Space
Despite the global universality of physical space, cultures vary substantially as to how space is coded in their language. Some for example do not use egocentric ‘left, right, front, back’ constructions to code spatial relations, instead using allocentric notions like ‘north, south, east, west’. While seeming unusual to us, utterances like “There is a scorpion by your northern foot!” are commonplace in other cultures. Whether not only spatial language, but also spatial cognition varies across cultures remains a highly contested question. We investigate whether spatial cognition differs between cultures with contrastive linguistic strategies to code spatial relations. We further investigate the ancient inherited biases for processing spatial information by comparing spatial cognition across all great ape species. The model for human spatial cognition that we propose has a rich, inherited primate basis, which may be masked by cultural specificities.
Persons involved: Daniel Haun
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Emotion
Emotional signals are crucial for sharing important information with others, for example to warn them of danger or to share enjoyment. We use many different signals to communicate to others how they feel, including facial expressions, vocalizations, and gesture. In our work, we address questions of whether these expressions are learned from cultural rules, or whether some emotional signals are biologically hard-wired. And in cases where culture plays a role, what features are important in shaping our emotions? We use a range of tools to investigate the roles of biological and cultural factors in emotional communication, including comparisons of perceptual and linguistic processes in different cultural groups, and studies of the ontogeny and phylogeny vocal emotional signals.
Persons involved: Disa Sauter, Daniel Haun
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Social Learning
Social learning is the acquisition of new information via observing others. This form of learning is essential to the transmission of cultural knowledge. We are investigating social learning in humans and the other great apes to identify differences and similarities in transmission biases across species. In particular we are interested in conformist transmission biases. Conformity serves a crucially important function in the transmission of human culture by promoting quick and stable in-group uniformity, which then stabilizes between-group cultural diversity over time.
Persons involved: Edwin van Leeuwen, Daniel Haun
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Cooperation & Fairness
Group-living apes, in particular humans, are highly social animals that participate in a variety of cooperative activities with other group members. We are interested in the motivations and the social cognition that underlie cooperation in great apes and humans. In particular, we investigate in which aspects cognition and motivations for collaboration and sharing might resemble and/or vary between different great ape species and different human cultural groups.
Persons involved: Emma Cohen, Daniel Haun, Katherine Cronin, Marie Schäfer, Yvonne Rekers
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Ontogeny of Group Mindedness
Humans organize social life within large-scale and complex systems of social groups. Defining oneself both as individual and as a belonging member to a group is an important feature of humans’ psychology. In inter-group contexts humans demonstrate a systematic tendency to favor and copy members of their own group (the in-group) over a different group (the out-group). Thus creating similarities in e.g. appearance or behavior among (in)group members, while at the same time, stabilizing contrast and distance towards out-groups. Often such social groups are large, including mainly complete strangers. Hence the aforementioned similarities can serve as markers (or tags) to identify strangers as in-group members. Such tags can appear in different forms including skin-color, languages and accents as well as flags, badges and hairstyles. We are interested in children's early perception and use of group tags.
Persons involved: Emma Cohen, Daniel Haun, Nadja Richter
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Roots of human social Interaction (ROSI)
Human social interaction is special in many ways. In collaboration with the ROSI research group funded by the Volkswagen Stiftung we focus on the evolution of uniquely human social cognition. Most apparent is humans’ ability to make inferences and predictions about others’ mental states. Humans can predict when others are or are not attentive, what others can and cannot see, what others have and have not seen, what others desire, believe and so forth. ROSI aims to isolate social cognitive skills that are unique to humans relative to the other great apes on one hand and to compare these skills across a selected set of diverse human cultural groups. By doing so we hope to make assumptions about both the phylogenetic as well as the cultural basis of human social cognition. For more information visit: www.eva.mpg.de/rosi/
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Social Bonding
Social bonds are fostered and maintained through a wide variety of activities in both humans and non-human primates. Bonding facilitates stable relationships and allows cooperation within groups to flourish via a range of mechanisms. One aim of our research is to characterize the range of social relationships that are present within and between chimpanzee social groups to measure the impact of those relationships on cooperative behaviours. Furthermore, our research experimentally manipulates two hypothesized bonding activities, mimicry and synchrony, to investigate their impact on helping behaviour in great apes and children, and the effects of synchronous activity on sharing behaviour in adult humans.
Persons involved: Emma Cohen, Daniel Haun, Katherine Cronin, Marie Schäfer, Yvonne Rekers
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