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How do humans build and navigate their complex social world? Standard theoretical frameworks often attribute this success to a foundational capacity to analyze other people’s appearance and behavior to make inferences about their unobservable mental states. Here we argue that this picture is incomplete. Human behavior leaves traces in our physical environment that reveal our presence, our goals, and even our beliefs and knowledge. A new body of research shows that, from early in life, humans easily detect these traces—sometimes spontaneously—and readily extract social information from the physical world. From the features and placement of inanimate objects, people make inferences about past events and how people have shaped the physical world. This capacity develops early and helps explain how people have such a rich understanding of others: by drawing not only on how others act but also on the environments they have shaped. Overall, social cognition is crucial not only to our reasoning about people and actions but also to our everyday reasoning about the inanimate world.
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Knowledge sources, narratives, and living in social-ecological systems
Abstract Humans exist as part of social-ecological systems (SES) in which biological, physical, chemical, economic, political and other social processes are tightly interwoven. Global change within these systems presents an increasingly untenable situation for long-term human security. Further, knowledge that humans possess about ourselves and SES represents a complex amalgamation of individual and collective factors. Because of various evolutionary pressures, people often reject this complex reality in favor of more simplistic perceptions and explanations. This thought paper offers an overview of how and where people acquire knowledge and how that knowledge acquisition process reflects and influences narratives, which subsequently affect efforts to address challenges in SES. We highlight three narratives as examples of constraints on finding ways forward toward a more resilient future. Our focal narratives include tendencies to conflate tame and wicked problems; to posit a false human-nature duality; and to resist the explanatory evidence from biocultural evolution. We then discuss the human cognitive propensity to create narratives to think about how we might intentionally develop narratives that are more appropriate for living in coevolving SES.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2317874
- PAR ID:
- 10545829
- Publisher / Repository:
- Springer
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change
- Edition / Version:
- 1
- Volume:
- 29
- Issue:
- 6
- ISSN:
- 1381-2386
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 29-54
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- Knowledge Social-ecological systems Biocultural evolution · Wicked problems Narratives
- Format(s):
- Medium: X Size: 967 KB Other: pdf
- Size(s):
- 967 KB
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1007/s11027-024-10151-3
