Читать книгу The Wiley-Blackwell Handbook of Childhood Social Development - Группа авторов - Страница 76

While there has been much debate over the influence of parents on the development of social behavior in children, one area where they clearly play an important role, is the development of the ability to see others as intentional agents. Children come to understand that others have thoughts, beliefs, and desires and that they may differ from one’s own thoughts. This developing of a theory of mind (TOM; Call & Tomasello, 2008) is an important component of an area that has received much attention during the 21st century–social cognition.

American comparative linguist Michael Tomasello has made a study of the development of social cognition in both humans and apes. By comparing the abilities and proclivities of human infants and their primate relatives Tomasello has been able to bring an evolutionary perspective to bear on the development of social cooperation and moral behavior. Based on a series of tasks that allowed him and his team to study the social behavior of humans and apes, Tomasello proposed that social cognition is the main feature of human development that sets us apart from our simian relatives. More specifically, Tomasello has proposed that human children develop two important features of social cognition. These are sharing attention (both attending to the same stimulus) and sharing intention (understanding the intention of the other party in order to cooperate). Tomasello found that while human children develop the ability to share both attention and intention, apes do not develop these forms of group‐minded social cognition.

Although young infants are socially oriented, it is not until they are around a year old that they actively engage in shared attention (Myers & Bjorklund, 2020; Tomasello, 2009). At this age they begin to direct an adult’s direction to an object in order that they might share attention and begin to use adult facial expressions to help understand others’ actions. This gaze following sets the stage for shared attention and hence social learning (Myers & Bjorklund, 2020). While apes such as chimpanzees are poor at imitation (despite the common term to “ape” another’s actions), from the age of three on toddlers begin to copy the actions of adults and older children as a form of social learning.

Arguably more importantly, from this age on they begin to understand the concept of sharing and “fair‐play.” In one fascinating study, pairs of children and pairs of chimpanzees were both given the task of retrieving a reward by cooperating (each pair had to pull a separate rope to retrieve the prize such as food or marbles). Both chimpanzees and children were able to do this. The difference emerged when the prize was asymmetrically divided, that is, one of each pair gained more than the other (despite putting in equal effort). While apes were reluctant to share their uneven spoils, the children immediately balanced up the rewards equitably as the one with the greater share gave their excess to the other (Tomasello, 2019, see also Hamann et al. 2011; Warneken et al., 2011). Astonishingly, the children in this study were only around 3 years of age, suggesting that, while collaboration occurs in both apes and humans from an early age (the chimpanzees were young of various ages) equitable sharing begins very early on in human social development (but plays little or no role in chimpanzee collaborations). As Grueniesen and Wyman (2020) noted, when chimpanzees are observed hunting collectively in the wild, they behave as a group of individuals working together, rather than a group with a shared intention. Perhaps chimpanzees only understand “I,” while children understand the collective “we.”

To Tomasello it was this development of equitable sharing that gave human groups a major advantage over other primates during hominin evolution. Tomasello proposes a two‐phase model for the evolution of human social development. First, around two million YBP, due to living on an increasingly dry savannah, members of the new genus Homo became obligate foragers/scavengers. That is, according to Tomasello, prior to the development of greater cooperation, foraging and scavenging were the only options available. This increased pressure for collaborative hunting and gathering and these selective pressures led to improved collaboration. Chimpanzees today also collaborate when hunting. However, in a second phase around 200,000 YBP, competition between groups led to greater in‐group collaboration and the evolution of the concept of equitable sharing (at least within a group). This is where humans part company with the great apes. In order to collaborate equitably, the ancestors of Homo sapiens would have evolved to share attention and intention, hence this highly integrated group behavior had a knock‐on effect on the development (at an early age) of aspects of social cognition. Clearly, as with all conceptions of human evolution, there has to be an element of speculation about this model. The fact that forager societies appear to develop similar patterns of social cognition and cooperation would lend support to Tomasello’s view that the roots of social morality are ancient. In fact, there is a large body of literature on the evolution of morality and cooperation which argues cooperation was a major feature in our social evolution (for example Curry, 2016).