Guest speaker Felix Warneken, Associate Professor of Psychology at U-M, will join the group to discuss the cognitive foundation of reciprocal cooperation.

Overview of Professor Warneken’s talk: Reciprocity is a powerful strategy to sustain cooperation, but little is known about its cognitive prerequisites. Professor Warneken argues that studies on the developmental emergence of reciprocal sharing behaviors can provide insight into its cognitive underpinnings. Professor Warneken will present data on children’s delay of gratification and future-directed thinking abilities and how they might be related to reciprocal sharing behaviors of different complexity. Professor Warneken concludes with some thoughts on how the study of psychological mechanism can explain similarities and differences in the cooperation of humans and other great apes.

Speaker bio: Professor Felix Warneken studies the origins of human social behavior, with a focus on the development and evolution of cooperation and morality. He uses developmental and cross-cultural studies with children, as well as comparative studies with nonhuman apes. He completed his Ph.D. and postdoctoral training at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, was a faculty member at Harvard University and is now an Associate Professor of Psychology in the Department of Psychology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.