What Makes Us Smart?

Abstract

How did humans become clever enough to live in nearly every major ecosystem on earth, create vaccines against deadly plagues, explore the oceans depths, and routinely traverse the globe at 30,000 feet in aluminum tubes while nibbling on roasted almonds? Drawing on recent developments in our understanding of human evolution, we consider what makes us distinctively smarter than other animals. Contrary to conventional wisdom, human brilliance emerges not from our innate brainpower or raw computational capacities, but from the sharing of information in communities and networks over generations. We review how larger, more diverse, and more optimally interconnected networks of minds give rise to faster innovation and how the cognitive products of this cumulative cultural evolutionary process feedback to make us individually “smarter”—in the sense of being better at meeting the challenges and problems posed by our societies and socioecologies. Here, we consider not only how cultural evolution supplies us with “thinking tools” (like counting systems and fractions) but also how it has shaped our ontologies (e.g., do germs and witches exist?) and epistemologies, including our notions of what constitutes a “good reason” or “good evidence” (e.g., are dreams a source of evidence?). Building on this, we consider how cultural evolution has organized and distributed cultural knowledge and cognitive tasks among subpopulations, effectively shifting both thinking and production to the level of the community, population, or network, resulting in collective information processing and group decisions. Cultural evolution can turn mindless mobs into wise crowds by facilitating and constraining cognition through a wide variety of epistemic institutions—political, legal, and scientific. These institutions process information and aid better decision‐making by suppressing or encouraging the use of different cultural epistemologies and ontologies.

Radical Collective Intelligence and the Reimagining of Cognitive Science

“…Many dark sides of the shift are well documented and have garnered considerable alarm in the research community. Henrich and Muthukrishna (2024) observe that more interconnectedness is not always better-excessive connectivity hinders cultural innovation because suboptimal ideas may receive enough attention to outperform optimal but underdeveloped ideas. They pointedly note that electric cars were invented at the dawn of automotive engineering but were quickly displaced by Ford's combustion engines.…”

“…To the extent we can account for behavior that seems intelligent in terms of culturally acquired concepts, we do not need to appeal to individual characteristics. Henrich and Muthukrishna (2024) show how cultural evolution has accelerated humans' ability to process information effectively. One of their critical points concerns multiple discovery, the phenomenon of major knowledge breakthroughs being achieved by multiple parties working independently (e.g., calculus).…”

Socio-cultural brain reprogramming–The uniqueness of human cognition

“…This has facilitated the accumulation, transmission, and modification of knowledge, skills, and technological innovations not just in face-to-face interactions but also across generations. Consequently, human creations are no longer solely the product of individual brains but rather of a collective intelligence (Henrich, 2015 ; Muthukrishna and Henrich, 2016 ; Henrich and Muthukrishna, 2023 ; Henrich et al, 2023 ).…”

What Doesn’t Kill Us: Harsh Ecologies Beget Difficulty-as-Improvement Norms

“…Societies differ in which practices connect with these propensities. At the third level (culture-based expertise), once a society has a solution to each of these survival pressures, it is likely to be sticky both because it is a solution (hence better than no solution) and also because expertise in a set of social practices takes on a normativeness as the right or appropriate way to be in a society ("our" way 1,14 ).…”