The hand of a mother pointing out something to her 18-month-old daughter: pointing is universal in humans but occurs in no other species.
Cooperation
The hand of a mother pointing out something to her 18-month-old daughter: pointing is universal in humans but occurs in no other species.
Michael Tomasello and his colleagues have found that we humans know that other humans are like us, and that we and others can act in the world. The fundamental basis of human life is cooperation. This has evolved in two stages. In the first, which is of joint intentions, we do things together, which includes taking on roles, and sharing in what occurs. In the second, there are group intentions, which involve commitments to groups, and of group moralities, such as loyalty and fairness. Conversation is a kind of cooperation in which we turn things over, verbally, with another person. It’s a human means of establishing friendly relationships, and maintaining them, in a way that involves making mental models of other people.
In the opening photo for this chapter you see a mother’s hand as she points out something to her eighteen-month-old daughter. Starting in the second half of a child’s first year, children, too, point to things of interest. On the day I wrote this I saw a baby, who didn’t look more than six or eight months old, point at a dog to draw the mother’s attention to it.
Pointing is a human universal. It’s an early sign of cooperation: “Let’s look at this together.” Among all the animals, only we do it.1 From Charles Darwin we learned of the survival of the fittest. From Richard Dawkins we learned of the selfish gene. We have learned, too, that our close animal relatives, the chimpanzees, are quite competitive. In the course of evolution, however, a whole new world opened up for us humans: a world of cooperation.
Daniel Povinelli and Daniela O’Neill worked with a group of seven chimpanzees who knew each other and got on well together. Using methods of reinforcement, they trained the chimpanzees separately to pull on a rope to draw toward them a box with fruit on it. Next, the box was made heavier so that one chimpanzee could not move it. Then two of the seven chimpanzees were selected and trained, by individual reinforcement, to pull on ropes together to bring the heavier fruit-bearing box toward them. These two practiced the cooperative skill and became good at it.
What would happen if a chimpanzee who had learned with the partner to pull in the heavier box were given a new partner who had only been trained to pull on the rope alone? Would the experienced chimpanzee show the inexperienced one what to do?
When an experienced and an inexperienced chimpanzee were given the joint rope-pulling task with the heavy box, the experienced one would pick up a rope, perhaps pull a bit, but then give up. Sometimes it would wait for while, even look over toward the new partner. Often, then, it would go into a bit of a sulk. Among the five chimpanzees who had no experience in the joint task only one of them, Megan, did pick up the rope and start to pull in such a way that, with the experienced chimpanzee, the two were able to pull the box in. Megan did this with both of the chimpanzees who were experienced at the joint task. But neither of the experienced chimpanzees were able to carry out the joint task with any of the four other inexperienced chimpanzees. Also, not once, with Megan or with any of the other inexperienced chimpanzees, did either of the experienced chimpanzees pick up the rope and offer it to the new partner, or do anything to indicate what the other should do. Although the experienced chimpanzees knew how to perform the joint task, they seemed not to know that the inexperienced partner had intentions, or needed help to act cooperatively on the task.
Esther Hermann, Michael Tomasello, and colleagues devised a range of tasks to compare the abilities of chimpanzees, orangutans, and infant humans. There were 106 chimpanzees aged 3 to 21 years, 32 orangutans aged 3 to 10 years, and 105 human children aged two-and-a-half years. The tasks were separated into two sets. One set was of physical, tasks of the kind that Jean Piaget invented to see how infants understood the world in their sensory-motor stage. They included finding a reward when it had been hidden, discrimination of quantity, understanding causes of events, and use of tools to retrieve rewards. The second set was in the social domain, and included observing another individual solving a problem and then trying to solve it in the same way; understanding communicative cues that would indicate the position of a hidden reward; being able to choose a communicative gesture in relation to the attentional state of another individual to whom the gesture was made; following an individual’s gaze toward a target; and understanding what an individual was trying to do when she or he was unsuccessful in completing a task.
In the physical tasks, chimpanzees and human infants were 69 percent correct, and did not differ from each other on average. Orangutans were less successful and scored 59 percent. On the social tasks, the human children scored 74 percent whereas chimpanzees and orangutans were correct only half as often, 33 percent and 36 percent. (The average chance scores on these tasks were above zero.) For the most part, the apes were unable to perform the social tasks.
So the ability of understanding one’s own and others’ intentions, of being able to do things jointly, is a human universal that emerges in human children by the age of two-and-a-half. This is the opening phase in a developmental pathway that includes perspective-taking and theory-of-mind. In the first phase, up to the age of two or so, babies come to know themselves and others as able to act in the world, capable of forming intentions to make changes to the world, and being able to cooperate with others.
This is a momentous leap: the basis of cultural activities of all kinds, including communication by means of language. In a later phase, at about age four, children come also to know both others and themselves as mental beings, capable of thinking and feeling. Cooperation, and the ability to know other minds and our own, are the most important principles we discuss in this book.
