The Human Capacity for Collaboration

One way to understand our capabilities as humans is through comparison with other animals.  Various studies have shown that young human children differ from our close primate relatives, chimpanzees, in social intelligence more than in other forms of intelligence.  Chimpanzees do have social skills, but it seems they are less capable than human children when it comes to understanding the intentions of others and using that understanding for collaborative purposes.

As Robert Sternberg has pointed out, intelligence has multiple components.  This raises the possibility that human intelligence has a different structure than that of other primates.  That hypothesis was tested by research reported last year in Psychological Science by E. Herrmann, M. V. Hernández-Lloreda, J. Call, B. Hare, and M. Tomasello.  These researchers used individual differences within a group of 105 human children and within a group of 106 chimpanzees to identify and compare the factors contributing to performance on a wide range of problem-solving tasks.

Herrmann et al. found that the human children showed a separate factor of social cognition, while the chimpanzees did not.  This finding supports the hypothesis that humans not only have superior social skills, but also that those social skills derive from a specialized component of intelligence in humans, while being a consequence of a broader intelligence component in chimpanzees.  In discussing this finding, the authors suggest that humans have "a species-specific 'cultural intelligence,' based on even more sophisticated social-cognitive skills, that underlies their unique ways of cooperating and communicating with others in the cultural group."

It seems that we, as humans, are "wired" for cooperation and communication.  This leads to a feedback loop:  We are social because we collaborate, and we collaborate because we are social.

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REFERENCES

Hare, B. (2007). From nonhuman to human mind: What changed and why. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 16, 60–64.

Herrmann, E., Call, J., Hernández-Lloreda, M.V., Hare, B., & Tomasello, M. (2007). Humans have evolved specialized skills of social cognition: The cultural intelligence hypothesis. Science, 317, 1360–1366.

Herrmann E., Hernández-Lloreda M. V., Call J., Hare B., Tomasello M. (2010). The structure of individual differences in the cognitive abilities of children and chimpanzees.  Psychological Science, 21(1), 102-110.

Sternberg, R.J. (1999). Successful intelligence: Finding a balance. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 3, 436–442.

Sternberg, R.J. (2004). International handbook of intelligence. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Tomasello, M., Carpenter, M., Call, J., Behne, T., & Moll, H. (2005). Understanding and sharing intentions: The origins of cultural cognition. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 28, 675–691.