Neurocognitive Adaptations Designed for Social Exchange
Abstract
For 25 years, the authors have been investigating the hypothesis that the enduring presence of social exchange interactions among our ancestors has selected for cognitive mechanisms that are specialized for reasoning about social exchange. This chapter discusses some of the high points of this 25-year research program. It argues that social exchange is ubiquitously woven through the fabric of human life in all human cultures everywhere. The complex pattern of functional and neural dissociations reveals that a neurocognitive specialization for reasoning about social exchange is implicated, including a subroutine for cheater detection. The chapter shows that the design, ontogenetic timetable, and cross-cultural distribution of social exchange are not consistent with any known domain-general learning process. Taken together, the data showing design specificity, precocious development, cross-cultural universality, and neural dissociability implicate the existence of an evolved, species-typical neurocomputational specialization.
Cite this
Leda Cosmides, John Tooby (2015). Neurocognitive Adaptations Designed for Social Exchange. https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470939376.ch20
@article{leda2015neurocognitive,
title = {Neurocognitive Adaptations Designed for Social Exchange},
author = {Cosmides, Leda and Tooby, John},
year = {2015},
doi = {10.1002/9780470939376.ch20}
}Citations in this library
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