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Naïve Normativity: The Social Foundation of Moral Cognition
Abstract
To answer tantalizing questions such as whether animals are moral or how morality evolved, I propose starting with a somewhat less fraught question: do animals have normative cognition? Recent psychological research suggests that normative thinking, or ought-thought, begins early in human development. Recent philosophical research suggests that folk psychology is grounded in normative thought. Recent primatology research finds evidence of sophisticated cultural and social learning capacities in great apes. Drawing on these three literatures, I argue that the human variety of social cognition and moral cognition encompass the same cognitive capacities and that the nonhuman great apes may also be normative beings. To make this argument, I develop an account of animal social norms that shares key properties with Cristina Bicchieri's account of social norms but which lowers the cognitive requirements for having a social norm. I propose a set of four early developing prerequisites implicated in social cognition that make up what I call naïve normativity: (1) the ability to identify agents, (2) sensitivity to in-group/out-group differences, (3) the capacity for social learning of group traditions, and (4) responsiveness to appropriateness. I review the ape cognition literature and present preliminary empirical evidence supporting the existence of social norms and naïve normativity in great apes. While there is more empirical work to be done, I hope to have offered a framework for studying normativity in other species, and I conclude that we should be open to the possibility that normative cognition is yet another ancient cognitive endowment that is not human-unique.
... The rise of social cognition as a field has recognized the importance of social interactions for the human mind. But even under the term "social cognition", the focus remained on individuals and their mental states (see Andrews, 2020;Schlicht, 2023, 8f.). ...
... Recent approaches to social cognition have pointed out that the social interactions considered in standard debates on social cognition appear to Introduction 3 be context-free and ahistorical -that is, standard approaches have failed to address the role that context, social norms, and bias play in social interaction, among other things (Spaulding, 2018b;Musholt, 2018;Coninx & Newen, 2018;McGeer, 2007McGeer, , 2015McGeer, , 2021Andrews, 2003Andrews, , 2020Eickers, 2019Eickers, , 2023aEickers, , 2024a. That is, the philosophy of social cognition increasingly acknowledges that social cognition and interaction may be heavily influenced by social norms (e.g., Zawidzki, 2013;McGeer, 2007McGeer, , 2015 as well as by social identity, situational context, biases, and stereotypes (Spaulding, 2018b;Westra, 2018Westra, , 2019. ...
... Rather, I build on recent approaches and offer a powerful addition -scripts -that strengthens the emphasis on the influence of socio-contextual factors on social cognition. In doing so, I join other recent authors in defending integrative approaches to social cognition and in arguing for the importance of contextual and social factors in social interaction (e.g., Spaulding, 2018aSpaulding, , 2018bAndrews, 2012Andrews, , 2020McGeer, 2015;Maibom, 2007). I contribute to these efforts by presenting a script approach to social cognition, to how we interact with others. ...
This book argues that our success in navigating the social world depends heavily on scripts. Scripts play a central role in our ability to understand social interactions shaped by different contextual factors.
In philosophy of social cognition, scholars have asked what mechanisms we employ when interacting with other people or when cognizing about other people. Recent approaches acknowledge that social cognition and interaction depend heavily on contextual, cultural, and social factors that contribute to the way individuals make sense of the social interactions they take part in. This book offers the first integrative account of scripts in social cognition and interaction. It argues that we need to make contextual factors and social identity central when trying to explain how social interaction works, and that this is possible via scripts. Additionally, scripts can help us understand bias and injustice in social interaction. The author’s approach combines several different areas of philosophy – philosophy of mind, social epistemology, feminist philosophy – as well as sociology and psychology to show why paying attention to injustice in interaction is much needed in social cognition research, and in philosophy of mind more generally.
Scripts and Social Cognition: How We Interact with Others will appeal to scholars and graduate students working in philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology, social epistemology, social ontology, sociology, and social psychology.
... Although nonhuman animals have been reported to exhibit seemingly moral, prosocial (Decety et al., 2016), empathetic, or virtuous behaviors or emotions like compassion, concern, grief, equity-aversion, care or altruism (de Waal, 2014;Vincent et al., 2018;Delon, in press;Andrews, 2020b;Westra & Andrews, 2022;Monsó & Andrews, 2022), various authors maintain that this does not indicate moral agency. For instance, Dixon (1995Dixon ( , 2008 denies that a dog who pulls a child from a fire can be ascribed moral motivation and thus moral agency. ...
... Instead, she claims, it is more likely that "the dog is made anxious by the cries for help and only wishes to stop these sounds by the most expedient method-removing the child from the burning building" (1995, p. 40) Animal moral agency skeptics, like Korsgaard (2006;, Ayala (2010), Musschenga (2015), Kitcher (2011), and Dixon, (1995 typically defend their position by appeal to a metacognitive conception of moral agency. The basic A predominant area of debate concerns the extent to which moral (or more widely, normative) cognition, thought and behavior may be shared beyond the human species (Andrews, 2020b;Flack & de Waal, 2000;de Waal, 2006de Waal, , 2014von Rohr et al., 2011;Danón, 2019;Kagan, 2000;Bernstein 2000). This debate is sometimes referred to as the continuist-discontinuist disagreement (Cova, 2013). ...
... Another prominent area of inquiry concerns what normative cognition consists of. For instance, what, if anything, defines normative, as opposed to, other types of thoughts, feelings, motivations, and behaviors (Vincent et al., 2018;Lorini, 2022;Andrews, 2020b;de Waal, 2014;Danón, 2019)? assumption is that higher-order, or metacognitive states or processes, like reflection, evaluation, and self-consciousness, are necessary for moral agency. ...
Can nonhuman animals and artificial intelligence (AI) entities be attributed moral agency? The general assumption in the philosophical literature is that moral agency applies exclusively to humans since they alone possess free will or capacities required for deliberate reflection. Consequently, only humans have been taken to be eligible for ascriptions of moral responsibility in terms of, for instance, blame or praise, moral criticism, or attributions of vice and virtue. Animals and machines may cause harm, but they cannot be appropriately ascribed moral responsibility for their behavior. This thesis challenges the conventional paradigm by proposing an alternative approach where moral agency is conceived as the competence to participate in moral responsibility practices. By shifting focus from intra-individual to contextual and socially situated features, this practice-focused approach appears to make the attribution of moral agency to nonhuman animals and AI entities more plausible than commonly assumed. Moreover, considering the current and potential future prevalence of nonhuman animals and AI entities in everyday settings and social contexts, a potential extension of moral agency to such entities could very well transform our social, moral, and legal practices. Hence, this thesis proposes that the attribution or withholding of moral agency to different entities should be carefully evaluated, considering the potential normative implications.
PDF available online: https://hdl.handle.net/2077/78610
... However, a number of philosophers, cognitive scientists, and ethologists have recently begun to approach this topic from a comparative perspective, asking whether or not social norms might be found in certain non-human animal communities (Andrews, 2020;Bekoff & Pierce, 2009;Dan on, 2019;Fitzpatrick, 2017Fitzpatrick, , 2020de Waal, 2014;Kappeler, Fichtel & van Schaik, 2019;Lorini, 2018;Powell, 2023;Rudolf von Rohr, Burkart & Schaik, 2011;Rudolf von Rohr et al., 2015;Vincent, Ring & Andrews, 2018;Westra & Andrews, 2021;Whiten, Horner & de Waal, 2005). This growing literature (on what we shall refer to as the 'animal normativity debate') is motivated by a number of examples of non-human animal behaviours that evoke the concepts associated with social norms and rules, and by ethological reports that have identified animal behaviours that appear to be regulated by the presence of other group members. ...
... Proponents of the view that non-human animals may possess social norms (hereafter, 'animal normativity') have pushed back against these critiques in several ways. Some have argued that evidence from non-human animals like chimpanzees might in fact be consistent with some common psychological criteria for social norms (Fitzpatrick, 2020;Westra & Andrews, 2021), while others have argued for a different set of psychological criteria that animals do meet (Andrews, 2020), or that some animals at least possess 'precursors' to human social norms (Rudolf von Rohr et al., 2011. However, progress in these debates is hindered by a general lack of consensus about both the psychological criteria for social norms and the kinds of behavioural data that would provide compelling evidence of animal normativity (or lack thereof ). ...
... The propensity for 'overimitation' in human children, where children imitate arbitrary and nonfunctional patterns of behaviour of those around them, is also often understood in the context of social norms, as a mechanism for ensuring conformity (Kenward, Karlsson & Persson, 2011;Keupp, Behne & Rakoczy, 2013). And, in the animal normativity literature, conformity to local practices, such as food colour preferences in vervet monkeys (van de Waal et al., 2013) are common examples of possible social norms (Andrews, 2020;Luncz & Boesch, 2014;Luncz & van de Waal, 2021;van Schaik, 2012). ...
Social norms – rules governing which behaviours are deemed appropriate or inappropriate within a given community – are typically taken to be uniquely human. Recently, this position has been challenged by a number of philosophers, cognitive scientists, and ethologists, who have suggested that social norms may also be found in certain non-human animal communities. Such claims have elicited considerable scepticism from norm cognition researchers, who doubt that any non-human animals possess the psychological capacities necessary for normative cognition. However, there is little agreement among these researchers about what these psychological prerequisites are. This makes empirical study of animal social norms difficult, since it is not clear what we are looking for and thus what should count as behavioural evidence for the presence (or absence) of social norms in animals. To break this impasse, we offer an approach that moves beyond contested psychological criteria for social norms. This approach is inspired by the animal culture research program, which has made a similar shift away from heavily psychological definitions of ‘culture’ and to become organized around a cluster of more empirically tractable concepts of culture. Here, we propose an analogous set of constructs built around the core notion of a normative regularity, which we define as a socially maintained pattern of behavioural conformity within a community. We suggest methods for studying potential normative regularities in wild and captive primates. We also discuss the broader scientific and philosophical implications of this research program with respect to questions of human uniqueness, animal welfare and conservation.
... This makes understanding the cognitive and evolutionary underpinnings of social norms critical to predicting, explaining and intervening upon human social behaviour. In recent years, a growing number of authors have approached the cognitive science of norms from a comparative perspective, with some suggesting that many animal communities, from nonhuman primates to eusocial insects, are also governed by social norms (table 1; [2,5,6,[22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31]). These proposals have proven controversial, as the capacity for social norms is frequently cited by other researchers as uniquely human, part of a suite of cognitive and evolutionary adaptations that contribute to 'the secret of our success' [32][33][34][35][36][37]. ...
... Other theorists invoke mentalizing in other aspects of normative cognition, including punishment [69], learning from evaluative feedback [70] and in the affective predictions that inform how it might feel to violate a norm [46]. One challenge with heavily mentalistic approaches to the psychology of norms is that they risk over-intellectualizing everyday human norm-conformity and unnecessarily excluding related nonhuman behaviours in the process [22,25]. For example, Bicchieri's account requires an ability that most developmental psychologists believe emerges only by fourand-a-half years of age in humans [71], and whose use in everyday social cognition is a matter of considerable disagreement [72,73]. ...
... Whether or not great apes or any other nonhuman animals are capable of belief-attribution is even more controversial [72,[74][75][76][77]. In a critique of Bicchieri's account, Andrews [22] argues that in this model the real function of belief-attribution is behavioural prediction and interpretation, and that there are many alternative cognitive mechanisms for behavioural prediction and interpretation that do not require belief-attribution, such as generalizing from the situation, or from an individual's past behaviour [72]. While sophisticated mentalistic abilities may be implicated in some human norms, other human norms are likely supported by simpler mentalistic and nonmentalistic processes. ...
Human communities teem with a variety of social norms. In order to change unjust and harmful social norms, it is crucial to identify the psychological processes that give rise to them. Most researchers take it for granted that social norms are uniquely human. By contrast, we approach this matter from a comparative perspective, leveraging recent research on animal social behaviour. While there is currently only suggestive evidence for norms in nonhuman communities, we argue that human social norms are likely produced by a wide range of mechanisms, many of which we share with nonhuman animals. Approaching this variability from a comparative perspective can help norm researchers expand and reframe the range of hypotheses they test when attempting to understand the causes of socially normative behaviours in humans. First, we diagnose some of the theoretical obstacles to developing a comparative science of social norms, and offer a few basic constructs and distinctions to help norm researchers overcome these obstacles. Then we develop a six-dimensional model of the psychological and social factors that contribute to variability in both human and potential nonhuman norms.
This article is part of the theme issue ‘Social norm change: drivers and consequences’.
