Abstract
Cooperation can evolve in the context of cognitive activities such as perception, attention, memory, and decision making, in addition to physical activities such as hunting, gathering, warfare, and childcare. The social insects are well known to cooperate on both physical and cognitive tasks, but the idea of cognitive cooperation in humans has not received widespread attention or systematic study. The traditional psychological literature often gives the impression that groups are dysfunctional cognitive units, while evolutionary psychologists have so far studied cognition primarily at the individual level. We present two experiments that demonstrate the superiority of thinking in groups, but only for tasks that are sufficiently challenging to exceed the capacity of individuals. One of the experiments is in a brain-storming format, where advantages of real groups over nominal groups have been notoriously difficult to demonstrate. Cognitive cooperation might often operate beneath conscious awareness and take place without the need for overt training, as evolutionary psychologists have stressed for individual-level cognitive adaptations. In general, cognitive cooperation should be a central subject in human evolutionary psychology, as it already is in the study of the social insects.
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David Sloan Wilson is an evolutionary biologist interested in a broad range of issues relevant to human behavior. He has published in psychology, anthropology, and philosophy journals in addition to his mainstream biological research. He is author of Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society (University of Chicago Press, 2002) and co-author with philosopher Elliott Sober of Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior (Harvard University Press, 1998).
John J. Timmel received his Ph.D. from Binghamton University in 2001.
Ralph R. Miller is Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Binghamton University. His research interests include information processing in animals, with an emphasis on elementary, evolutionarily derived, fundamentals of learning and memory that might be expected to generalize across species, including humans.
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Wilson, D.S., Timmel, J.J. & Miller, R.R. Cognitive cooperation. Hum Nat 15, 225–250 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-004-1007-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-004-1007-7