Emerging Trends in The Social and Behavioral Sciences

Biology and Culture

Item

Title

Biology and Culture

Author

Hobson, Robert Peter

Research Area

Special Areas of Interdisciplinary Study

Topic

Biology, the Individual and Society

Abstract

How are we to think of the developmental relations between individual and social dimensions of human psychology? On the one hand, an individual's mental development depends on social engagement and socially constructed symbolic systems and institutions. On the other hand, the very existence of a social system depends on the biologically provided constitution of the individuals who make up its members. I shall consider these matters at the interface between the behavioral and social sciences through the perspective of developmental psychopathology, and, in particular, the study of autism.

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etrds0025

extracted text

Biology and Culture
ROBERT PETER HOBSON

Abstract
How are we to think of the developmental relations between individual and social
dimensions of human psychology? On the one hand, an individual’s mental development depends on social engagement and socially constructed symbolic systems
and institutions. On the other hand, the very existence of a social system depends on
the biologically provided constitution of the individuals who make up its members.
I shall consider these matters at the interface between the behavioral and social sciences through the perspective of developmental psychopathology, and, in particular,
the study of autism.

INTRODUCTION
In this essay, I consider how human infants and toddlers are biologically
prepared to achieve specific forms of engagement with other people, both
in person-to-person exchanges and in joint relation to a shared world. Early
experience of these kinds of social relatedness has a profound influence on
the developing structure of human thought and personality. I shall argue that
the capacity to identify with the bodily expressed attitudes of others is critical for the development of symbolic thinking and for the enrichment and
integration of social-emotional functioning. This structuring of early social
relatedness and experience requires biological underpinnings. The modes of
interpersonal engagement to which it gives rise play a critical role in shaping
human cognitive and cultural lives.
The empirical perspective that grounds this approach is that of developmental psychopathology. Developmental psychopathology is the study of
typical and atypical developments alongside one another. Through the study
of typically developing children, one is able to identify trajectories of mental
growth that may be altered among atypically developing individuals. From
a complementary perspective, the study of atypically developing children
can reveal how what we take for granted (because seemingly universal) in
human development is more complex and potentially vulnerable than we
had supposed. Not only this, but by tracing the developmental implications
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

of abnormality, we can discover cause–effect relations among specific facets
of psychological functioning, as these evolve over time.
For the present purposes, I focus on the case of early childhood autism as
affording fresh insights into the inter relation between social and cognitive
developments. When we come to formulate an adequate theory of early interpersonal relations and intellectual growth, then we should also see why the
syndrome of autism takes the form that it does.
This constitutes an “emerging trend” of theoretical and empirical investigations in its focus on the contribution of previously neglected forms of early
social experience to the development and exercise of flexible symbolic thinking and linguistic communication. The approach promises to integrate and
enrich three classical developmental perspectives on the mind and its development, namely those articulated by George Herbert Mead, Lev Vygotsky,
and Sigmund Freud.
FOUNDATIONAL RESEARCH
THEORETICAL APPROACHES
In exploring how mind, self, and society are grounded in social relations,
G.H. Mead (1934) proposed that symbolic thinking entails “an arousal in the
individual himself of the response he is calling out in the other individual, a
taking of the role of the other, a tendency to act as the other person acts. One
participates in the same process the other person is carrying out and controls
his action with reference to that participation” (p. 73). This suggestion had
been anticipated in the work of Cooley (1902) and Baldwin (1902), each of
whom considered that a child comes to adopt a psychological perspective
vis-à-vis his or her own self and mental events through adopting appropriate kinds of alternative stance—where the appropriate kinds arise through
interaction with other people.
Related themes are central to the work of Vygotsky (1978), who suggested
that “Every function in the child’s cultural development appears twice: first,
on the social level, and later, on the individual level; first, between people
(interpsychological), and then inside the child (intrapsychological) … All the
higher functions originate as actual relations between human individuals”
(pp. 56–57, Vygotsky’s italics). In Mourning and Melancholia (1917), Freud,
too, used the notion of “internalization” to characterize how patterns of
interpersonal relatedness are not only represented but also repeated within
the orbit of an individual’s own mental functioning.
What these theories require is an account of the mechanism(s) by which
appropriate kinds of role-taking and internalization are achieved. Freud
(1921) proposed that the mechanism was the process of identifying with

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other people. Freud illustrated one form of identifying-with through the
example of a child identifying with his father and adopting his characteristics, but on a more basic level he considered that identification leads to
empathy and structures the most basic forms of interpersonal engagement.
A working definition of identification offered by Laplanche and Pontalis
(1973) is as follows: “Psychological process whereby the subject assimilates
an aspect, property or attribute of the other and is transformed, wholly or
partially, after the model the other provides.” When one identifies with
someone else, one participates in the other’s attitudes and actions, and is
moved to encompass and potentially to adopt the orientation of the other
alongside or in relation to one’s own psychological stance. It is in virtue of
this pre-conceptual and often affectively configured propensity to identify
with the attitudes and actions of other individuals that interpersonal
psychological engagement is not merging, but rather linkage that entails
differentiation and connectedness.
A particular species of identifying-with has special importance for the
present discussion. This occurs in the context of face-to-face communication
between people. One person has a propensity to be moved by the bodily
anchored expressions of the subjective states of another, in such a way
that the “otherness” of the other is not lost. An obvious case in point is
empathy—to feel empathy for someone else is not to feel like, but for,
the other—and as I shall detail shortly, other instances of prototypically
emotional communication and pre-reflective role-taking have reference to a
shared world.
One reason why these ideas have been only partially adopted and integrated into mainstream thinking about thinking and personality seems to
be that they have been considered speculative, with little convincing empirical support. Yet evidence might emerge from studying how human development unfolds. If processes of identifying-with and associated role-taking
shape development in diverse spheres such as children’s social relations,
self-consciousness, imitation, symbolic play, narrative and other aspects of
language (especially pragmatics), emotional experience and empathy, and
then developmental research from each of these domains might yield the
kind of evidence that is needed. To put it plainly, we might discover that
the phenomena resist explanation unless we invoke “identifying-with” as an
explanatory concept.
Correspondingly, if there is evidence for a weakness or relative dearth of
the propensity to identify with others among children with autism, then
we should be able to trace the developmental implications of this abnormality in these very same domains. This hypothesis about the pathogenesis
of autism contrasts with individualistic, cognitively styled theories that
situate the developmental source of deficits exclusively within the minds

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

(or representational processes) of affected children. Such theories show
little concern not only with interpersonal causes of disorder, but also with
issues of motivation and affect—each of which is an essential aspect of
identifying-with, and each of which seems central to understanding autism.
I now turn to a sample of studies in typical and atypical developments that
provide evidence in the light of which alternative theoretical options may be
judged.
TYPICAL EARLY DEVELOPMENT
There evidence that around the end of the first year of life, typically developing infants relate to other people as separate centers of psychological orientation toward a common world. As they approach 9 months of age, infants
come to take a certain stance or set of attitudes not only toward persons
vis-à-vis things, but more specifically toward the attitudes of other persons:
they share experiences of the world with a caregiver; they show objects, often
looking back and forth between the object and the caregiver’s eyes; they seek
out and relate to the caregiver’s affective relation to the world in social referencing, so that a caregiver’s response to an object (e.g., disgust) influences
an infant’s response to that same object; they make and respond to gestural requests; they come to imitate meaningful actions with objects, and so on
(see, e.g., Bretherton, McNew, & Beeghly-Smith, 1981; Carpenter, Nagell, &
Tomasello, 1998).
Then, around the age of 18 months, children come to acquire a conceptual
form of reflective self/other-awareness (theory of mind). This is manifest
as they begin to show new forms of empathy, look up to their parents
when proud of achieving something, engage in coordinated role-responsive
interactions, and show silly or coy behavior in front of a mirror (e.g.,
Brownell & Carriger, 1990; Cummings, Zahn-Waxler, & Radke-Yarrow, 1981;
Lewis & Brooks-Gunn, 1979). From around this age, toddlers not only make
self-descriptive utterances such as “my book” or “Mary eat” (Kagan, 1982),
but they may take an active part in talking about people’s feeling states
such as those of happiness, sadness, or distress (Dunn, Bretherton, & Munn,
1987). Only now do children know that other persons are fitting recipients for
a kind of analogical reasoning from their own case. Moreover, it is around
the same period that we see the first signs of creative symbolic play, for
which children need the self-reflective capacity to know that they are making
one thing stand for another. Social knowledge transforms and augments
intellectual as well as social life.
THE CASE OF AUTISM
Against this background, consider young children with autism. In the very
first description of the syndrome of autism, Kanner (1943) pinpointed the

