Did humans evolve to innovate with a social rather than technical orientation?

Abstract

Abstract The quality and frequency of human technical innovation differentiates us from all other species, and has played a primary role in creating the cognitive niche that we occupy. Yet, despite the centrality of technical innovation to human culture and our daily lives, most people rarely if ever innovate new products. To address this discrepancy we consider our evolutionary history, and how it might have created a species whose members are both highly innovative and highly unlikely to invent new products. We propose the social innovation hypothesis, which suggests that our minds evolved to innovate, but with a social rather than a technical orientation. Because people find social relations rewarding, they gravitate toward social rather than technical solutions to their problems. Thus, it may primarily be people who are less socially oriented who innovate technically. Consistent with this possibility, 1) engineers and physical scientists are less socially oriented and more likely to innovate new products than people in the humanities and social sciences, and 2) men are less socially oriented and more likely to innovate new products than women.