Abstract
Humans have a large number of capacities that allow them to make sense of other agents’ minds. I discuss these mentalizing capacities under the broader label social cognition and propose that social cognition is hierarchically organized, ranging from lower-order capacities (e.g., detecting agents and their goals) to higher-order capacities (e.g., self-awareness and mental state ascriptions). Capacities at the lower order develop earlier in life, evolved earlier in human history, and are processed faster. I introduce more than a dozen social-cognitive capacities, present evidence for their developmental, evolutionary, and processing order, and discuss several hierarchical relations among them. Moreover, I explore the hypothesis that full-blown mental state ascriptions (near the top of the developmental and evolutionary order) have likely seen an increase in use and significance after humans settled down about 12,000 years ago. I close with a few of the many questions left to be answered about human social cognition.
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Notes
- 1.
Despite the boundaries I drew around the capacities in Fig. 1, I do not assume that each of them has its own “circuit.” A capacity here is really the pattern of performance of certain functions under certain conditions, and currently we do not know how distinct the computations and neural substrates are for these functions. In fact, because I argue that many capacities build on each other, I expect a smaller number of divisible substrates that differentiate and recombine to enable interconnected performances.
- 2.
For the sake of a cultural history perspective, I express the reported background evidence as claims about the past, even when actual archeological evidence is often lacking and our knowledge stems from the study of present-time hunter-gatherer and sedentary societies.
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Malle, B.F. (2021). The Tree of Social Cognition: Hierarchically Organized Capacities of Mentalizing. In: Gilead, M., Ochsner, K.N. (eds) The Neural Basis of Mentalizing. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51890-5_17
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