Altruism
It has often been said that what distinguishes us from the animals is that we have language. Even more profound is that members of our species can cooperate. Almost everything that is important to us—relating in love, family, friendship, society—is based on cooperation. Felix Warneken and Tomasello have shown that by the age of two, a young human child, on seeing that another person has a plan but cannot quite carry it out, will go to help that person, as depicted in figure 20.2
Chimpanzees can almost do this … they can move something toward another chimpanzee, or human, when the other reaches for it. But they can’t grasp the idea of another person as having a plan. They can’t see when an intention has gone wrong, or do anything to help another person get the intention right.
Figure 20. In a study by Felix Warneken and Michael Tomasello, a two-year-old opens a cupboard for a person whom the child sees as wanting to put some books in there, but cannot open the door because she is holding the books. Source: Warneken, F., & Tomasello, M. (2009). Varieties of altruism in children and chimpanzees. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 13, 397–402. Photo by Sylvio Tuepke. Reproduced with permission of Felix Warneken, Anja Gampe, Jana Jurkat, and the staff of the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology.
Shared Intentionality
Unlike the apes, humans cooperate in caring for their children, they provide information that they think will be helpful to others, they teach others things they know will be helpful, they make group decisions, and they maintain social structures and norms.
Non-human primates do not collaborate in human-like ways because, although they have skills for carrying out intentions in an individualistic way, they don’t have skills or motivations for shared intentions. Only humans are so social that they can conceive and carry out shared intentions.
In A Natural History of Human Thinking, Tomasello goes further. He proposes the shared intentionality hypothesis.
Although humans’ great ape ancestors were social beings, they lived mostly individualistic and competitive lives, and so their thinking was geared toward achieving individual goals. But early humans were at some point forced by ecological circumstances into more cooperative lifeways, and so their thinking became more directed toward figuring out ways to coordinate with others to achieve joint goals or even collective group goals. And this changed everything.3
To think in a human way involves not just language, or languagelike features, but the cooperativity that supports language. Tomasello proposes that the principle of shared intentionality evolved in two stages.
He calls the first stage “joint intentionality.” It probably emerged during foraging, when humans began to share the tasks of gathering food. Chimpanzees don’t do this. They do travel in groups so that they are often together when they find a tree with fruit on it. But when they find some fruit, they take enough for themselves, then take it to one side and eat it on their own. When they have caught a monkey or piglet in a hunt, the joint activity often becomes a squabble over dominance.4 Human foragers, by contrast, seek and produce most of their food in collaboration with others. It was when this stage was reached, Tomasello imagines, perhaps 400,000 years ago, that the human activity of pointing began. Over there is a place we can perhaps get food, and this may have been accompanied by emotionally based sounds: “Emmm.” Or over there I see a wild animal: “Ohhhh.” This kind of cooperation involves people taking on joint goals, “We” goals, and promoting them to make them more important than individual goals. Then, with such goals, joint plans are arranged, and these often involve separate roles. You pull out these roots, and I’ll hold this animal skin (as a bag) so that we can put them in there, and take them back so that everyone in our group can eat them. Human beings have been adept at taking on such roles.
The taking on of “We” goals, rather than mere “I” goals, in children, was studied by Katharina Hamann along with Warneken and Tomasello. They had pairs of children work on a task together to get rewards. As they worked on the joint task, for every pair an arrangement was made so that one of the children was surprised to get her or his reward early. When this happened to two-and-a-half-year-olds, they were surprised to get a reward before the joint task was finished; they took the reward for themselves, and played no further part in the joint activity. The three-and-a-half-year-old children to whom this happened were different. When the surprise of an early reward came to them, they continued to work eagerly on the problem together with their partner until the other child also got the reward. For these older children, the joint goal—of both being able to complete the task together—became more important than the individual goal of getting a reward.
In adulthood, joint intentions and plans continue to be important. Laurette Larocque and I found that on average people made about ten new joint plans a day. We also asked participants to keep diaries of what happened when a joint plan went wrong. Usually this occurred not because of individuality, or selfishness, but because two people thought that what they knew and what the other person knew about the joint goal and plan were the same, but this was not so. Here is an example:
A participant was late in meeting her husband for a Toronto Blue Jays baseball game because she was waiting for their daughter to finish her homework, a condition that had to be fulfilled for the girl to see the game. The husband had the tickets and waited for his wife and daughter outside the baseball ground. When they arrived, he was angry at having been kept from seeing the game so far. He then missed several more innings arguing with his wife, trying to convince her that it was her fault that she was late. In this meeting that did not go as planned, there were multiple goals, including the daughter’s homework. Angry emotions occurred, and there was an argument. The most significant feature, in our view, was that the attempts at repair did not focus on the plan that had gone wrong. Our participant did not report that her husband said anything like: “Let’s go in as quickly as we can now so we don’t miss any more of the game.”5
We found, in this way, that joint plans mostly occurred between people who had ongoing relationships and that the relationship (with its ongoing set of shared social arrangements, in marriage, friendship, and so on) was more important than any particular plan.6
A difficulty with the issue of joint intentions is that not everyone is good in activities with others, and not always good with other people. Although there is a whole philosophy of ethics, it is all very well to propose that people should be decent and helpful with each other, but as Martha Nussbaum showed, this ability is affected by the accidents of life.
