Theory of mind, also known as mentalising, meta-representation, second-order intentionality, or m... more Theory of mind, also known as mentalising, meta-representation, second-order intentionality, or mindreading is the ability to attribute and reflect on the mental states of others. A number of investigators have noted that an important relationship exists between child language development and children's understanding of second-order intentionality. However, although the ontogeny of theory of mind has been extensively studied over the past few decades, only recently have we begun to understand more concerning the limits of human mentalising ability in adults. For example, several studies have shown that the limits of mentalising ability for normal adults are consistently placed around fifthorder intentionality (i.e. I believe that you suppose that I imagine that you want me to believe that...), forming a naturally recursive hierarchy which corresponds to increasingly embedded mindreading. Moreover, several psychologists have recently suggested the adult capacity for higher-order intentionality may have played a critical role in the evolution of language, including especially the ability for recursive syntax comprehension and production, according to a cognitive bootstrapping effect. Here, we used the Imposing Memory Task (n ¼ 210 female and 204 male adults) to analyse the association and interaction between higher-order intentionality capacity and performance on a recursive syntax measure. Multiple regression analyses indicated that recursive syntax abilities are lower than mindreading competences below fifth-order, but then reverses at higher values. In addition, a path analysis further suggested intentionality capacity as the likely causal variable. Thus, these results seem to suggest that first-order through fifth-order intentionality is necessary to assist the processing of simpler syntactic structures, but beyond fifth-order intentionality the cognitive scaffolding provided by recursive syntax may be engaged to enable higher-order mentalising. In summary, this may explain in part how and why many modern languages exhibit recursive syntax.
Exploitation of food resources that are dispersed in time and space has been crucial to the evolu... more Exploitation of food resources that are dispersed in time and space has been crucial to the evolutionary success of humans. Recent experimental work has shown that an absence of communication impairs decision-making in a foraging task. Here, we found that individuals in larger teams were more likely to reach group consensus and were more accurate and efficient foragers. Individuals in larger teams were also more likely to gesture to one another, while levels of verbal exchange were not significantly different in small and large groups. At last, teams in which individuals reported that they knew one another and rated team members as helpful and information-seeking were more accurate in their foraging. Overall, our findings offer experimental evidence that larger, communicating, familiar teams are quicker and more accurate foragers. We therefore suggest that complex communication within socially bonded relationships may have been important to the ecological success of the human lineage.
Language may be one of most important attributes which separates humans from other animal species... more Language may be one of most important attributes which separates humans from other animal species. It has been suggested by some commentators that the primary biological function of human language is to deceive and selfishly manipulate social competitors. However, despite the existence of a large body of relevant theoretical and empirical literature in favor of the social bonding hypothesis for language function, the ostensible evidence and arguments for the deception hypothesis have not been fully discussed. The following review analyses the evidence and theoretical arguments from human social behavior, comparative animal behavior, and developmental psychology and suggests that deception shows clear signs of a derived function for language. Furthermore, in addition to being used relatively infrequently across most human and non-human animal contexts, deception appears to be utilized just as often for prosocial and social bonding functions, as it is for antisocial purposes. Future studies should focus on theoretical and experimental investigations which explore interactions between deceptive and honest language use in the context of social bonding.
