Celebrating the continued importance of “Machiavellian Intelligence” 30 years on.

Abstract

The question of what has shaped primates' (and other species') cognitive capacities, whether technical or social demands remains a hot topic of inquiry. Indeed, a key area of study within the field of comparative psychology in the last few decades has been the focus on social life as a driving force behind the evolution of cognition, studied from behavioral and neurological perspectives, and from theoretical and empirical perspectives. Reflecting on contemporary studies of primate social cognition specifically one cannot ignore the book, Machiavellian Intelligence, co-edited by Richard Byrne and Andrew Whiten (Byrne & Whiten, 1988a). It is a keystone for the field: the volume as a whole has been cited over 3,000 times, without even including citations to individual chapters. This year, 2018, is the 30 th anniversary of the first publication of Machiavellian Intelligence, and with this special issue of the Journal of Comparative Psychology we mark that milestone. The key concept put forth in Machiavellian Intelligence was that primates' socio-cognitive abilities were shaped by the complex social worlds that they inhabited, rather than the technical or foraging challenges that they faced, as had previously been posited. In this issue, we consider the strength of the Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis 30 years on to explain primate social cognition, and we consider its applicability to non-primate species and to other cognitive domains.

The evolution of primate short-term memory

“…To succeed, this approach needs datasets that span a large number of species living in different ecological and social environments. Such datasets, however, are not readily available due to the logistic difficulties associated with testing large numbers of primates and, accordingly, little empirical research has explicitly tested these hypotheses (Hopper et al, 2018). Indeed, a recent review found that only a fraction of comparative primate cognition studies include more than two species (ManyPrimates, 2019a).…”