Wild Minds: What Animals Really Think
Henry Holt, 2000. $25.00 hardcover, pp 315 ISBN 0805056696 | ISBN: 0-805-05669-6
The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition
Harvard University Press, 1999. $29.95 hardcover, pp 272 ISBN 0674000706 | ISBN: 0-674-00070-6
Both authors reach similar conclusions, but their books differ substantially in style and content. Hauser's is intended for a more general audience, providing broad and entertaining discussions on the cognitive capacities of animals, especially primates. Hauser, a psychology professor at Harvard, has conducted seminal studies in primate ethology over the past two decades and provides a guided tour of how animals understand objects, causality, number and space, skills needed to navigate a spatially and temporally complex physical environment. These skills comprise what Hauser calls “mental toolkits”, a term also echoing his implicit endorsement of modular cognitive architecture. Such a view, in which specific behavioral skills are thought to arise from specific, evolved sets of cognitive processes, is the hallmark of the currently popular field of evolutionary psychology. However, the most interesting—and most contentious—applications of evolutionary psychology arise in the social domain. What cognitive processes underlie our ability to think about other people, empathize with them, and see them as moral agents? Furthermore, which, if any, such processes might be unique to humans? Hauser addresses this topic in the second part of his book, and speculates that only humans have true self-awareness. He reviews research showing that some animals can indeed become aware of their own bodies from seeing themselves in a mirror, but argues that they nonetheless cannot be aware of their own minds.
This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution