Let’s swap: Early understanding of social exchange by British and Nepali children

Harris, Paul L.; Núñez, María; Brett, Caroline

doi:10.3758/bf03200478

Cited by 58 publications

(30 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…Indeed, we have found no difference in performance between totally unfamiliar social contracts and thoroughly familiar ones. Moreover, the ability to detect cheaters on social contracts is present as early as it can be tested (age 3-4) (33). Consistent with the hypothesis that this adaptive specialization is part of our species' cognitive architecture, this pattern of results has been found in every culture where it has been tested, from industrialized market economies to Shiwiar hunterhorticulturalists of the Ecuadorian Amazon (23).…”

Section: Experimental Tests Of Social Contract Theorysupporting

confidence: 68%

Adaptive specializations, social exchange, and the evolution of human intelligence

Cosmides

Barrett

Tooby

2010

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

240

130

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Blank-slate theories of human intelligence propose that reasoning is carried out by general-purpose operations applied uniformly across contents. An evolutionary approach implies a radically different model of human intelligence. The task demands of different adaptive problems select for functionally specialized problem-solving strategies, unleashing massive increases in problem-solving power for ancestrally recurrent adaptive problems. Because exchange can evolve only if cooperators can detect cheaters, we hypothesized that the human mind would be equipped with a neurocognitive system specialized for reasoning about social exchange. Whereas humans perform poorly when asked to detect violations of most conditional rules, we predicted and found a dramatic spike in performance when the rule specifies an exchange and violations correspond to cheating. According to critics, people's uncanny accuracy at detecting violations of social exchange rules does not reflect a cheater detection mechanism, but extends instead to all rules regulating when actions are permitted (deontic conditionals). Here we report experimental tests that falsify these theories by demonstrating that deontic rules as a class do not elicit the search for violations. We show that the cheater detection system functions with pinpoint accuracy, searching for violations of social exchange rules only when these are likely to reveal the presence of someone who intends to cheat. It does not search for violations of social exchange rules when these are accidental, when they do not benefit the violator, or when the situation would make cheating difficult.evolutionary psychology | reasoning | cooperation | reciprocation T o the human mind, certain things seem intuitively correct. The world seems flat and motionless; objects seem solid rather than composed of empty space, fields, and wave functions; space seems Euclidian and 3-dimensional rather than curved and 11-dimensional. Because scientists are equipped with human minds, they often take intuitive propositions for granted and import them-unexaminedinto their scientific theories. Because they seem so self-evidently true, it can take centuries before these intuitive assumptions are questioned and, under the cumulative weight of evidence, discarded in favor of counterintuitive alternatives-a spinning earth orbiting the sun, quantum mechanics, relativity.For psychology and the cognitive sciences, the intuitive view of human intelligence and rationality-the blank-slate theory of the mind-may be just such a case of an intuition-fueled failure to grapple with evidence (1-4). According to intuition, intelligence-almost by definition-seems to be the ability to reason successfully about almost any topic. If we can reason about any content, from cabbages to kings, it seems self-evident that intelligence must operate by applying inference procedures that operate uniformly regardless of the content domains they are applied to (such procedures are general-purpose, domain-general, and content-independent). Consulting su...

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Section: Experimental Tests Of Social Contract Theorysupporting

confidence: 68%

Adaptive specializations, social exchange, and the evolution of human intelligence

Cosmides

Barrett

Tooby

2010

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

240

130

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“…CUMMINS 1996;HARRIS 2000;NÚÑEZ and HARRIS 1998;HARRIS et al 2001). Interestingly, children judged mutual non-compliance to be a violation, suggesting that they construe each party as having an obligation to comply independently of what the other party does (this would not necessarily have to be the case; children could have judged that if one party does nothing, the other party has no obligation to follow through).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Relationships and emotions in children's understanding of social contract violations

Barrett

Keller

Takezawa

et al. 2007

Journal of Evolutionary Psychology

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Abstract. Previous research on children's understanding of social contracts has shown that children are able to identify violations of social contracts from an early age, that they attribute negative feelings including anger to victims of contract violations, and that attributions of negative (moral) feelings to violators increase with age. This study examines two questions that have not been systematically investigated in prior work. First, do children attribute specific types of negative emotion, guilt and anger, to violators and victims of social contracts, and do these attributions change with age? Second, do children's attributions of guilt and anger depend on the social roles of the parties in the contract, including parents and offspring, siblings, and friends? Using a bilateral social contract scenario with first and fourth graders, we found that children in both age groups were able to identify contract violations, and attributed guilt to violators and anger to victims of social contract violations. Although anger and guilt attributions increased with age, they were high across both ages, and relatively unaffected by type of role relationship. These results suggest that children understand the moral emotions associated with violations of social contracts.

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“…From the age of 3 years onwards, children understand when a deontic rule is violated (e.g., Cummins 1996a; Harris et al 2001;Keller et al 2004;O'Brien et al 1998), and at about 4.5 years they are able to infer appropriate behavioral implications of a set of deontic conditional statements (Chao and Cheng 2000).…”

Section: How Do People's Deontic Capabilities Develop?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Deontic reasoning reviewed: psychological questions, empirical findings, and current theories

Beller

2009

Cogn Process

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Deontic reasoning is concerned with questions of whether actions are forbidden or allowed, obligatory or not obligatory. This article reviews empirical findings and psychological theories on deontic reasoning with regard to three questions that have guided psychological research during the last decades: How do people's deontic capabilities develop? How well do people perform in deontic reasoning tasks? And how do they represent deontic rules? In conclusion, it is discussed why deontic reasoning-despite astonishing, early developing competencies-is still a complex cognitive activity.

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Let’s swap: Early understanding of social exchange by British and Nepali children

Cited by 58 publications

References 17 publications

Adaptive specializations, social exchange, and the evolution of human intelligence

Adaptive specializations, social exchange, and the evolution of human intelligence

Relationships and emotions in children's understanding of social contract violations

Deontic reasoning reviewed: psychological questions, empirical findings, and current theories

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