Wu Charley M, Dale Rick, Hawkins Robert D
Human and Machine Cognition Lab, University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany.
Department of Communication, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA.
Open Mind (Camb). 2024 Aug 31;8:1037-1057. doi: 10.1162/opmi_a_00155. eCollection 2024.
A large program of research has aimed to ground large-scale cultural phenomena in processes taking place within individual minds. For example, investigating whether individual agents equipped with the right social learning strategies can enable cumulative cultural evolution given long enough time horizons. However, this approach often omits the critical processes that mediate between individual agents and multi-generational societies. Here, we argue that interacting groups are a necessary and explanatory level of analysis, linking individual and collective intelligence through two characteristic feedback loops. In the first loop, more sophisticated individual-level social learning mechanisms based on Theory of Mind facilitate group-level complementarity, allowing distributed knowledge to be compositionally recombined in groups; these group-level innovations, in turn, ease the cognitive load on individuals. In the second loop, societal-level processes of cumulative culture provide groups with new cognitive technologies, including shared language and conceptual abstractions, which set in motion new group-level processes to further coordinate, recombine, and innovate. Taken together, these cycles establish group-level interaction as a of intelligence, catalyzing both individual cognition and cumulative culture.
一个大型研究项目旨在将大规模文化现象建立在个体思维内部发生的过程之上。例如，研究配备了正确社会学习策略的个体行为者，在足够长的时间跨度内是否能够推动文化的累积进化。然而，这种方法往往忽略了在个体行为者和多代社会之间起中介作用的关键过程。在此，我们认为互动群体是一个必要且具有解释力的分析层面，它通过两个特征性反馈回路将个体智能与集体智能联系起来。在第一个回路中，基于心理理论的更复杂的个体层面社会学习机制促进了群体层面的互补性，使分布式知识能够在群体中进行组合重组；反过来，这些群体层面的创新减轻了个体的认知负担。在第二个回路中，文化累积的社会层面过程为群体提供了新的认知技术，包括共享语言和概念抽象，这引发了新的群体层面过程，以进一步协调、重组和创新。总之，这些循环将群体层面的互动确立为一种智能形式，催化个体认知和文化累积。
