# Cognitive Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience/Evolutionary Perspective on Social Cognitions


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## Introduction

![{width="101"} Why do we live in
cities? Why do we often choose to work together? Why do we enjoy sharing
our spare time with others? These are questions of Social Cognition and
its evolutionary development.

The term Social Cognition describes all abilities necessary to act
adequately in a social system. Basically, it is the study of how we
process social information, especially its storage, retrieval and
application to social situations. Social Cognition is a common skill
among various species.

In the following, the focus will be on Social Cognition as a human
skill. Important concepts and the development during childhood will be
explained. Having built up a conceptional basis for the term, we will
then take a look at this skill from an evolutionary perspective and
present the common theories on the origin of Social Cognition.

The publication of Michael Tomasello
*et al.* in the journal Behavioral and Brain
Sciences (2005) [^1] will
serve as a basis for this chapter.

## Social Cognition

### *The human faculty of Social Cognition*

thumb\|Playing football as a complex social
activity Humans are by far
the most talented species in reading the minds of others. That means we
are able to successfully predict what other humans perceive, intend,
believe, know or desire. Among these abilities, understanding the
intention of others is crucial. It allows us
to resolve possible ambiguities of physical actions. For example, if you
were to see someone breaking a car window, you would probably assume he
was trying to steal a stranger\'s car. He would need to be judged
differently if he had lost his car keys and it was his own car that he
was trying to break into. Humans also collaborate and interact
culturally. We perform complex collaborative activities, like building a
house together or playing football as a team. Over time this led to
powerful concepts of organizational levels like societies and states.
The reason for this intense development can be traced back to the
concept of *Shared Intentionality*.

### *Shared Intentionality*

An intentional action is an organism\'s intelligent behavioural
interaction with its environment towards a certain goal state. This is
the concept of Problem
Solving,
which was already described in the previous chapter.

The social interaction of agents in an environment which understand each
other as acting intentionally causes the emergence of Shared
Intentionality. This means that the agents work together towards a
shared goal in collaborative interaction. They do that in coordinated
action roles and mutual knowledge about themselves. The nature of the
activity or its complexity is not important, as long as the action is
carried out in the described fashion. It is important to mention that
the notion of *shared goals* means that the internal goals of each agent
include the intentions of the others. This can easily be misinterpreted.
For example, take a group of apes on a hunt. They appear to be acting in
a collaborative way, however, it is reasonable to assume that they do
not have coordinated action roles or a shared goal -- they could just be
acting towards the same individual goal. Summing up, the important
characteristics of the behaviour in question are that the agents are
mutually responsive, have the goal of achieving something together and
coordinate their actions with distributed roles and action plans.

The strictly human faculty to participate in collaborative actions that
involve shared goals and socially coordinated action plans is also
called *Joint Intention*. This requires an understanding of the goals
and perceptions of other involved agents, as well as sharing and
communicating these, which again seems to be a strictly human behaviour.
Due to our special motivation to share psychological states, we also
need certain complex cognitive representations. These representations
are called *dialogic cognitive representations*, because they have as
content mostly social engagement. This is especially important for the
concept of joint intentions, since we need not only a representation for
our own action plan, but also for our partner\'s plan. Joint Intentions
are an essential part of Shared Intentionality.

Dialogic cognitive representations are closely related with the
communication and use of linguistic symbols. They allow in some sense a
form of *collective intentionality*, which is important to construct
social norms, conceptualize beliefs and, most importantly, share them.
In complex social groups the repeated sharing of intentions in a
particular interactive context leads to the creation of habitual social
practices and beliefs. That may form normative or structural aspects of
a society, like government, money, marriage, etc. Society might hence be
seen as a product and an indicator of Social Cognition.

The social interaction that builds ground for activities involving
Shared Intentionality is proposed to be divided into three groups:

-   **Dyadic engagement**: The simple sharing of emotions and behaviour,
    by means of interaction and direct mutual response between agents.
    Dyadic interaction between human infants and adults are called
    *protoconversations*. These are turn-taking sequences of touching,
    face expressions and vocalisations. The exchange of emotions is the
    most important outcome of this interaction.

```{=html}
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-   **Triadic engagement**: Two agents act together towards a shared
    goal, while monitoring the perception and goal-direction of the
    other agent. They focus on the same problem and coordinate their
    actions respectively, which makes it possible to predict following
    events.

```{=html}
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```
-   **Collaborative engagement**: The combination of Joint Intentions
    and attention. At this point, the agents share a goal and act in
    complementary roles with a complex action plan and mutual knowledge
    about the selective attention
    and the intentions of one another. The latter aspect allows the
    agents to assist each other and reverse or take over roles.

These different levels of social engagement require the understanding of
different aspects of intentional action, as introduced above, and
presuppose the motivation to share psychological states with each other.

### *Development of Social Cognition during childhood*

!Children making social
experiences{width="150"}
A crucial point for Social Cognition is the comprehension of intentional
action. Children\'s understanding of intentional action can basically be
divided into three groups, each representing a more complex level of
grasp.