... Scripts have received uptake in recent approaches to social cognition (e.g., Bermúdez 2003;Andrews 2012; 2020; Spaulding 2018) but, I believe, scripts should be motivated beyond the consideration they have been given recently. Scripts still tend to be treated rather passingly (see Harris 2017;Zawidzki 2013;Bermúdez 2003;Maibom 2007;Spaulding 2018;Andrews 2020). Bermúdez was the first author to promote scripts in the context of debates about standard accounts of social cognition, but, as we will see, he advocates a hybrid model in which scripts play a limited role alongside these standard accounts. ...
... Kristin Andrews (2020) has pointed to the normative turn in social cognition, by which she means to describe the rise of attention given to social norms and stereotypes in social cognition research. This normative turn has allowed tools like scripts to gain attention in the debate. ...
... The normative turn in social cognition motivated the search for approaches to social cognition that would be more overtly suited to explain stereotypes, context, and norms. Recent accounts of social cognition have started taking these factors into consideration (Andrews 2012;Spaulding 2018;McGeer 2015;Andrews 2020;Zawidzki 2013;Maibom 2007); for example, factors such as stereotypes, bias, and situational context. Pluralistic and recent accounts have also criticized standard accounts of social cognition for not paying enough attention to the fact that social interactions are typically structured by norms in virtue of being embedded in the social world (Maibom 2007;Andrews 2020;Spaulding 2018) and that an account of social interaction needs to center context-sensitivity in order to be able to explain the vast variety of contexts we interact in. ...
To explain how social cognition normally serves us in real life, we need to ask which factors contribute to specific social interactions. Recent accounts, and mostly pluralistic models, have started incorporating contextual and social factors in explanations of social cognition. In this paper, I further motivate the importance of contextual and identity factors for social cognition. This paper presents scripts as an alternative resource in social cognition that can account for contextual and identity factors. Scripts are normative and context-sensitive knowledge structures that describe behavior in terms of corresponding events, situations, social roles, individuals, or mental state types in a way that guides action. The script approach presented here builds on recent accounts of social cognition but points out important differences and possible advantages it has over them: e.g., the script approach focuses even more strongly on context and identity.
... Scripts have already been acknowledged in the philosophy of social cognition and interaction as tools that tell people how to interact in different situational and cultural contexts (Andrews, 2012(Andrews, , 2020Bicchieri, 2006;Spaulding, 2018) but have been neglected in standard approaches to social cognition (e.g., Gopnik & Wellman, 1994). The goal of this paper is to draw on newer accounts of social cognition that consider scripts relevant, and to emphasize the central role scripts play for the coordination of behaviors. ...
... The turn to scripts in social cognition can be considered a part of the normative turn in folk psychology. This term has previously been used by Andrews (2020), for example, who speaks of normative-regulative theories in social cognition: ...
... The approach defended in this paper can be considered a contribution in line with the normative turn in folk psychology. Andrews is also among the theorists who have considered a role of scripts in social cognition (Andrews, 2012(Andrews, , 2020. Others include Shannon Spaulding (2018), Heidi Maibom (2007) and Christina Bicchieri (2006). ...
Some philosophical and psychological approaches to social interaction posit a powerful explanatory tool for explaining how we navigate social situations: scripts. Scripts tell people how to interact in different situational and cultural contexts depending on social roles such as gender. A script theory of social interaction puts emphasis on understanding the world as normatively structured. Social structures place demands, roles, and ways to behave in the social world upon us, which, in turn, guide the ways we interact with one another and the ways we coordinate our behaviors. In this paper, I explore the phenomenon of coordinated behaviors in social interactions in humans. I argue that looking closely at everyday interactions, for which social coordination is central, strongly points to a fundamental role of scripts for social cognition and interaction. In order to explain some social interactions, like those based on social coordination, we do not need to recourse to mental state attribution. Rather, I argue, scripts are a powerful resource for explaining social interaction and especially coordinated behaviors. Scripts have been neglected in standard approaches to social cognition but are (re‐)gaining attention via the normative turn in social cognition.
... This lack of consensus has resulted in growing doubt that the concept of morality picks out a natural kind: a cluster of psychological properties that are essential for morality (Machery & Stich, 2022;Stich, 2019;Westra & Andrews, 2022). In response to this doubt, some researchers have moved away from morality as an explanandum, suggesting that it might prove more fruitful to look for normative regularities, or basic normative abilities, found in infants and, to some degree, in other species (Andrews, 2020;O'Neill, 2017;O'Neill & Machery, 2019;Westra & Andrews, 2022). ...
... In response, some authors have suggested that morality, in a narrow sense, most likely does not result from biological evolution (Machery & Mallon, 2010); that it does not pick out a natural kind (Stich, 2019); and that it might prove more fruitful to look for basic normative abilities found in infants and other species (Andrews, 2020;O'Neill, 2017;O'Neill & Machery, 2019;Westra & Andrews, 2022). This line of reasoning is strengthened by similar worries, raised by philosophers and neuroscientists, about the disunity of moral judgments and their locations in the brain (Sinnott-Armstrong & Wheatley, 2014;Young & Dungan, 2012). ...
Research about the evolution of morality suffers from the lack of a clear, agreed-upon concept of morality. In response to this, recent accounts have become increasingly pluralist and pragmatic. In this paper, I argue that 1) both the concept of morality and the broader understanding of what makes us moral include ethical and metaethical assumptions; 2) there is no uncontroversial descriptive notion available, and therefore settling on a particular concept inevitably entails such assumptions; and 3) what is lacking is a reflection on the role that ethical and metaethical assumptions play, suggesting that the debate would benefit from making them explicit. Claims about “the true origin of morality” can fruitfully be analyzed as “mixed claims”: claims that combine a causal-historical hypothesis (e.g., about the evolution of a certain ability, such as empathy or joint intentionality) with ethical or metaethical assumptions about which abilities or norms make us moral. Making such assumptions explicit advances the epistemic aims of transparency and comparability, and thereby helps to avoid rash conclusions regarding, for instance, the nature of moral progress. Finally, it helps to unpack the normative knowledge shared by behavioral scientists and comparative psychologists and to give this knowledge its proper place in research.
... But is it true that humans are the only nomic animals? Recently, various studies by philosophers and ethologists have appeared where it is argued or hypothesised that there are non-human animals that are capable of nomic behaviour (de Waal, 2014a;Andrews, 2015Andrews, , 2020Lorini, 2017Lorini, , 2022Okrent, 2018;Vincent et al., 2018;Danón, 2019;Roughley & Bayertz, 2019;Fitzpatrick, 2020). For example, Frans de Waal (2014a, p. 187) supports the thesis according to which "that animal behaviour is not free of normativity [. . . ...
... According to de Waal, even animals with a very simple cognitive structure (invertebrates such as spiders or ants) could be endowed with the ability to see reality through 'lenses' that allow them to act normatively. This is an interesting perspective that harks back to the idea of a proto-normativity with distant evolutionary roots and perhaps to the idea of basic forms of (non-propositional) ought-thoughts (Rudolf von Rohr et al., 2011;Vincent et al., 2018;Danón, 2019;Andrews, 2020). ...
Recently, various philosophers and ethologists have argued or hypothesised that, in addition to humans, there are also non-human animals that are capable of following rules and implementing normative behaviours. The investigation of animal normativity until now, however, has been almost exclusively focused on mammals and, in particular, non-human primates and cetaceans. In contrast, this work aims to extend this research to the world of invertebrates and, more specifically, to the world of eusocial insects. For the purpose of investigating whether there are clues of normativity in the world of eusocial insects, we will inquire into the question of whether certain behaviours of ants can be considered normatively conditioned behaviours.
... 2) Non-human animals have only found little consideration in these pages -mainly for reasons of space. But there are at least two considerations relevant to the animal normativity literature (e.g., Andrews, 2020;Fitzpatrick, 2020; van Schaik & Burkart, 2018) that are worthy of further thought here: ...
... b) Some take it that animals, too, employ cultural learning. In light of the above, rather than considering whether they employ some sort of cooperation-norms as some in literature seek to do (e.g., Andrews, 2020), it'd make sense to investigate whether action is being coordinated by means of coordinationnorms -especially as there's a rich literature on action-coordination in non-human animals (e.g., Heesen et al., 2022;Genty et al., 2020). Positive findings would provide additional support for animal's capacity to learn culturally, whilst negative findings -either with regards to personal or coordination-norms -might provide at least a partial explanation of why they lack cultural learning. ...
A shared narrative in the literature on the evolution of cooperation maintains that social learning evolves early to allow for the transmission of cumulative culture. Social norms , whilst present at the outset, only rise to prominence later on, mainly to stabilise cooperation against the threat of defection. In contrast, I argue that once we consider insights from social epistemology, an expansion of this narrative presents itself: An interesting kind of social norm — an epistemic coordination norm — was operative in early and important instances of specialised social learning. I show how there’s a need for such norms in two key social learning strategies and explain how this need is constituted. In assessor-teaching (e.g. Castro et al., 2019b, 2021), epistemic coordination norms allow agents to coordinate around the content of social learning, i.e., what is to be known and how this is to be done. These norms also allow agents to coordinate around the form of cultural learning in what’s sometimes called strategic social learning (Laland, 2004; Hoppitt & Laland, 2013; Heyes, 2018, Chap. 5) and elsewhere. Broadly speaking, this concerns how cultural learning is organised within the social group. The upshot is that the evolution of social learning and social norms are intertwined in important and underappreciated ways from early on. The above matters as it informs our views about the evolution of social norms more generally. Truly social norms emerged to coordinate a plurality of complex behaviours and interactions, amongst them specialised social learning. I substantiate this view by contrasting it with Jonathan Birch’s views on the evolution of norms. What results is a general but cohesive narrative on the early evolution of social norms.
... Numerosos científicos y filósofos Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca / CC BY-NC-SA ArtefaCToS, Vol. 13, No. 1, (2024), piensan que este es el caso (Korsgaard, 2006;Schlingloff y Moore, 2017;Schmidt y Rakoczy, 2019). Sin embargo, en los últimos años, algunos psicólogos, etólogos cognitivos y filósofos han comenzado a explorar la posibilidad inversa: que pueda haber buenas razones para extender el rótulo de "criaturas normativas" más allá de la especie humana (Rudolf von Rohr et al., 2010;de Waal, 2014;Lorini, 2018;Okrent, 2018;Vincent et al., 2018;Kappeler et al., 2019;Danón, 2019;Andrews, 2020;Fitzpatrick, 2020;Westra y Andrews, 2022). Frans de Waal se destaca, en este contexto, por haber proporcionado un amplio repertorio de evidencia empírica que, según argumenta, nos muestra a diversos primates no humanos como animales cuyos patrones de comportamiento se ajustan a distintos tipos de normas. ...
... Pese a que, dadas todas estas diferencias, parece menos complejo atribuir normatividad primitiva a los animales no humanos que atribuirles normatividad en el sentido intelectualista, es preciso reconocer que Hannah Ginsborg se mantiene dubitativa con respecto a esta posibilidad. Por contraposición, Kristin Andrews ha reelaborado la noción de Ginsborg, dándole un tenor social, y ha defendido la posibilidad de atribuirla a los animales no humanos (Andrews, 2020). Para esta autora, podemos atribuir normatividad primitiva o ingenua (de carácter social) a algunos animales no humanos, como los primates, en la medida en que estos no sólo son capaces de distinguir a los miembros de su propio grupo de los individuos ajenos a este, sino que cuentan, además, con un sentido de cómo hacemos las cosas nosotros que no depende de su aprehensión previa de reglas o normas generales. ...
RESUMEN: Para una extensa tradición filosófica, la normatividad es un rasgo exclusivo de la especie humana. Recientemente, sin embargo , algunos filósofos y científicos comenzaron a explorar la posibilidad de atribuir algún tipo de normatividad a otras especies. Frans de Waal se destaca, en este contexto, por haber proporcionado un amplio repertorio de evidencia empírica sobre comportamientos de primates no humanos que parecen ajustarse a distintos tipos de normas. Los escépticos sobre la normatividad animal suelen, sin embargo, cuestionar este tipo de evi-dencia, brindando explicaciones alternativas, no normativas, de ella. Un modo en que los escépticos podrían justificar esta estrategia es apelando al llamado Canon de Morgan y aduciendo que las explicaciones no norma-tivas introducen procesos psicológicos más simples que las normativas. Ahora bien, cuán atractiva resulte esta línea argumentativa dependerá de cómo se entienda la sensibilidad normativa. Si en lugar de centrarnos en las caracterizaciones más demandantes de tal sensibilidad adoptamos la hipótesis de que algunos primates no humanos cuentan con una suerte de "normatividad primitiva" (Ginsborg, 2011; 2018), podremos elaborar expli-caciones de (al menos parte de) la evidencia empírica proporcionada por
... However, Kumar and Campbell also presume that norms are human unique. Here I have more than a quibble, given the burgeoning empirical and theoretical literature on the question of animal normativity (Andrews 2020;Danón 2019;Fitzpatrick 2020;de Waal 2014;von Rohr et al. 2011;Rohr et al. 2015;Whiten et al. 2005;Westra et al., in prep). ...