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pathognomonic disorder as “the children’s inability to relate themselves in the
ordinary way to people and situations from the beginning of life” (p. 242,
Kanner’s italics). He described how “people, so long as they left the child
alone, figured in about the same manner as did the desk, the bookshelf, or
the filing cabinet” (p. 246). Kanner recorded a number of instances in which
the children treated people like things, or related not to what another person
had just done, but to the hand that was in the way or the foot that stepped
upon the child’s blocks. Often the children failed to appreciate how linguistic utterances were anchored to the perspective of the person who uttered
them: for example, when one child stumbled and nearly fell, he said of himself: “You did not fall down.” Kanner also noted the children’s difficulty in
using language to convey meaning to others, their often inflexible use of
words and abnormal use of the personal pronouns “I” and “you,” and the
lack of variety in their spontaneous activity including a dearth of creative
symbolic play.
Controlled studies of young children with autism have highlighted their
atypicalities in one-to-one personal interaction, and their tendency not to
engage in sharing or in coordinating their attitudes with those of other people
in relation to shared surroundings (e.g., Loveland & Landry, 1986; Mundy,
Sigman, Ungerer, & Sherman, 1986). For example, Sigman, Kasari, Kwon, &
Yirmiya (1992) videotaped young children with and without autism in the
presence of an adult who appeared to hurt herself by hitting her finger with a
hammer, simulated fear toward a remote-controlled robot, and pretended to
be ill by lying down on a couch for a minute, feigning discomfort. The results
were that children with autism were unusual in rarely looking at or relating
to the adult. When the adult pretended to be hurt, for example, children with
autism often appeared unconcerned. When a small remote-controlled robot
moved toward the child and stopped about four feet away, the parent and
the experimenter, who were both seated nearby, made fearful facial expressions, gestures and vocalizations for 30 s. Almost all the children without
autism looked at an adult at some point, but fewer than half the children
with autism did so, and they seemed unaffected as they continued playing
with the robot.
Studies involving older children with autism have suggested that they
have limited “theory of mind,” for example in their appreciation of what
it means to “believe” or to see things a certain way (e.g. Baron-Cohen,
Tager-Flusberg, & Cohen, 2000). However, it is open to question whether
cognitive/conceptual limitations, rather than (as Kanner suggested) restricted
capacities for relatedness, are fundamental to the children’s impaired communication and symbolic functioning—and correspondingly, how much
biologically given modes of relatedness may contribute to the origins of
thinking and personality in typically developing human beings.

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

CUTTING-EDGE RESEARCH
In order to grasp the implications of what follows, it is necessary to appreciate that autism is a syndrome, that is, a constellation of clinical features
that tend to co-occur. For the present purposes, I take the view that the combination of social-relational and intellectual abnormalities in autism has an
intimate developmental relation to one another, an assumption that is controversial (e.g., Brunsdon & Happé, 2014; Hobson, 2014). I shall present just
some of the evidence that a weakened propensity to identify with the attitudes of others—a limitation that in the large majority of cases has a biological basis—underlies a broad sweep of affected children’s difficulties in the
communicative and intellectual as well as social domains. Autism reveals
how young children need the mental equipment for specific forms of early
interpersonal engagement if they are to participate fully in shared intellectual and cultural life. Since the topic of identifying-with has been almost
totally neglected in academic research, I shall need to draw on our own programmatic studies in order to illustrate points of methodological as well as
empirical importance.
IDENTIFICATION AND IMITATION
The first study concerns children’s propensity to imitate self/other orientated
actions (Meyer & Hobson, 2004). Matched groups of school-aged children
with and without autism were shown simple actions that afforded the potential for role-reversal. For example, a tester might pick up a small box near
herself and rest it on another box near the participant, and then return it to
its initial position; or she might pick up the box near the participant and rest
it on the box nearest to herself, and then replace it back as before. The child
was told simply: “Watch this,” and then after the object(s) were returned to
their original positions: “Now you.”
As predicted, children with autism copied the actions but were significantly less likely to imitate the self-other orientation shown by the tester (for
example, by copying the tester’s close-to-herself orientation by completing
the actions close-to-themselves). This appeared to be a direct reflection of
their lesser propensity to identify with the tester.
On the other hand, the group differences were not absolute and enough
variability was present in each group to consider patterns of individual
difference. We examined whether children’s propensity to imitate self-other
orientation was related to another aspect of social relations we believe to be
shaped by identification—interpersonal engagement involving sharing of
experience (Hobson & Hobson, 2007). In sharing experiences with someone
else, something of the experience of the other is encompassed alongside

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one’s own experience in a relational event that has a special phenomenology
as well as an essentially interpersonal structure (Campbell, 2002).
We went back to the videotapes of the children and tester during the
demonstration and imitation phases of each of the eight trials with three
a priori predictions, as follows: (i) children with autism would contrast
with control participants in spending more time looking at the objects
acted-upon and less time looking at the tester; (ii) participants with autism
would show fewer “sharing” looks toward the tester; and, critically, (iii)
within each group, individual differences in sharing looks (only) would
be associated with imitation of self-other orientation. “Sharing looks” (as
opposed to “checking looks” and “orienting looks”) were defined as those
looks directed to the tester that could be seen as a means to share experience
through interpersonal contact. Critically, two independent judges showed
excellent agreement on these ratings.
Results were that the children with autism looked at the objects for a higher
percentage of time, and they looked at the tester for less than half as much
time as children in the comparison group. Eleven of the 16 children with
autism compared with only five of the comparison children failed to engage
in a single sharing look. The percentage of time spent looking at the tester
overall, as well as frequency of checking and orienting joint attention looks,
were not related to the propensity to imitate self-other orientation in either
group. By contrast, sharing looks were specifically and significantly associated with the children’s propensity to adopt a self-other orientation when
imitating, both within and across the two groups.
The results suggest that a certain quality of interpersonal engagement
implicated in sharing looks is associated with a certain quality of imitation,
namely, that in which identifying with the other leads to the other person’s
self/other orientation being transposed to the imitator’s own stance. This
particular mode of imitation appears to make explicit the structure of
self-other experience implicated in sharing— not a merging, but a structure
that entails role-shifting.
IDENTIFICATION AND COMMUNICATION
A second study concerned nonverbal communication between adolescents
with and without autism as they had a conversation with an adult who was
conducting a semi-structured interview (García-Pérez, Lee, & Hobson, 2007).
The results were in keeping with previous studies (Capps, Kehres, & Sigman,
1998), in that there were surprisingly few and seemingly marginal group
differences on behavioral ratings such as smiles or gestures. Despite this,
clear group differences emerged on reliable “subjective” ratings of affective
engagement and smoothness of reciprocal interaction between the conversational partners.

