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Big Picture Science

Two heads may be bet­ter than one. But what about three or more? A new study shows that chim­panzees excel at com­plex tasks when they work in groups, and their accu­mu­lat­ed knowl­edge can even be passed from one gen­er­a­tion to the next. 

But group-think also can be mal­adap­tive. When humans rely on knowl­edge that they assume oth­er peo­ple pos­sess, they can become less than rational.

Find out why one cog­ni­tive sci­en­tist says that indi­vid­ual think­ing is a myth. Most of your deci­sions are made in groups, and most derive from emo­tion, not rationality.

Also, why we know far less than we think we do. For exam­ple, most peo­ple will say they under­stand how an every­day object like a zip­per works, but draw a blank when asked to explain it. 

Plus, why we have a bio­log­i­cal dri­ve to cat­e­go­rize peo­ple as us” or them,” and how we can over­ride it. 

Guests:

Steven Slo­man — Pro­fes­sor of cog­ni­tive lin­guis­tics and psy­cho­log­i­cal sci­ences at Brown Uni­ver­si­ty and edi­tor-in-chief of the jour­nal, Cognition

Robert Sapol­sky — Pro­fes­sor of neu­ro­science at Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty and author of Behave: The Biol­o­gy of Humans at Our Best and Worst

Lau­rance Doyle — Sci­en­tist at the SETI Institute