... The first individual who put meat into a fire could have been punished for violating a norm about how to handle one of the most valuable resources in a community. I've proposed that accepting norm violators and innovators more generally requires having the special cognitive skill of explaining behaviors in terms of reasons for acting-an important role for theory of mind (Andrews 2012). Innovators can be the first to demonstrate useful information to group members, such as attaching a stone tool to a branch with cordage, eating the new fruit in the area, or befriending an individual from an enemy group. ...
... The borders of moral cognition seem to be determined more by the pragmatic interests of moral psychologists and philosophers than by any real joints in nature. 2 Against this backdrop, many researchers have begun to search for different ways to carve up the same empirical territory. One very promising avenue of research has been to shift focus towards the psychology of social norms (Cialdini et al. 1991;Bicchieri 2006Bicchieri , 2017Sripada and Stich 2006;Colombo 2014;Kelly and Davis 2018;Andrews 2020;Birch 2020;Fitzpatrick 2020). 3 This research project shifted away from moral thinking as such and towards the broader tendency to conform to and enforce social rules that dictate which behaviors are required, allowed, or forbidden for members of a given community (Kelly and Setman 2020). ...
... Such a research program would need to proceed in the same manner as research on altruistic explanations of spontaneous helping behavior, which involved the systematic elimination of alternative, egoistic explanations of helping behaviors (Batson et al. 1988). However, for researchers who adopt affective accounts of oughtthoughts (Andrews 2020;Theriault et al. 2021), or who alternatively demand more advanced capacities for meta-representation (Korsgaard 2006) or shared intentionality (Tomasello 2019), such a research program would hold no probative value: for affective approaches, representations of rules are not necessary for the presence of social norms, while for more cognitively demanding accounts, they are not sufficient. Thus, the animal norms debate is left at an impasse: without any consensus about what the core psychological features of social norms are, there can be no agreement about the kind of empirical research agenda that would be suitable to study them. ...
Social norms are commonly understood as rules that dictate which behaviors are appropriate, permissible, or obligatory in different situations for members of a given community. Many researchers have sought to explain the ubiquity of social norms in human life in terms of the psychological mechanisms underlying their acquisition, conformity, and enforcement. Existing theories of the psychology of social norms appeal to a variety of constructs, from prediction-error minimization, to reinforcement learning, to shared intentionality, to domain-specific adaptations for norm acquisition. In this paper, we propose a novel methodological and conceptual framework for the cognitive science of social norms that we call normative pluralism. We begin with an analysis of the (sometimes mixed) explanatory aims of the cognitive science of social norms. From this analysis, we derive a recommendation for a reformed conception of its explanandum: a minimally psychological construct that we call normative regularities. Our central empirical proposal is that the psychological underpinnings of social norms are most likely realized by a heterogeneous set of cognitive, motivational, and ecological mechanisms that vary between norms and between individuals, rather than by a single type of process or distinctive norm system. This pluralistic approach, we suggest, offers a methodologically sound point of departure for a fruitful and rigorous science of social norms.
... While I argue that language facilitates the establishment and perdurance of institutional realities, the claim that normative states must be facilitated by language requires further empirical support. Recent research suggests that nonhuman animals, including chimpanzees, may possess forms of normative cognition (Andrews, 2020;Westra et al., 2024). These studies indicate that certain animals might operate within social norms that regulate behaviours within their communities, potentially challenging the assumption that normative states necessitate language. ...
Social entities only exist in virtue of collective acceptance or recognition, or acknowledgement by two or more individuals in the context of joint activities. Joint activities are made possible by the coordination of plans for action, and the coordination of plans for action is made possible by the capacity for collective intentionality. This paper investigates how primitive is the capacity that nonhuman animals have to create social entities, by individuating how primitive is the capacity for collective intentionality. I present a novel argument for the evolutionary primitiveness of social entities, by showing that the collective intentions upon which these social entities are created and shared are metaphysically reducible to the relevant individual intentions.
... For example, Griffin's idea of focusing on studying simple systems, as Ristau describes it, taking "a 'bottom-up' (or 'bottom-sideways'?) approach" (17-97) is a methodological suggestion that is of current philosophical interest, and is yet another point where Griffin has influenced my own thinking (Andrews 2024). The substantial discussion of animal expectations previews current philosophical interest in predictive processing (Seth 2022, Clark 2023) as well as research on animal normative cognition (Andrews 2020;Birch 2021;Danón 2024, Westra andAndrews 2022). Griffin's description of animal numerosity as "wordless thinking" anticipates ongoing research on the analogue magnitude representations thought to be shared by humans and animals (Beck 2012;Clarke and Beck 2021). ...
... It has been widely held that normative behavior and cognition are exclusively and distinctively human (Schmidt and Rakoczy 2019;Tomasello 2016;2021;Roughley 2019;Korsgaard 2006Korsgaard , 2010. In the last decade, however, that classic view has been challenged both by philosophers (Lorini 2022(Lorini , 2024Danón 2019;Fitzpatrick 2020;Andrews 2020;Andrews et al. 2024;Westra and Andrews 2022) and ...
In this paper, I will argue that chimpanzees deploy some normative sensitivity when they select (i) materials they will use to manufacture tools and (ii) objects to be used as tools. To defend this claim, I will examine some empirical evidence showing chimpanzees’ remarkable abilities to select adequate tools and materials for the task at hand, as well as reports on how they acquired these abilities, both in their infancy and as naive adults. Based on this evidence, I will argue that these selection processes are guided by evaluations that chimpanzees make about which materials or objects have the required properties to make them efficient tools for a specific task. This turns them into reason-based actions, at least in a modest sense. Furthermore, I will suggest that, after putting together these evaluations and their goals, chimpanzees arrive at “instrumental ought-thoughts” describing an ideal non-actual situation (the possession of a specific tool or material) and prescribing an action (that one chooses that tool or material). These ought-thoughts motivate chimpanzees’ selection behavior. Finally, I will give reasons to prefer the attribution of ought-thoughts to explain chimpanzees’ selection of tools and tool-making material over explanations that only invoke non-normative motivational states.
... The assessment of cooperative inclinations typically involves manually categorising individuals into discrete types, including conditional cooperators, free riders, triangle cooperators, unconditional cooperators and unclassified participants (Fischbacher & Gächter, 2010;Gächter & Fages, 2023). Yet social preferences may evolve over the experiment duration, as observed in cases where conditional cooperators transition into unconditional defectors (Andrews, 2020). In contrast, our methodology employs automated techniques for classifying individuals based on their responsiveness to various factors. ...
Understanding and predicting human cooperative behaviour and belief dynamics remains a major challenge both from the scientific and practical perspectives. Because of the complexity and multiplicity of material, social and cognitive factors involved, both empirical and theoretical work tends to focus only on some snippets of the puzzle. Recently, a mathematical theory has been proposed that integrates material, social and cognitive aspects of behaviour and beliefs dynamics to explain how people make decisions in social dilemmas within heterogeneous groups. Here we apply this theory in two countries, China and Spain, through four long-term behavioural experiments utilising the Common Pool Resources game and the Collective Risk game. Our results show that material considerations carry the smallest weight in decision-making, while personal norms tend to be the most important factor. Empirical and normative expectations have intermediate weight in decision-making. Cognitive dissonance, social projection, logic constraints and cultural background play important roles in both decision-making and beliefs dynamics. At the individual level, we observe differences in the weights that people assign to factors involved in the decision-making and belief updating process. We identify different types of prosociality and rule-following associated with cultural differences, various channels for the effects of messaging, and culturally dependent interactions between sensitivity to messaging and conformity. Our results can put policy and information design on firmer ground, highlighting the need for interventions tailored to the situation at hand and to individual characteristics. Overall, this work demonstrates the theoretical and practical power of the theory in providing a more comprehensive understanding of human behaviour and beliefs.
... Normative beliefs shape behavioral intentions by reflecting perceptions of how significant otherslike family, friends, and peersview certain behaviors (Fishbein and Ajzen, 1975). These beliefs influence whether individuals find behaviors socially acceptable, impacting their motivation to comply with social expectations (Andrews, 2020). For example, if one's social circle disapproves of a behavior, they are less likely to engage in it. ...
This study investigates the role of attitudes, behavioral beliefs, and normative beliefs in shaping the intention to adopt Islamic Wealth Management (IWM) among staff at the Islamic University in Uganda, Kampala Campus (IUIU-KC). Given the varied perceptions surrounding IWM understanding these influencing factors is crucial for its viability among stakeholders. By employing a qualitative exploratory approach, data were collected through interviews with purposively selected academicians from the Faculty of Management Studies. Thematic analysis revealed that positive attitudes, supportive behavioral beliefs, and favorable normative beliefs significantly encourage IWM adoption. The findings imply that fostering these positive perceptions can enhance IWM integration within educational and financial institutions. By understanding these key drivers, policymakers, educators, and financial institutions can develop targeted strategies to promote IWM adoption. This approach not only aids stakeholder engagement and curriculum refinement in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) but also supports informed policy-making, advancing the broader acceptance and integration of IWM in Uganda and similar contexts. Further still IWM may be an option toward achieving the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals if implemented.
... As we will show, our account of emotion recognition offers the tools to adequately describe these cases by using the multiple dimensions and their implementing features according to PMT, and by describing their hierarchical organization and the dynamics of their interaction. Our multidimensional framework also accounts for the way normative aspects shape emotion recognition and attribution, and is thus in line with the so-called "normative turn" in social cognition (Andrews, 2020). Various authors have started systematically investigating the way social norms, as well as stereotype and bias, influence attributions of mental states such as beliefs and desires (e.g., Berio & Musholt, 2022;Eickers, 2023;Newen, 2015;Spaulding, 2018;Westra & Andrews, 2022;Wolf et al., 2021). ...
Constructivist theories of emotions and empirical studies have been increasingly stressing the role of contextual information and cultural conventions in emotion recognition. We propose a new account of emotion recognition and attribution that systematically integrates these aspects, and argue that emotion recognition is part of the general process of person impression formation. To describe the structural organization and the role of background information in emotion recognition and attribution, we introduce situation models and personal models. These models constitute the top‐level structures in a complex hierarchy of dimensions which considers different types of basic emotion cues. Thus, we propose a multidimensional account of emotion recognition which enables us to integrate the top‐down and bottom‐up processes involved: basic emotion cues in certain contexts can trigger situation models and person models, which influence emotion recognition which, in turn, reinforce or modify these models. We argue that this kind of loop deeply affects the way emotions enter our social interactions. Our account is in line with the “normative turn” of social cognition, that stresses the way social expectations actively shape the patterns we recognize, and make, in our social world.
... At the same time, such mindshaping ensures reliability, since all who participate are trained to develop the same dispositions and expectations. According to the mindshaping hypothesis, such "tricks" are essential to human coordination more broadly: what sets us apart from other primates is not better mindreading, but, rather, a palette of neural mechanisms and social practices, e.g., fine-grained imitation (Lyons et al., 2007;Nielsen & Tomaselli, 2010), pedagogy (Csibra & Gergely, 2011;Sterelny, 2012), conformism (Klucharev et al., 2009;Muthukrishna et al., 2016), norm institution and enforcement (Henrich et al., 2006;Sripada & Stich, 2006), social scripts and stereotypes (Eickers, 2023;Bermúdez, 2003;Andrews, 2012Andrews, , 2020Spaulding, 2018;Schank & Abelson, 2013), self-constitution in terms of public narratives (Schechtman, 2018), etc., that make us more alike and familiar to each other, thereby dramatically simplifying coordinative tasks which, independently of mindshaping, appear intractable (Zawidzki, 2013). This is why we are able to coordinate on largescale, temporally extended cooperative tasks with countless unfamiliar individuals: we are shaped, typically culturally, to think, feel, and act in ways that make such tasks tractable. ...
