Cover not available
Part of
How the Brain Got Language – Towards a New Road Map
Edited by Michael A. Arbib
[Benjamins Current Topics 112] 2020
► pp. 151–166

Social manipulation, turn-taking and cooperation in apes

Implications for the evolution of language-based interaction in humans

| University of California, San Diego
This paper outlines how the focus on how communicative signals might emerge and how the capacity to interpret them might develop, does not yet explain what type of motivation is required to actually deal with those signals. Without the consistent production of appropriate responses to the production of communicative signals, there would be no point in producing any signal. If language is a tool to accomplish things with others, we need to understand what would lead to cooperation. The first step consists in avoiding the blind belief that all cooperation requires some prosocial attitude. A great deal of cooperation can occur while each participant in the interaction is selfishly attempting to maximize their own benefits or minimizing damaging consequences.
I describe how different types of turn-taking can be achieved via different levels of cognitive complexity and how interpretive turn-taking requires a great deal of cognitive abilities that great apes possess. Finally, I provide empirical evidence of social manipulation in non-human primates. Given our awareness of the occurrence of social manipulation during cooperation among human adults, it seems necessary to reconsider to what degree human communication and language evolution require unique prosocial motivations.
Keywords: communication, cooperation, language evolution, prosociality, social interaction, social manipulation
Article outline
  • Cooperation and human communication
  • Animal communication, manipulation vs. information
  • Social manipulation, mind-reading, ontogenetic ritualization
  • Towards a new road map
  • References
Published online: 11 August 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/bct.112.11ros
References (59)
References
Amici, F., Aureli, F., Mundry, R., Amaro, A. S., Barroso, A. M., Ferretti, J., Call, J. (2014a). Calculated reciprocity? A comparative test with six primate species. Primates 55, 447–457. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Arbib, M. A., Ganesh, V. & Gasser, B. (2014). Dyadic Brain Modeling, Ontogenetic Ritualization of Gesture in Apes, and the Contributions of Primate Mirror Neuron Systems. Phil Trans Roy Soc B, 369 (1644), 20130414. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Blakemore, S. -J. (2012). Development of the social brain in adolescence. Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 105(3), 111–116. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bruner, J. S. (1975). The ontogenesis of speech acts. Journal of child language, 2(1), 1–19. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Burkart, J. M., Hrdy, S. B., & Van Schaik, C. P. (2009). Cooperative breeding and human cognitive evolution. Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews, 18(5), 175–186. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Burnham, T. C., & Johnson, D. D. (2005). The biological and evolutionary logic of human cooperation. Analyse & Kritik, 27(1), 113–135. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Byrne, R. W., Cartmill, E., Genty, E., Graham, K. E., Hobaiter, C., & Tanner, J. (2017). Great ape gestures: intentional communication with a rich set of innate signals. Animal Cognition, 1–15.Google Scholar
Caselli, M. C., Rinaldi, P., Stefanini, S., & Volterra, V. (2012). Early action and gesture “vocabulary” and its relation with word comprehension and production. Child development, 83(2), 526–542. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chow, C. P., Mitchell, J. F., & Miller, C. T. (2015). Vocal turn-taking in a non-human primate is learned during ontogeny. In Proc. R. Soc. B (Vol. 282, No. 1807, p. 20150069). The Royal Society.Google Scholar
Christiansen, M. H., & Chater, N. (2016). The Now-or-Never bottleneck: A fundamental constraint on language. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 39. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dawkins, R., & Krebs, J. R. (1978). Animal signals: information or manipulation. Behavioural ecology: An evolutionary approach, 2, 282–309.Google Scholar
Garrod, S., & Pickering, M. J. (2004). Why is conversation so easy?. Trends in cognitive sciences, 8(1), 8–11. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Grice, H. P. (1975). Logic and Conversation. In P. Cole & J. L. Morgan (Eds.), Syntax and semantics. Volume 3: Speech Acts (pp. 225–242). New York: Seminar Press.Google Scholar
Halina, M., Rossano, F., & Tomasello, M. (2013). The ontogenetic ritualization of bonobo gestures. Animal cognition, 16(4), 653–666. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hare, B., Call, J., Agnetta, B., & Tomasello, M. (2000). Chimpanzees know what conspecifics do and do not see. Animal Behaviour, 59(4), 771–785. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hare, B., Call, J., & Tomasello, M. (2001). Do chimpanzees know what conspecifics know?. Animal behaviour, 61(1), 139–151. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Haun, D., & Over, H. (2015). Like me: a homophily-based account of human culture. In Epistemological dimensions of evolutionary psychology (pp. 117–130). Springer New York.Google Scholar
Henry, L., Craig, A. J., Lemasson, A., & Hausberger, M. (2015). Social coordination in animal vocal interactions. Is there any evidence of turn-taking? The starling as an animal model. Frontiers in psychology, 6, 1416.Google Scholar
Heritage, J. (1984). Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology. Cambridge: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Hobaiter, C., & Byrne, R. W. (2011). Serial gesturing by wild chimpanzees: its nature and function for communication. Animal cognition, 14(6), 827–838. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hrdy, S. B. (2011). Mothers and others. Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Huxley, J. (1966). The ritualization of Behaviour in animals and man. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society Vol. 251, 772, 249–269. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kinzler, K. D., Dupoux, E., and Spelke, E. S. (2007). The native language of social cognition. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 104, 12577–80. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Krebs, J. R. & Dawkins, R. (1984). Animal signals: mindreading and manipulation. In J. R. Krebs, N. B. Davies (Eds.), Behavioural Ecology: an Evolutionary Approach (2nd edn), Blackwell Scientific Publications, Oxford (1984), pp. 380–402.Google Scholar
