Cecilia Heyes (born 6 March 1960) 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
All Souls College (official name: College of the Souls of All the Faithful Departed) is a constituent college of the University of Oxford in England. Unique to All Souls, all of its members automatically become fellows (i.e., full members of t ...
, and a Professor of Psychology at the
University of Oxford
, mottoeng = The Lord is my light
, established =
, endowment = £6.1 billion (including colleges) (2019)
, budget = £2.145 billion (2019–20)
, chancellor ...
. She is also a Fellow of the
British Academy
The British Academy is the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and the social sciences.
It was established in 1902 and received its royal charter in the same year. It is now a fellowship of more than 1,000 leading scholars span ...
(psychology and philosophy sections), and President of the Experimental Psychology Society.
Heyes is the author of ''Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking'' (2018),
described by
Tyler Cowen
Tyler Cowen (; born January 21, 1962) is an American economist, columnist and blogger. He is a professor at George Mason University, where he holds the Holbert L. Harris chair in the economics department. He hosts the economics blog ''Marginal R ...
as "an important book and likely the most thoughtful of the year in the social sciences".
Heyes has argued that the picture presented by some
evolutionary psychology
Evolutionary psychology is a theoretical approach in psychology that examines cognition and behavior from a modern evolutionary perspective. It seeks to identify human psychological adaptations with regards to the ancestral problems they evolv ...
of the human mind as a collection of cognitive instinctsorgans of thought shaped by genetic evolution over very long time periods
does not fit research results. She posits instead that humans have cognitive gadgets"special-purpose organs of thought" built in the course of development through social interaction. These are products of cultural rather than genetic evolution,
[ and may develop and change much more quickly and flexibly than cognitive instincts.
In 2017, Heyes gave the Chandaria Lectures at the Institute of Philosophy, University of London.] She has written for the ''Times Literary Supplement
''The Times Literary Supplement'' (''TLS'') is a weekly literary review published in London by News UK, a subsidiary of News Corp.
History
The ''TLS'' first appeared in 1902 as a supplement to ''The Times'' but became a separate publication ...
'' and given a number of radio and television interviews.
Early life
Cecilia was the youngest of four children born to Helen Heyes (née Henneker) and James Heyes, who died in 1965. She credits her brother, Vincent Heyes, with having "taught his little sister how to argue, and how to enjoy doing itin the right companyabove nearly all things".[ She was the first member of her family to go to university.
]
Education
After passing the eleven-plus exam
The eleven-plus (11+) is a standardized examination administered to some students in England and Northern Ireland in their last year of primary education, which governs admission to grammar schools and other secondary schools which use academic ...
, Heyes studied at Highworth Grammar School for Girls
Highworth Grammar School is a selective secondary school (grammar school) in Ashford, Kent. The school also admits boys to the sixth form. At an Ofsted inspection in June 2013, the school was rated 1 (outstanding) in all categories .
Highworth ...
and then obtained a Bachelor of Science
A Bachelor of Science (BS, BSc, SB, or ScB; from the Latin ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for programs that generally last three to five years.
The first university to admit a student to the degree of Bachelor of Science was the University of ...
(1981) and PhD PHD or PhD may refer to:
* Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), an academic qualification
Entertainment
* '' PhD: Phantasy Degree'', a Korean comic series
* ''Piled Higher and Deeper'', a web comic
* Ph.D. (band), a 1980s British group
** Ph.D. (Ph.D. albu ...
(1984) in psychology at University College London (UCL). In 2016 she was awarded a Doctor of Science
Doctor of Science ( la, links=no, Scientiae Doctor), usually abbreviated Sc.D., D.Sc., S.D., or D.S., is an academic research degree awarded in a number of countries throughout the world. In some countries, "Doctor of Science" is the degree used f ...
, a higher doctorate, by the University of Oxford.
Career
In her first postdoctoral research position (1984–1986), Heyes studied evolutionary epistemology, a blend of philosophy, evolutionary biology and cognitive science. Funded by a two-year Harkness Fellowship
The Harkness Fellowship (previously known as the Commonwealth Fund Fellowship) is a program run by the Commonwealth Fund of New York City. This fellowship was established to reciprocate the Rhodes Scholarships and enable Fellows from several cou ...