Social density processes impact the activity and order of collective behaviours in a variety of b... more Social density processes impact the activity and order of collective behaviours in a variety of biological systems. Much effort has been devoted to understanding how density of people affects collective human motion in the context of pedestrian flows. However, there is a distinct lack of empirical data investigating the effects of social density on human behaviour in cooperative contexts. Here, we examine the functioning and performance of human teams in a central-place foraging arena using highresolution GPS data. We show that team functioning (level of coordination) is greatest at intermediate social densities, but contrary to our expectations, increased coordination at intermediate densities did not translate into improved collective foraging performance, and foraging accuracy was equivalent across our density treatments. We suggest that this is likely a consequence of foragers relying upon visual channels (local information) to achieve coordination but relying upon auditory channels (global information) to maximise foraging returns. These findings provide new insights for the development of more sophisticated models of human collective behaviour that consider different networks for communication (e.g. visual and vocal) that have the potential to operate simultaneously in cooperative contexts. Models of collective animal behaviour in which every agent updates its trajectory based on the trajectories of its neighbours find that with an increasing density of agents, the system (i.e. the swarm, school, flock, or crowd) switches from a state of disordered movement to a state of coherent collective movement 1,2. One of the best-known and studied examples is pedestrian flow of human crowds. Models and empirical data 3-5 show that at low densities, pedestrians tend to move freely, and the behaviour of the crowd can be partially compared with the behaviour of gases. At intermediate densities, crowd motion becomes highly coordinated and 'lanes' of bidirectional flow develop spontaneously. At high densities, coordinated motion can break down and crowds typically show stop-and-go waves and crowd turbulence. Whilst much effort has been devoted to describing and predicting collective human motion in the context of pedestrian flows 6 , there is a distinct lack of empirical data investigating the effects of social density on human behaviour in other relevant contexts 7,8. A fundamental human behaviour that is often dependent upon collective motion is foraging. In modern-day traditional societies, and in our evolutionary past, individuals have benefited from coordinating their movements and making collective decisions about how to obtain resources; searching for dispersed food sources in a patchy, uncertain environment, and then returning to a central location with this food resource 9-11. Indeed, individual search costs can be reduced, and group performance improved, if a number of foragers cooperate by coordinating their behaviour and exchanging information about encountered food items 12-14. Despite the importance of coordinated behaviour in a foraging context, we know very little about what factors predict the success or failure of such groups. Such knowledge may have important consequences for understanding the functioning of modern day teams and organisations 15,16 .
Background: The present study investigated the effects of supportive social network ties on healt... more Background: The present study investigated the effects of supportive social network ties on health in a sample of mothers with a young child. The aim of this study was to examine if Liverpool participants having a large supportive network of close relatives reported less cases of illness than participants without such social support. Methods: A cross-sectional design was employed whereby 74 randomly sampled mothers over the age of 20 with a child 24-36 months completed a questionnaire at twelve monthly time intervals over the course of one year. Multiple logistic regressions were applied to health survey data from participants from Liverpool collected from October 2001 to October 2002. Results: Respondents living in Liverpool reported decreased illness rates with increased interpersonal contact. A statistically significant reduction in physical illness was observed for mothers and infants that had high contact frequency with close relatives. A statistically significant reduction in physical illness was also found for participants with a large social network of close relatives. Conclusion: Results confirmed a potentially protective health relation for frequent contact with a large network of close relatives, but showed a less consistent picture for health benefits beyond a certain threshold of more distant relatives. Previous research has shown that social relationships can have a significant impact on psychological wellbeing, health and human disease, and so a greater understanding of social network structure is important to establish the need for preventive care and advice on maintaining important social relationships.
Savage et al. make a compelling case, Mehr et al. less so, for social bonding and credible signal... more Savage et al. make a compelling case, Mehr et al. less so, for social bonding and credible signalling, respectively, as the main adaptive function of human musicality. We express general advocacy for the former thesis, highlighting: (1) overlap between the two; (2) direct versus derived biological functions, and (3) aspects of music embedded in cultural evolution, for example, departures from tonality.
Evolutionary psychology : an international journal of evolutionary approaches to psychology and behavior, Jan 20, 2012
In the New York Times bestselling book The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists... more In the New York Times bestselling book The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists (2006), the world was granted its first exclusive introduction to the steadily growing dating coach and pick-up artist community. Many of its most prominent authorities claim to use insights and information gleaned both through first-hand experience as well as empirical research in evolutionary psychology. One of the industry's most well-respected authorities, the illusionist Erik von Markovik, promotes a three-phase model of human courtship: Attraction, building mutual Comfort and Trust, and Seduction. The following review argues that many of these claims are in fact grounded in solid empirical findings from social, physiological and evolutionary psychology. Two texts which represent much of this literature are critiqued and their implications discussed.
Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science, 2020
Evolutionary musicology is a subdiscipline of biomusicology, the study of music from a biological... more Evolutionary musicology is a subdiscipline of biomusicology, the study of music from a biological perspective, which embeds the psychological and physiological mechanisms of human music perception and production in the theory of biological evolution. Evolutionary musicology studies the origin and evolution of music in the human species, encompassing vocal communication and musical behaviors in non-human animal species; behavioral, cognitive, and neurological development of musical processing and skill; cross-cultural human universals in musical capacity and cognitive processing; and archeological evidence to develop hypotheses concerning the evolution of human musical appreciation and music-making.
Music and language are universal human abilities with many apparent similarities relating to thei... more Music and language are universal human abilities with many apparent similarities relating to their acoustics, structure, and frequent use in social situations. We might therefore expect them to be understood and processed similarly, and indeed an emerging body of research suggests that this is the case. But the focus has historically been on the individual, looking at the passive listener or the isolated speaker or performer, even though social interaction is the primary site of use for both domains. Nonetheless, an important goal of emerging research is to compare music and language in terms of acoustics and structure, social interaction, and functional origins to develop parallel accounts across the two domains. Indeed, a central aim of both of evolutionary musicology and language evolution research is to understand the adaptive significance or functional origin of human music and language. An influential proposal to emerge in recent years has been referred to as the social bonding hypothesis. Here, within a comparative approach to animal communication systems, I review empirical studies in support of the social bonding hypothesis in humans, non-human primates, songbirds, and various other mammals. In support of this hypothesis, I review six research fields: (i) the functional origins of music; (ii) the functional origins of language; (iii) mechanisms of social synchrony for human social bonding; (iv) language and social bonding in humans; (v) music and social bonding in humans; and (vi) pitch, tone and emotional expression in human speech and music. I conclude that the comparative study of complex vocalizations and behaviors in various extant species can provide important insights into the adaptive function(s) of these traits in these species, as well as offer evidence-based speculations for the existence of "musilanguage" in our primate ancestors, and thus inform our understanding of the biology and evolution of human music and language.
Exploitation of food resources that are dispersed in time and space has been crucial to the evolu... more Exploitation of food resources that are dispersed in time and space has been crucial to the evolutionary success of humans. Recent experimental work has shown that an absence of communication impairs decision-making in a foraging task. Here, we found that individuals in larger teams were more likely to reach group consensus and were more accurate and efficient foragers. Individuals in larger teams were also more likely to gesture to one another, while levels of verbal exchange were not significantly different in small and large groups. At last, teams in which individuals reported that they knew one another and rated team members as helpful and information-seeking were more accurate in their foraging. Overall, our findings offer experimental evidence that larger, communicating, familiar teams are quicker and more accurate foragers. We therefore suggest that complex communication within socially bonded relationships may have been important to the ecological success of the human lineage.
