Bidirectional Self-Other Mapping and the "Like-Me" Hypothesis

H social cognition begins in the newborn period. When the human newborn opens its eyes and sees a human act for the fi rst time, I have proposed that this engenders a feeling of interpersonal connectedness. To explain the idea, I off ered the “Like-Me” developmental hypothesis. Th e key suggestion is that perceiving others as like me is a social primitive. Th e new empirical research shows that the core sense of similarity to others is not the culmination of social development, but the precondition for it. Without this initial felt connection to others, human social cognition would not take the distinctively human form that it does. In the past, philosophers, social theorists, and psychologists have considered related ideas, but the foregoing departs from historical discussions in four ways. First, the relevant philosophers (e.g., Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Ryle) did not imagine that this process begins at birth. Th ese philosophers postulated that self-other mapping and fi rst steps toward cracking the problem of Other Minds were late emerging and mediated by language and/or deliberate introspective reasoning. Second, many sociologists and social psychologists working with adults gave priority to social learning from the outside in: An unformed self is given coherence by how others react to it (Cooley, Mead)—the “looking-glass self.” Instead, as I will show, infants also use self-experience to give meaning to the observed behavior of others in ways these theorists missed. Th ird, Piaget’s work with infants led him to theorize that they start out as “solipsists” with no links between self and other. Piaget was unable to provide a satisfactory mechanism of change from initial solipsism to the rich social cognition of 5-year-olds, because he underestimated the initial state. Freud’s and Baldwin’s neonatal “adulism,” merging, or lack of diff erentiation between self and other suff ers from the same problem, and were precursors to Piaget’s more sophisticated writing on the initial state. Fourth, although contemporary work on social primitives has shown that infants have visual preferences for faces (Johnson and Morton), eyespots (Baron-Cohen), and self-mobile entities (Leslie), my proposal goes beyond cues that induce infant visual attention. Infants’ supramodal representation of human action maps external events to the self. Crucially, this goes beyond heightened attention, preference, and visual expectations. In this essay I will discuss empirical studies concerning two social learning mechanisms that build on the “like-me” primitive—imitation and gaze following. Th e studies illuminate three aspects of social cognition: (a) origins, (b) mechanisms of change, and (c) bidirectional learning between self and other. Th e studies support the view that “like me” is a social primitive that gives rise to a life-long ability to connect to other humans, which is vital to our survival as a species. Humans have a long period of infantile immaturity compared to other animals. Th is immaturity has coevolved with powerful social learning mechanisms. Two of these social learning mechanisms—imitation and gaze following—are functional in human infancy, rare in the animal kingdom, and impoverished in autism. If one seeks to understand the birth, growth, and mechanisms of change in human social cognition, imitation and gaze following are promising domains to investigate. Imitation supports rapid learning of behavioral skills, social customs, and causal relations by observation. Rather than relying purely on maturation (which is not responsive to cultural contingencies), independent invention (which is slow) or trial and error (which can be dangerous), humans excel in imitative learning from others in OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Sat Dec 22 2012, NEWGEN