Thomas J. H. Morgan

Cognitive culture: theoretical and empirical insights into social learning strategies

Research into social learning (learning from others) has expanded significantly in recent years, not least because of productive interactions between theoretical and empirical approaches. This has been coupled with a new emphasis on learning strategies, which places social learning within a cognitive decision-making framework. Understanding when, how and why individuals learn from others is a significant challenge, but one that is critical to numerous fields in multiple academic disciplines, including the study of social cognition.

Experimental evidence for the co-evolution of hominin tool-making teaching and language

Hominin reliance on Oldowan stone tools – which appear from 2.5mya and are believed to have been socially transmitted – has been hypothesised to have led to the evolution of teaching and language. Here we present an experiment investigating the efficacy of transmission of Oldowan tool-making skills along chains of adult human participants (N=184) using 5 different transmission mechanisms. Across six measures, transmission improves with teaching, and particularly with language, but not with imitation or emulation. Our results support the hypothesis that hominin reliance on stone tool-making generated selection for teaching and language and imply that (i) low-fidelity social transmission, such as imitation/emulation, may have contributed to the ~700,000 year stasis of the Oldowan technocomplex, and (ii) teaching or proto-language may have been pre-requisites for the appearance of Acheulean technology. This work supports a gradual evolution of language, with simple symbolic communication preceding behavioural modernity by hundreds of thousands of years.

The biological bases of conformity.

Humans are characterized by an extreme dependence on culturally transmitted information and recent formal theory predicts that natural selection should favor adaptive learning strategies that facilitate effective copying and decision making. One strategy that has attracted particular attention is conformist transmission, defined as the disproportionately likely adoption of the most common variant. Conformity has historically been emphasized as significant in the social psychology literature, and recently there have also been reports of conformist behavior in non-human animals. However, mathematical analyses differ in how important and widespread they expect conformity to be, and relevant experimental work is scarce, and generates findings that are both mutually contradictory and inconsistent with the predictions of the models. We review the relevant literature considering the causation, function, history, and ontogeny of conformity, and describe a computer-based experiment on human subjects that we carried out in order to resolve ambiguities. We found that only when many demonstrators were available and subjects were uncertain was subject behavior conformist. A further analysis found that the underlying response to social information alone was generally conformist. Thus, our data are consistent with a conformist use of social information, but as subjects’ behavior is the result of both social and asocial influences, the resultant behavior may not be conformist. We end by relating these findings to an embryonic cognitive neuroscience literature that has recently begun to explore the neural bases of social learning. Here conformist transmission may be a particularly useful case study, not only because there are well-defined and tractable opportunities to characterize the biological underpinnings of this form of social learning, but also because early findings imply that humans may possess specific cognitive adaptations for effective social learning.

James Mark Baldwin and contemporary theories of culture and evolution

At the end of the nineteenth century, James Mark Baldwin was amongst Americas foremost psychologists and his ideas concerning the interactions between development and evolution were widely discussed. Richards’ [Richards (1987). Darwin and the emergence of evolutionary theories of mind and behavior. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press] eloquent and sympathetic account of Baldwins career devotes little space to the final period of Baldwins life—from 1909 until his death in 1934—when professional scandal forced his relocation to Paris. Although Baldwin conducted no further empirical research in this period and his theories began to be displaced by the rediscovery of Mendelian inheritance, he continued to discuss the links between ontogenesis and phylogenesis with notable thinkers in the French-speaking world, including Pierre Janet. Piaget, who attended Janets lectures during his two-year stay in Paris immediately after World War I, was also exposed to Baldwins ideas. Looking back many years later, Piaget denied that Baldwins theorizing had a deep influence on his own thinking. Nonetheless, Piagets emphasis on ever more elaborate stages of cognitive development echoes important themes in Baldwins work. Despite this, Piaget certainly did not assimilate Baldwins important ideas about the transmission of culture—what Baldwin called “Social Heredity”. Piagets neglect of this strand in Baldwins conception of development has had major consequences for the study of cognition. Here we discuss the contemporary re-awakening of interest in Baldwins ideas among biologists and suggest that it is time for developmental psychology to reconsider the centrality of cultural learning in early cognitive development.

Testing the Cognitive and Cultural Niche Theories of Human Evolution

The cognitive niche and the cultural niche are two competing theories of human evolution. One point over which they disagree is the importance of gene-culture interactions. Here, I use three models to evaluate this disagreement: (i) an asocial baseline model; (ii) a model of the cognitive niche, which includes a form of social learning that prevents gene-culture coevolution; and (iii) a model of the cultural niche, which allows gene-culture coevolution. Intelligence can evolve in all three models, and social transmission increases the range of conditions under which it can do so. However, only the model of the cultural niche (i) produces periods of evolutionary stasis, (ii) produces a positive relationship between population size and the rate of cultural and genetic evolution, and (iii) results in behaviors that are difficult to discover dominating the population. I review the available evidence for such patterns in human evolution and conclude that the cultural niche provides a more comprehensive explanation for human evolution than does the cognitive niche.