Periodic Reporting for period 1 - ACT (Why are the Big Two of Agency and Communion so Fundamental to Human Psychology? An Agency-Communion Theory (ACT) of Social Learning and Cultural Activity and Its Novel Account of Social Influence)
Reporting period: 2023-01-01 to 2025-06-30
Humans are an exceptionally social species and, thus, most human thought revolves around other people, oneself, and the self-other relationship. Psychologists have recently realized that humans primarily think about self and others alongside two basic dimensions: “Agency” (also called “intellectual goodness,” “power,” or “dominance”) and “communion” (also called “moral goodness,” “benevolence,” or “nurturance”). This realization has been a major breakthrough. But it also raised a cardinal question: Why did evolution forge the human mind this way?
My ERC project seeks to answer this question, and the answer comes in the form of a theory with the following key idea: Humans have been having remarkable evolutionary success over the last 300,000 years and evolutionary anthropologists largely credit this success to one specific ability: Humans’ exceptional social learning ability. More precisely, humans are so good at learning from each other that the knowledge and skills they gain from others accumulate over generations. This accumulation creates complex, open-ended culture in which humans have thrived formidably, have spread across all terrestrial areas of planet earth and have exploded in number. However, not all social learning is beneficial. In fact, social learning is only beneficial if one learns from the “right” individuals. And this is where agency and communion come in: According to the novel theory, the right individuals to learn from are those high in agency and high in communion. In short, then, evolution has forged a human mind that revolves around agency and communion, because such a mind enables humans to learn socially in the most effective manner and, thereby, create complex, open-ended culture and thrive within it.
My ERC project seeks to answer this question, and the answer comes in the form of a theory with the following key idea: Humans have been having remarkable evolutionary success over the last 300,000 years and evolutionary anthropologists largely credit this success to one specific ability: Humans’ exceptional social learning ability. More precisely, humans are so good at learning from each other that the knowledge and skills they gain from others accumulate over generations. This accumulation creates complex, open-ended culture in which humans have thrived formidably, have spread across all terrestrial areas of planet earth and have exploded in number. However, not all social learning is beneficial. In fact, social learning is only beneficial if one learns from the “right” individuals. And this is where agency and communion come in: According to the novel theory, the right individuals to learn from are those high in agency and high in communion. In short, then, evolution has forged a human mind that revolves around agency and communion, because such a mind enables humans to learn socially in the most effective manner and, thereby, create complex, open-ended culture and thrive within it.
To test this novel „agency-communion theory of social learning and cultural activity,“ the ERC project comprises four work packages. The work packages rely on complementary methodologies, including laboratory experiments, formal modelling, Big Data studies, and longitudinal panel studies. Two years into the grant (i.e. at the time of writing this midterm report), work on all four work packages is well underway. The first experiments have been conducted and the first formal models run. The statistical analyses of the Big Data studies are halfway through, and data collection of the main panel study will commence shortly. Our very first results provided support for the novel theory’s ideas on communion, but those results also indicated a need to revise the theory’s ideas on agency. The revised theory has now received support for its ideas on both, agency and communion, and it has done so from all studies conducted so far.
If the empirical results continue to support the novel theory in the same way they have done so far, the theory will change the state of the arts in psychology and evolutionary anthropology on at least four counts. First, agency and communion must have utterly important functions for humans, otherwise human psychology would not be tethered to these two dimensions so strongly, persistently, and completely. The novel theory will provide a compelling answer to the functional question of agency and communion. Second, the novel theory conceptualizes agency and communion in radically new ways (i.e. as guides for social learning), and because those two dimensions are psychology’s “fundamentals,” this reconceptualization should be consequential for large parts of psychology. Third, evolutionary anthropology is deeply concerned with the mechanisms that guide social learning from the “right” people. The novel theory provides fresh answers to this important issue, and the answers link social learning to key concepts in human psychology (i.e. agency and communion). Finally, social learning is widely considered the reason for humans’ capacity to build culture and thrive by cultural activity—humans’ most powerful evolutionary strategy. Consequently, continued support for the novel theory will reveal that agency and communion are not only fundamental and omnipresent in psychology, but also the root causes of human-unique cultural ability and, thus, of humans’ extraordinary evolutionary success.