1.  The first one to be mentioned is the identification of animate
    action. This means that after a couple of months, babies can
    differentiate between motion that was caused by some external
    influence and actions that an organism has performed by itself, as
    an animate being. At this stage, however, the child has not yet any
    understanding of potential goals the observed actor might have, so
    it is still incapable of predicting the behaviour of others.
2.  The next stage of comprehension includes the understanding that the
    organism acts with persistence towards achieving a goal. Children
    can now distinguish accidental incidents from intentional actions
    and failed from successful attempts. This ability develops after
    about 9 months. With this new perspective, the child also learns
    that the person it observes has a certain perception - thus a
    certain amount of predicting behaviour is possible. This is an
    essential difference between the first and the second stage.
3.  After around 14 months of age, children fully comprehend intentional
    action and the basics of rational decision making. They realise,
    that an actor pursuing a goal may have a variety of action plans to
    achieve a goal, and is choosing between them. Furthermore, a certain
    sense for the selective attention of an agent develops. This allows
    a broad variety of predictions of behaviour in a certain
    environment. In addition to that, children acquire the skill of
    cultural learning: when they observe how an individual successfully
    reaches a goal, they memorise the procedure. Hence, they can use the
    methods to reach their own goals. This is called imitative learning,
    which turns out to be an extremely powerful tool. By applying this
    technique, children also learn how things are conventionally done in
    their culture.

## Evolutionary perspective on Social Cognition

So far we discussed what Social Cognition is about. But how could this
behaviour develop during evolution? At first glance,
Darwin's theory of the survival of the
fittest does not support the
development of social behaviour. Caring for others, and not just for
oneself, seems to be a decrease of fitness. Nevertheless, various
theories have been formulated which try to explain Social Cognition from
an evolutionary perspective. We will present three influential theories
which have been formulated by Steven Gaulin and Donald McBurney.[^2]

### *Group Selection*

thumb\|Moai at Rano Raraku
Vero Wynne-Edwards first proposed
this theory in the 1960s. From an evolutionary perspective, a group is a
number of individuals which affect the fitness of each other. Group
Selection means that if any of the individuals of a group is doing
benefit to its group, the group is more likely to survive and pass on
its predisposition to the next generation. This again improves the
chance of the individual to spread its genetic material. So in this
theory a social organism is more likely to spread its genes than a
selfish organism. The distinction to the classical theory of evolution
is that not only the fittest individuals are likely to survive, but also
the fittest groups.

An example would be the history of the Rapa Nui. The Rapa Nui were the
natives of Easter Island which handled their resources extremely
wasteful in order to build giant heads made of stone. After a while,
every tree on the island was extinct because they needed the trunks to
transport the stones. The following lack of food led to the breakdown of
their civilization.

A society which handles their resources more moderate and provident
would not have ended up in such a fate. However, if both societies would
have lived on one island, the second group would not have been able to
survive because they would not have been able to keep the resources.

This indicates the problem of the Group Selection: it needs certain
circumstances to describe things properly. Additionally, every theory
about groups should include the phenomenon of migration. So in this
simple form, the theory is not capable of handling selfish behaviour of
some agents in altruistic groups: Altruistic groups which include
selfish members would turn into pure selfish ones over time, because
altruistic agents would work for selfish agents, thereby increasing the
cheaters\' fitness while decreasing their own. Thus, Group Selection may
not be a sufficient explanation for the development of Social Cognition.

### *Kin Selection*

Since altruistic populations are vulnerable to cheaters, there must
exist a mechanism that allows altruism to be maintained by natural
selection. The Kin Selection approach
provides an explanation how altruistic genes can spread without being
eliminated by selfish behaviour. The theory was developed by William D.
Hamilton and John M. Smith in
1964.[^3] The basic principle of Kin Selection is to benefit somebody
who is genetically related, for example by sharing food. For the
altruistic individual, this means a reduction of its own fitness by
increasing the fitness of its relative. However, the closer the
recipient is related to the altruist, the more likely he shares the
altruistic genes. The loss of fitness can be compensated since the genes
of the altruistically behaving agent have then the chance to be spread
indirectly through the recipient: The relative might be able to
reproduce and pass the altruistic genes over to the next generation.

In principle, the disadvantage for the giver should always be less than
the increased fitness of the addressee. This relation between costs and
benefit is expressed by Hamilton\'s rule taking additionally the
relatedness of altruist and recipient into account:

```{=html}
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```
$r \cdot b > c$

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</center>
```
!Ant colonies provide evidence for Kin
Selection
where

:   **r** shows the genetic relatedness between altruist and recipient
    (coefficient between zero and one),

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```

:   **b** is the reproductive benefit or increased fitness for the
    recipient and

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```

:   **c** are the altruist\'s reproductive costs or the reduction of his
    fitness in the performed action.

If the product of relatedness and benefit outweighs the costs for the
giver, the altruistic action should be performed. The closer the
recipient is genetically related, the higher costs are acceptable.

Examples for kin-selected altruism can be found in populations of social
insects like ants, termites or bees. An ant colony, for instance,
consists of one fertile queen and several hundreds or more of sterile
female workers. While the queen is the only one reproducing, the workers
are among other things responsible for brood care. The workers are
genetically closer related to the sisters they raise (75%) than they
would be to their own offspring (50%). Therefore, they are passing on
more of their genes than if they bred on their own.

According to Hamilton\'s rule, altruism is only favoured if directed
towards relatives, that is $r > 0$. Therefore, Kin Selection theory
accounts only for genetic relatives. Altruism however occurs among not
related individuals as well. This issue is addressed by the theory of
Reciprocal Altruism.

### *Reciprocal Altruism*

The theory of Reciprocal Altruism describes beneficial behaviour in
expectation of future reciprocity. This form of altruism is not a
selfless concern for the welfare of others but it denotes mutual
cooperation of repeatedly interacting species in order to maximise their
individual utility. In social life an individual can benefit from mutual
cooperation, but each one can also do even better by exploiting the
cooperative efforts of others. Game Theory
allows a formalisation of the strategic possibilities in such
situations. It can be shown, that altruistic behaviour can be more
successful (in terms of utility) than purely
self-interested strategies and therefore will lead to better fitness and
survivability.

In many cases social interactions can be modelled by the Prisoner\'s
Dilemma, which provides the basis of
our analysis. The classical prisoner\'s dilemma is as follows: Knut and
his friend are arrested by the police. The police has insufficient
evidence for a conviction, and, having separated both prisoners, visits
each of them to offer the same deal: if one testifies for the
prosecution against the other and the other remains silent, the betrayer
goes free and the silent accomplice receives the full ten-year sentence.
If both stay silent, the police can sentence both prisoners to only six
months in jail for a minor charge. If each betrays the other, each will
receive a two-year sentence.

  Prisoner 1 / Prisoner 2   Cooperate         Defect
  ------------------------- ----------------- -----------------
  Cooperate                 6 months each     10 years / free
  Defect                    free / 10 years   2 years each
                                              

  : Possible outcomes of the Prisoner\'s Dilemma:

Each prisoner has two strategies to choose from, to remain silent
(cooperate) or to testify (defect). Assume Knut wants to minimize his
individual durance. If Knut\'s friend cooperates, it is better to defect
and go free than to cooperate and spend six months in jail. If Knut\'s
friend defects, then Knut should defect too, because two years in jail
are better than ten. The same holds for the other prisoner. So defection
is the dominant strategy in the prisoner\'s dilemma, even though both
would do better, if they cooperated. In a one-shot game a rational
player would always defect, but what happens if the game is played
repeatedly?

One of the most effective strategies in the iterated prisoner\'s dilemma
is the mixed strategy called Tit for Tat:
Always cooperate in the first game, then do whatever your opponent did
in the previous game. Playing Tit for Tat means to maintain cooperation
as long as the opponent does. If the opponent defects he gets punished
in succeeding games by defecting likewise until cooperation is restored.
With this strategy rational players can sustain the cooperative outcome
at least for indefinitely long games (like life).[^4] Clearly Tit for
Tat is only expected to evolve in the presence of a mechanism to
identify and punish cheaters.

Assuming species are not able to choose between different strategies,
but rather that their strategical behaviour is hard-wired, we can
finally come back to the evolutionary perspective. In The Evolution of
Cooperation Robert Axelrod formalised
Darwin\'s emphasis on individual advantage in terms of game theory.[^5]
Based on the concept of an evolutionary stable
strategy in the context of
the prisoner\'s dilemma game he showed how cooperation can get started
in an asocial world and can resist invasion once fully established.

## Conclusion

Summing up, Social Cognition is a very complex skill and can be seen as
the fundament of our current society. On account of the concept of
Shared Intentionality, humans show by far the most sophisticated form of
social cooperation. Although it may not seem obvious, Social Cognition
can actually be compatible with the theory of evolution and various
reasonable approaches can be formulated. These theories are all based on
a rather selfish drive to pass on our genetic material - so it may be
questionable, if deep-rooted altruism and completely selfless behaviour
truly exists.

## References

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[^1]: Tomasello, M. et al (2005). Understanding and sharing intentions:
    The origins of cultural cognition. *Behavioral and Brain Sciences*,
    28(5), 675--735.

[^2]: Gaulin, S. J. C, & McBurney, D. H. (2003). *Evolutionary
    Psychology*. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall.

[^3]: Hamilton, W. D. (1964). The genetical evolution of social
    behaviour I and II. *Journal of Theoretical Biology*, 7, 17-52.

[^4]: Aumann, R. J. (1959). Acceptable Points in General Cooperative
    n-Person Games. *Contributions to the Theory of Games IV, Annals of
    Mathematics Study*, 40, 287-324.

[^5]: Axelrod, R. (1984). *The Evolution of Cooperation*. New York:
    Basic Books.