, she worked with Donald T. Campbell
Donald Thomas Campbell (November 20, 1916 – May 6, 1996) was an American social scientist. He is noted for his work in methodology. He coined the term ''evolutionary epistemology'' and developed a selectionist theory of human creativity. A ''R ...
at Lehigh University
Lehigh University (LU) is a private research university in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania in the Lehigh Valley region of eastern Pennsylvania. The university was established in 1865 by businessman Asa Packer and was originally affiliated with the Epis ...
, with William Wimsatt at the University of Chicago
The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chicago is consistently ranked among the b ...
, and with Daniel Dennett
Daniel Clement Dennett III (born March 28, 1942) is an American philosopher, writer, and cognitive scientist whose research centers on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relat ...
at Tufts University
Tufts University is a private research university on the border of Medford and Somerville, Massachusetts. It was founded in 1852 as Tufts College by Christian universalists who sought to provide a nonsectarian institution of higher learning. ...
.
Returning to the UK and to experimental psychology, from 1986–1989 Heyes was a Research Fellow of Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge
, mottoeng = Literal: From here, light and sacred draughts.
Non literal: From this place, we gain enlightenment and precious knowledge.
, established =
, other_name = The Chancellor, Masters and Schola ...
. During this period she studied animal learning and cognition in the laboratory of Nicholas Mackintosh
Nicholas John Seymour Mackintosh, (9 July 1935 – 8 February 2015) was a British experimental psychology, experimental psychologist and author, specialising in intelligence, psychometrics and animal learning.
Education
Mackintosh was born in L ...
and Anthony R. Dickinson.
In 1988, Heyes started a 20-year period back at UCL, first as a lecturer in psychology, and later as a Senior Lecturer (1993), Reader (1996), and Professor (2000). Throughout the period she headed a laboratory studying social cognitionsocial learning, imitation, mirror neurons, and self-recognition. This experimental work, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, BBSRC, EPSRC, and ESRC, initially focused on nonhuman animalsrodents and birdsand later used behavioural and neurophysiological methods to examine cognitive processes in adult humans.
In 2008, Heyes gave up her lab and moved to All Souls College, University of Oxford, where she is a Senior Research Fellow in Theoretical Life Sciences. She is also a full professor affiliated with the Department of Experimental Psychology.
Heyes has collaborated with economists as a Fellow of the ESRC Centre for Economic Learning and Social Evolution (1995–2010), founded by Ken Binmore
Kenneth George "Ken" Binmore, (born 27 September 1940) is an English mathematician, economist, and game theorist, a Professor Emeritus of Economics at University College London (UCL) and a Visiting Emeritus Professor of Economics at the Unive ...
, and since 2010 as a member of the Scientific Council of the Institute of Advanced Study in Toulouse, directed by Paul Seabright
Paul Seabright (born 8 July 1958) is British Professor of Economics in the Industrial Economics Institute and Toulouse School of Economics at the University of Toulouse, France.
Education
Seabright did his undergraduate studies at New College, ...
.
She was awarded the British Psychological Society's Cognitive Section Prize in 2004, Fellowship of the British Academy
Fellowship of the British Academy (FBA) is an award granted by the British Academy to leading academics for their distinction in the humanities and social sciences. The categories are:
# Fellows – scholars resident in the United Kingdom
# C ...
in 2010, and Fellowship of the Cognitive Science Society in 2018. Heyes was President of the Experimental Psychology Society from 2018 to 2019.
In 2017 Heyes gave the Chandaria Lectures at the Institute of Philosophy, University of London, and in 2020 she is scheduled to give the Rudolf Carnap Lectures at the Institute of Philosophy, Ruhr-Universität Bochum.
Research
Heyes works on the evolution of cognition, examining how genetic evolution, cultural evolution
Cultural evolution is an evolutionary theory of social change. It follows from the definition of culture as "information capable of affecting individuals' behavior that they acquire from other members of their species through teaching, imitation a ...
and learning combine to produce the mature cognitive abilities found in adult humans.[
Her theories are based on experimental research in animal, cognitive, developmental and social psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and behavioral economics. Although insistent that our understanding of the evolution of cognition must be data-driven, she also draws on theorizing in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of biology.]
