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15 Adaptive Specializations, Social Exchange, and the Evolution of Human Intelligence--Leda Cosmides, H. Clark Barrett, and John Tooby
Pages 293-318

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From page 293...
... According to critics, people's uncanny accuracy at detecting violations of social exchange rules does not reflect a cheater detection mechanism, but extends instead to all rules regulating when actions are permitted (deontic conditionals)
From page 294...
... Because they seem so self-evidently true, it can take centuries before these intuitive assumptions are questioned and, under the cumulative weight of evidence, discarded in favor of counterintuitive alternatives -- a spinning earth orbiting the sun, quantum mechanics, relativity. For psychology and the cognitive sciences, the intuitive view of human intelligence and rationality -- the blank-slate theory of the mind -- may be just such a case of an intuition-fueled failure to grapple with evidence (Gallistel, 1990; Tooby and Cosmides, 1992; Cosmides and Tooby, 2001; Pinker, 2002)
From page 295...
... in this view, human intelligence is more powerful than machine intelligence because it contains, alongside general-purpose inferential tools, a large and diverse array of adaptive specializations -- expert systems, equipped with proprietary problem-solving strategies that evolved to match the recurrent features of their corresponding problem domains.
From page 296...
... . By integrating results from evolutionary game theory with the ecology of huntergatherer life, we developed social contract theory: a task analysis specifying what computational properties a neurocognitive system would need to generate adaptive inferences and behavior in the social exchange problem domain (Cosmides and Tooby, 1989)
From page 297...
... Consequently, the existence of cheaters -- those who fail to deliver compensatory benefits -- threatens the evolution of exchange. Using evolutionary game theory, it has been shown that adaptations for social exchange can be favored and stably maintained by natural selection, but only if they include design features that enable them to detect cheaters, and cause them to channel future exchanges to reciprocators and away from cheaters (Trivers, 1971; Axelrod, 1984; Tooby and Cosmides, 1996)
From page 298...
... . Evolutionary Versus Economic and Other Functions A cheater is someone who has violated a social contract -- a conditional rule involving social exchange -- but not all violations of social contracts reveal the presence of a cheater.
From page 299...
... . This point is central to understanding the logic of the experiments reported here: if there is an evolved inference system specialized for reasoning about social exchange, then the cheater detection subroutine should be differentially activated by content cues signaling the potential for determining whether someone is a cheater.
From page 300...
... . engaging in social exchange therefore requires conditional reasoning.
From page 301...
... . Checkmarks indicate the correct card choices if one is looking for cheaters -- these should be chosen by a cheater detection subroutine, whether the exchange was expressed in a standard format (i.e., benefit to potential violator in antecedent clause)
From page 302...
... Although performance on the Wason selection task is typically poor, when the conditional rule involves social exchange and detecting a violation corresponds to looking for cheaters, 65–80% of subjects correctly detect violations (Cosmides, 1985, 1989; Gigerenzer and hug, 1992; Cosmides and Tooby, 2005, 2008)
From page 303...
... instead, they propose that reasoning about social exchange is governed by some version of deontic logic -- a formal system for reasoning about concepts such as permission and obligation. social contracts do involve deontic concepts, so this is a plausible proposal.
From page 304...
... empirically, permission schema theory is undermined or falsified if permission rules that are neither social contracts nor precautions routinely fail to elicit high levels of violation detection. Moreover, social contract theory is supported if social exchange rules (a subset of permission rules)
From page 305...
... . PERMISSION RULES WITHOUT BENEFITS The function of a social exchange for each participant is to gain access to a benefit that would otherwise be unavailable to them.
From page 306...
... lacking this key element, they are less likely to be interpreted as social contracts, and less likely to activate cheater detection. For this reason, social contract theory predicts that rules 2 and 3 will yield a significantly lower percentage of P & not-Q responses than rule 1.
From page 307...
... . This illustrates an important point: high levels of violation detection are typically found for social contracts and for precautionary rules, but not for permission rules that fall outside these categories.
From page 308...
... . Can it be pushed even lower by removing elements relevant to social exchange?
From page 309...
... We designed experiments 3 and 4 to clearly test whether intentional ity regulates violation detection in social exchanges and, if so, to pinpoint
From page 310...
... if the cheater detection mechanism is designed to check whether the potential violator has obtained the benefit specified in the rule, then we would see a drop in performance when the violator will not obtain that benefit -- even if his violation was intentional. Another possibility is that the cheater detec tion mechanism is not activated by innocent mistakes -- even when the rule violator gets the benefit regulated by the rule by making this mistake.
From page 311...
... , and performance on all three was significantly better than on two other permission rules tested that were not social contracts at all, one using rule 7 (10−6 < Ps < 0.047; si Text)
From page 312...
... 15.2. The results were remarkably clear: each factor -- benefit, intention, and ability -- contributed to violation detection, independently and additively (three-way AnovA, main effects: Benefit F1,342 = 7.30, P = 0.007, η = 0.14; Intention F1,342 = 10.22, P = 0.002, η = 0.17; Ability F1,342 = 4.87, P = 0.028, η = 0.12; no interactions)
From page 313...
... Why? if high performance on social contracts were due to the ability to do well on deontic rules, then subjects should routinely do well on problems where the deontic rules are neither
From page 314...
... This was true even for social contracts, which are deontic permission rules involving utilities: Performance was high when detecting violations would reveal cheaters, but low when it would not. Interpretation Theories Ruled Out Most theories attempting to explain the spike in violation detection for deontic rules focus on how the rule itself is interpreted.
From page 315...
... if this were true, then violation detection should suffer when people are asked to look for accidental violations of precautionary rules; like social contracts, these are deontic conditionals involving utilities. yet the accidentintention manipulation has no effect whatsoever on precautionary rules: people easily detect accidental violations of them (Fiddick, 2004)
From page 316...
... This provides three converging lines of evidence that the mechanism implicated is not designed to look for general rule violators, or deontic rule violators, or violators of social contracts, or even cases in which someone has been cheated; it does not deign to look for violators of social exchange rules in cases of mistake -- not even in cases when someone has accidentally benefited by violating a social contract. instead, this inspector Javert-like system is monomaniacally focused on looking for social contract rule violations when this is likely to lead to detecting cheaters -- defined as agents who obtain a rationed benefit while intentionally not meeting the requirement.
From page 317...
... To assess the benefits taken and requirements met in social exchanges, this system had to compute the interests of the parties involved -- inferring, for example, that processing one's own children's documents implies a potential to benefit through a kin relationship, though this is never explicitly stated. That the cheater detection system responds more strongly to intentional violations than to innocent mistakes implies that it monitors the intentions of the parties involved, suggesting recruitment of specialized inferential mechanisms known as "mindreading" or "theory of mind" (Baron-Cohen, 1995)
From page 318...
... When these predictions are empirically tested -- as here -- the results typically support the view that the human cognitive architecture contains special izations for adaptive problems our ancestors faced. in this case, we can show that the cheater detection system functions with pinpoint accuracy, remaining inactive not only on rules outside the domain of social exchange but also on social exchanges that show little promise of revealing a cheater.


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