Prof. Katja Liebal (FU Berlin): Understanding the human mind: The value of a comparative perspective

Abstract:  Are humans unique? If so, which cognitive and communication skills characterize human beings? Are these characteristics universal, or do they vary depending on the individual’s social, ecological, and cultural background? While it may sound plausible that answering these questions requires the comparison of different cultural groups to learn about the universals and variability of human behavior, it seems much less convincing that we can also benefit from studying other species, especially when our interest centers on the psychology of the human being. However, I argue that, when aiming to understand human psychology, we benefit from a frame of reference against which to assess it. The comparison with the psychology of other animals, and nonhuman primates in particular, can provide such a frame of reference and thereby contribute to the extraction of the definitive characteristics of the human species.

Bio:  Katja Liebal is a comparative psychologist with a background in biology. After finishing her PhD on social communication of great apes at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, she has worked as lecturer at the Department of Psychology at the University of Portsmouth, UK, and as Assistant Professor for Evolutionary Psychology at the Cluster Languages of Emotion at Universität Berlin. Currently, she works as Professor for Comparative Developmental Psychology at the Psychology department at Freie Universität Berlin. Her main research interests center on the multimodal communication of nonhuman primates and human children and the developmental trajectories of their corresponding socio-cognitive and communicative skills. Furthermore, she is interested in the prosocial behavior of great apes and children from diverse cultural backgrounds. She uses observational and experimental methods and combines cross-species, cross-cultural approaches to study different species of great apes and human children from different cultural contexts.