Gedeon Deak reading: The Cultural Intelligence Hypothesis
General intelligence hypothesis
• Larger brains enable humans to perform all kinds of cognitive operations more
efficiently than other species
Adapted intelligence hypothesis
• Cognitive abilities evolve in response to relatively specific environmental
challenges
• For primates, the challenging demands of foraging for seasonal fruits and
resources embedded in substrates (i.e. stuff that’s hard to get at)
Social intelligence hypothesis
• Distinctive aspects of cognition in primates are in response to the very
challenging demands of a complex social life
• Constant competition and cooperation
• Humans are “ultra-social”
• Humans can create different cultural groups that use different kinds of artifacts,
and human kids have to learn to use these artifacts to participate
o This takes special social-cognitive skills of social learning, communicatin,
and theory of mind (knowing that others have thoughts and knowledge
different from your own)
• Humans have these socio-cultural skills when we’re babies, which serves as a
facilitator for the development of our complex cognition
PCTB tests
• In the battery of tests of physical and social cognition:
o Human babies and chimpanzees scored the same in physical domain, and
were more skillful than the orangutans
o In the social domain, humans were twice as often correct as both chimps
and orangutans, and humans were more skillful than both ape species (the
ape species were not statistically different from one another)
• Results of the tests showed:
o Strong support for the cultural intelligence hypothesis that humans have
evolved some specialized social-cognitive skills for living and exchanging
knowledge in cultural groups
o Physically, human kids performed on par with chimps on tasks of physical
cognition, but blew them out of the water on tasks of social cognition
o Does not support general intelligence hypothesis (because that should
have led to kids differing from apes in both physical and social domains
equally—which is not what happened)
o Humans may have the distinctive ability to understand unobserved causal
forces in general including the mental states of others as causes of
behavior