There is evidence that mental illness is partly socially constituted: diagnoses are historically “transient” (Hacking, Rewriting the soul: Multiple personality and the sciences of memory. Princeton University Press, 1998a; Mad travelers. University of Virginia, 1998b) and culturally variable (Toh, Nature Reviews Psychology, 1(2), 72–86, 2022). However, this view risks pernicious relativism. On most social constitution views, mental illness is what (some suitably expert part of) society takes it to be. But this has morally abhorrent implications, e.g., it legitimizes many spurious and harmful diagnoses (like “drapetomania”) and makes mental illness a matter of fashion rather than an objective challenge. This paper defends a conception of mental illness according to which it is partly socially constituted, yet which avoids such pernicious relativism: mental illness consists in an objective inability - a deficit in the skilled metacognitive self-regulation required to be rationally interpretable by one’s community, including oneself. Such reasons responsiveness requires skilled regulation of cognition, conation, and behavior, such that they respect relevant interpretive norms. Because such norms vary culturally, such skills are partly socially constituted.
... Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca / CC BY-NC-SA ArtefaCToS, Vol. 13, No. 1, (2024), 255-277 Building upon de Waal's pioneering work, a group of philosophers also construe some behaviors as evidence for normative capacities (Fitzpatrick, 2020;Andrews, 2020;Vincent, Ring, and Andrews, 2019). Two shifts in focus in this latter approach are worth mentioning. ...
A partir de una gran cantidad de investigación respecto a las vidas sociales de los primates, Frans de Waal ha sido un pionero defensor de la continuidad mental entre animales humanos y no humanos, avanzando la idea de que tales criaturas exhibían rudimentos de comportamientos políticos y morales. Uno de los rasgos en el que se ha concentrado Frans de Waal es el de normatividad animal, un conjunto de comportamientos funcionalmente definidos como la adherencia a estándares socialmente. Recientemente, a su vez, algunos filósofos y filósofas han apoyado esta posición, afirmando que los animales muestran una capacidad psicológica de cognición normativa que subyace a aquellos y a otros comportamientos. En este artículo, evalúo si la defensa de la normatividad animal constituye un ejercicio de construcción de teoría en cognición comparada. Con ese fin, presento tres rasgos de esta clase de construcción teórica. En primer lugar, el rol explicativo de construir análisis funcionales de capacidades cognitivas. En segundo lugar, la ayuda conceptual que brinda el pensamiento comparativo a la cognición comparada. En tercer lugar, el valor heurístico de la teoría en especificar caminos posibles de indagación. Tomando en cuenta estos rasgos, evalúo si las afirmaciones de los defensores de la normatividad animal los toman en consideración. Mi respuesta es negativa. En primer lugar, dado que algunos defensores se concentran en rasgos comportamentales y no en capacidades psicológicas, no están produciendo teoría en cognición comparada, si bien, como argumento, deberían. En segundo lugar, hay una despreocupación por el testeo de hipótesis y no hay consideraciones evolutivas que apoyen la posición de los defensores. Finalmente, la afirmación de que los animales no humanos exhiben normatividad no parece tener un valor heurístico definido.
... If we gain robust evidence that other species also engage in over-imitation, it will offer further support for the claim that other species are normative beings whose communities are guided by social norms (Andrews et al., 2024;Westra et al., 2024). Recent arguments in favor of animal social norms and normative cognition in other species will be bolstered by the evidence that these species also engage in over-imitation, given its norm-learning function (see, e.g., Andrews, 2020a;Danón, 2019;Fitzpatrick, 2020;Vincent et al., 2019;though Powell et al. (2023) argues that social norms in eusocial insects do not require a capacity for imitation because they do not need to be learned, for species with plastic social norms there will have to be some learning and hence some kind of selective imitation). The current evidence supporting over-imitation in other animals offers additional support for animal normativity since the stronger the normative constraints are in a society, the more need there is for over-imitation. ...
Human culture is seen as more cumulative, cooperative, and normative, in contrast to animal cultures. One hypothesis to explain these differences is the over-imitation hypothesis—that the differences between human culture and animal cultures can be traced to the human unique tendency to over-imitate. In this paper we analyze the current state of the literature on animal over-imitation and challenge the adequacy of the over-imitation hypothesis. To make this argument, we first argue that the function of human over-imitation is norm-learning. Then we review the empirical evidence against animal over-imitation and argue that these studies do not take into account relevant variables given the normative nature of over-imitation. We then analyze positive empirical evidence of over-imitation in great apes and canids and conclude they may have some capacity for over-imitation. In addition to the methodological suggestion for how to study animal over-imitation, a theoretical suggestion is that over-imitation might be much more widely found among species. The larger implication is that if we do find widespread evidence of over-imitation across species, many of the current theories of human uniqueness that focus on human hyper-cooperation or social norms may have only identified a difference of degree between humans and other animals.
... As far as we know, only (some) adult human beings are moral agents in this sense. While some ethicists do argue that certain animals, in particular primates, can have "naïve normativity" (Andrews 2020) or be "moral subjects" who act on the basis of moral motivations (Rowlands 2017) such arguments don't amount to saying that these animals are reflective moral agents. So, on Milburn's argument (other things being equal), if I were to hunt and kill a deer for my dinner, I would be violating the deer's rights. ...
In Just Fodder, Josh Milburn defends the view that sentient animals have negative rights. Since non-human animals are not moral agents, and can’t themselves violate anyone’s rights, wild predation is normally ethically unproblematic. However, Milburn argues, there are occasions when humans can become morally responsible for an animal’s predation. In cases like these, predation does violate the prey animal’s rights. The difficulty here lies in determining when a human is ‘sufficiently’ morally responsible for an animal’s predation for the predation to count as a rights violation. In this paper, I pick out what I take to be the relevant criteria Milburn identifies for moral responsibility: creating increased predation risk, foreseeability of increased predation risk, intending predation to happen, having some kind of special responsibility for the predator, and having some kind of special relationship to the prey. I argue that, at least as applied by Milburn, these criteria can lead to a kind of moral over-extension, one that rules out most forms of wild animal rehabilitation, species reintroduction and rewilding.
... Whether it is appropriate to call that collaboration shared intentional or not is a separate question that may not depend on the cognitive capacities or know-how participants require. Looking for the behaviors associated with skillful collaboration may focus our attention on non-human animal-centred questions like what know-how, communication (Heesen et al., 2020(Heesen et al., , 2021a, patterns or norms (Andrews, 2020;Andrews et al., in preparation;Westra and Andrews, 2022), might facilitate collaboration. ...
Shared intentionality is a specific form of shared agency where a group can be understood to have an intention. It has been conjectured that humans are better equipped for collaboration than other animals because humans but not other great apes share intentions. However, exporting shared intentionality from a debate about the ontology of mental state attributions like intentions to groups does not seamlessly lend itself to evolutionary science. To explore and de-center the implicit assumptions of Western conceptions of cooperation, I look at Zhuangzi’s philosophy of (in)action. This philosophy treats the actions of individuals as always a form of co-action alongside other agencies to whom one must adapt. Thinking of collaboration as a product of skillful co-action, not shared intention, sidesteps asking about cooperation in “kinds” or levels. Instead, it directs attention to the know-how and behavioral flexibility needed to make our constant coordination adaptive.
... In answer to this impasse, this paper will put forward a proposal about what action understanding could involve that lies midway between the aforementioned two extremes (see also Andrews 2020). According to it, differently from the second extreme option, action understanding would involve the ascription of some mental states. ...
How do we understand other individuals’ actions? Answers to this question cluster around two extremes: either by ascribing to the observed individual mental states such as intentions, or without ascribing any mental states. Thus, action understanding is either full-blown mindreading, or not mindreading. An intermediate option is lacking, but would be desirable for interpreting some experimental findings. I provide this intermediate option: actions may be understood by ascribing to the observed individual proto-intentions. Unlike intentions, proto-intentions are subject to context-bound normative constraints, therefore being more widely available across development. Action understanding, when it consists in proto-intention ascription, can be a minimal form of mindreading.
... To explain these sorts of human normative practices and to offer a schema that will be of more use when examining social norms in animals, Andrews has developed a less cogni tively demanding account of a norm type that that she calls animal social norms, mod elled on Bicchieri's account (Andrews 2020). An animal social norm has the following three properties: (a) there is a pattern of behaviour demonstrated by community mem bers; (b) individuals are motivated to conform to the pattern of behaviour; (c) individuals expect that community members will also conform, and that they will sanction those who do not conform. ...
Observations of animals engaging in apparently moral behaviour have prompted the question of whether morality is shared between humans and other animals, with little agreement on the answer. Some philosophers explicitly argue that morality is unique to humans, because moral agency requires capacities that are only demonstrated in our species. Other philosophers argue that some animals can participate in morality because they possess these capacities in a rudimentary form, or because the touted capacities are not necessary for moral participation. Empirical research programs on possible moral capacities such as fairness and empathy have seen scientists joining in these debates. We argue that the current debate suffers because discussions often fail to provide both a proper philosophical foundation about the nature of moral practices and a solid empirical ground for claims about what animals can and cannot do. In this chapter we focus on the second of these issues, and defend the claim that animals have three sets of capacities that, on some views, are taken as necessary or foundational for moral judgment and action. These are capacities of care, capacities of autonomy, and normative capacities. Care, we argue, is widely found among social animals. Autonomy and normativity are more recent topics of empirical investigation, so while there is less evidence of these capacities at this point in our developing scientific knowledge, the current data is strongly suggestive.
... Papadopoulos argues for a normative approach to shared intentionality instead. Following Andrews' [60] analysis of minimal criteria for social norms, he claims that other species may display shared intentionality by following implicit social norms that amount to implicit behavioural obligations. ...
Research in comparative cognition on allegedly uniquely human capacities considers the identification of these human capacities in other species as one of their main points of inquiry. Capacities are applied in their theoretical descriptions to promising empirical data. The conclusion then often is that even though, on a behavioural level, the human and nonhuman cases appear related, on a cognitive level there is no relation whatsoever because the underlying cognitive states diverge in quality. This result seems dissatisfying for two reasons: (1) there is ample empirical evidence that suggests the presence of the capacities in other species, and (2) the claim that the underlying states diverge often hinges on the reference to the theoretical definitions of these capacities only. This opinion piece focuses on the capacity of ostensive intentional communication to demonstrate that the original theoretical analyses often are not befitting a comparative endeavour and should therefore not be used as pivotal reference within comparative research. An outlook will be provided on more promising approaches to identifying ostensive communication, namely an interactive approach that will allow for ostension to not be perceived as a one-turn signalling behaviour, but as interactive, with the possibility of being established in a trial-and-error manner.
This article is part of the theme issue ‘Revisiting the human ‘interaction engine’: comparative approaches to social action coordination’.
... They argue for minimal accounts of moral agency that do not require moral judgement as metarepresentational scrutiny of reasons for action. Some accounts instead acknowledge emotionally motivated behavior as potentially moral and suggest we turn our focus to empathy as a moral motivation (Waller 1997;Rowlands 2012;Andrews 2013;Andrews & Gruen 2014;Monsó 2015;. In this paper, I propose that instead of making traditional moral theories bend to this de-intellectualized concept of morality to include nonhuman animals, there is a more direct way to move the animal morality debate forward: Care ethics as a sentimentalist moral theory acknowledges moral emotions and situates morality in particular relationships, instead of in the realm of abstract and impartial reason. ...
Are there nonhuman animals who behave morally ? In this paper I answer this question in the affirmative by applying the framework of care ethics to the animal morality debate. According to care ethics, empathic care is the wellspring of morality in humans. While there have been several suggestive analyses of nonhuman animals as empathic, much of the literature within the animal morality debate has marginalized analyses from the perspective of care ethics. In this paper I examine care ethics to extract its core commitments to what is required for moral care: emotional motivation that enables the intentional meeting of another’s needs, and forward-looking responsibility in particular relationships. What is not required, I argue, are metarepresentational capacities or the ability to scrutinize one’s reasons for action, and thus being retrospectively accountable. This minimal account of moral care is illustrated by moral practices of parental care seen in many nonhuman animal species. In response to the worry that parental care in nonhuman animals lacks all evaluation and is therefore nonmoral I point to cultural differences in human parenting and to normativity in nonhuman animals.
The Cambridge Handbook of Moral Psychology is an essential guide to the study of moral cognition and behavior. Originating as a philosophical exploration of values and virtues, moral psychology has evolved into a robust empirical science intersecting psychology, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, and neuroscience. Contributors to this interdisciplinary handbook explore a diverse set of topics, including moral judgment and decision making, altruism and empathy, and blame and punishment. Tailored for graduate students and researchers across psychology, philosophy, anthropology, neuroscience, political science, and economics, it offers a comprehensive survey of the latest research in moral psychology, illuminating both foundational concepts and cutting-edge developments.
