Anthropology
Daniel Haun (MPI for Evolutionary Anthropology & Universität Leipzig)
Rethinking Cognitive Uniqueness: A Comparative Cultural Psychology of the Human Mind

What makes human cognition unique? In this talk, I revisit an ambition already present in Wundt’s vision of psychology: to understand
the human mind through coordinated evidence from child development, cross-cultural variation, and species comparison. I argue that
uniquely human cognition cannot be understood from any one of these perspectives alone. A Comparative Cultural Psychology
approach asks how cognitive capacities emerge in children, which capacities humans share with other animals, and how far proposed
human universals are shaped by social, ecological, and cultural environments. Drawing on examples from chimpanzee cognition and
culture, and from children’s development across diverse societies, I will examine a series of target domains, including social learning,
social cognition, and abstraction. Together, these perspectives suggest that human cognitive uniqueness may lie not in any single
species-defining capacity, but in the developmental interaction between shared biological foundations, human-typical social and
representational capacities, and culturally structured environments that give rise to diverse forms of thinking, learning, and social life.