Dillon Browne and colleagues studied 385 families, each with a mother, a father, and two siblings. The study involved mothers and siblings cooperating in pairs (mother with older sibling, mother with younger sibling, two siblings together) to build a cognitively challenging design from children’s building blocks. The interactions were recorded and sensitivity of each individual was scored for mutuality, mind-reading, and communicative clarity. The abilities of mothers in these respects were due to individual differences, but the abilities of children were found to be diminished by adversities that had occurred within the family. These adversities included living in poverty, discord between the parents, parental mental or physical illness, and other kinds of stress. Such adversities get inside the family and spill over into interactions, not just for the parents, but also for the children. Over time, effects of this kind become part of children’s individual abilities in being able to take part in plans and projects that are shared with others, and the adversities become risks for psychiatric problems in adulthood. In mental illness a person is likely to become self-involved—in depression, anxiety, or resentments—less able to take part well in joint actions with others, or sometimes to take part in anything much in the social world.
A further challenge to the idea of joint intentions is that people might not really promote joint goals to the position of being more important than their individual goals. They might only cooperate with others because of arrangements like, “I’ll do this for you, if you’ll do that for me”: individual intentions of a reciprocal kind. We may sometimes observe or read about people who have a tendency to act in this way.
When marriages break down, there is an immediate reversion to individual intentions, and the only cooperative thing that many couples can agree on, when they separate, is to prioritize their children. Even this, however, might be thought of as individual, because, from a biological point of view it will be each individual’s genes that are being passed on.
In his 2014 book, Tomasello has identified a second stage, which he calls “collective intentionality.” Here he proposes that we don’t just work together on joint goals and plans, but we also collaborate within a community. When humans started hunting or scavenging, they would bring food for the whole group. For humans, eating became a collective activity. We identify with our community so that in our interactions we are affected by group agreements, and contribute to what the whole group is doing. Group rituals and group norms become established. We eat dinner together at seven o’clock. Other group activities arose, and those who did not contribute were frowned upon: an early stage in morality. Each person must play her or his part, not take more than the fair share, not cheat. It’s at this stage that the strong and raw emotions of shame and guilt began to occur. We experience these now when we do something that is against the interests of the group. Also at this stage, self-monitoring began to take place as people regulated their actions to fit in with those of the group.
Another kind of function at the collective stage is of interactions that have effects on the future. Parents instruct their children, who are able to learn from the instruction, not just by observation and imitation, but by taking on goals, skills, and knowledge that have been explained to them. Then, of course, those who have been taught can themselves pass on goals, and instruct others in skills and knowledge. In a study of this issue, Lewis Dean and colleagues designed a puzzle box that could be solved with three stages of difficulty, with greater rewards at each successive stage. Success at the third stage built on success at the second stage, which was based on success at the first stage. Working together, three- to four-year-old human children were successful in being able to reach the higher stages. Monkeys and chimpanzees were not. The children’s success in reaching higher-stage solutions was based on cooperative processes that included verbal instruction of each other and helping each other.
In A Natural History of Human Morality, Tomasello extends his proposals. He suggests that the first stage he outlines, of joint intentionality, ensures that both partners in joint enterprises have developed cognitive skills to assign roles, and to share results of joint activities. Rather than “me and that other one,” or “me versus that other one,” humans have become able to engage with each other, commit to each other, to be no longer just individuals but “We.” In the second stage, of collective intentionality, distinct cultural groups have emerged, with morality based on loyalty, conformity, and cultural identity. The “We” becomes “Us,” who are obliged, morally, to observe standards of the community as a whole, standards such as justice, and fairness.
Among the benefits of teaching and learning are technologies. Flint tools started to be made more than three million years ago. It seems likely that skills of making them were at first passed on by observing others, and imitating them. As Frederick Coolidge and Thomas Wynn explain, the earlier flint tools, mostly scrapers, remained the same for hundreds of thousands of years. Only between about 100,000 and 50,000 years ago did rapid changes, in the form of improvements in tool-making, begin to be seen, with the production of knives, arrows, and so on. At the same time, we can imagine technologies of clothing, cooking, and shelter underwent development. More recently still, technologies of transport and, of course, most recently, of the digital world have emerged. All require discussion, planning, and sharing. Agreements and shared conventions are established. It is only on the basis of such conventions—for instance of words as having certain agreed meanings—that language became possible.