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

What is striking here is not the bald fact that children with autism have
limited affective engagement—after all, this is what Kanner (1943) considered pathognomic of the syndrome—but rather, the fact that this eludes
measurement by “behavioral” ratings. Moreover, intersubjective engagement proves to be a critical variable for predicting change in other variables
(as in the case of sharing looks, cited above). Here we had raters evaluate the
linguistic content of the videotaped conversations for the degree to which
participant children were able to establish “cognitive linkage” with what
the interviewer was intending to convey (Hobson, Hobson, García-Pérez, &
Du Bois, 2012). Among children with autism (only), there was a positive correlation between a child’s ability to link in with the interviewer’s intended
meanings and independent, reliable ratings of emotional connectedness
between the interlocutors—but not a correlation with verbal mental age.
Therefore a rating of affective engagement was related to these children’s
cognitive/linguistic adjustments in conversation with someone else.
In a final part of this study, we analyzed the exchanges utterance by utterance. Children with autism could pick up and linguistically modify elements
of the interviewer’s speech, but frequently they failed to elaborate upon what
they had adopted in a coherent manner. Often they provided follow-on discourse that was truncated, unexpanded, or vague. Here it may be recalled
that a hallmark of identifying-with is that an individual assimilates the stance
of the other in such a way as to have this available as a new-found part of his
or her own cognitive or affective repertoire. It was in this respect, the ability
to establish fresh cognitive/linguistic foundations on which to build over the
course of conversation, that the children with autism were atypical.
IDENTIFICATION AND SYMBOLIC PLAY
According to the view outlined here, there are cognitive, affective and motivational aspects to coherent underlying intersubjective processes at the core
of communication and social engagement (Hobson, 2008)—and that these
processes are disrupted in autism. In particular, identifying-with is prototypically affective in infancy, but it is also cognitive (for instance, people
are distinguished from things) and motivational (one is moved). Therefore
if identifying-with is weak among children with autism, one would expect
there to be affective and motivational consequences.
In a study of symbolic play, Hobson, Lee, & Hobson (2008) reported that
groups of children and adolescents with and without autism, matched for
age and verbal ability, were similar in demonstrating the mechanics of play.
These particular, relatively able children were equally able to “metarepresent” in the sense of manifesting play in which they invented imaginary
objects and/or made one thing stand for another and/or attributed pretend

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properties, as well as to demonstrate flexibility in using toys. As predicted,
however, the play of children with autism was distinctive for a lack of those
qualities of playful pretend—awareness of self as creating meanings, investment in symbolic meanings, creativity, and fun—that had been hypothesized
to reflect the social-developmental underpinnings of typical creative play.
The nature of their symbolizing seemed different in kind from that of the
comparison children.
KEY ISSUES FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
Intersubjective engagement is not reducible to elements of any individual’s
behavior. Correspondingly, Kanner’s (1943) formulation of autism as an
impairment in affective contact between a child and other people is not
metaphorical. Events within the system of child-in-relation-to-other may
constitute the appropriate “unit of analysis” of social experience and
behavior (Vygotsky, 1962), for typical and atypical early developments.
If this is so, how can one measure intersubjective engagement and the
experiential implications of identifying-with? The appropriate measuring
instrument is a human being. Or rather, at least two human beings, because
a scientific approach requires that independent raters can agree in judging
the phenomena being researched. Some reviewers of the papers cited above
have balked at the possibility that seemingly nonobjective ratings of videotaped human interactions, for example those of emotional connectedness,
sharing looks, or investment and fun in play, can be made reliably—but
they can. In addition, as the results indicated, these were among the critical
variables accounting for what might otherwise have been taken as unrelated
phenomena such as linguistic coordination, imitative role-reversal, and
social-communicative functioning.
Of course, there is nothing magical in rating subjective states that have bodily expression. It is a prejudice to suppose that there is an unbridgeable gap
between what a person’s body expresses and what lies “behind” such behavior. On the contrary, a tenet of the present approach is that human beings read
a range of mental states in and through the expressions of others (Wittgenstein, 1958). It is a prejudice to suppose that we should restrict science to the
measurement of behavior that is somehow stripped of its subjective dimension.
Moreover, infants’ diverse relations with people and things have cognitive,
conative (motivational) and affective aspects, not components. It is a developmental achievement to emancipate thought from will and feeling (something
that is never fully accomplished), or indeed to distinguish thoughts from
what is thought about. No wonder that developmental theories restricted

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

to computer-like representational functioning have difficulty in making representations meaningful to the organism whose representations they are. It
is from human beings’ relations with the world that we need to begin our
account of mental development.
The success of the “emerging trend” I have discussed depends on conceptual as well as methodological innovation. For this reason, there is much to
be gained from interdisciplinary collaboration among philosophers, developmentalists and neuroscientists. For instance, it is in part a logical matter
whether children acquire the conceptual distinction between thoughts (or
more basically, attitudes) and things in interdependence with an understanding of persons and selves. The logic is that to conceive of oneself as a self
among other selves is implicated in understanding how given objects and
events fall under different descriptions-for-persons. These and other matters of philosophy have a direct bearing on developmental theorizing and
research.
For their part, neuroscientists may help to identify various patterns of
neurological dysfunction that either give rise to, or reflect, problems in
the social-communicative domain. Two examples are the tentative and
controversial evidence of abnormal “mirror neuron” functioning in autism
(e.g., Dapretto et al., 2006) and reduced neurofunctional correlates of
empathic functioning (Minio-Paluello, Baron-Cohen, Avenanti, Walsh, &
Aglioti, 2009). However, it is important not to jump to the conclusion that
such abnormalities pinpoint the cause of disorder. Instead they may reflect
atypicalities in current brain functioning for which the developmental
sources are to be found elsewhere.
Finally, it may be worthwhile to signpost a few of the many areas that
invite investigation. To begin with, there is scope to study the varieties of
identifying-with, and their contributions to personality development as well
as social-communicative and intellectual functioning. It is also important to
establish what does and does not depend on identifying-with. Although it is
probable that autistic children’s limited empathy with and concern for others
is linked with their abnormalities in identification, for example, other processes seem to be implicated in their relatively spared potential for forming
attachments and exhibiting jealousy. In addition, many children with autism
develop sophisticated language and thinking, and one needs to investigate
the bases for the children’s abilities as well as disabilities.
Research with other populations of children promises to enrich the developmental picture. The study of autism and “autism-like” features among
congenitally blind children (e.g., Hobson, 2014) has suggested that lack of
vision may deprive individuals of just the kind of co-orientation toward the
(visually specified) world that is also impoverished when young children fail
to identify with others. This may explain why the developmental sequelae of

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very early-onset blindness can include a picture closely akin to that of sighted
children with autism.
Another route to studying the biological foundations of human social
relations is to adopt an evolutionary and comparative approach. Already
there is evidence that critical contrasts between humans and nonhuman
primates lie in propensities/abilities to engage in sharing forms of joint
attention, showing empathy, imitating with role-reversals, and symbolizing (e.g., Tomasello & Racokzy, 2003)—and it is at least plausible that in
providing mankind with the ability to identify-with, biology prompted the
small but momentous step toward the evolution of thinking, talking, and
institutionally embedded Homo Sapiens.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am very grateful to the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral
Sciences, Stanford, and the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust,
London, for supporting a sabbatical during which ideas in this the paper
were developed.
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Hobson, R. P. (2008). Interpersonally situated cognition. International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 6, 377–397.
Hobson, R. P. (2014). The coherence of autism. Autism, 18, 6–16.
Hobson, R. P., Hobson, J. A., García-Pérez, R., & Du Bois, J. (2012). Dialogic linkage and resonance in autism. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 42,
2718–2728.
Hobson, R. P., Lee, A., & Hobson, J. A. (2008). Qualities of symbolic play among
children with autism: A social-developmental perspective. Journal of Autism and
Developmental Disorders, 39, 12–22.
Kagan, J. (1982). The emergence of self. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 23,
363–381.
Kanner, L. (1943). Autistic disturbances of affective contact. Nervous Child, 2, 217–250.
Laplanche, J., & Pontalis, J. B. (1973). The language of psychoanalysis. London, England:
Hogarth.
Lewis, M., & Brooks-Gunn, J. (1979). Social cognition and the acquisition of self . New
York, NY: Plenum.
Loveland, K. A., & Landry, S. H. (1986). Joint attention and language in autism and
developmental language delay. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 16,
335–349.
Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, self, and society. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Meyer, J. A., & Hobson, R. P. (2004). Orientation in relation to self and other: The case
of autism. Interaction Studies, 5, 221–244.
Minio-Paluello, I., Baron-Cohen, S., Avenanti, A., Walsh, V., & Aglioti, S. M. (2009).
Absence of embodied empathy during pain observation in Asperger syndrome.
Biological Psychiatry, 65, 55–62.

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Mundy, P., Sigman, M., Ungerer, J., & Sherman, T. (1986). Defining the social deficits
of autism: The contribution of non-verbal communication measures. Journal of
Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 27, 657–669.
Sigman, M. D., Kasari, C., Kwon, J. H., & Yirmiya, N. (1992). Responses to the negative emotions of others by autistic, mentally retarded, and normal children. Child
Development, 63, 796–807.
Tomasello, M., & Racokzy, H. (2003). What makes human cognition unique? From
individual to shared to collective intentionality. Mind and Language, 18, 121–147.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1962). Thought and language (In: E. Hanfmann & G. Vakar (trans.)).
Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Wittgenstein, L. (1958). Philosophical investigations (translated by G. E. M. Anscombe).
Oxford, England: Blackwell.

