholar
Laland, K. N., Odling-Smee, J., & Myles, S. (2010). How culture shaped the human genome: Bringing genetics and the human sciences together. Nature Reviews Genetic, 11, 137–148. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrg2734 Google Scholar
Likowski, , et al. in Heyes C 2012. What can imitation do for cooperation? In Calcott, B., Joyce, R., & Sterelny, K. (Eds.), Signalling, commitment & cooperation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Marino, L. (2006). Absolute brain size: Did we throw the baby out with the bathwater? Proceeding of the National Academic of Science, 103, 13563–13564. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0606337103 Google Scholar
Morgan, T. J. H., Rendell, L. E., Ehn, M., Hoppitt, W., & Laland, K. N. (2012). The evolutionary basis of human social learning. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 279, 653–662. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2011.1172 Google Scholar
Nicol, C. J., & Pope, S. J. (1996). The maternal feeding display of domestic hens is sensitive to perceived chick error. Animal Behaviour, 52, 767–774. https://doi.org/10.1006/anbe.1996.0221 Google Scholar
Nowak, M., & Highfield, R. (2011). Super-cooperators: The mathematics of evolution, altruism and human behaviour or why we need each other to succeed. London, UK: Canongate.Google Scholar
Nowak, M. A., & Sigmund, K. (1998). Evolution of indirect reciprocity by image scoring. Nature, 393, 573–577. https://doi.org/10.1038/31225 Google Scholar
Pawlby, S. J. (1977). Imitative interaction. In Scaffer, H. (Ed.), Studies in mother-infant interaction (pp. 203–224). New York, NY: Academic.Google Scholar
Richerson, P. J., & Boyd, R. (1998). The evolution of human ultrasociality. In Eibl-Eibesfeldt, I. & Salter, F. K. (Eds.), Indoctrinability, ideology, and warfare; evolutionary perspectives (pp. 71–95). New York, NY: Berghahn Books.Google Scholar
Richerson, P. J., & Boyd, R. (2005). Not by genes alone: How culture transformed human evolution. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Richerson, P. J., & Henrich, J. (2012). Tribal social instincts and the cultural evolution of institutions to solve collective action problems. Cliodynamics, 3, 38–80. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1368756 Google Scholar
Richerson, P., Baldini, R., Bell, A. V., Demps, K., Frost, K., Hillis, V., … Zefferman, M. (2014). Cultural group selection plays an essential role in explaining human cooperation: A sketch of the evidence. Behavioral Brain Science, 39, 1–71. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X1400106X Google Scholar
Ridley, M. (2011). The rational optimist. New York, NY: HarperCollins.Google Scholar
Rose, M. R., & Lauder, G. V. (1996). Adaptation. San Diego, CA: Academic.Google Scholar
Somel, M., Rohlfs, R., & Liu, X. (2014). Transcriptomic insights into human brain evolution: Acceleration, neutrality, heterochrony. Current Opinion in Genetic & Development, 29, 110–119. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gde.2014.09.001 Google Scholar
Stel, M., Blascovich, J., McCall, C., Mastop, J., Van Baaren, R. B., & Vonk, R. (2010). Mimicking disliked others: Effects of a priori liking on the mimicry-liking link. European Journal of Social Psychology, 40, 867–880.Google Scholar
Sterelny, K. (2012). The evolved apprentice. Cambridge, MA: MIT.Google Scholar
Striedter, G. F. (2005). Principles of brain evolution. Sunderland, MA: Sinauer.Google Scholar
Tanner, R. J., Ferraro, R., Chartrand, T. L., Bettman, J. R., & van Baaren, R. (2008). Of chameleons and consumption: The impact of mimicry on choice and preferences. Journal of Consumer Research, 34, 754–766. https://doi.org/10.1086/522322 Google Scholar
Tarr, B., Launay, J., & Dunbar, R. I. M. (2014). Music and social bonding: ‘Self-other’ merging and neuorhormonal mechanisms. Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 1096. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01096 Google Scholar
Tennie, C., Call, J., & Tomasello, M. (2009). Ratcheting up the ratchet: On the evolution of cumulative culture. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Societ B, 364, 2405–2415. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2009.0052 Google Scholar
Thornton, A., & McAuliffe, K. (2006). Teaching in wild meerkats. Science, 313, 227–229. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1128727 Google Scholar
Tomasello, M. (1999). The cultural origins of human cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Tomasello, M. (2008). Origins of human communication. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Tomasello, M. (2010). Human culture in evolutionary perspective. In Gelfand, M. J., Chui, C., & Hong, Y. (Eds.), Advances in culture and psychology. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Tomasello, M., Hare, B., Lehmann, H., & Call, J. (2007). Reliance on head versus eyes in the gaze following of great apes and human infants: The cooperative eye hypothesis. Journal of Human Evolution, 52, 314–320. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhevol.2006.10.001 Google Scholar
Trivers, R. L. (1971). The evolution of reciprocal altruism. The Quarterly Review of Biology, 46, 35–57. https://doi.org/10.1086/406755 Google Scholar
van Baaren, R. B., Holland, R. W., Kawakami, K., & van Knippenberg, A. (2004). Mimicry and prosocial behavior. Psychological Science, 15, 71–74. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0963-7214.2004.01501012.x Google Scholar
van Baaren, R., Janssen, L., Chartrand, T. L., & Dijksterhuis, A. (2009). Where is the love? The social aspects of mimicry. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Societ B, 364, 2381–2389. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2009.0057 Google Scholar
van Schaik, C. P., & Burkart, J. M. (2011). Social learning and evolution: The cultural intelligence hypothesis. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Societ B, 366, 1008–1016. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2010.0304 Google Scholar
van Swol, L. M. (2003). The effects of nonverbal mirroring on perceived persuasiveness, agreement with an imitator, and reciprocity in a group discussion. Communication Research, 304, 461–480. https://doi.org/10.1177/0093650203253318 Google Scholar
Wen, N., Herrman, P. A., & Legare, C. H. (2016). Ritual increases children’s affiliation with in-group members. Evolution and Human Behaviour, 37, 54–60.Google Scholar
West, S. A., Griffin, A. S., & Gardner, A. (2007). Social semantics: Altruism, cooperation, mutualism, strong reciprocity and group selection. Journal of Evolutionary Biology, 20, 415–432. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1420-9101.2006.01258.x Google Scholar
West, S. A., El Mouden, C., & Gardner, A. (2011). Sixteen common misconceptions about the evolution of cooperation in humans. Evolution and Human Behaviour, 32, 231–262. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2010.08.001 Google Scholar
Yabar, Y., Johnston, L., Miles, L., & Peace, V. (2006). Implicit behavioral mimicry: Investigating the impact of group membership. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 30, 97–113. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10919-006-0010-6 Google Scholar