What Is Unique in Infant Thinking About Others? Infant Social Cognition from an Evolutionary Perspective

In search of the uniquely human in social cognition, this chapter compares empirical findings on social cognition in human infants with that of our closest genetic relatives – nonhuman great apes. In the main part of the chapter, I focus on the understanding of others’ mental states such as desires (in terms of preferences), goals, intentions, and beliefs. Grasping the content of others’ thoughts is one of the most powerful tools when it comes to predicting and explaining others’ behavior. Comparing human infants, individuals who are not yet able to produce language themselves, with great apes, that also require language-reduced tasks due to species differences in communication, seems a promising way to solve the puzzle of the phylogeny of social cognition. Due to enhanced abilities in both human and nonhuman primates, I argue that the main difference between human infants’ and great apes’ social cognition does not lie in their tracking or understanding of others’ mental states, but instead in their willingness to make use of this understanding when it comes to sharing psychological states with others. Thus, what is unique in human infants’ thinking about others might be a high degree of social motivation to put their minds together with those of the individuals around them