HUMAN INTELLIGENCE 279Another major feature of these sociocognitive dynamics is that, as for
hunting in wild dogs or wolves, the switch of cooperative pattern can be
almost instantaneous, even in quite novel situations. Th is was demon-
strated rather dramatically when a bus ran over a cyclist in a London
street in June 2015. Within seconds, dozens of former bystanders got to-
gether and coordinated their actions. Th ey actually lift ed the heavy bus,
in concerted eff ort, at least enough for the victim to be pulled away.
“With so many strangers suddenly and rapidly trying to work together,
it’s diffi cult to discern how much coordination there was. But at the very
least, some kind of collective understanding of what they were trying to
achieve began to develop.... [It was] almost like working towards a
mutual goal but unknowingly, without actually communicating it across.”^27
An understanding of the dynamics of social cognition helps explain that
collective understanding.
Th e power of those dynamics also explains why human culture is not
merely an effl orescence of human cognition but is its very medium and
constitution. As anthropologist Cliff ord Geertz explained, culture does
not merely “supplement, develop and extend organically based capaci-
ties,” as the notion of observational learning might suggest. Instead it is
an ingredient of those capacities. A cultureless human being, Geertz
suggested, “would prob ably turn out to be not an intrinsically talented
though unfulfi lled ape, but a wholly mindless and consequently unwork-
able monstrosity.”^28
In a culture of individual competitiveness, of course, such ideas may
seem odd. As Daniel Siegel pointed out in his book, Th e Developing Mind,
the idea that we do not “own” our minds, in de pen dently of others, tends to
make people feel uncomfortable. It particularly contrasts with the idea
that intelligence, or cognitive functioning, in humans refl ects some basic
nonsocial functioning that varies among individuals like personal strength
or power. Such is the power of ideology.
We can, perhaps, now see why attempting to summarize people’s abil-
ities with a simple yardstick, like an IQ test, rudely cuts across what it
means to be human. To illustrate this point, I next discuss some of the
“cognitive abilities” claimed to be mea sured in IQ tests. I discussed some
of these in chapter 7 as products of dynamical systems generally. Here
I put them into human cultural context.
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