22 Aug
2017
22 Aug
'17
1:57 p.m.
The Department of Cognitive Science
cordially invites you
to the public defense of the PhD thesis
The naïve sociology of resource transfer
An investigation of the inferential links between sharing behaviors and relational models
in human infants
by
Denis Tatone
Primary supervisor: Gergely Csibra
Secondary supervisor: Dan Sperber
Members of the Dissertation Committee:
József Fiser, Chair, CEU
Valerie Kuhlmeier, external examiner, Queens University
Luca Surian, external examiner, University of Trento
abstract | The ubiquitous occurrence of active transfer (giving) in the domain of nonkin
interactions represents one of the most distinguishing features of the human sharing
complex, and a striking departure from the sharing behavior of non-human primates, where
giving occurs rarely and only in the presence of dependent offspring. The re-deployment of
giving outside of parental-care contexts, we surmise, reflects human-unique selective
pressures for the formation of cooperative partnerships to smooth the risks of
high-variance foraging via reciprocal sharing. The co-variation between giving and
reciprocally patterned relationships, we hypothesize, represented an evolutionarily
recurrent feature of our ancestral social ecology, which has been captured in the human
cognitive system in the form of an adaptive prior: an inbuilt propensity to infer from the
occurrence of a giving-based interactions the existence of an underlying relationship
regulated on reciprocal exchange. Borrowing from Fiske's (1992) Relational Models
Theory, we characterize such relationship as conforming to the equality-matching (EM)
model (i.e., a model governed by a directive standard of even balance). Building on these
premises, the present work seeks to experimentally investigate such sensitivity to giving
as cue of EM relationships in human infants. The dissertation is composed of five sets of
studies (excluding the Appendix), which addressed this hypothesis at different levels:
first, by assessing whether infants are capable of representing giving actions, and which
are the minimal input conditions for inducing such representation (Chapters III and IV);
second, by testing whether infants encode information functional for the bookkeeping of
welfare imbalances (a socially relevant aspect of EM relationships) selectively for
giving-based interactions (Chapters V and VI); and, third, by exploring whether infants
expect equal resource division specifically for allocation procedures involving active
distribution (Chapter VII). The findings produced by these studies convergently supported
the hypothesis that the observation of giving primes the representation of EM
relationships, additionally suggesting that superficially similar transferring actions
(i.e., unresisted taking) may elicit fundamentally different inferences about the
coordination rules adopted by the sharing partners. These results have two major
implications for the research on early social cognition. Firstly, they demonstrate that
infants are equipped with a rich conceptual repertoire of possession-related actions,
which they exploit to infer different rules for regulating benefit exchange over time.
Secondly, they suggest that, beyond the attribution of morally relevant dispositions and
the representation of cooperative/competitive coalitions, infants' naïve sociology
also encompasses the understanding and classification of social relationships on the basis
of different rules of long-term exchange and benefit distribution.
organized by the Department of Cognitive Science
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