Cognitive adaptations for <i>n</i>‐person exchange: the evolutionary roots of organizational behavior

Tooby, John; Cosmides, Leda; Price, Michael

doi:10.1002/mde.1287

Cited by 231 publications

(231 citation statements)

References 37 publications

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“…Evidence from hunter-gatherers, small-scale societies, archaeology, and primatology indicates that this has been a pervasive and evolutionarily long-enduring part of human sociality, plausibly at least as far back as the human-chimpanzee common ancestor (32)(33)(34)(35). Modern nation-states are examples of coalitions that use force to resolve conflicts in their interest, both domestically and (36).…”

Section: Engineering Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Formidability and the logic of human anger

Sell

Tooby

Cosmides

2009

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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687

677

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Eleven predictions derived from the recalibrational theory of anger were tested. This theory proposes that anger is produced by a neurocognitive program engineered by natural selection to use bargaining tactics to resolve conflicts of interest in favor of the angry individual. The program is designed to orchestrate two interpersonal negotiating tactics (conditionally inflicting costs or conditionally withholding benefits) to incentivize the target of the anger to place greater weight on the welfare of the angry individual. Individuals with enhanced abilities to inflict costs (e.g., stronger individuals) or to confer benefits (e.g., attractive individuals) have a better bargaining position in conflicts; hence, it was predicted that such individuals will be more prone to anger, prevail more in conflicts of interest, and consider themselves entitled to better treatment. These predictions were confirmed. Consistent with an evolutionary analysis, the effect of strength on anger was greater for men and the effect of attractiveness on anger was greater for women. Also as predicted, stronger men had a greater history of fighting than weaker men, and more strongly endorsed the efficacy of force to resolve conflicts-both in interpersonal and international conflicts. The fact that stronger men favored greater use of military force in international conflicts provides evidence that the internal logic of the anger program reflects the ancestral payoffs characteristic of a small-scale social world rather than rational assessments of modern payoffs in large populations.aggression ͉ evolutionary psychology ͉ recalibrational theory ͉ welfare tradeoff ratio A nger is part of the basic biology of the human species. It spontaneously appears in infancy (1, 2), is effectively universal in its distribution across cultures and individuals (3, 4), and has a species-typical neural basis (5). To understand the evolutionary biology of anger, however, it is also important to characterize its evolved function-that is, what (if anything) was anger engineered by natural selection to accomplish? A recent model-the recalibrational theory of anger-hypothesizes that the regulatory program governing anger evolved in the service of bargaining, to resolve conflicts of interest in favor of the angry individual (6, 7). More precisely, the function of anger is to orchestrate behavior in the angry individual that creates incentives in the target of the anger to recalibrate upwards the weight he or she puts on the welfare of the angry individual. Here, we report empirical tests of 11 predictions derived from this model. Engineering AnalysisAnger, Welfare Tradeoff Ratios (WTRs), and Bargaining. In social species, actions undertaken by one individual commonly have impacts on the welfare of others (measured in fitness, or in other currencies). Consequently, neurocognitive programs in social species should have been designed by selection to solve the following computational adaptive problem: For a given choice set involving self and other, how much weight shou...

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Section: Engineering Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Formidability and the logic of human anger

Sell

Tooby

Cosmides

2009

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

Self Cite

687

677

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“…However, from an evolutionary perspective, it has been argued that signals of support and agreement should serve as excellent alliance cues, even when that agreement or support is not explicitly related to social affiliation (Pietraszewski, 2011;2013;Tooby, Cosmides, Price, 2006). Because cooperation requires coordination, shared opinions should be treated by as probabilistic markers of social affiliation, even in the absence of explicit cooperation or competition .…”

Section: The Credulity Of the Alliance Detection Systemmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Understanding and predicting alliance behaviors therefore requires cognitive systems specialized for these dynamics (Byrne & Whiten, 1988;Harcourt, 1998;Pietraszewski, 2012;Tomasello & Call, 1997;Tooby & Cosmides, 2010;Tooby, Cosmides, & Price, 2006).…”

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confidence: 99%

Constituents of political cognition: Race, party politics, and the alliance detection system

et al. 2015

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!Research suggests that the mind contains a set of adaptations for detecting alliances: an alliance detection system, which monitors for, encodes, and stores alliance information and then modifies the activation of stored alliance categories according to how likely they will predict behavior within a particular social interaction. Previous studies have established the activation of this system when exposed to explicit competition or cooperation between individuals. In the current studies we examine if shared political opinions produce these same effects. In particular, (1) if participants will spontaneously categorize individuals according to the parties they support, even when explicit cooperation and antagonism are absent, and (2) if party support is sufficiently powerful to decrease participants' categorization by an orthogonal but typically-diagnostic alliance cue (in this case the target's race). Evidence was found for both: Participants spontaneously and implicitly kept track of who supported which party, and when party cross-cut race-such that the race of targets was not predictive of party support-categorization by race was dramatically reduced. To verify that these results reflected the operation of a cognitive system for modifying the activation of alliance categories, and not just socially-relevant categories in general, an identical set of studies was also conducted with in which party was either crossed with sex or age (neither of which is predicted to be primarily an alliance category). As predicted, categorization by party occurred to the same degree, and there was no reduction in either categorization by sex or by age. All effects were replicated across two sets of between-subjects conditions. These studies provide the first direct empirical evidence that party politics engages the mind's systems for detecting alliances and establish two important social categorization phenomena: (1) that categorization by age is, like sex, not affected by alliance information and (2) that political contexts can reduce the degree to which individuals are represented in terms of their race.!

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“…Given a long evolutionary history of group living, human cognition may have been shaped by natural selection to solve coordination problems (Tooby & Cosmides, 2010;Tooby, Cosmides, & Price, 2006). If game theorists are correct that common knowledge is needed for coordination, then humans might have cognitive mechanisms for recognizing it.…”

Section: The Psychology Of Common Knowledge and Coordinationmentioning

confidence: 99%

The psychology of coordination and common knowledge.

Thomas¹,

DeScioli²,

Haque³

et al. 2014

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

131

117

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Research on human cooperation has concentrated on the puzzle of altruism, in which one actor incurs a cost to benefit another, and the psychology of reciprocity, which evolved to solve this problem. We examine the complementary puzzle of mutualism, in which actors can benefit each other simultaneously, and the psychology of coordination, which ensures such benefits.Coordination is facilitated by common knowledge-the recursive belief state in which A knows X, B knows X, A knows that B knows X, B knows that A knows X, ad infinitum. We test whether people are sensitive to common knowledge when deciding whether to engage in risky coordination. Participants decided between working alone for a certain profit and working together for a potentially higher profit that they would receive only if their partner made the same choice. Results showed that more participants attempted risky coordination when they and their prospective partner had common knowledge of the payoffs (broadcasted over a loudspeaker) than when they had only shared knowledge (conveyed to both by a messenger) or primary knowledge (revealed to each partner separately). These results confirm the hypothesis that people represent common knowledge as a distinct cognitive category that licenses them to coordinate with others for mutual gain. We discuss how this hypothesis can provide a unified explanation for diverse phenomena in human social life, including recursive mentalizing, performative speech acts, public assemblies and protests, and self-conscious emotional expressions.

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Cognitive adaptations for n‐person exchange: the evolutionary roots of organizational behavior

Cited by 231 publications

References 37 publications

Formidability and the logic of human anger

Formidability and the logic of human anger

Constituents of political cognition: Race, party politics, and the alliance detection system

The psychology of coordination and common knowledge.

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