Theory of mind, also known as mentalising, meta-representation, second-order intentionality, or m... more Theory of mind, also known as mentalising, meta-representation, second-order intentionality, or mindreading is the ability to attribute and reflect on the mental states of others. A number of investigators have noted that an important relationship exists between child language development and children's understanding of second-order intentionality. However, although the ontogeny of theory of mind has been extensively studied over the past few decades, only recently have we begun to understand more concerning the limits of human mentalising ability in adults. For example, several studies have shown that the limits of mentalising ability for normal adults are consistently placed around fifth-order intentionality (i.e. I believe that you suppose that I imagine that you want me to believe that...), forming a naturally recursive hierarchy which corresponds to increasingly embedded mindreading. Moreover, several psychologists have recently suggested the adult capacity for higher-order intentionality may have played a critical role in the evolution of language, including especially the ability for recursive syntax comprehension and production, according to a cognitive bootstrapping effect. Here, we used the Imposing Memory Task (n = 210 female and 204 male adults) to analyse the association and interaction between higher-order intentionality capacity and performance on a recursive syntax measure. Multiple regression analyses indicated that recursive syntax abilities are lower than mindreading competences below fifth-order, but then reverses at higher values. In addition, a path analysis further suggested intentionality capacity as the likely causal variable. Thus, these results seem to suggest that first-order through fifth-order intentionality is necessary to assist the processing of simpler syntactic structures, but beyond fifth-order intentionality the cognitive scaffolding provided by recursive syntax may be engaged to enable higher-order mentalising. In summary, this may explain in part how and why many modern languages exhibit recursive syntax.
Language may be one of most important attributes which separates humans from other animal species... more Language may be one of most important attributes which separates humans from other animal species. It has been suggested by some commentators that the primary biological function of human language is to deceive and selfishly manipulate social competitors. However, despite the existence of a large body of relevant theoretical and empirical literature in favor of the social bonding hypothesis for language function, the ostensible evidence and arguments for the deception hypothesis have not been fully discussed. The following review analyses the evidence and theoretical arguments from human social behavior, comparative animal behavior, and developmental psychology and suggests that deception shows clear signs of a derived function for language. Furthermore, in addition to being used relatively infrequently across most human and non-human animal contexts, deception appears to be utilized just as often for prosocial and social bonding functions, as it is for antisocial purposes. Future studies should focus on theoretical and experimental investigations which explore interactions between deceptive and honest language use in the context of social bonding.
Theory of mind, also known as mentalising, meta-representation, second-order intentionality, or m... more Theory of mind, also known as mentalising, meta-representation, second-order intentionality, or mindreading is the ability to attribute and reflect on the mental states of others. A number of investigators have noted that an important relationship exists between child language development and children's understanding of second-order intentionality. However, although the ontogeny of theory of mind has been extensively studied over the past few decades, only recently have we begun to understand more concerning the limits of human mentalising ability in adults. For example, several studies have shown that the limits of mentalising ability for normal adults are consistently placed around fifthorder intentionality (i.e. I believe that you suppose that I imagine that you want me to believe that...), forming a naturally recursive hierarchy which corresponds to increasingly embedded mindreading. Moreover, several psychologists have recently suggested the adult capacity for higher-order intentionality may have played a critical role in the evolution of language, including especially the ability for recursive syntax comprehension and production, according to a cognitive bootstrapping effect. Here, we used the Imposing Memory Task (n ¼ 210 female and 204 male adults) to analyse the association and interaction between higher-order intentionality capacity and performance on a recursive syntax measure. Multiple regression analyses indicated that recursive syntax abilities are lower than mindreading competences below fifth-order, but then reverses at higher values. In addition, a path analysis further suggested intentionality capacity as the likely causal variable. Thus, these results seem to suggest that first-order through fifth-order intentionality is necessary to assist the processing of simpler syntactic structures, but beyond fifth-order intentionality the cognitive scaffolding provided by recursive syntax may be engaged to enable higher-order mentalising. In summary, this may explain in part how and why many modern languages exhibit recursive syntax.
Exploitation of food resources that are dispersed in time and space has been crucial to the evolu... more Exploitation of food resources that are dispersed in time and space has been crucial to the evolutionary success of humans. Recent experimental work has shown that an absence of communication impairs decision-making in a foraging task. Here, we found that individuals in larger teams were more likely to reach group consensus and were more accurate and efficient foragers. Individuals in larger teams were also more likely to gesture to one another, while levels of verbal exchange were not significantly different in small and large groups. At last, teams in which individuals reported that they knew one another and rated team members as helpful and information-seeking were more accurate in their foraging. Overall, our findings offer experimental evidence that larger, communicating, familiar teams are quicker and more accurate foragers. We therefore suggest that complex communication within socially bonded relationships may have been important to the ecological success of the human lineage.
