CogSci Colloquium: Christopher Krupenye (Johns Hopkins)

The Social Minds of Humans and Other Apes

Abstract: The social world is extremely dynamic and awash with uncertainty. Yet, most of the time humans manage to navigate it fluidly. What sorts of cognitive representations do we generate to parse the social world, adeptly track social information, predict others’ behavior, and make strategic decisions? What is it about the way that humans do this, that makes us unique? Our closest relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos, provide a powerful opportunity to investigate how minds very similar to our own (and to our common evolutionary ancestors) represent and navigate the world—in the absence of patterning by human culture and language. Through comparisons between humans and other apes, I explore the foundational cognitive mechanisms, and underlying representations, that shape human social life. In doing so, I also spotlight those components that uniquely define our species. This approach helps elucidate the cognitive underpinnings and evolutionary origins of human sociality, ranging from politics to morality. At the same time, it bears on broader questions that unite the cognitive sciences, concerning the origins of knowledge and the functioning of the human mind.