ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2022
Shared intentionality, reason-giving and the evolution of human culture.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers.
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Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed, 74 citations in OpenAlex.
- Environmental variability shapes the representational format of cultural learning.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- The technical-reasoning network is recruited when people observe others make or teach how to make tools: An fMRI study.iScience · 2025Article
- Music as a social instrument: a brief historical and conceptual perspective.Frontiers in cognition · 2025Review
- Reinforcement learning of altruistic punishment differs between cultures and across the lifespan.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- Socially adaptive cognitive architecture for human-robot collaboration in industrial settings.Frontiers in robotics and AI · 2024Article
- Adaptive Circadian Rhythms for Autonomous and Biologically Inspired Robot Behavior.Biomimetics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Modeling intentionality in the human brain.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2023Article
- The experimental emergence of convention in a non-human primate.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Social learning in swarm robotics.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- The origins of human cumulative culture: from the foraging niche to collective intelligence.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- The emergence of collective knowledge and cumulative culture in animals, humans and machines.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Human cumulative culture and the exploitation of natural phenomena.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Paradox of diversity in the collective brain.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Collective minds: social network topology shapes collective cognition.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Review
- Developing fluency in a language of tactile communication.Frontiers in rehabilitation sciences · 2022Review
- Analysis of the cognitive processes involved in creating and sustaining cooperative group activity.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 1 institution in 5 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The biological approach to culture focuses almost exclusively on processes of social learning, to the neglect of processes of cultural coordination including joint action and shared intentionality. In this paper, we argue that the distinctive features of human culture derive from humans' unique skills and motivations for coordinating with one another around different types of action and information. As different levels of these skills of 'shared intentionality' emerged over the last several hundred thousand years, human culture became characterized first by such things as collaborative activities and pedagogy based on cooperative communication, and then by such things as collaborative innovations and normatively structured pedagogy. As a kind of capstone of this trajectory, humans began to coordinate not just on joint actions and shared beliefs, but on the reasons for what we believe or how we act. Coordinating on reasons powered the kinds of extremely rapid innovation and stable cumulative cultural evolution especially characteristic of the human species in the last several tens of thousands of years. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue 'The emergence of collective knowledge and cumulative culture in animals, humans and machines'.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.