What Is Special About Human Reasoning

We humans are spectacularly good at figuring things out, but this is not necessarily what makes our thinking special. Other primates are already quite good at abstract, logical, causal inferences. Here I argue that our reasoning abilities skyrocketed because of the requirements of our hypercooperative way of life, which relies on coordination, division of labor, and cumulative culture. The psychology of reasoning should certainly concern itself with the highly derived abilities that allow us to handle formal logic or probability calculus—but it should also give full attention to what reasoning mostly did and still mostly does for us, which is to unravel the horrendous complexity of cooperating with our conspecifics.