Browsing by Author "Singer, Wolf J."

Cooperative behavior has become conventionalized and institutionalized over the course of human evolution. When faced with situations in which we desire to coordinate with others, we adopt social conventions such as driving on a particular side of the road, and adhere to these for social reasons: we expect others to, they expect us to, and this is common knowledge in our cultural community. Many of these practices have also become institutionalized via processes of formal codification and symbolic mediation, resulting for instance, in traffic laws and road signs. And such practices have a normative quality such that there may be penalties for non-adherence.Conventional and institutionalized modes of coordinating represent derived evolutionary traits in the human lineage. Here, proximate causes of this uniqueness are grounded in a group of human-specific social-cognitive abilities, known as ‘collective intentionality’. Already apparent in young children, and apparently absent in chimpanzees, these abilities include a capacity to cooperate with joint goals and joint attention; to collectively assign symbolic functions and to grasp the ‘collective imaginings’ that these prescribe; and to act according to social norms. Ultimate causes of this uniqueness are discussed in terms of reduced levels of social competition; group-selection processes promoting hyper-cooperativeness; and the institution of an egalitarian social organization in human evolution.