FURTHER READING
Freud, S. (1921). Identification. In J. Strachey (Ed.), The standard edition of the complete
psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. xviii, pp. 105 – 110). London, England:
Hogarth.
Hobson, R. P. (2002). The cradle of thought. London, England: Macmillan(Reprinted in
2004, New York, NY: Oxford University Press).
Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, self, and society. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Tomasello, M. (1999). The cultural origins of human cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

ROBERT PETER HOBSON SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Robert Peter Hobson is Emeritus Professor of Developmental Psychopathology, University College, London, and Honorary Consultant Psychiatrist in
Psychotherapy at the Tavistock Clinic, London. He is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, and has a PhD in Experimental Psychology from the University
of Cambridge. His research interests converge upon the significance of interpersonal relations for understanding the course of human developments,
both typical and atypical, and include programmatic studies of autism and
mother–infant relations. He has written two books on early development and
autism. The first, Autism and the Development of Mind (Erlbaum, 1993),
is rather dense, but the second, The Cradle of Thought (MacMillan, 2002,
and in the United States, Oxford University Press, 2004) was written for a
wider readership. He has also edited and contributed several chapters to
a book on Consultations in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy (Karnac, 2014).

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

Peter was fortunate to benefit from two wonderful sabbaticals at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, and is now
semi-retired and living in California.
RELATED ESSAYS
Social Epigenetics: Incorporating Epigenetic Effects as Social Cause and Consequence (Sociology), Douglas L. Anderton and Kathleen F. Arcaro
Telomeres (Psychology), Nancy Adler and Aoife O’Donovan
Kin-Directed Behavior in Primates (Anthropology), Carol M. Berman
The Sexual Division of Labor (Anthropology), Rebecca Bliege Bird and Brian
F. Codding
Genetics and the Life Course (Sociology), Evan Charney
Sexual Behavior (Anthropology), Melissa Emery Thompson
Evolutionary Approaches to Understanding Children’s Academic Achievement (Psychology), David C. Geary and Daniel B. Berch
Genetic and Environmental Approaches to Political Science (Political Science),
Zoltán Fazekas and Peter K. Hatemi
Genetics and Social Behavior (Anthropology), Henry Harpending and Gregory Cochran
An Evolutionary Perspective on Developmental Plasticity (Psychology), Sarah
Hartman and Jay Belsky
Grandmothers and the Evolution of Human Sociality (Anthropology), Kristen
Hawkes and James Coxworth
Genetic Foundations of Attitude Formation (Political Science), Christian Kandler et al.
Niche Construction: Implications for Human Sciences (Anthropology), Kevin
N. Laland and Michael O’Brien
Evolutionary Perspectives on Animal and Human Personality (Anthropology), Joseph H. Manson and Lynn A. Fairbanks
Darwinism as a Decryption Key for the Human Mind (Psychology), Csaba
Pléh and Ottilia Boross
Behavioral Heterochrony (Anthropology), Victoria Wobber and Brian Hare



Biology and Culture
ROBERT PETER HOBSON

Abstract
How are we to think of the developmental relations between individual and social
dimensions of human psychology? On the one hand, an individual’s mental development depends on social engagement and socially constructed symbolic systems
and institutions. On the other hand, the very existence of a social system depends on
the biologically provided constitution of the individuals who make up its members.
I shall consider these matters at the interface between the behavioral and social sciences through the perspective of developmental psychopathology, and, in particular,
the study of autism.

INTRODUCTION
In this essay, I consider how human infants and toddlers are biologically
prepared to achieve specific forms of engagement with other people, both
in person-to-person exchanges and in joint relation to a shared world. Early
experience of these kinds of social relatedness has a profound influence on
the developing structure of human thought and personality. I shall argue that
the capacity to identify with the bodily expressed attitudes of others is critical for the development of symbolic thinking and for the enrichment and
integration of social-emotional functioning. This structuring of early social
relatedness and experience requires biological underpinnings. The modes of
interpersonal engagement to which it gives rise play a critical role in shaping
human cognitive and cultural lives.
The empirical perspective that grounds this approach is that of developmental psychopathology. Developmental psychopathology is the study of
typical and atypical developments alongside one another. Through the study
of typically developing children, one is able to identify trajectories of mental
growth that may be altered among atypically developing individuals. From
a complementary perspective, the study of atypically developing children
can reveal how what we take for granted (because seemingly universal) in
human development is more complex and potentially vulnerable than we
had supposed. Not only this, but by tracing the developmental implications
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

of abnormality, we can discover cause–effect relations among specific facets
of psychological functioning, as these evolve over time.
For the present purposes, I focus on the case of early childhood autism as
affording fresh insights into the inter relation between social and cognitive
developments. When we come to formulate an adequate theory of early interpersonal relations and intellectual growth, then we should also see why the
syndrome of autism takes the form that it does.
This constitutes an “emerging trend” of theoretical and empirical investigations in its focus on the contribution of previously neglected forms of early
social experience to the development and exercise of flexible symbolic thinking and linguistic communication. The approach promises to integrate and
enrich three classical developmental perspectives on the mind and its development, namely those articulated by George Herbert Mead, Lev Vygotsky,
and Sigmund Freud.
FOUNDATIONAL RESEARCH
THEORETICAL APPROACHES
In exploring how mind, self, and society are grounded in social relations,
G.H. Mead (1934) proposed that symbolic thinking entails “an arousal in the
individual himself of the response he is calling out in the other individual, a
taking of the role of the other, a tendency to act as the other person acts. One
participates in the same process the other person is carrying out and controls
his action with reference to that participation” (p. 73). This suggestion had
been anticipated in the work of Cooley (1902) and Baldwin (1902), each of
whom considered that a child comes to adopt a psychological perspective
vis-à-vis his or her own self and mental events through adopting appropriate kinds of alternative stance—where the appropriate kinds arise through
interaction with other people.
Related themes are central to the work of Vygotsky (1978), who suggested
that “Every function in the child’s cultural development appears twice: first,
on the social level, and later, on the individual level; first, between people
(interpsychological), and then inside the child (intrapsychological) … All the
higher functions originate as actual relations between human individuals”
(pp. 56–57, Vygotsky’s italics). In Mourning and Melancholia (1917), Freud,
too, used the notion of “internalization” to characterize how patterns of
interpersonal relatedness are not only represented but also repeated within
the orbit of an individual’s own mental functioning.
What these theories require is an account of the mechanism(s) by which
appropriate kinds of role-taking and internalization are achieved. Freud
(1921) proposed that the mechanism was the process of identifying with

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other people. Freud illustrated one form of identifying-with through the
example of a child identifying with his father and adopting his characteristics, but on a more basic level he considered that identification leads to
empathy and structures the most basic forms of interpersonal engagement.
A working definition of identification offered by Laplanche and Pontalis
(1973) is as follows: “Psychological process whereby the subject assimilates
an aspect, property or attribute of the other and is transformed, wholly or
partially, after the model the other provides.” When one identifies with
someone else, one participates in the other’s attitudes and actions, and is
moved to encompass and potentially to adopt the orientation of the other
alongside or in relation to one’s own psychological stance. It is in virtue of
this pre-conceptual and often affectively configured propensity to identify
with the attitudes and actions of other individuals that interpersonal
psychological engagement is not merging, but rather linkage that entails
differentiation and connectedness.
A particular species of identifying-with has special importance for the
present discussion. This occurs in the context of face-to-face communication
between people. One person has a propensity to be moved by the bodily
anchored expressions of the subjective states of another, in such a way
that the “otherness” of the other is not lost. An obvious case in point is
empathy—to feel empathy for someone else is not to feel like, but for,
the other—and as I shall detail shortly, other instances of prototypically
emotional communication and pre-reflective role-taking have reference to a
shared world.
One reason why these ideas have been only partially adopted and integrated into mainstream thinking about thinking and personality seems to
be that they have been considered speculative, with little convincing empirical support. Yet evidence might emerge from studying how human development unfolds. If processes of identifying-with and associated role-taking
shape development in diverse spheres such as children’s social relations,
self-consciousness, imitation, symbolic play, narrative and other aspects of
language (especially pragmatics), emotional experience and empathy, and
then developmental research from each of these domains might yield the
kind of evidence that is needed. To put it plainly, we might discover that
the phenomena resist explanation unless we invoke “identifying-with” as an
explanatory concept.
Correspondingly, if there is evidence for a weakness or relative dearth of
the propensity to identify with others among children with autism, then
we should be able to trace the developmental implications of this abnormality in these very same domains. This hypothesis about the pathogenesis
of autism contrasts with individualistic, cognitively styled theories that
situate the developmental source of deficits exclusively within the minds

