Explaining the Cultural Evolution of large-scale Collaboration: Conventionality as an Alternative for Collective Intentionality

Abstract

The scalar notion of collective intentionality has been used to characterize the evolution of largely uncollaborative apes to highly collaborative ones. This proposal covers human evolution up until and including the formation of hunter-gather groups. But can collective intentionality also explain the emergence of complex societies? I argue that it cannot. Instead of collective intentionality, collaboration in complex societies hinges on a set of non-strategic attitudes and standardized human interactions so that role divisions, institutions, norms and conventions can emerge as group-level phenomena. This set, summarized as ‘conventionality’, is a product of group-level selection rather than of collectively intending minds.