Introduction“Humans had in some uni

Introduction
“Humans had in some unique fashion become so ecologically dominant that they in
effect became their own principal hostile force of nature, explicitly in regard to
evolutionary changes in human psyche and social behavior” (Alexander, 1990b, p. 4).
For more than twenty years, many leading social scientists have been exploring the
questions: How has evolution shaped human cognition and behavior? (Barkow, Cosmides
and Tooby, 1992; Buss, 1995, 2003; Cosmides and Tooby, 1997; Flinn, 2004; Mithen,
1996; Plotkin, 1998; Stevens and Price, 1996; Tooby and Cosmides, 1989). What general
selective forces drove the evolution of hominids? (Alexander, 1990a,b, 2005, 2006) and
What combination of selective forces caused the appearance of the various unique and
Information behavior: a socio-cognitive ability
Evolutionary Psychology – ISSN 1474-7049 – Volume 5(2). 2007. -258-
distinctive features of humans and their social life? (Alexander, 1990b; Baumeister, 2005).
Many social science subjects are developing their fields of inquiry within such an
evolutionary framework, including evolutionary biology, evolutionary ecology,
evolutionary psychiatry, evolutionary psychology and cognitive archeology. In this paper
we ask: How has human information behavior evolved? We also explore the relationship
between information behavior, as a socio-cognitive ability, and human evolution.
Alexander’s Ecological Dominance and Social Competition (EDSC) model
currently provides the most comprehensive overview of human traits in the development of
a theory of human evolution, sociality and socio-cognitive abilities (Alexander, 1971, 1979,
1987, 1990a, b; Alexander and Tinkle, 1981; Finn, Geary and Ward, 2005; Geary, 2005;
Irons, 2005). Alexander’s model provides a basis for explaining the evolution of human
cognitive abilities as it centers on the ecological dominance of humans in nature and their
competence in social competition. Humans have become ecologically dominant via
increased inter and intra group competition and cooperation, and have developed various
socio-cognitive abilities (Alexander, 1987). Irons (2005) and Flinn, Geary and Ward (2005)
provide an extensive overview of the strengths and weaknesses of Alexander’s Model for
fields such as evolutionary psychology and anthropology, and highlight the validity of
Alexander’s Model with support from the human fossil record and findings from studies of
the human brain and mind.
In this paper we briefly outline two views of human evolution, and then describe
what is meant by a human socio-cognitive ability which is a uniquely human attribute
(Alexander, 1990b). We then propose that information behavior is an important sociocognitive
ability and describe what is meant by the term information behavior from the
perspective of information science, information theory/processing, evolutionary
psychology and the emerging information behavior perspective. The paper then discusses
how information behavior is emerging as an important human socio-cognitive ability from
an interdisciplinary perspective. Such reviews are a useful way of understanding the
interdisciplinary relations between fields incorporating evolutionary perspectives (Krill,
Platek, Goetz and Shackelford, 2007).
Human Evolution: Two Views
Information behavior is a uniquely human attribute that differentiates humans from
other mammals due to unique attributes of the human brain. Somewhere along the
evolutionary line the human brain diverged from that of other mammals. There are various
theories as to why this is so. One theory is that there is qualitative difference between the
human brain as it is now and what it was in pre-human form. Spink and Cole (2006) refer
to what is termed a great leap-type neurological transformation in the human brain (Ehrlich,
2000; Klein, 2000), which may have produced a dramatic transformation in human
cognitive architecture (Mithen, 1988, 1996) and enhanced working memory (Wynn and
Coolidge, 2004). This occurred from 40,000 to 75,000 years ago. According to Mithen
(1996), this dramatic transformation allowed Homo sapiens to survive while Neanderthals
did not. Human hunter-gatherers became dramatically more efficient in exploiting their
environment, more able to cope with environmental extremes, and more flexible in social
behavior (Mithen, 1988). Mithen’s Great Leap forward theory is a radical form of the
theory of punctuated equilibria which holds that evolutionary transformations took place in
sudden, radical steps (Gould and Eldredge, 1977).