Cognitive Adaptations for Social Exchange

Abstract

The human mind is the most complex natural phenomenon humans have yet encountered, and Darwin ’s gift to those who wish to understand it is a knowledge of the process that created it and gave it its distinctive organization: evolution. Because we know that the human mind is the product of the evolutionary process, we know something vitally illuminating: that, aside from those properties acquired by chance, the mind consists of a set of adaptations, designed to solve the long-standing adaptive problems humans encountered as hunter-gatherers. Such a view is uncontroversial to most behavioral scientists when applied to topics such as vision or balance. Yet adaptationist approaches to human psychology are considered radical-or even transparently false-when applied to most other areas of human thought and action, especially social behavior. Nevertheless, the logic of the adaptationist postion is completely general, and a dispassionate evaluation of its implications leads to the expectation that humans should have evolved a constellation of cognitive adaptations to social life. Our ancestors have been members of social groups and engaging in social interactions for millions and probably tens of millions of years. To behave adaptively, they not only needed to construct a spatial map of the objects disclosed to them by their retinas, but a social map of the persons, relationships, motives, interactions, emotions, and intentions that made up their social world.