If you want to watch the webinar together with other Oslo-based participants, this will be possible in room GMH 452 at Blindern.
About the lecture:
Social norms permeate human life. Most of our activities can be characterised by rules about what is appropriate, allowed, required, or forbidden – rules that are crucial in making us hyper-cooperative animals.
I will present the current cognitive-evolutionary account of ‘norm psychology’, of the mental processes that enable normative behaviour, and propose an alternative that I believe is better supported by current evidence and better placed to promote interdisciplinary dialogue about norms.
The incumbent theory focusses on rules and claims that humans genetically inherit cognitive and motivational mechanisms specialised for processing these rules.
The cultural evolutionary alternative defines normativity in relation to behaviour – compliance, enforcement, and commentary – and suggests that it depends on implicit and explicit processes.
The implicit processes are genetically inherited and domain-general; rather than being specialised for normativity, they do many jobs in many species.
The explicit processes are culturally inherited and domain-specific; they are constructed from mentalising and reasoning by social interaction in childhood.
The cultural evolutionary, or ‘cognitive gadget’, account implies that researchers should not merely chart cultural and developmental variation in normativity, but test the extent to which that variation is due to nature (genetic factors), nurture (learning and social learning), and/or culture (cultural learning).
More broadly, the cultural evolutionary perspective suggests that people alive today – parents, peers, educators, elders, politicians, lawyers – have more responsibility for sustaining normativity than the nativist view implies.
Our actions don’t just shape and transmit the rules, they create in each new generation mental processes that can grasp the rules and put them into action.
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About Cecilia Heyes
Cecilia Heyes is Professor of psychology at Oxford University, and her work is focused on the evolution of the human mind.
Heyes is Senior Research Fellow in the Theoretical Life Sciences at All Souls College, University of Oxford. She is also full professor affiliated with the Department of Experimental Psychology.
She was awarded the British Psychological Society's Cognitive Section Prize in 2004, Fellowship of the British Academy in 2010, and Fellowship of the Cognitive Science Society in 2018.
Heyes was President of the Experimental Psychology Society in 2018 and 2019. She has published many influential articles on the evolution of the human mind and the book “Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking” with Harvard University Press in 2018.