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(or representational processes) of affected children. Such theories show
little concern not only with interpersonal causes of disorder, but also with
issues of motivation and affect—each of which is an essential aspect of
identifying-with, and each of which seems central to understanding autism.
I now turn to a sample of studies in typical and atypical developments that
provide evidence in the light of which alternative theoretical options may be
judged.
TYPICAL EARLY DEVELOPMENT
There evidence that around the end of the first year of life, typically developing infants relate to other people as separate centers of psychological orientation toward a common world. As they approach 9 months of age, infants
come to take a certain stance or set of attitudes not only toward persons
vis-à-vis things, but more specifically toward the attitudes of other persons:
they share experiences of the world with a caregiver; they show objects, often
looking back and forth between the object and the caregiver’s eyes; they seek
out and relate to the caregiver’s affective relation to the world in social referencing, so that a caregiver’s response to an object (e.g., disgust) influences
an infant’s response to that same object; they make and respond to gestural requests; they come to imitate meaningful actions with objects, and so on
(see, e.g., Bretherton, McNew, & Beeghly-Smith, 1981; Carpenter, Nagell, &
Tomasello, 1998).
Then, around the age of 18 months, children come to acquire a conceptual
form of reflective self/other-awareness (theory of mind). This is manifest
as they begin to show new forms of empathy, look up to their parents
when proud of achieving something, engage in coordinated role-responsive
interactions, and show silly or coy behavior in front of a mirror (e.g.,
Brownell & Carriger, 1990; Cummings, Zahn-Waxler, & Radke-Yarrow, 1981;
Lewis & Brooks-Gunn, 1979). From around this age, toddlers not only make
self-descriptive utterances such as “my book” or “Mary eat” (Kagan, 1982),
but they may take an active part in talking about people’s feeling states
such as those of happiness, sadness, or distress (Dunn, Bretherton, & Munn,
1987). Only now do children know that other persons are fitting recipients for
a kind of analogical reasoning from their own case. Moreover, it is around
the same period that we see the first signs of creative symbolic play, for
which children need the self-reflective capacity to know that they are making
one thing stand for another. Social knowledge transforms and augments
intellectual as well as social life.
THE CASE OF AUTISM
Against this background, consider young children with autism. In the very
first description of the syndrome of autism, Kanner (1943) pinpointed the

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pathognomonic disorder as “the children’s inability to relate themselves in the
ordinary way to people and situations from the beginning of life” (p. 242,
Kanner’s italics). He described how “people, so long as they left the child
alone, figured in about the same manner as did the desk, the bookshelf, or
the filing cabinet” (p. 246). Kanner recorded a number of instances in which
the children treated people like things, or related not to what another person
had just done, but to the hand that was in the way or the foot that stepped
upon the child’s blocks. Often the children failed to appreciate how linguistic utterances were anchored to the perspective of the person who uttered
them: for example, when one child stumbled and nearly fell, he said of himself: “You did not fall down.” Kanner also noted the children’s difficulty in
using language to convey meaning to others, their often inflexible use of
words and abnormal use of the personal pronouns “I” and “you,” and the
lack of variety in their spontaneous activity including a dearth of creative
symbolic play.
Controlled studies of young children with autism have highlighted their
atypicalities in one-to-one personal interaction, and their tendency not to
engage in sharing or in coordinating their attitudes with those of other people
in relation to shared surroundings (e.g., Loveland & Landry, 1986; Mundy,
Sigman, Ungerer, & Sherman, 1986). For example, Sigman, Kasari, Kwon, &
Yirmiya (1992) videotaped young children with and without autism in the
presence of an adult who appeared to hurt herself by hitting her finger with a
hammer, simulated fear toward a remote-controlled robot, and pretended to
be ill by lying down on a couch for a minute, feigning discomfort. The results
were that children with autism were unusual in rarely looking at or relating
to the adult. When the adult pretended to be hurt, for example, children with
autism often appeared unconcerned. When a small remote-controlled robot
moved toward the child and stopped about four feet away, the parent and
the experimenter, who were both seated nearby, made fearful facial expressions, gestures and vocalizations for 30 s. Almost all the children without
autism looked at an adult at some point, but fewer than half the children
with autism did so, and they seemed unaffected as they continued playing
with the robot.
Studies involving older children with autism have suggested that they
have limited “theory of mind,” for example in their appreciation of what
it means to “believe” or to see things a certain way (e.g. Baron-Cohen,
Tager-Flusberg, & Cohen, 2000). However, it is open to question whether
cognitive/conceptual limitations, rather than (as Kanner suggested) restricted
capacities for relatedness, are fundamental to the children’s impaired communication and symbolic functioning—and correspondingly, how much
biologically given modes of relatedness may contribute to the origins of
thinking and personality in typically developing human beings.

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CUTTING-EDGE RESEARCH
In order to grasp the implications of what follows, it is necessary to appreciate that autism is a syndrome, that is, a constellation of clinical features
that tend to co-occur. For the present purposes, I take the view that the combination of social-relational and intellectual abnormalities in autism has an
intimate developmental relation to one another, an assumption that is controversial (e.g., Brunsdon & Happé, 2014; Hobson, 2014). I shall present just
some of the evidence that a weakened propensity to identify with the attitudes of others—a limitation that in the large majority of cases has a biological basis—underlies a broad sweep of affected children’s difficulties in the
communicative and intellectual as well as social domains. Autism reveals
how young children need the mental equipment for specific forms of early
interpersonal engagement if they are to participate fully in shared intellectual and cultural life. Since the topic of identifying-with has been almost
totally neglected in academic research, I shall need to draw on our own programmatic studies in order to illustrate points of methodological as well as
empirical importance.
IDENTIFICATION AND IMITATION
The first study concerns children’s propensity to imitate self/other orientated
actions (Meyer & Hobson, 2004). Matched groups of school-aged children
with and without autism were shown simple actions that afforded the potential for role-reversal. For example, a tester might pick up a small box near
herself and rest it on another box near the participant, and then return it to
its initial position; or she might pick up the box near the participant and rest
it on the box nearest to herself, and then replace it back as before. The child
was told simply: “Watch this,” and then after the object(s) were returned to
their original positions: “Now you.”
As predicted, children with autism copied the actions but were significantly less likely to imitate the self-other orientation shown by the tester (for
example, by copying the tester’s close-to-herself orientation by completing
the actions close-to-themselves). This appeared to be a direct reflection of
their lesser propensity to identify with the tester.
On the other hand, the group differences were not absolute and enough
variability was present in each group to consider patterns of individual
difference. We examined whether children’s propensity to imitate self-other
orientation was related to another aspect of social relations we believe to be
shaped by identification—interpersonal engagement involving sharing of
experience (Hobson & Hobson, 2007). In sharing experiences with someone
else, something of the experience of the other is encompassed alongside

