The evolution of human cognition

Abstract

The evolution of human cognition presents a number of empirical puzzles. Why did humans evolve cognitive biases, behaviors that cause systematic errors in judgement? Why are humans the only animal species to cooperate in very large groups of non-kin? And what accounts for the consistent emergence of egalitarian social norms in evolutionarily relevant foragers and likely in most ancestral humans? In this dissertation, I present three evolutionary models of human cognition that set out to explain these and other puzzles from plausible first principles. An overarching theme of the three studies is that integrating the social component of ancestral human decision-making into traditional evolutionary models, which primarily focus on individual decision-making, may be essential for successfully explaining the various evolutionary puzzles posed by human cognition.