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"Unusually well organized, integrated, and edited, unlike so many haphazard collections of edited papers. The theoretical position is intriguing, and the evidence convincing....The papers are generally excellent." --American Scientist
"In summary, the reader of Machiavellian Intelligence will find the book promising for generating new hypotheses and additional questions about the evolution of intelligence, phylogenetic differences in social intelligence, and sources of selection pressure for attentional manipulation such as deception, to mention just a few. These topics could be explored fruitfully using the book as a reader in an interdisciplinary seminar with graduate students from psychology, anthropology, and zoology and would surely provide for a lively and thoughtful exchange of ideas and opinions. Clearly the topic of primate social intelligence, enthusiastically launched by this collection of writings, offers much tinder for future research." --International Journal of P
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According to conventional wisdom, our unique human intellect results from evolutionary pressures for skilled tool use and for communication to enhance co-operation. This book explores a quite different idea: that the driving force was social expertise, allowing subtle manipulation of others within the social group. The need to outwit one's clever colleagues then produces an evolutionary spiralling of `Machiavellian intelligence'. This book forms a complete and self-contained text on this topic, including the origins of the idea, a wealth of exciting applications in anthropology, psychology, and zoology, and a current evaluation of more traditional ideas --to what extent is Machiavellian intelligence complementary or alternative to them? With contributions by an international team of authors, the reader is brought to the frontiers of scientific work on the origin of human intellect.
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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful
Ethnographically rich
19 Jun 2003
Format:Paperback
The premise of this collection of articles (25 in all) is really quite simple. The editors contend that the competitive nature of social group living provided the primary impetus driving the evolutionary development of monkey, ape, and human intelligence. Other triggers for this change are considered - tool use and foraging behavior - but this collection represents a significant first salvo advocating social expertise.
No more than six articles could be considered empirical research reports due to the absence of significant research in this area prior to the publication of this volume. The majority of the articles are ethnographic is content; however, the variety and specificity of these reports are fascinating reading.
The articles are grouped into seven sections. The first includes three early works, one originally published in 1953 that sparked the idea of social expertise. Primate social relationships are the second group, and it contains one study of human child interactions. The effect of adding a third party to dyads is discussed in the social complexity section. Theory of mind especially as it may be demonstrated among chimpanzees is the subject of three articles in the fourth section, and deception is discussed in the fifth. Alternatives to social expertise are reviewed in the sixth section, and the exploitation of the expertise of others in primate groups in the last.
Considerable research has been done since 1988 which may have supplanted this collection. For example, Sternberg and Kaufman's collection "The Evolution of Human Intelligence" (2001) or Corballis and Lea's "The Descent of Mind" (1999) may be a much better starting places for a review of more contemporary work. Nonetheless, I thoroughly enjoyed this read. If you have the time to indulge in a multi-volume introduction to the evolution of intelligence, find and include this book. To some extent it established the parameters for the ongoing dialog.
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