一项大型研究计划旨在将大规模的文化现象植根于个人头脑中发生的过程中。例如,调查配备了正确的社会学习策略的个体代理人是否可以在足够长的时间范围内实现累积的文化演变。然而,这种方法通常忽略了在个体代理人和多代社会之间进行调解的关键群体级别的过程。这里,我们认为互动群体是一种必要和解释的分析水平,通过两个特征性的反馈循环将个人和集体智慧联系起来。在第一个循环中,基于心理理论的更复杂的个人层面的社会学习机制促进了群体层面的互补性,允许分布式知识在群体中进行组合重组;这些群体层面的创新,反过来,减轻个人的认知负荷。在第二个循环中,社会层面的累积文化过程为群体提供了新的认知技术,包括共享语言和概念抽象,启动了新的小组级流程以进一步协调,重组,和创新。一起来看,这些循环建立了群体层面的互动,作为智能的双重引擎,催化个体认知和累积文化。
A large program of research has aimed to ground large-scale cultural phenomena in processes taking place within individual minds. For example, investigating whether individual agents equipped with the right social learning strategies can enable cumulative cultural evolution given long enough time horizons. However, this approach often omits the critical group-level processes that mediate between individual agents and multi-generational societies. Here, we argue that interacting groups are a necessary and explanatory level of analysis, linking individual and collective intelligence through two characteristic feedback loops. In the first loop, more sophisticated individual-level social learning mechanisms based on Theory of Mind facilitate group-level complementarity, allowing distributed knowledge to be compositionally recombined in groups; these group-level innovations, in turn, ease the cognitive load on individuals. In the second loop, societal-level processes of cumulative culture provide groups with new cognitive technologies, including shared language and conceptual abstractions, which set in motion new group-level processes to further coordinate, recombine, and innovate. Taken together, these cycles establish group-level interaction as a dual engine of intelligence, catalyzing both individual cognition and cumulative culture.