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one’s own experience in a relational event that has a special phenomenology
as well as an essentially interpersonal structure (Campbell, 2002).
We went back to the videotapes of the children and tester during the
demonstration and imitation phases of each of the eight trials with three
a priori predictions, as follows: (i) children with autism would contrast
with control participants in spending more time looking at the objects
acted-upon and less time looking at the tester; (ii) participants with autism
would show fewer “sharing” looks toward the tester; and, critically, (iii)
within each group, individual differences in sharing looks (only) would
be associated with imitation of self-other orientation. “Sharing looks” (as
opposed to “checking looks” and “orienting looks”) were defined as those
looks directed to the tester that could be seen as a means to share experience
through interpersonal contact. Critically, two independent judges showed
excellent agreement on these ratings.
Results were that the children with autism looked at the objects for a higher
percentage of time, and they looked at the tester for less than half as much
time as children in the comparison group. Eleven of the 16 children with
autism compared with only five of the comparison children failed to engage
in a single sharing look. The percentage of time spent looking at the tester
overall, as well as frequency of checking and orienting joint attention looks,
were not related to the propensity to imitate self-other orientation in either
group. By contrast, sharing looks were specifically and significantly associated with the children’s propensity to adopt a self-other orientation when
imitating, both within and across the two groups.
The results suggest that a certain quality of interpersonal engagement
implicated in sharing looks is associated with a certain quality of imitation,
namely, that in which identifying with the other leads to the other person’s
self/other orientation being transposed to the imitator’s own stance. This
particular mode of imitation appears to make explicit the structure of
self-other experience implicated in sharing— not a merging, but a structure
that entails role-shifting.
IDENTIFICATION AND COMMUNICATION
A second study concerned nonverbal communication between adolescents
with and without autism as they had a conversation with an adult who was
conducting a semi-structured interview (García-Pérez, Lee, & Hobson, 2007).
The results were in keeping with previous studies (Capps, Kehres, & Sigman,
1998), in that there were surprisingly few and seemingly marginal group
differences on behavioral ratings such as smiles or gestures. Despite this,
clear group differences emerged on reliable “subjective” ratings of affective
engagement and smoothness of reciprocal interaction between the conversational partners.

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

What is striking here is not the bald fact that children with autism have
limited affective engagement—after all, this is what Kanner (1943) considered pathognomic of the syndrome—but rather, the fact that this eludes
measurement by “behavioral” ratings. Moreover, intersubjective engagement proves to be a critical variable for predicting change in other variables
(as in the case of sharing looks, cited above). Here we had raters evaluate the
linguistic content of the videotaped conversations for the degree to which
participant children were able to establish “cognitive linkage” with what
the interviewer was intending to convey (Hobson, Hobson, García-Pérez, &
Du Bois, 2012). Among children with autism (only), there was a positive correlation between a child’s ability to link in with the interviewer’s intended
meanings and independent, reliable ratings of emotional connectedness
between the interlocutors—but not a correlation with verbal mental age.
Therefore a rating of affective engagement was related to these children’s
cognitive/linguistic adjustments in conversation with someone else.
In a final part of this study, we analyzed the exchanges utterance by utterance. Children with autism could pick up and linguistically modify elements
of the interviewer’s speech, but frequently they failed to elaborate upon what
they had adopted in a coherent manner. Often they provided follow-on discourse that was truncated, unexpanded, or vague. Here it may be recalled
that a hallmark of identifying-with is that an individual assimilates the stance
of the other in such a way as to have this available as a new-found part of his
or her own cognitive or affective repertoire. It was in this respect, the ability
to establish fresh cognitive/linguistic foundations on which to build over the
course of conversation, that the children with autism were atypical.
IDENTIFICATION AND SYMBOLIC PLAY
According to the view outlined here, there are cognitive, affective and motivational aspects to coherent underlying intersubjective processes at the core
of communication and social engagement (Hobson, 2008)—and that these
processes are disrupted in autism. In particular, identifying-with is prototypically affective in infancy, but it is also cognitive (for instance, people
are distinguished from things) and motivational (one is moved). Therefore
if identifying-with is weak among children with autism, one would expect
there to be affective and motivational consequences.
In a study of symbolic play, Hobson, Lee, & Hobson (2008) reported that
groups of children and adolescents with and without autism, matched for
age and verbal ability, were similar in demonstrating the mechanics of play.
These particular, relatively able children were equally able to “metarepresent” in the sense of manifesting play in which they invented imaginary
objects and/or made one thing stand for another and/or attributed pretend

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properties, as well as to demonstrate flexibility in using toys. As predicted,
however, the play of children with autism was distinctive for a lack of those
qualities of playful pretend—awareness of self as creating meanings, investment in symbolic meanings, creativity, and fun—that had been hypothesized
to reflect the social-developmental underpinnings of typical creative play.
The nature of their symbolizing seemed different in kind from that of the
comparison children.
KEY ISSUES FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
Intersubjective engagement is not reducible to elements of any individual’s
behavior. Correspondingly, Kanner’s (1943) formulation of autism as an
impairment in affective contact between a child and other people is not
metaphorical. Events within the system of child-in-relation-to-other may
constitute the appropriate “unit of analysis” of social experience and
behavior (Vygotsky, 1962), for typical and atypical early developments.
If this is so, how can one measure intersubjective engagement and the
experiential implications of identifying-with? The appropriate measuring
instrument is a human being. Or rather, at least two human beings, because
a scientific approach requires that independent raters can agree in judging
the phenomena being researched. Some reviewers of the papers cited above
have balked at the possibility that seemingly nonobjective ratings of videotaped human interactions, for example those of emotional connectedness,
sharing looks, or investment and fun in play, can be made reliably—but
they can. In addition, as the results indicated, these were among the critical
variables accounting for what might otherwise have been taken as unrelated
phenomena such as linguistic coordination, imitative role-reversal, and
social-communicative functioning.
Of course, there is nothing magical in rating subjective states that have bodily expression. It is a prejudice to suppose that there is an unbridgeable gap
between what a person’s body expresses and what lies “behind” such behavior. On the contrary, a tenet of the present approach is that human beings read
a range of mental states in and through the expressions of others (Wittgenstein, 1958). It is a prejudice to suppose that we should restrict science to the
measurement of behavior that is somehow stripped of its subjective dimension.
Moreover, infants’ diverse relations with people and things have cognitive,
conative (motivational) and affective aspects, not components. It is a developmental achievement to emancipate thought from will and feeling (something
that is never fully accomplished), or indeed to distinguish thoughts from
what is thought about. No wonder that developmental theories restricted

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to computer-like representational functioning have difficulty in making representations meaningful to the organism whose representations they are. It
is from human beings’ relations with the world that we need to begin our
account of mental development.
The success of the “emerging trend” I have discussed depends on conceptual as well as methodological innovation. For this reason, there is much to
be gained from interdisciplinary collaboration among philosophers, developmentalists and neuroscientists. For instance, it is in part a logical matter
whether children acquire the conceptual distinction between thoughts (or
more basically, attitudes) and things in interdependence with an understanding of persons and selves. The logic is that to conceive of oneself as a self
among other selves is implicated in understanding how given objects and
events fall under different descriptions-for-persons. These and other matters of philosophy have a direct bearing on developmental theorizing and
research.
For their part, neuroscientists may help to identify various patterns of
neurological dysfunction that either give rise to, or reflect, problems in
the social-communicative domain. Two examples are the tentative and
controversial evidence of abnormal “mirror neuron” functioning in autism
(e.g., Dapretto et al., 2006) and reduced neurofunctional correlates of
empathic functioning (Minio-Paluello, Baron-Cohen, Avenanti, Walsh, &
Aglioti, 2009). However, it is important not to jump to the conclusion that
such abnormalities pinpoint the cause of disorder. Instead they may reflect
atypicalities in current brain functioning for which the developmental
sources are to be found elsewhere.
Finally, it may be worthwhile to signpost a few of the many areas that
invite investigation. To begin with, there is scope to study the varieties of
identifying-with, and their contributions to personality development as well
as social-communicative and intellectual functioning. It is also important to
establish what does and does not depend on identifying-with. Although it is
probable that autistic children’s limited empathy with and concern for others
is linked with their abnormalities in identification, for example, other processes seem to be implicated in their relatively spared potential for forming
attachments and exhibiting jealousy. In addition, many children with autism
develop sophisticated language and thinking, and one needs to investigate
the bases for the children’s abilities as well as disabilities.
Research with other populations of children promises to enrich the developmental picture. The study of autism and “autism-like” features among
congenitally blind children (e.g., Hobson, 2014) has suggested that lack of
vision may deprive individuals of just the kind of co-orientation toward the
(visually specified) world that is also impoverished when young children fail
to identify with others. This may explain why the developmental sequelae of

