Abstract
The biological approach to culture focuses almost exclusively on processes of social learning, to the neglect of processes of cultural coordination including joint action and shared intentionality. In this paper, we argue that the distinctive features of human culture derive from humans' unique skills and motivations for coordinating with one another around different types of action and information. As different levels of these skills of ‘shared intentionality’ emerged over the last several hundred thousand years, human culture became characterized first by such things as collaborative activities and pedagogy based on cooperative communication, and then by such things as collaborative innovations and normatively structured pedagogy. As a kind of capstone of this trajectory, humans began to coordinate not just on joint actions and shared beliefs, but on the reasons for what we believe or how we act. Coordinating on reasons powered the kinds of extremely rapid innovation and stable cumulative cultural evolution especially characteristic of the human species in the last several tens of thousands of years.This article is part of a discussion meeting issue ‘The emergence of collective knowledge and cumulative culture in animals, humans and machines’.
Highlights
It is widely recognized that human capacities for coordination and collaboration, as we find in joint action and shared intentionality, are some of our most distinctive psychological traits
We propose an evidence-based account1 of how human cumulative culture evolved from the emergence of joint and shared intentionality, with a focus on the relatively recent role of coordination around reasons in this trajectory
The result was that actions were selected not just because of their apparent success or frequency, but because they came with convincing reasons. It is these ‘reason-based’ forms of transmission, and the ability to coordinate on joint reasons for action, that underlie the kinds of extremely rapid innovation and stable cumulative cultural evolution characteristic of the human species in the last dozen or so millennia
Summary
It is widely recognized that human capacities for coordination and collaboration, as we find in joint action and shared intentionality, are some of our most distinctive psychological traits. Tomasello et al [1] proposed that human cultural transmission was distinguished from that of other species by the accumulation of modifications over time via the so-called ‘ratchet effect’, leading to what is known as ‘cumulative culture’ One can see such a process in the historical development of all kinds of human tools and technology, as well as social structures and institutions. The result was that actions were selected not just because of their apparent success or frequency, but because they came with convincing reasons It is these ‘reason-based’ forms of transmission, and the ability to coordinate on joint reasons for action, that underlie the kinds of extremely rapid innovation and stable cumulative cultural evolution characteristic of the human species in the last dozen or so millennia
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