Infants pick intelligent adults

From The Secret of Our Success by Joseph Henrich. How culture is driving evolution. Page 41.

In the last fifteen years, an important complementary line of evidence has become available as developmental psychologists have returned to focusing on cultural learning in children and infants. With new evolutionary thinking in the air, they have zoomed in on testing specific ideas about the who, when, and what of cultural learning. It’s now clear that infants and young children use cues of competence and reliability, along with familiarity, to figure out from whom to learn. In fact, by age one, infants use their own early cultural knowledge to figure out who tends to know things, and then use this performance information to focus their learning, attention, and memory.

Infants are well known to engage in what developmental psychologists call “social referencing.” When an infant, or young child, encounters something novel, say when crawling up to a chainsaw, they will often look at their mom, or some other adult in the room, to check for an emotional reaction. If the attending adult shows positive affect, they often proceed to investigate the novel object. If the adult shows fear or concern, they back off. This occurs even if the attending adult is a stranger. In one experiment, mothers brought one-year-olds to the laboratory at Seoul National University. The infants were allowed to play and get comfortable in the new environment, while mom received training for her role in the experiment. The researchers had selected three categories of toys, those to which infants typically react (1) positively, (2) negatively, and (3) with uncertain curiosity (an ambiguous toy). These different kinds of toys were each placed in front of the infants, one at a time, and the infant’s reactions were recorded. Mom and a female stranger sat on either side of the baby and were instructed to react either with smiling and excitement or with fear.

The results of this study are strikingly parallel to studies of cultural learning among both young children and university students. First, the babies engaged in social referencing, looking at one of the adults, four times more often, and more quickly, when an ambiguous toy was placed in front of them. That is, under uncertainty, they used cultural learning. This is precisely what an evolutionary approach predicts for when individuals should use cultural learning (see note 9). Second, when faced with an ambiguous toy, babies altered their behavior based on the adults’ emotional reactions: when they saw fear, they backed off, but when they saw happiness, they approached the toy and changed to regard it more positively. Third, infants tended to reference the stranger more than their moms, probably because mom herself was new to this environment and was thus judged less competent by her baby.

By 14 months, infants are already well beyond social referencing and already showing signs of using skill or competence cues to select models. After observing an adult model acting confused by shoes, placing them on his hands, German infants tended not to copy his unusual way of turning on a novel lighting device: using his head. However, if the model acted competently, confidently putting shoes on his feet, babies tended to copy the model and used their heads to activate the novel lighting device. Later, by age three, a substantial amount of work shows that children not only track and use competence in their immediate cultural learning but retain this information to selectively target their future learning in multiple domains. For example, young children will note who knows the “correct linguistic labels for common objects (like “ducks”), use this information for targeting their learning about both novel tools or words, and then remember this competence information for a week, using it to preferentially learn new things from the previously more competent model.

O Captain! My Captain! by Walt Whitman

Click to enlarge.

O Captain! My Captain!
by Walt Whitman

O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won,
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills,
For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding,
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
Here Captain! dear father!
This arm beneath your head!
It is some dream that on the deck,
You’ve fallen cold and dead.

My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still,
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will,
The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done,
From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won;
Exult O shores, and ring O bells!
But I with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

Autumnal Journey by Rose Datoc Dall

Autumnal Journey by Rose Datoc Dall

Click to enlarge.

Our species has more forms of social organization than the rest of the primate order combined

From The Secret of Our Success by Joseph Henrich. How culture is driving evolution. Page 10.

Other species have also spread widely and achieved immense ecological success; however, this success has generally occurred by speciation, as natural selection has adapted and specialized organisms to survive in different environments. Ants, for example, capture an equivalent biomass to modern humans, making them the most dominant of terrestrial invertebrates. To accomplish this, ant lineages have split, genetically adapted, and specialized into more than 14,000 different species with vast and complicated sets of genetic adaptations.5 Meanwhile, humans remain a single species and show relatively little genetic variation, especially when the diverse range of environments we inhabit is considered. We have, for example, much less genetic variation than chimpanzees and show no signs of splitting into subspecies. By contrast, chimpanzees remain confined to a narrow band of tropical African forest and have already diverged into three distinct subspecies. As will become clear in chapter 3, the manner in which we adapt to diverse environments, and why we thrive in so many different ecologies, does not arise from an array of environment-specific genetic adaptations, as with most species.

