Abstract
Human cognitive uniqueness is often defined in terms of cognitive abilities such as introspection, imitation and cooperativeness. However, little is known about how those traits vary in populations or correlate across individuals. Here we test whether those three cognitive domains are correlated manifestations of an underlying factor, analogous to the psychometric ‘g’ factor, or independent ‘behavioural phenotypes’, analogous to the ‘Big-Five’ personality components. We selected eight variables measuring introspection and extraversion, verbal and physical imitation, cooperation and punishment, and evaluated their individual variability, domain-consistency and sub-structuring in a sample of 84 individuals. Results show high variation and limited clustering into three independent ‘behavioural phenotypes’ of introspection, imitation and cooperation. Only one significant correlation was identified (between two measures of extraversion), while other within-domain measures (introspection vs. extraversion, verbal vs. physical imitation, and cooperation vs. punishment) were not associated. Finally, no between-domain association was identified either through correlations or factor analysis. Overall, the results do not lend support to the hypothesis of a general ‘behavioural phenotype’ underlying individual behaviour. The independence of behaviours of introspection, imitation and cooperation may be the reason why individuals are able to adopt different behavioural strategies (combinations of behavioural phenotypes) and play distinct roles in the maintenance of human distinctive features such as hyper-cooperation and cumulative culture.
Highlights
Human societies exhibit unique features such as hypercooperation and cumulative culture (Burkart et al 2014), often interpreted as the result of cognitive traits distinguishing humans from other species
Our main finding is that there is no evidence that human behaviours across the domains of introspection, imitation and cooperation are structured by a pervasive ‘behavioural phenotype’ or underlying factor analogous to the ‘g’ factor
The only significant correlation was internal to the introspection domain. Neither of those two measures of introversion showed an association with our measure of introspection (Introspection Score)
Summary
Human societies exhibit unique features such as hypercooperation and cumulative culture (Burkart et al 2014), often interpreted as the result of cognitive traits distinguishing humans from other species. Cumulative culture relies on high-fidelity transmission of socially shared knowledge (Dean et al 2014), which is possible due to the human propensity to overimitate role models or copy actions irrelevant to achieving an explicit goal (Legare and Nielsen 2015). Introspection is another cognitive ability interpreted as distinctively human and our ‘default-mode processing’ allowing for mental displacement in space and time (Wilson et al 2014), and even as the feature that allowed modern humans to outcompete Neanderthals (Mithen 1996). Introspection, imitation and cooperation may be correlated in individuals, suggesting the existence of some general factor underlying
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