In this article, I explore whether domesticated animals (DAs) of different speciesbelonging to the same community participate in authoring and sustaining, what I call, thefabric of zoodemocracy. The fabric refers to a set of activities, social norms, and valuesthat together sustain our democracies (e.g., cooperation, protest, and helping one’sneighbour). I explore this by situating my intervention within systemic theories ofdemocracy and the political turn in animal rights theory. Specifically, I situate my workwithin Donaldson and Kymlicka’s zoopolitical project, arguing that animals are owedrights to participation in decision making as community members. Some, however,challenge the idea that DAs can actually sustain democratic communities because they donot have, for example, the rational capacities to control themselves. Others suggest thatthere are conceptual and normative problems with the concept of co-authorship advancedby Donaldson and Kymlicka. This article addresses these debates by: (1) identifying someof the key elements needed to sustain the fabric of democratic communities; and (2)empirically testing whether DAs have the necessary capacities to sustain suchcommunities. I do this by analysing the data I collected while conducting a multispeciesethnography at VINE sanctuary, Springfield, Vermont, US, for 8 weeks.
When, if ever, is it better to spend money to improve pig welfare over chicken welfare? Which species of fish is worst off in commercial aquaculture operations? When, if ever, would humans benefit less from a policy than animals stand to lose? The answers to these questions involve making interspecies welfare comparisons—assessments of how well or poorly the members of one species are faring compared to the members of another species. It’s important to answer these questions, as governments, NGOs, and private actors regularly make decisions that assume particular views about them. However, there is no accepted method for making interspecies welfare comparisons; welfare assessment tools are designed to make comparisons within species, not across them. This volume addresses this crucial gap in the literature: it proposes a methodology for making such comparisons, it puts that methodology into practice, and then reports some tentative, proof-of-concept results. This book reports the results of a collaborative, 20-month, interdisciplinary project on making interspecies welfare comparisons. It includes contributions from philosophers, neuroscientists, comparative psychologists, animal welfare scientists, and many others. Unlike many edited volumes, this book is the product of a joint enterprise with a specific, shared goal: to develop a way to make principled comparisons between courses of action that affect different kinds of animals. This book reflects the contributors’ collective view about one way to achieve that goal.
La tradición filosófica ha caracterizado el fenómeno de la normatividad, esto es, la capacidad de actuar según normas, como una capacidad exclusiva del ser humano. En contraposición, dicha tradición ha considerado que el comportamiento de los animales no humanos se reduce a meras respuestas al entorno, relegando su actividad al ámbito del instinto y la supervivencia. Sin embargo, los avances realizados a partir del siglo XX en el campo de la etología permiten cuestionar esta caracterización. El objetivo de este trabajo es mostrar la existencia de aspectos normativos presentes en un tipo de comportamiento observado en diversas especies: el juego social. Realizaremos un análisis conceptual y una revisión crítica de la literatura filosófica y de los resultados reportados por la evidencia empírica relativa al juego social. A partir de una reconstrucción del concepto de “práctica” desarrollado por Rawls (1955), intentaremos mostrar que el juego social presenta características normativas que nos habilitan a extender la noción de práctica más allá de nuestra propia especie. Nuestro principal argumento presenta la siguiente estructura: (1) toda práctica supone, necesariamente, normatividad; (2) el juego social en animales presenta ciertas características estructurales por las cuales resulta pertinente describirlo como un tipo de práctica; y, por lo tanto, (3) la tesis de que ciertas especies de animales no humanos exhiben un comportamiento normativo es, al menos, plausible y merece ser considerada seriamente.
Traditional philosophy has characterized the phenomenon of normativity, i.e., the ability to act according to norms, as an exclusive capacity of human beings. In contrast, this tradition has considered the behavior of non-human animals to be mere responses to the environment, relegating their activity to the realm of instinct and survival. However, advances made since the 20th century in the field of ethology allow us to question this characterization. The aim of this work is to demonstrate the existence of normative aspects present in a type of behavior observed in various species: social play. We will undertake a conceptual analysis and a critical review of the philosophical literature and the results reported by empirical evidence regarding social play. Building upon a reconstruction of the concept of "practice" developed by Rawls (1955), we will attempt to show that social play exhibits normative characteristics that allow us to extend the notion of practice beyond our own species. Our main argument runs as follows: (1) every practice necessarily involves normativity; (2) social play in animals exhibits certain structural characteristics that make it relevant to describe it as a type of practice; and, therefore, (3) the thesis that certain species of non-human animals exhibit normative behavior is, at the very least, plausible and deserves to be seriously considered.
Norms play a crucial role in governing human societies. From an early age, humans possess an innate understanding of norms, recognizing certain behaviours, contexts, and roles as being governed by them. The evolution of normativity has been linked to its contribution to the promotion of cooperation in large groups and is intertwined with the development of joint intentionality. However, there is no evolutionary consensus on what normatively differentiated our hominin ancestors from the phylogenetic lineage leading to chimpanzees and bonobos. Here we propose that the development of teaching through a process of evaluative feedback between parent and offspring functioned as a prerequisite for the later development of normativity. Parents approve or disapprove of offspring’s behaviours based on their own learned knowledge of what is appropriate or inappropriate. We argue our proposition using a simple model of cultural transmission, which shows the adaptive advantage offered by these elementary forms of teaching. We show that an important part of this adaptive advantage can arise from the benefits derived from guidance about which behaviours to adopt or reject. We propose that this type of guidance has fundamental elements that characterise the normative world. We complete our argument by reviewing several studies that examine the emergence of normativity in young children without prior exposure to a normative framework with respect to the behaviours under analysis. We suggest that this normativity is best interpreted as manifestations of teaching among young children rather than as norm recognition among early normative children.
Although the concept of objectification is seen as a valuable tool in feminist theorizing, far less attention has been paid to animalization: treating or regarding a person as a nonhuman animal. I argue that animalization is a distinctive category of wrongdoing, modeling a theory of the phenomenon on Kantian theories of objectification in feminist philosophy. Actions are animalizing, I claim, when they embody a kind of disregard for a person's characteristically human capacities that are analogous to the fitting treatment of animals. I contend that my view overcomes standard objections to the use of the concept of animalization and shows how, despite surface similarities, animalization is different from both objectification and infantilization.
A growing literature argues that animals can act for moral reasons without being responsible. I argue that the literature often fails to maintain a clear distinction between moral behavior and moral agency, and I formulate a dilemma: either animals are less moral or they are more responsible than the literature suggests. If animals can respond to moral reasons, they are responsible according to an influential view of moral responsibility—Quality of Will. But if they are responsible, as some argue, costly implications must be acknowledged. If, however, they should not be considered responsible, then we may have to reassess the meaning of animal morality. I discuss ways to eschew responsibility or to tailor it to animals and argue that each requires a revised conception of animal morality.
Could emotions be a uniquely human phenomenon? One prominent theory in emotion science, Lisa Feldman Barrett’s Theory of Constructed Emotion (tce), suggests they might be. The source of the sceptical challenge is that tce links emotions to abstract concepts tracking socio-normative expectations, and other animals are unlikely to have such concepts. Barrett’s own response to the sceptical challenge is to relativize emotion to the perspective of an interpreter, but this is unpromising. A more promising response may be to amend the theory, dropping the commitment to the abstract nature of emotion concepts and allowing that, like olfactory concepts, they have disjunctive sensory groundings. Even if other animals were emotionless, this would not imply they lack morally significant interests. Unconceptualized valenced experiences are a sufficient basis for morally significant interests, and such experiences may occur even in the absence of discrete, constructed emotions.
Vastaamme Antti ja Pentti Moilasen artikkelin "Ekososialisaatio ja ekoindividuaa-tio sivistysideaaleina-ekososiaalisen kasvatuksen teorian kritiikkiä" huomioihin, jotka perustuvat omista näkemyksistämme poikkeaviin tapoihin ymmärtää kasvatus-tiedettä ja ekologiaa. Moilasten saksalainen kasvatus-ja sivistysteoria ei ole sovel-tunut kasvatusfilosofisten tarkastelujemme lähtökohdaksi sen ihmiskeskeisyyden vuoksi. Tutkimusperinne, josta oma tarkastelumme kumpuaa, tunnistaa kasvatuksen tutkimuksen monenlaisia teoreettisia näkökulmia soveltavana tieteenä. Monitietei-sen ja monista teoreettisista perinteistä ammentavan ekososiaalisen kasvatusajatte-lun peruslähtökohtana on pyrkimys käsittää kasvatus ei-ihmiskeskeisesti ja avartaa mielikuvitusta kohti rakentavaa monilajista vuorovaikutusta ihmisen ja muun luon-non välillä. Ihmiskeskeinen tapa ymmärtää kasvatus ja sen peruskäsitteet uusintaa ekologisesti tuhoavaa suhdetta toisiin eläviin olentoihin. Vastineemme puolustaa ekososialisaation ja ekoindividuaation käsitteitä, tarkentaa näihin liittyviä ajatuksia sekä oikoo Moilasten niihin liittämiä merkittävimpiä väärinkäsityksiä. Lisäksi puemme sanoiksi joitakin sellaisia ajatuksia, joita emme ole aiemmin katsoneet tar-peellisiksi avata siitä syystä, että nämä käsitykset ovat jo niin laajasti jaettuja moderneissa kasvatuksen teoretisoinneissa.
African (Bantu) philosophy conceptualizes morality through ubuntu, which emphasizes the role of community in producing moral agents. This community is characterized by practices that respond to and value interdependence, such as care, cooperation, and respect for elders and ancestral knowledge. While there have been attributions of morality to nonhuman animals in the interdisciplinary animal morality debate, this debate has focused on Western concepts. We argue that the ubuntu conception of morality as a communal practice applies to some nonhuman animals. African elephant communities are highly cooperative and structured around elders; they alloparent, protect their communities, mourn their dead, and pass on cultural knowledge between generations. Identifying these as important moral practices, ubuntu provides a theoretical framework to expand our ethical concern for elephants to their communities. In practice, this will deepen our understanding of the wrongness of atrocities like culling for population management or trophy hunting.
In this chapter, I pursue two aims. Firstly, I propose an original survey and analysis of the way proponents of 4E cognition have until now defined the relations between normativity and cognitive science. A first distinction is made between making normativity an explanandum of 4E cognitive science, and turning normativity into a property or part of the explanantia of 4E cognitive science. Inside of the latter option, one must distinguish between methodological, ontological and semantic claims on the value of normativity for studying and defining cognitive phenomena. The second aim of the paper consists in developing the further claim that normativity is an essential property of daily intentional concepts and of scientific concepts. I show how 4E cognition might further develop this latter claim in the context of recent debates about cognitive ontologies in neuroscience.
In this chapter, I argue that “cultural models”, understood as socially shared and action-guiding knowledge, are intrinsically normative. Arguably, the traditional approach to “cultural models” provided initial conceptual and methodological tools to systematize the whole notion of “socially shared information”, and there are occasional references to underlying normativity. But there is no systematic exposition of underlying cognitive and social components and a comprehensive discussion of normativity. Thus, in this chapter, I provide a tentative account of “cultural models” as it pertains to normative cognition, its genesis and its evolution. The goal is to connect the construct of “cultural models” to more recent theorizing in cognitive and evolutionary sciences.
We respond to four sets of criticisms of our book, A Better Ape. Against Kristin Andrews, we argue that human normativity is more than just the social maintenance of behavioral conformity, and that one of its functions is to enable humans to adapt to changing environments. Against Jay Odenbaugh, we argue that sympathy, loyalty, trust, and respect are emotions, and that norms are capable of motivating behavior on their own. In response to Mara Bollard, we develop a view about the content of moral emotions, and explain how essentialism might also have positive effects in moral cognition. In response to Joshua May, we defend the power of social integration to foster moral progress and expand our taxonomy of moral progress.
Norms permeate human life. Most of people's activities can be characterized by rules about what is appropriate, allowed, required, or forbidden-rules that are crucial in making people hyper-cooperative animals. In this article, I examine the current cognitive-evolutionary account of "norm psychology" and propose an alternative that is better supported by evidence and better placed to promote interdisciplinary dialogue. The incumbent theory focuses on rules and claims that humans genetically inherit cognitive and motivational mechanisms specialized for processing these rules. The cultural-evolutionary alternative defines normativity in relation to behavior-compliance, enforcement, and commentary-and suggests that it depends on implicit and explicit processes. The implicit processes are genetically inherited and domain-general; rather than being specialized for normativity, they do many jobs in many species. The explicit processes are culturally inherited and domain-specific; they are constructed from mentalizing and reasoning by social interaction in childhood. The cultural-evolutionary, or "cognitive gadget," perspective suggests that people alive today-parents, educators, elders, politicians, lawyers-have more responsibility for sustaining normativity than the nativist view implies. People's actions not only shape and transmit the rules, but they also create in each new generation mental processes that can grasp the rules and put them into action.
