“But as Tomasello argues in his book, this “social intelligence hypothesis” is something of an understatement. A social nature isn’t enough to fully distinguish between humans and chimpanzees—male chimpanzees can form political alliances, for example, and sometimes work together to hunt, both of which require advanced social skills. Humans are not just socially intelligent, then; as Tomasello and others have put it, we’re “ultra-social” in ways that the great apes are not, with an enhanced capacity for cooperation that arose somewhere along our species’ evolutionary path.”
“Even when chimpanzees do collaborate, there’s been no evidence to date that they have the ability to adopt complementary roles in group efforts or establish a complex division of labor.”
“But collaboration didn’t just change the way early humans procured food, Tomasello argues; it also changed how humans understood themselves in relation to others. Specifically, people came to think of themselves as part of a larger unit whose members worked together for mutual gain. They began, in other words, to have what Tomasello calls “shared intentionality.””
“This, he says, is the subtle cognitive capacity—that difference of degree Darwin wrote about—that sets humans apart from the great apes, the reason why we have developed cultural institutions and engage in large-scale collaborative activities. Sharing intentions means that two minds are paying attention to the same thing and working toward the same goal, but each with its own perspective on that shared reality.”
“Through their actions, the researchers concluded, the children in the study seemed to believe that fairness was the equal division of spoils when both parties worked together to obtain them—that sharing was fair only in the context of collaboration.”
“In The Descent of Man, Darwin wrote: “I fully subscribe to the judgment of those writers who maintain that of all the differences between man and the lower animals, the moral sense or conscience is by far the most important.” By extension, then, our enhanced ability to cooperate may be the most significant distinction between us and our closest evolutionary relatives.”