Social learning is toddlers’ only cognitive edge over great apes.

Evidence

On all the subtests of mental abilities, except social learning, there’s essentially no difference between chimpanzees and two-and-a-half-year-old humans, despite the fact that the two-and-a-half-year-olds have much larger brains. Orangutans, who have slightly smaller brains than chimpanzees, do a bit worse, but not much worse. Even on the subtest that focused specifically on assessing the causal efficacy of tool properties (causal modeling), the toddlers got 71% correct, the chimps 61%, and the orangutans 63%. Meanwhile the chimps trounced the toddlers on tool use 74% to 23%. … By contrast, for the social learning subtest, the averages shown in figure 2.2 actually conceal the fact that most of the two-and-a-half-year-olds scored 100% on the test, whereas most of the apes scored 0%. Overall, these findings suggest that the only exceptional cognitive abilities possessed by young children in comparison to two other great apes relate to social learning, and not to space, quantities, or causality. — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success, 78

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Humans copy spontaneously and automatically far more than chimpanzees do. — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture…, 100; Cultural learning machinery must activate early in development — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture…, 187; Reports on ape cognitive superiority are contested and hard to replicate. — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture…, 1086 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Humans were evolutionarily selected for learnability, not behavioral fixedness #corroborates (0.82)