Hostname: page-component-89b8bd64d-r6c6k Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-05-09T13:07:03.008Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Cultural technologies for peace may have shaped our social cognition

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2024

Amine Sijilmassi Open the ORCID record for Amine Sijilmassi [Opens in a new window] ,
Lou Safra  and
Nicolas Baumard
Amine Sijilmassi*
Affiliation:
Département d’études cognitives, Institut Jean Nicod, ENS, EHESS, PSL University, CNRS, Paris, France amine.sij@gmail.com lou.safra@sciencespo.fr https://sites.google.com/site/lousafra/home nbaumard@gmail.com https://nicolasbaumards.org/
Lou Safra
Affiliation:
Département d’études cognitives, Institut Jean Nicod, ENS, EHESS, PSL University, CNRS, Paris, France amine.sij@gmail.com lou.safra@sciencespo.fr https://sites.google.com/site/lousafra/home nbaumard@gmail.com https://nicolasbaumards.org/
Nicolas Baumard
Affiliation:
Département d’études cognitives, Institut Jean Nicod, ENS, EHESS, PSL University, CNRS, Paris, France amine.sij@gmail.com lou.safra@sciencespo.fr https://sites.google.com/site/lousafra/home nbaumard@gmail.com https://nicolasbaumards.org/
*
*Corresponding author.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Peace, the article shows, is achieved by culturally evolved institutions that incentivize positive-sum relationships. We propose that this insight has important consequences for the design of human social cognition. Cues that signal the existence of such institutions should play a prominent role in detecting group membership. We show how this accounts for previous findings and suggest avenues for future research.

Information

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 47 , 2024 , e28
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

Footnotes

†

These authors contributed equally.

References

Alvard, M. S. (2003). Kinship, lineage, and an evolutionary perspective on cooperative hunting groups in Indonesia. Human Nature, 14, 129–163.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bartoš, V., & Levely, I. (2021). Sanctioning and trustworthiness across ethnic groups: Experimental evidence from Afghanistan. Journal of Public Economics, 194, 104347. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpubeco.2020.104347CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Basyouni, R., & Parkinson, C. (2022). Mapping the social landscape: Tracking patterns of interpersonal relationships. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 26(3), 204–221.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bowles, S., & Gintis, H. (2004). Persistent parochialism: Trust and exclusion in ethnic networks. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 55(1), 1–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cassar, A., d'Adda, G., & Grosjean, P. (2014). Institutional quality, culture, and norms of cooperation: Evidence from behavioral field experiments. The Journal of Law and Economics, 57(3), 821–863. https://doi.org/10.1086/678331CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chalik, L., & Rhodes, M. (2014). Preschoolers use social allegiances to predict behavior. Journal of Cognition and Development, 15(1), 136–160.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fabbri, M. (2022). Institutional quality shapes cooperation with out-group strangers. Evolution and Human Behavior, 43(1), 53–70. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2021.11.003CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Habyarimana, J., Humphreys, M., Posner, D. N., & Weinstein, J. M. (2007). Why does ethnic diversity undermine public goods provision?. American Political Science Review, 101(4), 709–725.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hechter, M. (1987). Principles of group solidarity. University of California Press.Google Scholar
Hobsbawm, E., & Ranger, T. (1983). The invention of tradition. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Hruschka, D., Efferson, C., Jiang, T., Falletta-Cowden, A., Sigurdsson, S., McNamara, R., … Henrich, J. (2014). Impartial institutions, pathogen stress and the expanding social network. Human Nature, 25(4), 567–579. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-014-9217-0CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kinzler, K. D. (2021). Language as a social cue. Annual Review of Psychology, 72, 241–264.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kurzban, R., Tooby, J., & Cosmides, L. (2001). Can race be erased? Coalitional computation and social categorization. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 98(26), 15387–15392.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Liberman, Z., Kinzler, K. D., & Woodward, A. L. (2014). Friends or foes: Infants use shared evaluations to infer others’ social relationships. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143(3), 966.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Liberman, Z., Kinzler, K. D., & Woodward, A. L. (2021). Origins of homophily: Infants expect people with shared preferences to affiliate. Cognition, 212, 104695.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Liberman, Z., & Shaw, A. (2017). Children use partial resource sharing as a cue to friendship. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 159, 96–109.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Liberman, Z., & Shaw, A. (2018). Secret to friendship: Children make inferences about friendship based on secret sharing. Developmental Psychology, 54(11), 2139.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Liberman, Z., Woodward, A. L., & Kinzler, K. D. (2017). Preverbal infants infer third-party social relationships based on language. Cognitive Science, 41, 622–634.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lin, S. Y., & Packer, D. J. (2017). Dynamic tuning of evaluations: Implicit racial attitudes are sensitive to incentives for intergroup cooperation. Social Cognition, 35(3), 245–272.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Noyes, A., & Dunham, Y. (2017). Mutual intentions as a causal framework for social groups. Cognition, 162, 133–142.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Noyes, A., & Dunham, Y. (2020). Groups as institutions: The use of constitutive rules to attribute group membership. Cognition, 196, 104143.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing the commons: The evolution of institutions for collective action. Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pietraszewski, D., Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. (2014). The content of our cooperation, not the color of our skin: An alliance detection system regulates categorization by coalition and race, but not sex. PLoS ONE, 9(2), e88534.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pietraszewski, D., Curry, O. S., Petersen, M. B., Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. (2015). Constituents of political cognition: Race, party politics, and the alliance detection system. Cognition, 140, 24–39.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Spadaro, G., Gangl, K., Van Prooijen, J.-W., Van Lange, P. A. M., & Mosso, C. O. (2020). Enhancing feelings of security: How institutional trust promotes interpersonal trust. PLoS ONE, 15(9), e0237934. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0237934CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Van Bavel, J. J., & Packer, D. J. (2021). The power of us: Harnessing our shared identities to improve performance, increase cooperation, and promote social harmony. Little, Brown Spark.Google Scholar
Wiessner, P. (2019). Collective action for war and for peace: A case study among the Enga of Papua New Guinea. Current Anthropology, 60(2), 224–244.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wiessner, P. W., & Tumu, A. (1998). Historical vines: Enga networks of exchange, ritual, and warfare in Papua New Guinea. Smithsonian Institution Press.Google Scholar
Wilson, S., Bassiou, E., Denli, A., Dolan, L. C., & Watson, M. (2018). Traveling groups stick together: How collective directional movement influences social cohesion. Evolutionary Psychology, 16(3), 1474704918792134.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed