[SydPhil] Speaker Update: Fri 13th: Workshop on Co-ordination, Co-operation and Evolution

[Richard Menary]

Dear All,

Glenda Satne has been added to the list of speakers (see below). The workshop will now run until 4.30 p.m. in the same building, the Australian Hearing Hub. A campus map can be found here: https://www.mq.edu.au/about/contacts-and-maps/maps


With the visit to Macquarie University of John Michael and Richard Moore, we are holding a workshop this Friday (13th April). All are welcome.

10.30 - 11.30 AHH Cognitive Science Seminar room level 3 (3.610)

The Chains of Habit: Repeated Coordination in Joint Decision-Making Boosts Cooperation by Eliciting a Sense of Commitment

John Michael (Warwick)

We tested the hypothesis that repeated coordination with a partner can elicit a sense of commitment, leading people to resist tempting alternatives and thereby sustaining cooperation through fluctuations in individuals’ interests. In our paradigm, participants performed a repeated joint decision-making task with the same partner in one block (Partner Condition), and with a different partner on each trial in a separate  block (Stranger Condition). When both players coordinated on the same option, both were rewarded. On some trials, participants were offered outside options presenting varying degrees of temptation to defect. Participants were informed that they were coordinating with a partner or partners who were in the lab with them. The results of their choices, as well as the trajectories of their mouse movements, indicated that participants in the Partner Condition were more resistant to the temptation to defect. I discuss these results against the background of recent theorizing about the ultimate and proximal mechanisms of human cooperation.

11.40 - 12.40 AHH Cognitive Science Seminar room level 3 (3.610)

Communication, Coordination, and the Evolution of the Stag Hunt

Richard Moore (Humboldt-Berlin School of Mind and Brain)

In this talk I will develop an account of the foundations of coordination in communication. I will argue against two hypotheses about Gricean communication defended by Tomasello (2008). They are (1) that Gricean communication is a form of joint action, and (2) that inferring communicative goals requires cooperative reasoning. Against these claims I will argue for a weaker view, namely that Gricean communication is made more effective when used by interlocutors who can engage in joint action and joint attention, and who do reason cooperatively. I will illustrate my arguments via a discussion of Stag Hunt coordination studies of children and great ape subjects.
My revisions to Tomasello's account are important because they make it possible to explain how simple forms of communicative coordination could support the emergence of more complex ones in phylogeny. Moreover, they suggest that the evolution of human language was enabled less by radical changes to hominin social cognition in phylogeny than by small tweaks to social attention, environmental changes, and a better diet that supported the development of superior domain general reasoning capacities.

2 - 3 AHH Seminar room level 5 (5.212)

Cultural Evolution and Emotion Development

Penny van Bergen (MQ) and Richard Menary (MQ)

In this review we highlight a new perspective on children's emotion development: the cultural evolutionary perspective. Past research shows that parent-child reminiscing has important benefits not only for children's memory development, but also for the understanding of emotions, emotional perspective-taking, and theory of mind. By reminiscing about emotional past events, both mundane and influential, parents have the opportunity to scaffold and extend children's understanding of their own emotional experiences at a time when children are no longer in a state of high arousal. They also can consider the emotional perspectives of other people present at the event, such as siblings, friends, or strangers, and explore the ways in which these peoples' mental experiences differ from one’s own. While individual differences in parents' scaffolding approaches are well known, no research to date has considered possible generational differences in how scaffolding is used to enhance children's emotion. Taking a cultural evolutionary perspective, we provide a sketch of a framework for understanding the cultural inheritance of emotional scaffolding.
3.30 - 4.30 AHH Seminar room level 5 (5.212)
Minimal Collective Intentionality in Evolution and Development
Glenda Satne (UOW and Alberto Hurtado University)
One important application of theories of collective intentionality concerns the evolution of human specific cognitive capacities (Tomasello 2014). A promising idea behind this explanatory attempt is the Cooperative Evolutionary Hypothesis (CEH), namely, the idea that humans’ capacity for social cooperation is at the heart of their ability to understand others’ mental states and behavior, leading to an explanation of how humans came to share thoughts and language. However, some of the most popular defenses of CEH face important problems. After identifying some of the central problems of the leading views, I propose and defend an alternative way of understanding shared intentionality that can help substantiate CEH: the Minimal Collective View. Psychological capacities for minimal collective intentionality are discussed vis à vis evidence of their developmental and evolutionary trajectories.
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