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The Transformative Cultural Intelligence Hypothesis: Evidence from Young Children’s Problem-Solving

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Abstract

This study examined 4-year-olds’ problem-solving under different social conditions. Children had to use water in order to extract a buoyant object from a narrow tube. When faced with the problem ‘cold’ without cues, nearly all children were unsuccessful (Experiment 1). But when a solution-suggesting video was pedagogically delivered prior to the task, most children (69% in Experiment 1, 75% in Experiment 2) succeeded. Showing children the same video in a non-pedagogical manner did not lift their performance above baseline (Experiment 1) and was less effective than framing it pedagogically (Experiments 1 and 2). The findings support ideas central to natural pedagogy (Csibra and Gergely Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 13(4), 148–153, 2009). They also challenge the Cultural Intelligence hypothesis, according to which only humans’ social, but not their physical, cognition differs qualitatively from that of great apes. A more radical, transformative variant of the Cultural Intelligence hypothesis is suggested according to which humans’ physical cognition is shaped by their social nature and must therefore be recognized as equally distinctive as their social cognition.

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Acknowledgements

This paper was written during my Templeton Fellowship at the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study (NDIAS). I thank the John Templeton Foundation and the NDIAS for their support. Thanks also to Thea Weiss, Yeva Manukyan, Tiffany Chang, and Jacqueline Eguino for help with data collection, as well as to Nick Jackson and Richard Williams for statistical advice and to Peter Wiersbinski for helpful discussions.

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  1. Department of Psychology, University of Southern California, 3620 S. McClintock Ave, Los Angeles, CA, 99089, USA

    Henrike Moll

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  1. Henrike Moll
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Correspondence to Henrike Moll.

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The video that children were shown in the Incidental and the Pedagogical Conditions of Sections 2 and 3. (MOV 39510 kb)

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Moll, H. The Transformative Cultural Intelligence Hypothesis: Evidence from Young Children’s Problem-Solving. Rev.Phil.Psych. 9, 161–175 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-017-0342-7

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