Conversation
Language occurs in all societies, but how did conversation arise? An answer is proposed by Robin Dunbar in The Human Story.7 It is that conversation arose as the principal means by which humans create and maintain relationships.
Primates live in social groups, and for each species the group has a maximum size. For lemurs it is about 9, for cebus monkeys it is about 18, for chimpanzees it is about 50, and for human beings it is about 150. For humans, this is the number of people with whom one maintains social relationships, and knows something of their history, their relations with others, their personality. The relative size of the cortex in primates is closely related to the size of their social group. In lemurs, the cortex is 1.2 times the rest of the brain. In cebus monkeys, it’s 2.4 times. In chimpanzees, it’s 3.2 times. In humans, it’s 4.1 times. If one plots group size against brain size, the result is a straight line. In other words, the larger the group size, the larger the cortex. Dunbar’s suggestion is that the more individuals there are in the social group, the more cortex must be devoted to maintaining mental models of them.
Chimpanzees maintain their relationships by grooming. They sit with those with whom they are close, cuddle a bit, and go through the other’s fur, removing twigs and insects. It’s a relaxed and affectionate activity. Chimpanzees spend about 20 percent of their time doing this, and they need to do it with all the individuals in their group with whom they have close relationships. Dunbar has proposed that as group size and brain size kept increasing, as primates evolved, so did the time necessary for maintaining relationships in the social group. As this increase continued, Dunbar has calculated that in our forebears, such as homo erectus and homo habilis, a point was reached when they needed to spend 30 percent of their time grooming. Beyond this point, there just was not enough time to do everything else. It was at this point that conversation emerged. Based on Dunbar’s analyses, this seems to have occurred some 200,000 years ago.
From Dunbar’s findings we learn that conversation is verbal grooming. When we start a relationship, we tell the other about our self, and we learn from the other about who she or he is. Conversation is also the way in which we maintain our relationships. In conversation, we don’t just talk about ourselves, we gossip: and in this way we develop our understandings of others whom we know.
Starting at the point at which infants begin to put words together, we are fascinated by the actions and the effects of actions, and interactions, of ourselves and others. Dunbar, with Anna Marriot and N. D. Duncan, recorded topics of conversation, and the amount of time people spent on different topics, in university cafeterias and places such as bars and trains. They found 70 percent of females’ speaking time and some 60 percent of males’ speaking time were occupied by issues of social relevance: by relationships (“personal relationships arising from social events, social relationships and actual behavior in social situations and the emotional experiences involved”), by personal experiences (“factual experiences, events and circumstances as experienced by the speaker or third party including emotional response to these”), and by future social activity.8 Sport and similar topics accounted for 8.7 percent of speaking time. Work-related and academic topics accounted for 13.5 percent.
Equipped with what Michael Tomasello and Hannes Rakoczy call “the real thing” of knowing that we and others can act in the world, and can do things with others, we become fascinated by the doings of ourselves and others, and the effects of such doings.
Maxims and Expectations
Paul Grice has proposed that conversation is based on four maxims. The first is that when you take your turn in a conversation, you should say the right amount: not too little and not too much. Next is truthfulness: don’t say anything false and don’t say anything for which you lack any basis. Third is relevance: what you say should relate to what’s going on in the conversation. Fourth is to be clear and orderly: avoid obscurity, organize what you say appropriately, be immediate, and be brief.
Grice points out that these principles apply to other cooperative activities. Imagine you are helping someone cook dinner. This person asks you to pass a saucepan. The maxim of the right amount enables the cook to expect that you don’t supply three saucepans. As to truthfulness, if the cook asks for salt, you shouldn’t surreptitiously hand over sugar. For relevance, if the cook asks for olive oil, then you shouldn’t offer an oven cloth. For clarity and orderliness, you should act with reasonable dispatch and not say, for instance, “Not now. I’ve got to go off for ten minutes to read a book.”
Human cooperation is enabled by language. It’s not just going about in a group like a shoal of fish, not just joining together as wolves do when hunting, not just foraging for food—some of which might be shared as happens also with chimpanzees. It’s the making of cooperative arrangements with others to go out with a friend, to have families, to work together in jobs, to form societies. We do together what we cannot do on our own.
When one recalls some incident, or when one is in the process of constructing or repairing something, visual images can occur that are individual. But a great deal of our thinking, perhaps most of it, is verbal, or verbal-like. Language is based on social cooperation, so most thinking is socially based.
We humans experience ourselves and others as having a life of the mind, and this life is therefore based on cooperation. In a recent book, Charles Taylor has argued that although language has often been regarded in terms of information, and of naming things and concepts that we know, it does not merely describe. It brings a world into being, usually a social world. Conversational language is a way of constructing our experiences of ourselves with others.9