The everyday operations of animal shelters and animal protection organizations involve a host of ethical decisions. This volume is the outcome of a collaboration between a team of animal ethicists and representatives and employees of an animal shelter, the Montreal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (Montreal SPCA). The volume offers a set of recommendations on how animal shelters can respond to the difficult ethical questions they face given the many constraints under which they must operate. These recommendations are informed by a commitment to take seriously the moral status of nonhuman animals. The volume also contains seven chapters that explore in more detail some of the ethical questions involved in everyday animal shelter operations.
Normativity is widely regarded as the ability to make evaluative judgments based on a shared system of social norms. When normativity is viewed through the cognitively demanding lens of human morality, however, the prospect of finding social norms innonhuman animals rapidly dwindles and common causal structures are overlooked. In this paper, I develop a biofunctionalist account of social normativity and examine its implications for how we ought to conceptualize, explain, and study social norms in the wild. I propose that we think of social normative systems as behavior-regulatory power structures that resolve conflicts between nested levels of selection in favor of the higher level. I argue that the best case for social norms outside of humans is not in the animals one might expect, such as primates or other large-brained vertebrates, but rather in social insects. Finally, I engage with a number of potential objections to this unorthodox proposal.
Reasons and Normativity in Non-human Animals According to intellectualist approaches to reasons and normativity, non-human animals lack a genuine sensitivity to reasons. In that sense, in contrast to human beings, they cannot be considered normative creatures. Against intellectualism, in this paper, we hold that when a creature arrives at a new doxastic state by carrying out a certain type of reasoning, the premises of it constitute genuine reasons for her. We are interested in reasoning as a personal level process, which requires a certain kind of intelligence, implicit knowledge, and some (partial) understanding of the reasons by which the creature arrives at a new belief. However, this sort of reasoning requires neither the possession of epistemic concepts nor the possession of meta-representational competencies, as the intellectualists hold. Thus, if some non-human animals-such as great apes-have the capacity to carry out this kind of reasoning, they can be credited with a practical ability to use reasons and a (partial) cognitive access to them. In this sense, they could also be taken to be normative animals. Sumario: 1. Introducción.-2. El enfoque intelectualista: comprensión de las razones y capacidades reflexivas.-3. Razonamiento y razones: una concepción moderada.-4. Razonamiento y razones en animales no humanos: alguna evidencia empírica 1. Introducción He aquí una de las pocas tesis con respecto a las cuales parece haber amplio acuerdo en ámbitos filosóficos: los animales humanos somos criaturas normativas. En tal sentido, usualmente se acepta que un requisito central que los seres humanos han de satisfacer (y de hecho normalmente lo hacen), en tanto criaturas normativas, es el de ser sensibles a razones y responder a ellas, tanto para actuar como para pensar
Darwin claimed that human and animal minds differ in degree but not in kind, and that ethical principles such as the Golden Rule are just an extension of thinking found in animals. Both claims are false. The best way to distinguish differences in degree from differences in kind is by identifying mechanisms that have emergent properties. Recursive thinking is an emergent capability found in humans but not in other animals. The Golden Rule and some other ethical principles such as Kant’s categorical imperative require recursion, so they constitute ethical thinking that is restricted to humans. Changes in kind have tipping points resulting from mechanisms with emergent properties.
Despite increasing numbers of publications showing that many animals possess the neural substrates involved in emotions and consciousness and exhibit agency in their behavior, many animals are still restrained and forced to take part in applied or fundamental research. However, these restraints and procedures, because they stress animals and limit the expression of adaptive behavior, may result in compromised findings. Researchers should alter their research paradigms to understand the mechanisms and functions of the brain and behavior so that the paradigms incorporate animals’ agency. This article discusses how animal agency cannot only be the key to more wide-ranging and improved research in existing domains but can also lead to new research questions about behavior and brain evolution.
Research in comparative cognition on allegedly uniquely human capacities considers the identification of these human capacities in other species as one of their main points of inquiry. Capacities are applied in their theoretical descriptions to promising empirical data. The conclusion then often is that even though, on a behavioural level, the human and nonhuman cases appear related, on a cognitive level there is no relation whatsoever because the underlying cognitive states diverge in quality. This result seems dissatisfying for two reasons: (1) there is ample empirical evidence that suggests the presence of the capacities in other species, and (2) the claim that the underlying states diverge often hinges on the reference to the theoretical definitions of these capacities only. This opinion piece focuses on the capacity of ostensive intentional communication to demonstrate that the original theoretical analyses often are not befitting a comparative endeavour and should therefore not be used as pivotal reference within comparative research. An outlook will be provided on more promising approaches to identifying ostensive communication, namely an interactive approach that will allow for ostension to not be perceived as a one-turn signalling behaviour, but as interactive, with the possibility of being established in a trial-and-error manner.
Significance
Recent research suggests that infants possess principles of fairness and ingroup support. We examined whether 1.5- and 2.5-y-olds would prioritize fairness or ingroup support when the two were pitted against each other. Children watched mixed-recipients resource-allocation events in which a puppet distributor faced two potential recipients, an ingroup and an outgroup puppet. Expectations about the distributor’s actions depended on how many allocation items were available. When there were as many items as puppets, children expected fairness to prevail; when there were fewer items than puppets, however, children expected ingroup support to prevail. Thus, beginning early in life, children expect fairness in mixed-recipients scenarios unless there is a shortage of resources, in which case they expect ingroup support to override fairness.
Full-text access here: http://rdcu.be/Cou0. When misfortune befalls another, humans may feel distress, leading to a motivation to escape. When such misfortune is perceived as justified, however, it may be experienced as rewarding and lead to motivation to witness the misfortune. We explored when in human ontogeny such a motivation emerges and whether the motivation is shared by chimpanzees. Chimpanzees and four- to six-year-old children learned through direct interaction that an agent was either prosocial or antisocial and later saw each agent’s punishment. They were given the option to invest physical effort (chimpanzees) or monetary units (children) to continue watching. Chimpanzees and six-year-olds showed a preference for watching punishment of the antisocial agent. An additional control experiment in chimpanzees suggests that these results cannot be attributed to more generic factors such as scene coherence or informational value seeking. This indicates that both six-year-olds and chimpanzees have a motivation to watch deserved punishment enacted.
Empirical studies of the social lives of non-human primates, cetaceans, and other social animals have prompted scientists and philosophers to debate the question of whether morality and moral cognition exists in non-human animals. Some researchers have argued that morality does exist in several animal species, others that these species may possess various evolutionary building blocks or precursors to morality, but not quite the genuine article, while some have argued that nothing remotely resembling morality can be found in any non-human species. However, these different positions on animal morality generally appear to be motivated more by different conceptions of how the term “morality” is to be defined than on empirical disagreements about animal social behaviour and psychology. After delving deeper into the goals and methodologies of various of the protagonists, I argue that, despite appearances, there are actually two importantly distinct debates over animal morality going on, corresponding to two quite different ways of thinking about what it is to define “morality”, “moral cognition”, and associated notions. Several apparent skirmishes in the literature are thus cases of researchers simply talking past each other. I then focus on what I take to be the core debate over animal morality, which is concerned with understanding the nature and phylogenetic distribution of morality conceived as a psychological natural kind. I argue that this debate is in fact largely terminological and non-substantive. Finally, I reflect on how this core debate might best be re-framed.
In contrast to a wealth of human studies, little is known about the ontogeny and consistency of empathy-related capacities in other species. Consolation - post-conflict affiliation from uninvolved bystanders to distressed others - is a suggested marker of empathetic concern in non-human animals. Using longitudinal data comprising nearly a decade of observations on over 3000 conflict interactions in 44 chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), we provide evidence for relatively stable individual differences in consolation behaviour. Across development, individuals consistently differ from one another in this trait, with higher consolatory tendencies predicting better social integration, a sign of social competence. Further, similar to recent results in other ape species, but in contrast to many human self-reported findings, older chimpanzees are less likely to console than are younger individuals. Overall, given the link between consolation and empathy, these findings help elucidate the development of individual socio-cognitive and -emotional abilities in one of our closest relatives.
Significance
We examined whether one mechanism contributing to ingroup favoritism might be an abstract and early-emerging sociomoral expectation of ingroup support. In violation-of-expectation experiments, 17-mo-old infants first watched third-party interactions among unfamiliar adults identified (using novel labels) as belonging to the same group, to different groups, or to unspecified groups. Next, one adult needed help, and another adult either did or did not provide it. Infants expected help to be provided when the two adults belonged to the same group, but held no expectation when the adults belonged to different groups or to unspecified groups. Infants thus already possess an abstract expectation of ingroup support, and this finding sheds light on one of the mechanisms underlying ingroup favoritism in human interactions.
Significance
Competitive tendencies may make it hard for members of a group to cooperate with each other. Humans use many different “enforcement” strategies to keep competition in check and favor cooperation. To test whether one of our closest relatives uses similar strategies, we gave a group of chimpanzees a cooperative problem that required joint action by two or three individuals. The open-group set-up allowed the chimpanzees a choice between cooperation and competitive behavior like freeloading. The chimpanzees used a combination of partner choice and punishment of competitive individuals to reduce competition. In the end, cooperation won. Our results suggest that the roots of human cooperation are shared with other primates.
It is tempting to assume that being a moral creature requires the capacity to attribute mental states to others, because a creature cannot be moral unless she is capable of comprehending how her actions can have an impact on the well-being of those around her. If this assumption were true, then mere behaviour readers could never qualify as moral, for they are incapable of conceptualising mental states and attributing them to others. In this paper, I argue against such an assumption by discussing the specific case of empathy. I present a characterisation of empathy that would not require an ability to attribute mental states to others, but would nevertheless allow the creature who possessed it to qualify as a moral being. Provided certain conditions are met, a behaviour reader could be motivated to act by this form of empathy, and this means that behaviour readers could be moral. The case for animal morality, I shall argue, is therefore independent of the case for animal mindreading.
The idea that animals can act morally-can act for moral reasons-has been almost universally rejected by philosophers and scientists alike. According to tradition, while animals may be objects of moral concern, they cannot be regarded as subjects of moral motivation. This book argues against the traditional view. Animals can act for moral reasons-at least there are no compelling reasons for supposing that that they can't. Animals can act on the basis of moral emotions-emotions that possess moral content-and these emotions provide reasons for their actions. Animals can, in this sense, be moral subjects. Using recent empirical work in cognitive ethology as a springboard, this book embarks on a meticulous examination of the idea of moral motivation-an examination that weaves its way through central topics in the philosophy of mind, metaphysics, metaethics, and moral psychology. The result of this investigation is a powerful defense of an extraordinarily controversial claim-animals can, in fact, be moral-that is sure to engender heated debate.
Evolutionary theory predicts that natural selection will fashion cognitive biases to guide when, and from whom, individuals acquire social information but the precise nature of these biases, especially in ecologically valid group contexts, remains unknown. We exposed four captive groups of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) to a novel extractive foraging device and, by fitting statistical models, isolated four simultaneously operating transmission biases. These include biases to copy (i) higher-ranking and (ii) expert individuals, and to copy others when (iii) uncertain or (iv) of low rank. High-ranking individuals were relatively un-strategic in their use of acquired knowledge, which, combined with the bias for others to observe them, may explain reports that high innovation rates (in juveniles and subordinates) do not generate a correspondingly high frequency of traditions in chimpanzees. Given the typically low rank of immigrants in chimpanzees, a ‘copying dominants’ bias may contribute to the observed maintenance of distinct cultural repertoires in neighboring communities despite sharing similar ecology and knowledgeable migrants. Thus, a copying dominants strategy may, as often proposed for conformist transmission, and perhaps in concert with it, restrict the accumulation of traditions within chimpanzee communities whilst maintaining cultural diversity.
It used to be thought that folk psychology is the only game in town. Focusing merely on what people do will not allow you to predict what they are likely to do next. For that, you must consider their beliefs, desires, intentions, etc. Recent evidence from developmental psychology and fMRI studies indicates that this conclusion was premature. We parse motion in an environment as behavior of a particular type, and behavior thus construed can feature in systematizations that we know. Building on the view that folk psychological knowledge is knowledge of theoretical models, I argue that social knowledge is best understood as lying on a continuum between behavioral and full-blown psychological models. Between the two extremes, we have what I call social models. Social models represent social structures in terms of their overall purpose and circumscribe individuals' roles within them. These models help us predict what others will do or plan what we should do without providing information about what agents think or want. Thinking about social knowledge this way gives us a more nuanced picture of what capacities are engaged in social planning and interaction, and gives us a better tool with which to think about the social knowledge of animals and young children.
