Shared Intentionality
Apparently is a key cognitive difference between us and apes. Gives us culture. It works like this:
… apes are mostly concerned with their own individual goals. They use or exploit others - by gathering information from them, manipulating them as social tools, coordinating actions with them for their own benefit - and often compete with them as well. Human children, on the other hand, often are concerned with sharing psychological states with others by providing them with helpful information, forming shared intentions and attention with them, and learning from demonstrations produced for their benefit. The emergence of these skills and motives for shared intentionality during human evolution did not create totally new cognitive skills. Rather, what it did was to take existing skills of, for example, gaze following, manipulative communication, group action, and social learning, and transform them into their collectively based counterparts of joint attention, cooperative communication, collaborative action, and instructed learning - cornerstones of cultural living. Shared intentionality is a small psychological difference that made a huge difference in human evolution in the way that humans conduct their lives …
I don’t know. A lot of humans I know sound more like those apes. There’s more here. John Hawks, of course.
Topics: Uncategorized
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 11:53 pm on Thursday, January 11, 2007
2 Responses to “Shared Intentionality”
Leave a Reply
Trackback URLYou must be logged in to post a comment.
January 12th, 2007 at 10:15 am
Heh. That was exactly my thought as I was reading! :)
January 12th, 2007 at 10:26 pm
Politicians == Apes