Andrew Whiten | |
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Born | David Andrew Whiten 1948 (age 75–76) Grimsby, England |
Nationality | British |
Known for | research in social cognition |
Title | Professor of Evolutionary and Developmental Psychology; Professor Wardlaw Emeritus at University of St Andrews in Scotland |
Awards |
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Academic background | |
Alma mater |
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Academic work | |
Discipline | Psychology |
Sub-discipline | |
Institutions | University of St Andrews |
Main interests | evolution of social cognition in human and non-human primates |
Website | Andrew Whiten |
David Andrew Whiten,known as Andrew Whiten (born 1948) is a British zoologist and psychologist,Professor of Evolutionary and Developmental Psychology,and Professor Wardlaw Emeritus at University of St Andrews in Scotland. [1] [2] He is known for his research in social cognition,specifically on social learning,tradition and the evolution of culture,social Machiavellian intelligence,autism and imitation,as well as the behavioral ecology of sociality. [3] In 1996,Whiten and his colleagues invented an artificial fruit that allowed to study learning in apes and humans. [4] [5]
Whiten was born in 1948 in Grimsby,England. [6] He graduated with a degree in zoology from the University of Sheffield and achieved a PhD in Psychology at the University of Bristol. [3]
Whiten started reading and lecturing at the University of St Andrews in 1970,joined the Department of Psychology in St Andrews in 1975,and became professor of evolutionary and developmental psychology in 1997. [1] [3] Whiten was co-founder of the Scottish Primate Research Group. [3] In 2003,he founded the Centre for Social Learning and Cultural Evolution at the University of St Andrews. [1] He also was founder and first director of the primate research center Living Links to Human Evolution (short:Living Links) that opened 2008 in Edinburgh Zoo and draws more than 250,000 visitors per year. [2] [7] [3]
Whiten is a pioneer in the study of cultural evolution in chimpanzees and other primates,studying them for decades. He has demonstrated the existent of traditions in primate culture in areas such as foraging,tool use and courtship. He has also shown that it is possible to introduce new traditions,by teaching primates in different groups different methods for getting a treat from a box. The first two chimps taught others,who almost always learned the method used first in their group. In another study,vervet monkeys which had learned to avoid grains of corn of a particular color (flavored by a bitter taste) relearned their color preferences for food once they became part of another group with different preferences. Such transmission chain studies have shown cultural learning between individuals in at least 20 different species. The ability to learn from others is particularly important for adaptability under changing conditions such as climate change. [8]
Whiten is member of the following learned societies: [9]
He was member of the Editorial Board of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society,Biological Sciences,from 2008 to 2013. [10] He additionally chaired the Research Awards Committee of the British Academy from 2011 to 2013. [1] [9]
Whiten was awarded the Delwart International Scientific Prize by the Royal Academies for Science and the Arts of Belgium in 2001, [11] the Rivers Memorial Medal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI),and the Osman Hill Medal of the Primate Society of Great Britain in 2007. He is the first and only scientist who was awarded both,the Sir James Black Medal (in 2014) and the Senior Prize and Medal for Public Engagement (in 2015) by the Royal Society of Edinburgh. [1] [12] [13] [9] [14] [15]
He was awarded an honorary doctor of the Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh in 2015,of the University of Stirling in 2016,and of the University of Edinburgh in 2016/2017. [12] [16] [17] [18]
In primatology,the Machiavellian intelligence or social brain hypothesis describes the capacity of primates to manuever in complex social groups. The first introduction of this concept came from Frans de Waal's book Chimpanzee Politics (1982). In the book de Waal notes that chimpanzees performed certain social maneuvering behaviors that he thought of as being "Machiavellian".
Sir Frederic Charles Bartlett FRS was a British psychologist and the first professor of experimental psychology at the University of Cambridge. He was one of the forerunners of cognitive psychology as well as cultural psychology. Bartlett considered most of his own work on cognitive psychology to be a study in social psychology,but he was also interested in anthropology,moral science,philosophy,and sociology. Bartlett proudly referred to himself as "a Cambridge psychologist" because while he was at the University of Cambridge,settling for one type of psychology was not an option.
Franciscus Bernardus Maria de Waal was a Dutch-American primatologist and ethologist. He was the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Primate Behavior in the Department of Psychology at Emory University in Atlanta,Georgia,director of the Living Links Center at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory,and author of numerous books including Chimpanzee Politics (1982) and Our Inner Ape (2005). His research centered on primate social behavior,including conflict resolution,cooperation,inequity aversion,and food-sharing. He was a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Sir Paul Patrick Gordon Bateson,was an English biologist with interests in ethology and phenotypic plasticity. Bateson was a professor at the University of Cambridge and served as president of the Zoological Society of London from 2004 to 2014.
Richard Walter Wrangham is an English anthropologist and primatologist;he is Professor of Biological Anthropology at Harvard University. His research and writing have involved ape behavior,human evolution,violence,and cooking.
Evolutionary developmental psychology (EDP) is a research paradigm that applies the basic principles of evolution by natural selection,to understand the development of human behavior and cognition. It involves the study of both the genetic and environmental mechanisms that underlie the development of social and cognitive competencies,as well as the epigenetic processes that adapt these competencies to local conditions.
Animal culture can be defined as the ability of non-human animals to learn and transmit behaviors through processes of social or cultural learning. Culture is increasingly seen as a process,involving the social transmittance of behavior among peers and between generations. It can involve the transmission of novel behaviors or regional variations that are independent of genetic or ecological factors.
The evolutionary origin of religion and religious behavior is a field of study related to evolutionary psychology,the origin of language and mythology,and cross-cultural comparison of the anthropology of religion. Some subjects of interest include Neolithic religion,evidence for spirituality or cultic behavior in the Upper Paleolithic,and similarities in great ape behavior.
Primate cognition is the study of the intellectual and behavioral skills of non-human primates,particularly in the fields of psychology,behavioral biology,primatology,and anthropology.
Josep Call is a Spanish comparative psychologist specializing in primate cognition.
Cecilia Heyes is a British psychologist who studies the evolution of the human mind. She is a Senior Research Fellow in Theoretical Life Sciences at All Souls College,and a Professor of Psychology at the University of Oxford. She is also a Fellow of the British Academy,and President of the Experimental Psychology Society.
Deep social mind is a concept in evolutionary psychology;it refers to the distinctively human capacity to 'read' the mental states of others while reciprocally enabling those others to read one's own mental states at the same time. The term 'deep social mind' was first coined in 1999 by Andrew Whiten,professor of Evolutionary and Developmental Psychology at St. Andrews University,Scotland. Together with closely related terms such as 'reflexivity' and 'intersubjectivity',it is now well-established among scholars investigating the evolutionary emergence of human sociality,cognition and communication.
Imitative learning is a type of social learning whereby new behaviors are acquired via imitation. Imitation aids in communication,social interaction,and the ability to modulate one's emotions to account for the emotions of others,and is "essential for healthy sensorimotor development and social functioning". The ability to match one's actions to those observed in others occurs in humans and animals;imitative learning plays an important role in humans in cultural development. Imitative learning is different from observational learning in that it requires a duplication of the behaviour exhibited by the model,whereas observational learning can occur when the learner observes an unwanted behaviour and its subsequent consequences and as a result learns to avoid that behaviour.
Social learning refers to learning that is facilitated by observation of,or interaction with,another animal or its products. Social learning has been observed in a variety of animal taxa,such as insects,fish,birds,reptiles,amphibians and mammals.
Theory of mind in animals is an extension to non-human animals of the philosophical and psychological concept of theory of mind (ToM),sometimes known as mentalisation or mind-reading. It involves an inquiry into whether non-human animals have the ability to attribute mental states to themselves and others,including recognition that others have mental states that are different from their own. To investigate this issue experimentally,researchers place non-human animals in situations where their resulting behavior can be interpreted as supporting ToM or not.
Kevin Neville Lala is an English evolutionary biologist who is Professor of Behavioural and Evolutionary Biology at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. Educated at the University of Southampton and University College London,he was a Human Frontier Science Program fellow at the University of California,Berkeley before joining the University of St Andrews in 2002. He is one of the co-founders of niche construction theory and a prominent advocate of the extended evolutionary synthesis. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Society of Biology. He has also received a European Research Council Advanced Grant,a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award,and a John Templeton Foundation grant. He was the president of the European Human Behaviour and Evolution Association from 2007 to 2010 and a former president of the Cultural Evolution Society. Lala is currently an external faculty of the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research.
Susan Denise Healy FRSE professor of biology at the University of St. Andrews,specialist in cognitive evolution and behavioural studies of birds and understanding the neurological basis of this. She was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2021.
Malinda Carpenter,Ph.D,FRSE is a professor of developmental psychology at the University of St Andrews,an international researcher specialising in infant and child communications,prosocial behaviour and group reactions,in how people learn to understand others,and building self esteem;her work includes research between ape and human social cognition,and more recently in considering human-robotic communication futures.
Dora Biro is a behavioral biologist and the Beverly Petterson Bishop and Charles W. Bishop Professor,Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Rochester. She was previously a Professor of Animal Behaviour at the University of Oxford. and a visiting professor in the Primate Research Institute of Kyoto University in Japan. Biro studies social behavior,problem solving,and learning in birds and primates.
In social psychology,a transmission chain is when information is passed between people sequentially,each person in the chain usually modifying the information they were given. This is similar to the telephone game. The transmission chain method is a method used in cultural evolution research to uncover biases in cultural transmission. This method was first developed by Frederic Bartlett in 1932.