I’m going to talk about some new findings in my field, comparative cognition. I’m interested in what makes humans unique. There are findings that I think are fantastically cool, in that they might be redefining how we think about human nature, but first they’re going to pose for us some really interesting new problems.

I’m doing this, in part, because I think already having redefined human nature in the last couple of years is sort of a tall order, and that scared me, but also because I think that open questions about human nature can actually be more fun and I couldn’t help but use this audience to kind of get some feedback on this stuff.

The findings in comparative cognition I’m going to talk about are often different than the ones you hear comparative cognitive researchers typically talking about. Usually when somebody up here is talking about how animals are redefining human nature, it’s cases where we’re seeing animals being really similar to humans—elephants who do mirror self-recognition; rodents who have empathy; capuchin monkeys who obey prospect theory—all these cases where we see animals doing something really similar.

Laurie Santos is Associate Professor, Department of Psychology; Director, Comparative Cognition Laboratory, Yale University.

Read original article


Tags: comparative cognition, human nature