Log inCooperation And Altruism In Apes And Children w/ Felix Warneken
Hi, everybody! Today, I bring you an interview with Dr. Felix Warneken. He is Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Michigan. He’s interested in Developmental Psychology; Culture; Cognition; and Comparative Animal Behavior. His research group addresses questions like how and why human social life involves complex interactions between individuals working together, and what cognitive skills allow them to do so. They do so by examining the earliest forms of cooperation in young children, untangling the processes shaping cooperation across development in different sociocultural contexts, and comparing human cooperation with that of our closest evolutionary relatives, the great Apes.
Hi, everybody! Today, I bring you an interview with Dr. Felix Warneken. He is Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Michigan. He’s interested in Developmental Psychology; Culture; Cognition; and Comparative Animal Behavior. His research group addresses questions like how and why human social life involves complex interactions between individuals working together, and what cognitive skills allow them to do so. They do so by examining the earliest forms of cooperation in young children, untangling the processes shaping cooperation across development in different sociocultural contexts, and comparing human cooperation with that of our closest evolutionary relatives, the great Apes.
In this episode, we talk about cooperation in the great Apes and human infants. First, we discuss the proper ways of talking about seemingly disparate behaviors, like cooperation, helping, and altruism. Then, we refer to how crucial it is for us to know how social cognition works in different species. We also address the problem of establishing a biological basis for behavior, and how to deal with sociocultural and behaviorist explanations, without disregarding environmental influences. We then talk about kin selection, reciprocal altruism, in-group favoritism, deception, and other mechanisms that operate in both humans and other close primates. Toward the end, we talk about what distinguishes humans from other primates at the level of social cognition.
https://youtu.be/JO_vKNHodVE
Link to podcast version (Anchor): https://bit.ly/2WjHh3q