Krupenye, C., Kano, F., Hirata, S., Call, J., & Tomasello, M. (2016). Great apes anticipate that other individuals will act according to false beliefs. Science, 354(6308), 110–114. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Levinson, S. C. (2013). Action Formation and Ascription. In J. Sidnell & T. Stivers (Eds.), Handbook of conversation analysis (pp.103–130). Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.Google Scholar
(2016). Turn-taking in human communication–origins and implications for language processing. Trends in cognitive sciences, 20(1), 6–14. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Liebal, K., & Rossano, F. (2017). The give and take of food sharing in Sumatran orang-utans, Pongo abelii, and chimpanzees, Pan troglodytes. Animal Behaviour, 133, 91–100. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mascaro, O., & Sperber, D. (2009). The moral, epistemic, and mindreading components of children’s vigilance towards deception. Cognition, 112(3), 367–380. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Nielsen, M., & Blank, C. (2011). Imitation in young children: when who gets copied is more important than what gets copied. Developmental psychology, 47(4), 1050. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Over, H., & Carpenter, M. (2012). Putting the social into social learning: explaining both selectivity and fidelity in children’s copying behavior. Journal of Comparative Psychology, 126(2), 182. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Owren, M. J., Rendall, D., & Ryan, M. J. (2010). Redefining animal signaling: influence versus information in communication. Biology & Philosophy, 25(5), 755–780. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Premack, D., & Woodruff, G. (1978). Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind? The Behavioural and Brain Sciences, 1, 515–526. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Richerson, P. J., & Boyd, R. (2005). Not by genes alone. University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Rossano, F. (2013). Sequence organization and timing of bonobo mother-infant interactions. Interaction studies, 14(2), 160–189. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2019). The structure and timing of human versus primate social interaction. In Hagoort, P. (ed.) Human Language: from Genes and Brains to Behavior. MIT Press, 201–219.Google Scholar
Rossano, F., & Liebal, K. (2014). Requests’ and ‘offers’ in orangutans and human infants. Requesting in social interaction, 333–362.Google Scholar
Sacks, H. (1992). Lectures on Conversation: Volume II. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Sacks, H., Schegloff, E. A., & Jefferson, G. (1974). A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turn-Taking for Conversation. Language, 50, 696–735. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schegloff, E. A. (1992). Repair after next turn: the last structurally provided for place for the defense of intersubjectivity in conversation. American Journal of Sociology, 95(5), 1295–1345. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2007). Sequence Organization in Interaction: a Primer in Conversation Analysis. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Seyfarth, R. M., & Cheney, D. L. (2003). Signalers and receivers in animal communication. Annual review of psychology, 54(1), 145–173. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Seyfarth, R. M., Cheney, D. L., & Marler, P. (1980). Vervet monkey alarm calls: semantic communication in a free-ranging primate. Animal Behaviour, 28(4), 1070–1094. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Shannon, C. E., & Weaver, W. (1949). The mathematical theory of communication. Urbana, Ill. Univ. Illinois Press, 1, 17.Google Scholar
Silk, J. B., Brosnan, S. F., Henrich, J., Lambeth, S. P., & Shapiro, S. (2013). Chimpanzees share food for many reasons: the role of kinship, reciprocity, social bonds and harassment on food transfers. Animal behaviour, 85(5), 941–947. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Smith, W. J. (1977). The behavior of communicating. Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Spranger, M., & Steels, L. (2014, October). Discovering communication through ontogenetic ritualisation. In Development and Learning and Epigenetic Robotics (ICDL-Epirob), 2014 Joint IEEE International Conferences on (pp. 14–19). IEEE.Google Scholar
Stivers, T., Enfield, N. J., Brown, P., Englert, C., Hayashi, M., Heinemann, T., et al. (2009). Universals and cultural variation in turn-taking in conversation. PNAS, 106(26), 10587–10592. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tinbergen, N. (1952). “Derived” activities; their causation, biological significance, origin, and emancipation during evolution. The Quarterly review of biology, 27(1), 1–32. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tomasello, M. (2009). Why we cooperate. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tomasello, M., Call, J., Nagell, K., Olguin, R., & Carpenter, M. (1994). The learning and use of gestural signals by young chimpanzees: A trans-generational study. Primates, 35(2), 137–154. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tomasello, M., Carpenter, M., Call, J., Behne, T., & Moll, H. (2005). Understanding and sharing intentions: The origins of cultural cognition. Behavioral and brain sciences, 28(5), 673–727. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tomasello, M., Melis, A. P., Tennie, C., Wyman, E., Herrmann, E., Gilby, I. C. & Melis, A. (2012). Two key steps in the evolution of human cooperation: the interdependence hypothesis. Current anthropology, 53(6). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Trivers, R. L. (1971). The evolution of reciprocal altruism. The Quarterly review of biology, 46(1), 35–57. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Uetz, G. W., Roberts, J. A., & Taylor, P. W. (2009). Multimodal communication and mate choice in wolf spiders: female response to multimodal versus unimodal signals. Animal Behaviour, 78(2), 299–305. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Völter, C. J., Rossano, F., & Call, J. (2015). From exploitation to cooperation: social tool use in orang- utan mother–offspring dyads. Animal Behaviour, 100, 126–134. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2016). Social manipulation in nonhuman primates: Cognitive and motivational determinants. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews.Google Scholar
Wiener, N. (1948). Cybernetics: Control and communication in the animal and the machine (p. 194). New York: Wiley.Google Scholar
Wilson, M. L., Boesch, C., Fruth, B., Furuichi, T., Gilby, I. C., Hashimoto, C., Hobaiter, C. L., Hohmann, G., Itoh, N., Koops, K., et al. (2014). Lethal aggression in Pan is better explained by adaptive strategies than human impacts. Nature 513, 414–417. DOI logoGoogle Scholar