Language may be one of most important attributes which separates humans from other animal species... more Language may be one of most important attributes which separates humans from other animal species. It has been suggested by some commentators that the primary biological function of human language is to deceive and selfishly manipulate social competitors. However, despite the existence of a large body of relevant theoretical and empirical literature in favor of the social bonding hypothesis for language function, the ostensible evidence and arguments for the deception hypothesis have not been fully discussed. The following review analyses the evidence and theoretical arguments from human social behavior, comparative animal behavior, and developmental psychology and suggests that deception shows clear signs of a derived function for language. Furthermore, in addition to being used relatively infrequently across most human and non-human animal contexts, deception appears to be utilized just as often for prosocial and social bonding functions, as it is for antisocial purposes. Future studies should focus on theoretical and experimental investigations which explore interactions between deceptive and honest language use in the context of social bonding.
Social density processes impact the activity and order of collective behaviours in a variety of b... more Social density processes impact the activity and order of collective behaviours in a variety of biological systems. Much effort has been devoted to understanding how density of people affects collective human motion in the context of pedestrian flows. However, there is a distinct lack of empirical data investigating the effects of social density on human behaviour in cooperative contexts. Here, we examine the functioning and performance of human teams in a central-place foraging arena using highresolution GPS data. We show that team functioning (level of coordination) is greatest at intermediate social densities, but contrary to our expectations, increased coordination at intermediate densities did not translate into improved collective foraging performance, and foraging accuracy was equivalent across our density treatments. We suggest that this is likely a consequence of foragers relying upon visual channels (local information) to achieve coordination but relying upon auditory channels (global information) to maximise foraging returns. These findings provide new insights for the development of more sophisticated models of human collective behaviour that consider different networks for communication (e.g. visual and vocal) that have the potential to operate simultaneously in cooperative contexts. Models of collective animal behaviour in which every agent updates its trajectory based on the trajectories of its neighbours find that with an increasing density of agents, the system (i.e. the swarm, school, flock, or crowd) switches from a state of disordered movement to a state of coherent collective movement 1,2. One of the best-known and studied examples is pedestrian flow of human crowds. Models and empirical data 3-5 show that at low densities, pedestrians tend to move freely, and the behaviour of the crowd can be partially compared with the behaviour of gases. At intermediate densities, crowd motion becomes highly coordinated and 'lanes' of bidirectional flow develop spontaneously. At high densities, coordinated motion can break down and crowds typically show stop-and-go waves and crowd turbulence. Whilst much effort has been devoted to describing and predicting collective human motion in the context of pedestrian flows 6 , there is a distinct lack of empirical data investigating the effects of social density on human behaviour in other relevant contexts 7,8. A fundamental human behaviour that is often dependent upon collective motion is foraging. In modern-day traditional societies, and in our evolutionary past, individuals have benefited from coordinating their movements and making collective decisions about how to obtain resources; searching for dispersed food sources in a patchy, uncertain environment, and then returning to a central location with this food resource 9-11. Indeed, individual search costs can be reduced, and group performance improved, if a number of foragers cooperate by coordinating their behaviour and exchanging information about encountered food items 12-14. Despite the importance of coordinated behaviour in a foraging context, we know very little about what factors predict the success or failure of such groups. Such knowledge may have important consequences for understanding the functioning of modern day teams and organisations 15,16 .