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very early-onset blindness can include a picture closely akin to that of sighted
children with autism.
Another route to studying the biological foundations of human social
relations is to adopt an evolutionary and comparative approach. Already
there is evidence that critical contrasts between humans and nonhuman
primates lie in propensities/abilities to engage in sharing forms of joint
attention, showing empathy, imitating with role-reversals, and symbolizing (e.g., Tomasello & Racokzy, 2003)—and it is at least plausible that in
providing mankind with the ability to identify-with, biology prompted the
small but momentous step toward the evolution of thinking, talking, and
institutionally embedded Homo Sapiens.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am very grateful to the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral
Sciences, Stanford, and the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust,
London, for supporting a sabbatical during which ideas in this the paper
were developed.
REFERENCES
Baldwin, J. M. (1902). Social and ethical interpretations in mental development. New York,
NY: Macmillan.
Baron-Cohen, S., Tager-Flusberg, H., & Cohen, D. J. (2000). Understanding other minds:
Perspectives from developmental cognitive neuroscience (2nd ed.). New York, NY:
Oxford University Press.
Bretherton, I., McNew, S., & Beeghly-Smith, M. (1981). Early person knowledge as
expressed in gestural and verbal communication: When do infants acquire a “theory of mind”? In M. E. Lamb & L. R. Sherrod (Eds.), Infant social cognition: Empirical
and theoretical considerations (pp. 333 – 373). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
Brownell, C. A., & Carriger, M. S. (1990). Changes in cooperation and self-other differentiation during the second year. Child Development, 61, 1164–1174.
Brunsdon, V. E. A., & Happé, F. (2014). Exploring the ‘fractionation’ of autism at the
cognitive level. Autism, 2, 17–30.
Campbell, J. (2002). Reference and consciousness. Oxford, England: Oxford University
Press.
Capps, L., Kehres, J., & Sigman, M. (1998). Conversational abilities among children
with autism and children with developmental delays. Autism, 2, 325–344.
Carpenter, M., Nagell, K., & Tomasello, M. (1998). Social cognition, joint attention,
and communicative competence from 9 to 15 months of age. Monographs of the
Society for Research in Child Development, 63, 1–143.
Cooley, C. H. (1902). Human nature and the social order. New York, NY: Scribner.

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Cummings, E. M., Zahn-Waxler, C., & Radke-Yarrow, M. (1981). Young children’s
responses to expressions of anger and affection by others in the family. Child Development, 52, 1274–1282.
Dapretto, M., Davies, M. S., Pfeifer, J. H., Scott, A. A., Sigman, M., Bookheimer, S. Y.,
& Iacoboni, M. (2006). Understanding emotions in others: Mirror neuron dysfunction in children with autism spectrum disorders. Nature Neuroscience, 9, 28–30.
Dunn, J., Bretherton, I., & Munn, P. (1987). Conversations about feeling states
between mothers and their young children. Developmental Psychology, 23, 132–139.
Freud, S. (1917). Mourning and Melancholia. In J. Strachey (Ed.), The standard edition
of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. XIV, pp. 237–258). London,
England: Hogarth.
Freud, S. (1921). Identification. In J. Strachey (Ed.), The standard edition of the complete
psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. XVIII, pp. 105–110). London, England:
Hogarth.
García-Pérez, R. M., Lee, A., & Hobson, R. P. (2007). On intersubjective engagement in
autism: A controlled study of nonverbal aspects of conversation. Journal of Autism
and Developmental Disorders, 37, 1310–1322.
Hobson, J. A., & Hobson, R. P. (2007). Identification: The missing link between imitation and joint attention? Development and Psychopathology, 19, 411–431.
Hobson, R. P. (2008). Interpersonally situated cognition. International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 6, 377–397.
Hobson, R. P. (2014). The coherence of autism. Autism, 18, 6–16.
Hobson, R. P., Hobson, J. A., García-Pérez, R., & Du Bois, J. (2012). Dialogic linkage and resonance in autism. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 42,
2718–2728.
Hobson, R. P., Lee, A., & Hobson, J. A. (2008). Qualities of symbolic play among
children with autism: A social-developmental perspective. Journal of Autism and
Developmental Disorders, 39, 12–22.
Kagan, J. (1982). The emergence of self. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 23,
363–381.
Kanner, L. (1943). Autistic disturbances of affective contact. Nervous Child, 2, 217–250.
Laplanche, J., & Pontalis, J. B. (1973). The language of psychoanalysis. London, England:
Hogarth.
Lewis, M., & Brooks-Gunn, J. (1979). Social cognition and the acquisition of self . New
York, NY: Plenum.
Loveland, K. A., & Landry, S. H. (1986). Joint attention and language in autism and
developmental language delay. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 16,
335–349.
Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, self, and society. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Meyer, J. A., & Hobson, R. P. (2004). Orientation in relation to self and other: The case
of autism. Interaction Studies, 5, 221–244.
Minio-Paluello, I., Baron-Cohen, S., Avenanti, A., Walsh, V., & Aglioti, S. M. (2009).
Absence of embodied empathy during pain observation in Asperger syndrome.
Biological Psychiatry, 65, 55–62.

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Mundy, P., Sigman, M., Ungerer, J., & Sherman, T. (1986). Defining the social deficits
of autism: The contribution of non-verbal communication measures. Journal of
Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 27, 657–669.
Sigman, M. D., Kasari, C., Kwon, J. H., & Yirmiya, N. (1992). Responses to the negative emotions of others by autistic, mentally retarded, and normal children. Child
Development, 63, 796–807.
Tomasello, M., & Racokzy, H. (2003). What makes human cognition unique? From
individual to shared to collective intentionality. Mind and Language, 18, 121–147.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1962). Thought and language (In: E. Hanfmann & G. Vakar (trans.)).
Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Wittgenstein, L. (1958). Philosophical investigations (translated by G. E. M. Anscombe).
Oxford, England: Blackwell.

FURTHER READING
Freud, S. (1921). Identification. In J. Strachey (Ed.), The standard edition of the complete
psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. xviii, pp. 105 – 110). London, England:
Hogarth.
Hobson, R. P. (2002). The cradle of thought. London, England: Macmillan(Reprinted in
2004, New York, NY: Oxford University Press).
Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, self, and society. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Tomasello, M. (1999). The cultural origins of human cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

ROBERT PETER HOBSON SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Robert Peter Hobson is Emeritus Professor of Developmental Psychopathology, University College, London, and Honorary Consultant Psychiatrist in
Psychotherapy at the Tavistock Clinic, London. He is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, and has a PhD in Experimental Psychology from the University
of Cambridge. His research interests converge upon the significance of interpersonal relations for understanding the course of human developments,
both typical and atypical, and include programmatic studies of autism and
mother–infant relations. He has written two books on early development and
autism. The first, Autism and the Development of Mind (Erlbaum, 1993),
is rather dense, but the second, The Cradle of Thought (MacMillan, 2002,
and in the United States, Oxford University Press, 2004) was written for a
wider readership. He has also edited and contributed several chapters to
a book on Consultations in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy (Karnac, 2014).

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

Peter was fortunate to benefit from two wonderful sabbaticals at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, and is now
semi-retired and living in California.
RELATED ESSAYS
Social Epigenetics: Incorporating Epigenetic Effects as Social Cause and Consequence (Sociology), Douglas L. Anderton and Kathleen F. Arcaro
Telomeres (Psychology), Nancy Adler and Aoife O’Donovan
Kin-Directed Behavior in Primates (Anthropology), Carol M. Berman
The Sexual Division of Labor (Anthropology), Rebecca Bliege Bird and Brian
F. Codding
Genetics and the Life Course (Sociology), Evan Charney
Sexual Behavior (Anthropology), Melissa Emery Thompson
Evolutionary Approaches to Understanding Children’s Academic Achievement (Psychology), David C. Geary and Daniel B. Berch
Genetic and Environmental Approaches to Political Science (Political Science),
Zoltán Fazekas and Peter K. Hatemi
Genetics and Social Behavior (Anthropology), Henry Harpending and Gregory Cochran
An Evolutionary Perspective on Developmental Plasticity (Psychology), Sarah
Hartman and Jay Belsky
Grandmothers and the Evolution of Human Sociality (Anthropology), Kristen
Hawkes and James Coxworth
Genetic Foundations of Attitude Formation (Political Science), Christian Kandler et al.
Niche Construction: Implications for Human Sciences (Anthropology), Kevin
N. Laland and Michael O’Brien
Evolutionary Perspectives on Animal and Human Personality (Anthropology), Joseph H. Manson and Lynn A. Fairbanks
Darwinism as a Decryption Key for the Human Mind (Psychology), Csaba
Pléh and Ottilia Boross
Behavioral Heterochrony (Anthropology), Victoria Wobber and Brian Hare


Biology and Culture
ROBERT PETER HOBSON

Abstract
How are we to think of the developmental relations between individual and social
dimensions of human psychology? On the one hand, an individual’s mental development depends on social engagement and socially constructed symbolic systems
and institutions. On the other hand, the very existence of a social system depends on
the biologically provided constitution of the individuals who make up its members.
I shall consider these matters at the interface between the behavioral and social sciences through the perspective of developmental psychopathology, and, in particular,
the study of autism.

