Human cognitive limitations and emotions: The emergence of social complexity

Abstract

An evolutionary approach to human cognition and social complexity, acknowledging the essential role of social emotions, is attempted. From the start, every kind of cognition, either artificial or natural, is limited. In living beings, it is the life cycle, life course, or life history what determines the extension, intensity, and limitations of the cognitive tools evolved to adapt to the own niche: from bacteria to multicellulars, animals, mammals, anthropoids, etc. Herein we will briefly survey some of those instances. In the human case, the essential niche becomes an extended social group with a rich diversity of cognitive links or ‘bonds’ in continuous interaction. Evolutionarily, the adaptation process to this social niche has involved a series of brain size increases, allowing, above all, the cognitive wonders inherent in language. But it has also involved a restructuring of the cognitive ‘shortcuts’ — essentially, emotions — that help individuals to navigate their own life in the natural environment and, especially, within the highly complex social milieu. Ultimately, this social adaptation process made possible the emergence of human ‘ultrasociality’ –the crux of Anthropogenesis-- and the most conspicuous behavioral traits still observable in contemporary societies, the effects of which also reverberate in the practice of science itself.