Heyes advances simple explanations for animal and human behavior. For example, her associative sequence learning model of imitation and mirror neurons suggests they are based on associative learning
Learning is the process of acquiring new understanding, knowledge, behaviors, skills, values, attitudes, and preferences. The ability to learn is possessed by humans, animals, and some machines; there is also evidence for some kind of learnin ...
. However, she is not a fan of parsimony. She argues that, when a simple and a complex explanation both fit current data, scientists need to devise new experiments to test the theories against one another. We can't assume that the simple explanation is more likely to be right.
In common with evolutionary psychologists such as Steven Pinker
Steven Arthur Pinker (born September 18, 1954) is a Canadian-American cognitive psychologist, psycholinguist, popular science author, and public intellectual. He is an advocate of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind.
P ...
, Leda Cosmides
Leda Cosmides (born May 1957) is an American psychologist, who, together with anthropologist husband John Tooby, helped develop the field of evolutionary psychology.
Biography
Cosmides originally studied biology at Radcliffe College/Harvard Univ ...
and John Tooby
John Tooby (born 1952) is an American anthropologist, who, together with psychologist wife Leda Cosmides, helped pioneer the field of evolutionary psychology.
Biography
Tooby received his PhD in Biological Anthropology from Harvard University i ...
, Heyes works within the computational view of the mind, and assumes that genetic evolution has played a major role in shaping the minds and behavior of all animals. In contrast with other evolutionary psychologists, she argues that cultural evolution has been the principal architect of the human mind. Distinctively human cognitive mechanismssuch as language, imitation, theory of mind, episodic memory, causal understanding, morality, and explicit metacognitionare constructed in childhood through social interaction. These "cognitive gadgets" are built from and by "old parts"genetically inherited attentional, motivational, and learning processes that are present in a wide range of animals.
According to Heyes, "At birth, the minds of human babies are only subtly different from the minds of newborn chimpanzees. We are friendlier, our attention is drawn to different things, and we have a capacity to learn and remember that outstrips the abilities of newborn chimpanzees. Yet when these subtle differences are exposed to culture-soaked human environments, they have enormous effects. They enable us to upload distinctively human ways of thinking from the social world around us."[
Heyes's "cultural evolutionary psychology" implies that the human mind is more fragile and more agile than previously assumed; more vulnerable to catastrophe, and better able to adapt to new technologies and ways of life. "In a skeletal, traumatized population, children would be unlikely to develop the Big Special cognitive mechanisms, such as causal understanding, episodic memory, imitation and mindreading. The capacity for cultural evolution, as well as the products of cultural evolution, would be lost." However "cultural evolutionary psychology ... suggests that distinctively human cognitive mechanisms are light on their feet, constantly changing to meet the demands of new social and physical environments. ... On the cognitive gadgets view, rather than taxing an outdated mind, new technologiessocial media, robotics, virtual realitymerely provide the stimulus for further cultural evolution of the human mind."][
Cultural evolutionary studies are rapidly expanding. Unlike other cultural evolutionists, Heyes argues that it is not just ''what'' we think, but ''how'' we think, that is shaped by cultural evolution. Both the grist and the mills of the mind are cultural products.
Like dual-inheritance theorists, Heyes assumes that Darwinian selection plays an important role in cultural evolution; that the products of cultural evolution are sometimes adaptive; and that genetic and cultural evolution often work together. However, she argues that cultural selection has been the dominant force in shaping distinctively human cognitive mechanisms. She acknowledges the possibility of ]genetic assimilation
Genetic assimilation is a process described by Conrad H. Waddington by which a phenotype originally produced in response to an environmental condition, such as exposure to a teratogen, later becomes genetically encoded via artificial selection ...
, but finds little evidence that cognitive gadgets have been genetically assimilated.
Reception
Daniel Dennett
Daniel Clement Dennett III (born March 28, 1942) is an American philosopher, writer, and cognitive scientist whose research centers on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relat ...
says that people who study animal behavior fall into two camps, 'romantics' and 'killjoys'. Heyes is regarded by romantics as a killjoy.[ ]Frans de Waal
Franciscus Bernardus Maria "Frans" de Waal (born October 29, 1948) is a Dutch primatologist and ethologist. He is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Primate Behavior in the Department of Psychology at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, ...
, a long-standing critic, believes that Heyes takes simple explanations for animal behavior too seriously, and engages in "theoretical acrobatics".