Background: The present study investigated the effects of supportive social network ties on healt... more Background: The present study investigated the effects of supportive social network ties on health in a sample of mothers with a young child. The aim of this study was to examine if Liverpool participants having a large supportive network of close relatives reported less cases of illness than participants without such social support. Methods: A cross-sectional design was employed whereby 74 randomly sampled mothers over the age of 20 with a child 24-36 months completed a questionnaire at twelve monthly time intervals over the course of one year. Multiple logistic regressions were applied to health survey data from participants from Liverpool collected from October 2001 to October 2002. Results: Respondents living in Liverpool reported decreased illness rates with increased interpersonal contact. A statistically significant reduction in physical illness was observed for mothers and infants that had high contact frequency with close relatives. A statistically significant reduction in physical illness was also found for participants with a large social network of close relatives. Conclusion: Results confirmed a potentially protective health relation for frequent contact with a large network of close relatives, but showed a less consistent picture for health benefits beyond a certain threshold of more distant relatives. Previous research has shown that social relationships can have a significant impact on psychological wellbeing, health and human disease, and so a greater understanding of social network structure is important to establish the need for preventive care and advice on maintaining important social relationships.
Savage et al. make a compelling case, Mehr et al. less so, for social bonding and credible signal... more Savage et al. make a compelling case, Mehr et al. less so, for social bonding and credible signalling, respectively, as the main adaptive function of human musicality. We express general advocacy for the former thesis, highlighting: (1) overlap between the two; (2) direct versus derived biological functions, and (3) aspects of music embedded in cultural evolution, for example, departures from tonality.
Evolutionary psychology : an international journal of evolutionary approaches to psychology and behavior, Jan 20, 2012
In the New York Times bestselling book The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists... more In the New York Times bestselling book The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists (2006), the world was granted its first exclusive introduction to the steadily growing dating coach and pick-up artist community. Many of its most prominent authorities claim to use insights and information gleaned both through first-hand experience as well as empirical research in evolutionary psychology. One of the industry's most well-respected authorities, the illusionist Erik von Markovik, promotes a three-phase model of human courtship: Attraction, building mutual Comfort and Trust, and Seduction. The following review argues that many of these claims are in fact grounded in solid empirical findings from social, physiological and evolutionary psychology. Two texts which represent much of this literature are critiqued and their implications discussed.
Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science, 2020
Evolutionary musicology is a subdiscipline of biomusicology, the study of music from a biological... more Evolutionary musicology is a subdiscipline of biomusicology, the study of music from a biological perspective, which embeds the psychological and physiological mechanisms of human music perception and production in the theory of biological evolution. Evolutionary musicology studies the origin and evolution of music in the human species, encompassing vocal communication and musical behaviors in non-human animal species; behavioral, cognitive, and neurological development of musical processing and skill; cross-cultural human universals in musical capacity and cognitive processing; and archeological evidence to develop hypotheses concerning the evolution of human musical appreciation and music-making.
Music and language are universal human abilities with many apparent similarities relating to thei... more Music and language are universal human abilities with many apparent similarities relating to their acoustics, structure, and frequent use in social situations. We might therefore expect them to be understood and processed similarly, and indeed an emerging body of research suggests that this is the case. But the focus has historically been on the individual, looking at the passive listener or the isolated speaker or performer, even though social interaction is the primary site of use for both domains. Nonetheless, an important goal of emerging research is to compare music and language in terms of acoustics and structure, social interaction, and functional origins to develop parallel accounts across the two domains. Indeed, a central aim of both of evolutionary musicology and language evolution research is to understand the adaptive significance or functional origin of human music and language. An influential proposal to emerge in recent years has been referred to as the social bonding hypothesis. Here, within a comparative approach to animal communication systems, I review empirical studies in support of the social bonding hypothesis in humans, non-human primates, songbirds, and various other mammals. In support of this hypothesis, I review six research fields: (i) the functional origins of music; (ii) the functional origins of language; (iii) mechanisms of social synchrony for human social bonding; (iv) language and social bonding in humans; (v) music and social bonding in humans; and (vi) pitch, tone and emotional expression in human speech and music. I conclude that the comparative study of complex vocalizations and behaviors in various extant species can provide important insights into the adaptive function(s) of these traits in these species, as well as offer evidence-based speculations for the existence of "musilanguage" in our primate ancestors, and thus inform our understanding of the biology and evolution of human music and language.
