Psychology seminar

Speaker: Leda Cosmides (Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences, University of California, Santa Barbara)

Title: Cognitive adaptations for social exchange

Abstract: Social exchange—cooperation for mutual benefit—is rare in the animal kingdom. Yet it is as characteristic of human beings as language and tool use. There are good reasons to think that the human cognitive architecture contains cognitive machinery that is specialized for reasoning about social exchange.

I will present evidence—cognitive, cross-cultural, and neuropsychological—that our brains contain cognitive adaptations for reasoning about social exchange, which include a subroutine designed for detecting cheaters. Because social exchange allows trade, this evolved competence provides a cognitive foundation for human economic activity and other forms of cooperation.

I will focus on evidence of a close fit between the computational requirements for engaging in social exchange, which can be derived from evolutionary game theory, and the design features of the programs that are activated when people reason about this domain. These programs are functionally specialized and domain-specific; they constitute a module in the original sense developed in artificial intelligence: a mechanism or program that is organized to perform a particular function.

The results challenge the traditional view that human reasoning is accomplished by content-free algorithms within a putatively blank-slate mind, and cast new light on debates about human rationality.

Contact

Dr Richard Shillcock