Social learning in chimpanzees has been studied extensively and it is now widely accepted that chimpanzees have the capacity to learn from conspecifics through a multitude of mechanisms. Very few studies, however, have documented the existence of spontaneously emerged traditions in chimpanzee communities. While the rigour of experimental studies is helpful to investigate social learning mechanisms, documentation of naturally occurring traditions is necessary to understand the relevance of social learning in the real lives of animals. In this study, we report on chimpanzees spontaneously copying a seemingly non-adaptive behaviour ("grass-in-ear behaviour"). The behaviour entailed chimpanzees selecting a stiff, straw-like blade of grass, inserting the grass into one of their own ears, adjusting the position, and then leaving it in their ear during subsequent activities. Using a daily focal follow procedure, over the course of 1 year, we observed 8 (out of 12) group members engaging in this peculiar behaviour. Importantly, in the three neighbouring groups of chimpanzees (n = 82), this behaviour was only observed once, indicating that ecological factors were not determiners of the prevalence of this behaviour. These observations show that chimpanzees have a tendency to copy each other's behaviour, even when the adaptive value of the behaviour is presumably absent.
There exists an undeniable chasm between the capacities of humans and those of animals. Our minds have spawned civilizations and technologies that have changed the face of the Earth, whereas even our closest animal relatives sit unobtrusively in their dwindling habitats. Yet despite longstanding debates, the nature of this apparent gap has remained unclear. What exactly is the difference between our minds and theirs?
In The Gap, psychologist Thomas Suddendorf provides a definitive account of the mental qualities that separate humans from other animals, as well as how these differences arose. Drawing on two decades of research on apes, children, and human evolution, he surveys the abilities most often cited as uniquely human—language, intelligence, morality, culture, theory of mind, and mental time travel—and finds that two traits account for most of the ways in which our minds appear so distinct: Namely, our open-ended ability to imagine and reflect on scenarios, and our insatiable drive to link our minds together. These two traits explain how our species was able to amplify qualities that we inherited in parallel with our animal counterparts; transforming animal communication into language, memory into mental time travel, sociality into mind reading, problem solving into abstract reasoning, traditions into culture, and empathy into morality.
Suddendorf concludes with the provocative suggestion that our unrivalled status may be our own creation—and that the gap is growing wider not so much because we are becoming smarter but because we are killing off our closest intelligent animal relatives.
Weaving together the latest findings in animal behavior, child development, anthropology, psychology, and neuroscience, this book will change the way we think about our place in nature. A major argument for reconsidering what makes us human, The Gap is essential reading for anyone interested in our evolutionary origins and our relationship with the rest of the animal kingdom.
“A provocative and entertaining gem of a book.”
—Simon Baron-Cohen
“Beautifully written, well researched and thought provoking… I found it fascinating and strongly recommend it to everyone who is curious as to how we have evolved to become the dominant species in the world today.”
—Jane Goodall
“sure-handed, fascinating book”
—Scientific American Mind
“Fascinating…enjoyable..would make [a] marvellous gift”
—Nature
for more info visit http://thegap.psy.uq.edu.au/
An argument that as folk psychologists humans (and perhaps other animals) don't so much read minds as see one another as persons with traits, emotions, and social relations.
By adulthood, most of us have become experts in human behavior, able to make sense of the myriad behaviors we find in environments ranging from the family home to the local mall and beyond. In philosophy of mind, our understanding of others has been largely explained in terms of knowing others' beliefs and desires; describing others' behavior in these terms is the core of what is known as folk psychology. In Do Apes Read Minds? Kristin Andrews challenges this view of folk psychology, arguing that we don't consider others' beliefs and desires when predicting most quotidian behavior, and that our explanations in these terms are often inaccurate or unhelpful. Rather than mindreading, or understanding others as receptacles for propositional attitudes, Andrews claims that folk psychologists see others first as whole persons with traits, emotions, and social relations.
Drawing on research in developmental psychology, social psychology, and animal cognition, Andrews argues for a pluralistic folk psychology that employs different kinds of practices (including prediction, explanation, and justification) and different kinds of cognitive tools (including personality trait attribution, stereotype activation, inductive reasoning about past behavior, and generalization from self) that are involved in our folk psychological practices. According to this understanding of folk psychology—which does not require the sophisticated cognitive machinery of second-order metacognition associated with having a theory of mind—animals (including the other great apes) may be folk psychologists, too.
Predicting others' affiliative relationships is critical to social cognition, but there is little evidence of how this ability develops. We examined 9-month-old infants' inferences about 3rd-party affiliation based on shared and opposing evaluations. Infants expected 2 people who expressed shared evaluations to interact positively, whereas they expected 2 people who expressed opposing evaluations to interact negatively. A control condition revealed that infants' expectations could not be due to mere perceptual repetition. Thus, an abstract understanding that 3rd-party affiliation can be based on shared intentions has roots in the 1st year of life. These findings have implications for understanding humans' earliest representations of the social world. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved).
Abstract All four species of great apes and young human children (12–24 mo of age) were administered an imitation task designed to distinguish between results learning (emulation) and action learning (imitation). Some subjects were exposed to a demonstrator either pushing or pulling a door to open a box, whereas others simply saw the door of the box opening itself in one of the two directions (the ghost control). Most of the apes successfully opened the box in both experimental conditions, as well as in a baseline condition, but without being influenced either by the demonstrator's actions or by the door's motions. In contrast, human children over 12 mo of age were influenced by the demonstration: the 18-mo-olds were influenced by the demonstrator's actions, and the 24-mo-olds were influenced both by the demonstrator's actions and by the door's motions in the ghost control. These results provide support for the hypothesis that human children have a greater propensity than great apes for focusing either on a demonstrator's action or on the result of their action, as needed, in social learning situations.
Babies may opt for a simpler way to turn on a light after watching an adult do it. Here we show that if an adult demonstrates a new way to execute a task to a group of infants aged 14 months, the children will use this action to achieve the same goal only if they consider it to be the most rational alternative. Our results indicate that imitation of goal-directed action by preverbal infants is a selective, interpretative process, rather than a simple re-enactment of the means used by a demonstrator, as was previously thought1, 2, 3.
Deferred imitation after a 1-week delay was examined in 14-month-old infants. Six actions, each using a different object, were demonstrated to each infant. One of the six actions was a novel behavior that had a zero probability of occurrence in spontaneous play. In the imitation condition, infants observed the demonstration but were not allowed to touch the objects, thus preventing any immediate imitation. After the 1-week delay, infants returned to the laboratory and their imitation of the adult's previous actions was scored. Infants in the imitation condition produced significantly more of the target actions than infants in control groups who were not exposed to the modeling; there was also strong evidence for the imitation of the novel act. From a cognitive perspective deferred imitation provides a means of assessing recall memory and representation in children. From a social-developmental viewpoint the findings illustrate that the behavioral repertoire of infants and their knowledge about objects can expand as a result of seeing the actions of others. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Beyond Youthful Aggression
Two decades ago, the combination of a demographic bulge of young males in Enga Province of Papua New Guinea and more deadly armaments triggered a series of intertribal wars and a surge in war-related fatalities; more recently, both wars and deaths have dropped. Drawing upon 20 years of conflict data, as well as historical records of the local social institutions, Wiessner and Pupu (p. 1651 ) analyzed the impact of youth-driven violence upon the traditional hierarchies and the subsequent evolution of the indigenous institutions into political structures capable of controlling conflict and reducing bloodshed.
Punishment can help maintain cooperation by deterring free-riding and cheating. Of particular importance in large-scale human societies is third-party punishment in which individuals punish a transgressor or norm violator even when they themselves are not affected. Nonhuman primates and other animals aggress against conspecifics with some regularity, but it is unclear whether this is ever aimed at punishing others for noncooperation, and whether third-party punishment occurs at all. Here we report an experimental study in which one of humans' closest living relatives, chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), could punish an individual who stole food. Dominants retaliated when their own food was stolen, but they did not punish when the food of third-parties was stolen, even when the victim was related to them. Third-party punishment as a means of enforcing cooperation, as humans do, might therefore be a derived trait in the human lineage.
A new theory of the evolution of human cognition and human social life that emphasizes the role of information sharing across generations.
Over the last three million years or so, our lineage has diverged sharply from those of our great ape relatives. Change has been rapid (in evolutionary terms) and pervasive. Morphology, life history, social life, sexual behavior, and foraging patterns have all shifted sharply away from those of the other great apes. In The Evolved Apprentice, Kim Sterelny argues that the divergence stems from the fact that humans gradually came to enrich the learning environment of the next generation. Humans came to cooperate in sharing information, and to cooperate ecologically and reproductively as well, and these changes initiated positive feedback loops that drove us further from other great apes.
Sterelny develops a new theory of the evolution of human cognition and human social life that emphasizes the gradual evolution of information-sharing practices across generations and how these practices transformed human minds and social lives. Sterelny proposes that humans developed a new form of ecological interaction with their environment, cooperative foraging. The ability to cope with the immense variety of human ancestral environments and social forms, he argues, depended not just on adapted minds but also on adapted developmental environments.
Bradford Books imprint
Observations of animals engaging in apparently moral behavior have led academics and the public alike to ask whether morality is shared between humans and other animals. Some philosophers explicitly argue that morality is unique to humans, because moral agency requires capacities that are only demonstrated in our species. Other philosophers argue that some animals can participate in morality because they possess these capacities in a rudimentary form. Scientists have also joined the discussion, and their views are just as varied as the philosophers’. Some research programs examine whether animals countenance specific human norms, such as fairness. Other research programs investigate the cognitive and affective capacities thought to be necessary for morality. There are two sets of concerns that can be raised by these debates. They sometimes suffer from there being no agreed upon theory of morality and no clear account of whether there is a demarcation between moral and social behavior; that is, they lack a proper philosophical foundation. They also sometimes suffer from there being disagreement about the psychological capacities evident in animals. Of these two sets of concerns—the nature of the moral and the scope of psychological capacities—we aim to take on only the second. In this chapter we defend the claim that animals have three sets of capacities that, on some views, are taken as necessary and foundational for moral judgment and action. These are capacities of care, capacities of autonomy, and normative capacities. Care, we argue, is widely found among social animals. Autonomy and normativity are more recent topics of empirical investigation, so while there is less evidence of these capacities at this point in our developing scientific knowledge, the current data is strongly suggestive.
Norms in the Wild takes a unique look at social norms, answering questions about diagnosis (how can we tell that a shared practice is a social norm?), measurement (how do we measure expectations and preferences?), and change (which tools can we adopt to effect norm change?). The theories developed in the book are brought to life by examining real-life cases of norm creation and abandonment, the rationale behind policy interventions, and how change can be spearheaded by various types of trendsetters, be they individuals, groups, or the media. By exploring how a range of problems, from poor sanitation to child marriage, can be addressed, the book shows how social norms can have a causal impact on collective behavior, and which interventions may succeed in creating new norms or abandoning harmful ones. In laying the theoretical groundwork for implementing social changes in a contextually sensitive and empirically based way, it also diagnoses why some less culturally attuned attempts to eliminate negative practices have failed.
A proposal that human social cognition would not have evolved without mechanisms and practices that shape minds in ways that make them easier to interpret.
In this novel account of distinctively human social cognition, Tadeusz Zawidzki argues that the key distinction between human and nonhuman social cognition consists in our complex, diverse, and flexible capacities to shape each other's minds in ways that make them easier to interpret. Zawidzki proposes that such "mindshaping"—which takes the form of capacities and practices such as sophisticated imitation, pedagogy, conformity to norms, and narrative self-constitution—is the most important component of human social cognition. Without it, he argues, none of the other components of what he terms the "human sociocognitive syndrome," including sophisticated language, cooperation, and sophisticated "mindreading," would be possible.
Challenging the dominant view that sophisticated mindreading—especially propositional attitude attribution—is the key evolutionary innovation behind distinctively human social cognition, Zawidzki contends that the capacity to attribute such mental states depends on the evolution of mindshaping practices. Propositional attitude attribution, he argues, is likely to be unreliable unless most of us are shaped to have similar kinds of propositional attitudes in similar circumstances. Motivations to mindshape, selected to make sophisticated cooperation possible, combine with low-level mindreading abilities that we share with nonhuman species to make it easier for humans to interpret and anticipate each other's behavior. Eventually, this led, in human prehistory, to the capacity to attribute full-blown propositional attitudes accurately—a capacity that is parasitic, in phylogeny and today, on prior capacities to shape minds.