Exploitation of food resources that are dispersed in time and space has been crucial to the evolu... more Exploitation of food resources that are dispersed in time and space has been crucial to the evolutionary success of humans. Recent experimental work has shown that an absence of communication impairs decision-making in a foraging task. Here, we found that individuals in larger teams were more likely to reach group consensus and were more accurate and efficient foragers. Individuals in larger teams were also more likely to gesture to one another, while levels of verbal exchange were not significantly different in small and large groups. At last, teams in which individuals reported that they knew one another and rated team members as helpful and information-seeking were more accurate in their foraging. Overall, our findings offer experimental evidence that larger, communicating, familiar teams are quicker and more accurate foragers. We therefore suggest that complex communication within socially bonded relationships may have been important to the ecological success of the human lineage.
Theory of mind, also known as mentalising, meta-representation, second-order intentionality, or m... more Theory of mind, also known as mentalising, meta-representation, second-order intentionality, or mindreading is the ability to attribute and reflect on the mental states of others. A number of investigators have noted that an important relationship exists between child language development and children's understanding of second-order intentionality. However, although the ontogeny of theory of mind has been extensively studied over the past few decades, only recently have we begun to understand more concerning the limits of human mentalising ability in adults. For example, several studies have shown that the limits of mentalising ability for normal adults are consistently placed around fifth-order intentionality (i.e. I believe that you suppose that I imagine that you want me to believe that...), forming a naturally recursive hierarchy which corresponds to increasingly embedded mindreading. Moreover, several psychologists have recently suggested the adult capacity for higher-order intentionality may have played a critical role in the evolution of language, including especially the ability for recursive syntax comprehension and production, according to a cognitive bootstrapping effect. Here, we used the Imposing Memory Task (n = 210 female and 204 male adults) to analyse the association and interaction between higher-order intentionality capacity and performance on a recursive syntax measure. Multiple regression analyses indicated that recursive syntax abilities are lower than mindreading competences below fifth-order, but then reverses at higher values. In addition, a path analysis further suggested intentionality capacity as the likely causal variable. Thus, these results seem to suggest that first-order through fifth-order intentionality is necessary to assist the processing of simpler syntactic structures, but beyond fifth-order intentionality the cognitive scaffolding provided by recursive syntax may be engaged to enable higher-order mentalising. In summary, this may explain in part how and why many modern languages exhibit recursive syntax.
Language may be one of most important attributes which separates humans from other animal species... more Language may be one of most important attributes which separates humans from other animal species. It has been suggested by some commentators that the primary biological function of human language is to deceive and selfishly manipulate social competitors. However, despite the existence of a large body of relevant theoretical and empirical literature in favor of the social bonding hypothesis for language function, the ostensible evidence and arguments for the deception hypothesis have not been fully discussed. The following review analyses the evidence and theoretical arguments from human social behavior, comparative animal behavior, and developmental psychology and suggests that deception shows clear signs of a derived function for language. Furthermore, in addition to being used relatively infrequently across most human and non-human animal contexts, deception appears to be utilized just as often for prosocial and social bonding functions, as it is for antisocial purposes. Future studies should focus on theoretical and experimental investigations which explore interactions between deceptive and honest language use in the context of social bonding.
Uploads
Papers by Nathan Oesch
were more accurate in their foraging. Overall, our findings offer experimental evidence that larger, communicating, familiar teams are quicker and more accurate foragers. We therefore suggest that complex communication within socially bonded relationships may have been important to the ecological success of the human lineage.
were more accurate in their foraging. Overall, our findings offer experimental evidence that larger, communicating, familiar teams are quicker and more accurate foragers. We therefore suggest that complex communication within socially bonded relationships may have been important to the ecological success of the human lineage.