Evolutionary anthropologists, Dan Sperber
Dan Sperber (born 20 June 1942 in Cagnes-sur-Mer) is a French social and cognitive scientist and philosopher. His most influential work has been in the fields of cognitive anthropology, linguistic pragmatics, psychology of reasoning, and phil ...
and Olivier Morin, portray Heyes as a "a forceful critic of the Evolutionary Psychology approach defended by Cosmides, Tooby, Pinker and others", and commend her predictive power: "Having defended empiricism when the odds were lowest, Cecilia Heyes reaps the rewards of a series of wise bets".[ Unpublished paper.] However, they argue that she over-estimates the influence of cultural, rather than genetic, evolution in shaping human cognition, and, using literacy and numeracy as examples, that her book ''Cognitive Gadgets'' does not provide compelling evidence for cultural selection rather than cultural diffusion of distinctively human cognitive mechanisms.[
]Tyler Cowen
Tyler Cowen (; born January 21, 1962) is an American economist, columnist and blogger. He is a professor at George Mason University, where he holds the Holbert L. Harris chair in the economics department. He hosts the economics blog ''Marginal R ...
, an economist, wrote of ''Cognitive Gadgets'': "think of this book as perhaps the best attempt so far to explain the weirdness of humans, relative to other animals", and "Highly recommended, it is likely to prove one of the most thought-provoking books of the year."[
Economist ]Diane Coyle
Diane Coyle (born February 1961) is an economist and a former advisor to the UK Treasury. She was vice-chairman of the BBC Trust, the governing body of the British Broadcasting Corporation, and was a member of the UK Competition Commission fro ...
described ''Cognitive Gadgets'' as a new and "persuasive approach to thinking about decision-makingnot for example as a matter of setting up choices in ways that nudge flawed humans to do the right thing".
Reviewing ''Cognitive Gadgets'' in the arts journal ''Leonardo
Leonardo is a masculine given name, the Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese equivalent of the English, German, and Dutch name, Leonard
Leonard or ''Leo'' is a common English masculine given name and a surname.
The given name and surname originate ...
'', Jan Baatens described the book as "an impressive and convincing intervention in the debate on what makes us human", and commends Heyes's style of thinking as "nuanced and cautious. The author does not make overgeneralizing claims, she is not looking for a new Grand Theory".
In 2019, a precis of ''Cognitive Gadgets'' was reviewed by 20–30 cognitive scientists, neuroscientists and philosophers in ''Behavioral and Brain Sciences
''Behavioral and Brain Sciences'' is a bimonthly peer-reviewed scientific journal of Open Peer Commentary established in 1978 by Stevan Harnad and published by Cambridge University Press. It is modeled on the journal ''Current Anthropology'' (whi ...
''.[
]
Curiosities
As Lord Mallard of All Souls College
All Souls College (official name: College of the Souls of All the Faithful Departed) is a constituent college of the University of Oxford in England. Unique to All Souls, all of its members automatically become fellows (i.e., full members of t ...
, Heyes is required to sing a medieval Mallard Song
The Mallard Song is an ancient tradition of All Souls' College, Oxford. It is sung every year at the Bursar's Dinner in March and the college's Gaudy in November and also sung in a separate special ceremony once a century.
The ceremony
In the c ...
after two dinners each year. The dinners are attended only by fellows of the college.
Heyes chose the word 'gadgets' for culturally evolved cognitive mechanisms, in part, because she likes the sound of the wordalmost as much as the word 'rapture'.
Selected publications
Monograph
* Heyes, C. M. (2018). ''Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking''. Harvard University Press.
Edited books and special issues
* Heyes, C. M. & Galef, B. G. Eds. (1996) ''Social Learning and the Roots of Culture''. Academic Press. Pp. 411.
* Heyes, C. M. & Huber, L. Eds. (2001) ''The'' ''Evolution of Cognition''. MIT Press. Pp. 400.
* Heyes, C. M. & Hull, D.Eds. (2001) ''Selection Theory and Social Construction: The Evolutionary Naturalistic Epistemology of Donald T. Campbell''. SUNY Press. Pp. 200.
*
Articles
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
References
External links
*
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Heyes, Cecilia
Living people
1960 births
Fellows of All Souls College, Oxford
Fellows of the British Academy