Shared intentions and the advance of cumulative culture in hunter-gatherers

TL;DR

This paper models the evolution of shared intentions in humans, showing it likely emerged during periods of rapid environmental change when the benefits of collaboration were high, explaining the development of cumulative culture.

Contribution

It provides a formal model demonstrating the conditions under which shared intentionality evolved in hunter-gatherers, linking environmental change to collaborative behavior development.

Findings

Shared intentionality evolves during high-benefit environmental changes.

Low benefits do not favor the evolution of shared intentions.

Shared intentions become dominant in populations under certain conditions.

Abstract

It has been hypothesized that the evolution of modern human cognition was catalyzed by the development of jointly intentional modes of behaviour. From an early age (1-2 years), human infants outperform apes at tasks that involve collaborative activity. Specifically, human infants excel at joint action motivated by reasoning of the form "we will do X" (shared intentions), as opposed to reasoning of the form "I will do X [because he is doing X]" (individual intentions). The mechanism behind the evolution of shared intentionality is unknown. Here we formally model the evolution of jointly intentional action and show under what conditions it is likely to have emerged in humans. Modelling the interaction of hunter-gatherers as a coordination game, we find that when the benefits from adopting new technologies or norms are low but positive, the sharing of intentions does not evolve, despite being a mutualistic behaviour that directly benefits all participants. When the benefits from adopting new technologies or norms are high, such as may be the case during a period of rapid environmental change, shared intentionality evolves and rapidly becomes dominant in the population. Our results shed new light on the evolution of collaborative behaviours.