If not a dizzying array of genetic adaptations, what is the secret of our species’ success? Most would agree that it traces, at least in part, to our ability to manufacture locally appropriate tools, weapons, and shelters, as well as to control fire and harness diverse food sources, like honey, game, fruit, roots, and nuts. Many researchers also point to our cooperative abilities and diverse forms of social organization. Human hunter-gatherers all cooperate intensively within families and to some degree on larger scales ranging from a few families, called bands, to tribes of thousands. These forms of social organization vary on a bewildering array of dimensions, with differing dimensions, with differing rules for group membership/identity (e.g., tribal groups), marriage (e.g., cousin marriage, see chapter 9), exchange, sharing, ownership, and residence. Just considering hunter-gatherers, our species has more forms of social organization than the rest of the primate order combined.

Here there be bears

Something to keep in mind when next doing some urban planning.

Click to enlarge.

A large beauty premium exists when the job entails personal interaction

Among the elements of success, beyond simple raw IQ, are Knowledge, Experience, Skills, Values, Behaviors, Motivation, Capability, and Character. I have long suspected that appearances, beauty or handsomeness, were in there somewhere but that 1) it depended on the particular job and 2) that it was a somewhat two-edged sword and that there are plenty of situations in which unusually good looks can be a detriment.

This is interesting research towards the first supposition.

From Beauty, Job Tasks, and Wages: A New Conclusion about Employer Taste-Based Discrimination by Todd R. Stinebrickner, Ralph Stinebrickner, and Paul J. Sullivan. From the Abstract.
My emphasis:

We use novel data from the Berea Panel Study to reexamine the labor market mechanisms generating the beauty wage premium. We find that the beauty premium varies widely across jobs with different task requirements. Specifically, in jobs where existing research such as Hamermesh and Biddle (1994) has posited that attractiveness is plausibly a productivity enhancing attribute—those that require substantial amounts of interpersonal interaction—a large beauty premium exists. In contrast, in jobs where attractiveness seems unlikely to truly enhance productivity—jobs that require working with information and data—there is no beauty premium. This stark variation in the beauty premium across jobs is inconsistent with the employer-based discrimination explanation for the beauty premium, because this theory predicts that all jobs will favor attractive workers. Our approach is made possible by unique longitudinal task data, which was collected to address the concern that measurement error in variables describing the importance of interpersonal tasks would tend to bias results towards finding a primary role for employer taste-based discrimination. As such, it is perhaps not surprising that our conclusions about the importance of employer taste-based discrimination are in stark contrast to all previous research that has utilized a similar conceptual approach.

My Heart Leaps Up by William Wordsworth

Click to enlarge.

My Heart Leaps Up
by William Wordsworth

My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.

Culture makes us smart

From The Secret of Our Success by Joseph Henrich. How culture is driving evolution. Page 6.

Of course, all these products of cultural evolution, from words to tools, do indeed make us individually smarter, or at least mentally better equipped to thrive in our current environments (so, “smarter”). You, for example, probably received a massive cultural download while growing up that included a convenient base-10 counting system, handy Arabic numerals for easy representation, a vocabulary of at least 60,000 words (if you are a native English speaker), and working examples of the concepts surrounding pulleys, springs, screws, bows, wheels, levers, and adhesives. Culture also provides heuristics, sophisticated cognitive skills like reading, and mental prostheses like the abacus that have evolved culturally to both fit, and to some degree, modify our brains and biology. However, as you’ll see, we don’t have these tools, concepts, skills, and heuristics because our species is smart; we are smart because we have culturally evolved a vast repertoire of tools, concepts, skills, and heuristics. Culture makes us smart.

With one more heave, the day sends us a generous orb

Stanza III of Three Valentines to the Wide World by Mona Van Duyn.

III

Your yen two wol slee me sodenly;
I may the beautee of hem not sustene.
-Merciles Beaute

When, in the middle of my life, the earth stalks me
with sticks and stones, I fear its merciless beauty.
This morning a bird woke me with a four-note outcry,
and cried out eighteen times. With the shades down, sleepy
as I was, I recognized his agony.
It resembles ours. With one more heave, the day
sends us a generous orb and lets us
see all sights lost when we lie down finally.

And if, in the middle of her life, some beauty falls on
a girl, who turns under its swarm to astonished woman,
then, into that miraculous buzzing, stung
in the lips and eyes without mercy, strangers may run.
An untended power--I pity her and them.
It is late, late; haste! says the falling moon,
as blinded they stand and smart till the fever's done
and blindly she moves, wearing her furious weapon.

Beauty is merciless and intemperate.
Who, turning this way and that, by day, by night,
still stands in the heart-felt storm of its benefit,
will plead in vain for mercy, or cry, "Put out
the lovely eyes of the world, whose rise and set
move us to death!" And never will temper it,
but against that rage slowly may learn to pit
love and art, which are compassionate.

Summer Landscape, 1900 by Johan Krouthén

Summer Landscape, 1900 by Johan Krouthén (1858–1932).

Click to enlarge.