2 thinking & com Flashcards
competitive vs cooperative thinking
- Competitive thinking (apes) - don’t understand that person pointing would want to help them/ cooperate with them
- Cooperative thinking (humans) - assumption that cooperation is there
Social psychology
- “[T]he scientific study of how people’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others.” (Allport, 1985)
- Topics: attitudes, persuasion/influence, social cognition, self-concept
- Primordial site for cognitive development (Mead, 1934)
- Communication plays a central part
how great apes think: They share with humans three important cognitive skills
Representation
Inference
Self-monitoring
How great apes think: representation
○ Great apes solve problems by representing situations off-line
Evidence from experiments requiring great apes to fetch tools from a different room
how great apes think: Inference
2) Inference
○ Great apes make inferences (e.g., about causal relationships)
If they observe that A leads to B -> when A is present, they expect B to be present
how great apes think: self-monitoring
○ Great apes have the ability to self-monitor and adjust their actions (“[to] simulate a potential action-outcome sequence ahead of time and observe it—as if it were an actual action-outcome sequence—and then evaluate the imagined outcome”; Tomasello, 2014, p. 14)
○ This process enables them to adjust their actions in real time ○ In experiments where chimpanzees compete for food with humans, they approach a piece of food without being seen (vs. being seen) if given the choice ○ This also shows that great apes understand intentional relationships in a problem situation
The evolutionary basis of these skills
- What was the evolutionary advantage?
○ Adaptation of ancestors
○ Essential to develop relationships with others- Is it always an advantage for humans to have extra skills?
○ Larger brains are ‘costly’ (Dunbar, 1996) - Complex cognition helps organisms manage new problems within unpredictable environments; this involves understanding the causal and/or intentional relationships involved in a problem situation
- Complex cognition helps individuals manage social relationships (Dunbar, 1996)
○ 100-120 social relships that we can hold
○ Ancestors created communities of that size - so having these social groups meant we adapted
○ A lot of conflicts with this number of people = thinking skills developed - So, great apes use complex cognition to resolve material and social problems
- Is it always an advantage for humans to have extra skills?
individual intentionality
- Individual intentionality: individual goals + knowledge used to pursue them
○ Individual vs joint - apes often have individual goals (competition with other apes) rather than joining with others- They use this knowledge for competition: they know how to pursue individual goals in a social world
Comparison with humans: joint intentionality
The same three skills enable human cognition (but in more complex versions)
joint goals & joint attention
Cooperative cognitive skills and motivations are needed for human communication (week 2)
○ Humans use JOINT INTENTIONALITY
More socially complex
A cooperative turn in the history of humans
- Chimpanzees: “group behaviour in I-mode” - not cooperative (Tomasello, 2014, p. 35)
- Humans (as a species) underwent a “cooperative turn”: it became advantageous to do things together (collaborative foraging for food and hunting)
Humans developed “joint intentionality”: cognitive skills and motivations to form and pursue joint goals + shared knowledge (common ground)
Three cognitive skills: making up cooperative thinking and motivations
perspectival representation: representing the others’ pov in my mind (i know what you know)
recursive inference: awareness of your represenation of my pov (i know you know what i know)
communicative self-monitoring: adjusting language/ behaviours - anticipating the likely effect of a communicative action, leading to the pre-correction of errors
Observations about neurodivergence: Autistic intelligence:
spectrum of self-attentiveness and other-attentiveness
both types are important
- First-order competencies vs. second-order competencies - Autistic people may sometimes fail to grasp implicit/tacit meanings and expectations often associated with the organisation of communication activities and tasks according to dominant conceptions (a second-order competence) - Varieties of intelligence and ways of making sense of events and actions in non-normative ways ○ ‘Teapot’ example to illustrate the difference between first-order and second-order competence § Father asks son if he would make tea - the father later asks if he made tea § The son says yes he did, he made it for himself - he took the question literally § Literal = first order § Conventionally, people would make it for others
Grice’s core proposal
cooperation of p and r is key; their joint goal is to get r to know p’s intention
recap: 3 principles and 3 cognitive skills
principles:
- context
- relevance
- common ground
(connected by cooperation)
Skills:
- perspectival representation
- recursive inference
- communicative self-monitoring
reading: Liszkowski et al 2008 - study on infant joint intentionality
placed twelve-month-olds in various situations in which they observed an adult misplace an object or lose track of it in some way, and then start searching. In these situations infants pointed to the sought-for object (more often than to distractor objects that were misplaced in the same way but were not needed by the adult), and in doing this they showed no signs of wanting the object for themselves (no whining, reaching, etc.). The infants simply wanted to help the adult by informing her of the location of the sought-for object.