Bringing together findings from developmental psychology, comparative psychology, evolutionary psychology, and philosophy of psychology, Zawidzki offers a strikingly original framework for understanding human social cognition.
Bradford Books imprint
This book argues that we are obligated to treat all sentient animals as “ends in themselves.” Drawing on a theory of the good derived from Aristotle, it offers an explanation of why animals are the sorts of beings who have a good. Drawing on a revised version of Kant’s argument for the value of humanity, it argues that rationality commits us to claiming the standing of ends in ourselves in two senses. As autonomous beings, we claim to be ends in ourselves when we claim the standing to make laws for ourselves and each other. As beings who have a good, we also claim to be ends in ourselves when we take the things that are good for us to be good absolutely and so worthy of pursuit. The first claim commits us to joining with other autonomous beings in relations of reciprocal moral lawmaking. The second claim commits us to treating the good of every sentient animal as something of absolute importance. The book also argues that human beings are not more important than, superior to, or better off than the other animals. It criticizes the “marginal cases” argument and advances a view of moral standing as attaching to the atemporal subjects of lives. It offers a non-utilitarian account of the relationship between the good and pleasure, and addresses questions about the badness of extinction and about whether we have the right to eat animals, experiment on them, make them work for us, and keep them as pets.
Differential experience leads infants to have perceptual processing advantages for own- over other-race faces, but whether this experience has down-stream consequences is unknown. Three experiments examined whether 7-month-olds (Range = 5.9-8.5 months, N = 96) use gaze from own- versus other-race adults to anticipate events. When gaze predicted an event’s occurrence with 100% reliability, 7-month-olds followed both adults equally; with 25% (chance) reliability, neither was followed. However, with 50% (uncertain) reliability, infants followed own- over other-race gaze. Differential face race experience may thus affect how infants use social cues from own- versus other-race adults for learning. Such findings suggest that infants integrate online statistical reliability information with prior knowledge of own- versus other-race to guide social interaction and learning.
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The identification and recruitment of trustworthy partners represents an important adaptive challenge for any species that relies heavily on cooperation [1, 2]. From an evolutionary perspective, trust is difficult to account for as it involves, by definition, a risk of non-reciprocation and defection by cheaters [3, 4]. One solution for this problem is to form close emotional bonds, i.e., friendships, which enable trust even in contexts where cheating would be profitable [5]. Little is known about the evolutionary origins of the human tendency to form close social bonds to overcome the trust problem. Studying chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), one of our closest living relatives, is one way of identifying these origins. While a growing body of research indicates that at least some of the properties of close human relationships find parallels in the social bonds of chimpanzees [6-10] and that chimpanzees extend favors preferentially toward selected individuals [11-14], it is unclear whether such interactions are based on trust. To fill this gap in knowledge, we observed the social interactions of a group of chimpanzees and established dyadic friendship relations. We then presented chimpanzees with a modified, non-verbal version of the human trust game and found that chimpanzees trust their friends significantly more frequently than their non-friends. These results suggest that trust within closely bonded dyads is not unique to humans but rather has its evolutionary roots in the social relationships of our closest primate relatives.
The evolution of behavior is sometimes considered irrelevant to the issue of human morality, since it lacks the normative character of morality (‘ought’), and consist entirely of descriptions of how things are or came about (‘is’). Evolved behavior, including that of other animals, is not entirely devoid of normativity, however. Defining normativity as adherence to an ideal or standard, there is ample evidence that animals treat their social relationships in this manner. In other words, they pursue social values. Here I review evidence that nonhuman primates actively try to preserve harmony within their social network by, e.g., reconciling after conflict, protesting against unequal divisions, and breaking up fights amongst others. In doing so, they correct deviations from an ideal state. They further show emotional self-control and anticipatory conflict resolution in order to prevent such deviations. Recognition of the goal-orientation and normative character of animal social behavior permits us to partially bridge the is/ought divide erected in relation to human moral behavior.
In this paper I intend to argue that an explanatory role for folk psychology is also a regulative role, and that language is not required for these regulative functions. I will start by drawing out the relationship between prediction, explanation, and regulation of behavior according to both mindreading approaches to folk psychology and the pluralistic account I defend. I will argue that social cognition does not take the form of causal reasoning so much as it does normative reasoning, and will introduce the folk psychological spiral. Then I will examine the cognitive resources necessary for participating in the folk psychological spiral, and I will argue that these cognitive resources can be had without language. There is preliminary evidence that some other species understand one another through a normative lens that, through looping effects, creates expectations that community members strive to live up to.
Social norms-generalized expectations about how others should behave in a given context-implicitly guide human social life. However, their existence becomes explicit when they are violated because norm violations provoke negative reactions, even from personally uninvolved bystanders. To explore the evolutionary origin of human social norms, we presented chimpanzees with videos depicting a putative norm violation: unfamiliar conspecifics engaging in infanticidal attacks on an infant chimpanzee. The chimpanzees looked far longer at infanticide scenes than at control videos showing nut cracking, hunting a colobus monkey, or displays and aggression among adult males. Furthermore, several alternative explanations for this looking pattern could be ruled out. However, infanticide scenes did not generally elicit higher arousal. We propose that chimpanzees as uninvolved bystanders may detect norm violations but may restrict emotional reactions to such situations to in-group contexts. We discuss the implications for the evolution of human morality.
This paper is divided into two parts. In Section 1, I explore and defend a “regulative view” of folk-psychology as against the “standard view” (encompassing both theory-theory and simulation theory, as well as hybrid variations). On the regulative view, folk-psychology is conceptualized in fundamentally interpersonal terms as a “mind-making” practice through which we come to form and regulate our minds in accordance with a rich array of socially shared and socially maintained sense-making norms. It is not, as the standard view maintains, simply an epistemic capacity for coming to know about the mental states and dispositions already there. Importantly, the regulative view can meet and beat the standard at its own epistemic game. But it also does more. In Section 2, I show how the regulative view makes progress on two other problems that remain puzzling on the standard view: (1) the problem of “first-person authority” – accounting for the special features of self-knowledge; and (2) the problem of “reactive responsiveness” – accounting for our deep concern with calling one another to account for normatively untoward behaviour, both generally and in the moral domain.
The notion of animal culture has been well established mainly through research aiming at uncovering differences between populations. In chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes verus), cultural diversity has even been found in neighboring communities, where differences were observed despite frequent immigration of individuals. Female chimpanzees transfer at the onset of sexual maturity at an age, when the behavioral repertoire is fully formed. With immigrating females, behavioral variety enters the group. Little is known about the diversity and the longevity of cultural traits within a community. This study is building on previous findings of differences in hammer selection when nut cracking between neighboring communities despite similar ecological conditions. We now further investigated the diversity and maintenance of cultural traits within one chimpanzee community and were able to show high levels of uniformity in group-specific behavior. Fidelity to the behavior pattern did not vary between dispersing females and philopatric males. Furthermore, group-specific tool selection remained similar over a period of 25 years. Additionally, we present a study case on how one newly immigrant female progressively behaved more similar to her new group, suggesting that the high level of similarity in behavior is actively adopted by group members possibly even when originally expressing the behavior in another form. Taken together, our data support a cultural transmission process in adult chimpanzees, which leads to persisting cultural behavior of one community over time. Am. J. Primatol. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
A central feature of human psychology is our pervasive tendency to divide the social world into “us” and “them”. We prefer to associate with those who are similar to us over those who are different, preferentially allocate resources to similar others, and hold more positive beliefs about similar others. Here we investigate the developmental origins of these biases, asking if preference for similar others occurs prior to language and extensive exposure to cultural norms. We demonstrate that, like adults, prelinguistic infants prefer those who share even trivial similarities with themselves, and these preferences appear to reflect a cognitive comparison process (“like me”/“not like me”). However, unlike adults, infants do not appear to prefer others with an utterly arbitrary similarity to themselves. Together, these findings suggest that the phenomena of ingroup bias, and enhanced interpersonal attraction toward those who resemble ourselves, may be rooted in an inherent preference for similarity to self, which itself may be enhanced during development by the influence of cultural values.
Observations were made in 10 preschools of interactions in 2 domains of social events: social conventional and moral. On the basis of criteria defining each domain, observed events could be reliably classified as social conventional or moral. As another aspect of the study, an interview was administered to children from the preschool who had witnessed the same events as the observer. The children's view of the events as social conventional or moral was in agreement with our classifications of the events in 83% of the cases. It was hypothesized that the responses of both children and adults to social conventional events differ from their responses to moral events. Observed behaviors were rated on a standard checklist of response categories. Different types of responses were elicited by the 2 types of events. Almost all responses to social conventional transgressions were initiated by adults. Children and adults responded with equal frequency to moral transgressions. Adults responded to social conventional transgressions differently from the ways they reacted to moral transgressions.
A model for the evolution of cooperation shows that two conditions are necessary for cooperation to be stable: a hunting success rate that is low for single hunters and increases with group size, and a social mechanism limiting access to meat by non-hunters. Testing this model on Taı̈ chimpanzees, Pan troglodytes, showed that (1) it pays for individuals to hunt in groups of three or four rather than alone or in pairs, and (2) cooperation is stable because hunters gain more at these group sizes than cheaters, owing to a meat-sharing pattern in which hunting, dominance and age, in that order, determine how much an individual gets. In addition, hunters provide cheaters (about 45% of the meat eaters) with the surplus they produce during the hunts. Thus, cooperation in Taı̈ male chimpanzees is an evolutionarily stable strategy, and its success allows cheating to be an evolutionarily stable strategy for Taı̈ female chimpanzees. In Gombe chimpanzees, cooperation is not stable, first, because hunting success is very high for single hunters, and second, because no social mechanism exists that limits access to meat by non-hunters. The analysis showed that some assumptions made when discussing cooperation in other social hunters might be wrong. This might downgrade our general perception of the importance of cooperation as an evolutionary cause of sociality.
Is the sense of fairness uniquely human? Human reactions to reward division are often studied by means of the ultimatum game, in which both partners need to agree on a distribution for both to receive rewards. Humans typically offer generous portions of the reward to their partner, a tendency our close primate relatives have thus far failed to show in experiments. Here we tested chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and human children on a modified ultimatum game. One individual chose between two tokens that, with their partner's cooperation, could be exchanged for rewards. One token offered equal rewards to both players, whereas the other token favored the chooser. Both apes and children responded like humans typically do. If their partner's cooperation was required, they split the rewards equally. However, with passive partners-a situation akin to the so-called dictator game-they preferred the selfish option. Thus, humans and chimpanzees show similar preferences regarding reward division, suggesting a long evolutionary history to the human sense of fairness.
Recent research has shown that infants are more likely to engage with in-group over out-group members. However, it is not known whether infants' learning is influenced by a model's group membership. This study investigated whether 14-month-olds (N = 66) selectively imitate and adopt the preferences of in-group versus out-group members. Infants watched an adult tell a story either in their native language (in-group) or a foreign language (out-group). The adult then demonstrated a novel action (imitation task) and chose 1 of 2 objects (preference task). Infants did not show selectivity in the preference task, but they imitated the in-group model more faithfully than the out-group model. This suggests that cultural learning is beginning to be truly cultural by 14 months of age.
Abstract— Passive versus active ontologies for modeling the nature of representation impose powerful constraints on the conceptual possibilities for the different versions of constructivism. The neoconstructivism outlined by N. S. Newcombe (2011) is convergent with an active, action-based approach to representation; however, it does not directly address the issue of representational emergence. If cognition is fundamentally emergent from (inter)action, then an emergent constructivist approach to development is necessary to fully transcend the limitations of the passive ontologies inherent to nativist and empiricist perspectives.
Researchers have reported a total of 31 infanticides in 4 different chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) populations. Though infanticide
is infrequent, low reproductive rates of females likely make it a strong selective pressure in the species. We report a new
incident of intragroup infanticide in Gombe National Park, Tanzania, in which a community male attacked a 3.5-yr-old male.
We then consider the infanticide in terms of adaptive and nonadaptive explanations for infanticide including the social pathology,
by-product of male aggression, nutritive benefits, resource competition, and sexual selection hypotheses. The incident reported
here is not well explained by any of them. While the infanticide is puzzling in terms of ultimate explanations for infanticide,
it provides a good context in which to consider proximate mechanisms for offspring recognition. The incident provides some
evidence that males may use their mating history with the mother to assess paternity likelihood.