INTRODUCTION
In this essay, I consider how human infants and toddlers are biologically
prepared to achieve specific forms of engagement with other people, both
in person-to-person exchanges and in joint relation to a shared world. Early
experience of these kinds of social relatedness has a profound influence on
the developing structure of human thought and personality. I shall argue that
the capacity to identify with the bodily expressed attitudes of others is critical for the development of symbolic thinking and for the enrichment and
integration of social-emotional functioning. This structuring of early social
relatedness and experience requires biological underpinnings. The modes of
interpersonal engagement to which it gives rise play a critical role in shaping
human cognitive and cultural lives.
The empirical perspective that grounds this approach is that of developmental psychopathology. Developmental psychopathology is the study of
typical and atypical developments alongside one another. Through the study
of typically developing children, one is able to identify trajectories of mental
growth that may be altered among atypically developing individuals. From
a complementary perspective, the study of atypically developing children
can reveal how what we take for granted (because seemingly universal) in
human development is more complex and potentially vulnerable than we
had supposed. Not only this, but by tracing the developmental implications
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

of abnormality, we can discover cause–effect relations among specific facets
of psychological functioning, as these evolve over time.
For the present purposes, I focus on the case of early childhood autism as
affording fresh insights into the inter relation between social and cognitive
developments. When we come to formulate an adequate theory of early interpersonal relations and intellectual growth, then we should also see why the
syndrome of autism takes the form that it does.
This constitutes an “emerging trend” of theoretical and empirical investigations in its focus on the contribution of previously neglected forms of early
social experience to the development and exercise of flexible symbolic thinking and linguistic communication. The approach promises to integrate and
enrich three classical developmental perspectives on the mind and its development, namely those articulated by George Herbert Mead, Lev Vygotsky,
and Sigmund Freud.
FOUNDATIONAL RESEARCH
THEORETICAL APPROACHES
In exploring how mind, self, and society are grounded in social relations,
G.H. Mead (1934) proposed that symbolic thinking entails “an arousal in the
individual himself of the response he is calling out in the other individual, a
taking of the role of the other, a tendency to act as the other person acts. One
participates in the same process the other person is carrying out and controls
his action with reference to that participation” (p. 73). This suggestion had
been anticipated in the work of Cooley (1902) and Baldwin (1902), each of
whom considered that a child comes to adopt a psychological perspective
vis-à-vis his or her own self and mental events through adopting appropriate kinds of alternative stance—where the appropriate kinds arise through
interaction with other people.
Related themes are central to the work of Vygotsky (1978), who suggested
that “Every function in the child’s cultural development appears twice: first,
on the social level, and later, on the individual level; first, between people
(interpsychological), and then inside the child (intrapsychological) … All the
higher functions originate as actual relations between human individuals”
(pp. 56–57, Vygotsky’s italics). In Mourning and Melancholia (1917), Freud,
too, used the notion of “internalization” to characterize how patterns of
interpersonal relatedness are not only represented but also repeated within
the orbit of an individual’s own mental functioning.
What these theories require is an account of the mechanism(s) by which
appropriate kinds of role-taking and internalization are achieved. Freud
(1921) proposed that the mechanism was the process of identifying with

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other people. Freud illustrated one form of identifying-with through the
example of a child identifying with his father and adopting his characteristics, but on a more basic level he considered that identification leads to
empathy and structures the most basic forms of interpersonal engagement.
A working definition of identification offered by Laplanche and Pontalis
(1973) is as follows: “Psychological process whereby the subject assimilates
an aspect, property or attribute of the other and is transformed, wholly or
partially, after the model the other provides.” When one identifies with
someone else, one participates in the other’s attitudes and actions, and is
moved to encompass and potentially to adopt the orientation of the other
alongside or in relation to one’s own psychological stance. It is in virtue of
this pre-conceptual and often affectively configured propensity to identify
with the attitudes and actions of other individuals that interpersonal
psychological engagement is not merging, but rather linkage that entails
differentiation and connectedness.
A particular species of identifying-with has special importance for the
present discussion. This occurs in the context of face-to-face communication
between people. One person has a propensity to be moved by the bodily
anchored expressions of the subjective states of another, in such a way
that the “otherness” of the other is not lost. An obvious case in point is
empathy—to feel empathy for someone else is not to feel like, but for,
the other—and as I shall detail shortly, other instances of prototypically
emotional communication and pre-reflective role-taking have reference to a
shared world.
One reason why these ideas have been only partially adopted and integrated into mainstream thinking about thinking and personality seems to
be that they have been considered speculative, with little convincing empirical support. Yet evidence might emerge from studying how human development unfolds. If processes of identifying-with and associated role-taking
shape development in diverse spheres such as children’s social relations,
self-consciousness, imitation, symbolic play, narrative and other aspects of
language (especially pragmatics), emotional experience and empathy, and
then developmental research from each of these domains might yield the
kind of evidence that is needed. To put it plainly, we might discover that
the phenomena resist explanation unless we invoke “identifying-with” as an
explanatory concept.
Correspondingly, if there is evidence for a weakness or relative dearth of
the propensity to identify with others among children with autism, then
we should be able to trace the developmental implications of this abnormality in these very same domains. This hypothesis about the pathogenesis
of autism contrasts with individualistic, cognitively styled theories that
situate the developmental source of deficits exclusively within the minds

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(or representational processes) of affected children. Such theories show
little concern not only with interpersonal causes of disorder, but also with
issues of motivation and affect—each of which is an essential aspect of
identifying-with, and each of which seems central to understanding autism.
I now turn to a sample of studies in typical and atypical developments that
provide evidence in the light of which alternative theoretical options may be
judged.
TYPICAL EARLY DEVELOPMENT
There evidence that around the end of the first year of life, typically developing infants relate to other people as separate centers of psychological orientation toward a common world. As they approach 9 months of age, infants
come to take a certain stance or set of attitudes not only toward persons
vis-à-vis things, but more specifically toward the attitudes of other persons:
they share experiences of the world with a caregiver; they show objects, often
looking back and forth between the object and the caregiver’s eyes; they seek
out and relate to the caregiver’s affective relation to the world in social referencing, so that a caregiver’s response to an object (e.g., disgust) influences
an infant’s response to that same object; they make and respond to gestural requests; they come to imitate meaningful actions with objects, and so on
(see, e.g., Bretherton, McNew, & Beeghly-Smith, 1981; Carpenter, Nagell, &
Tomasello, 1998).
Then, around the age of 18 months, children come to acquire a conceptual
form of reflective self/other-awareness (theory of mind). This is manifest
as they begin to show new forms of empathy, look up to their parents
when proud of achieving something, engage in coordinated role-responsive
interactions, and show silly or coy behavior in front of a mirror (e.g.,
Brownell & Carriger, 1990; Cummings, Zahn-Waxler, & Radke-Yarrow, 1981;
Lewis & Brooks-Gunn, 1979). From around this age, toddlers not only make
self-descriptive utterances such as “my book” or “Mary eat” (Kagan, 1982),
but they may take an active part in talking about people’s feeling states
such as those of happiness, sadness, or distress (Dunn, Bretherton, & Munn,
1987). Only now do children know that other persons are fitting recipients for
a kind of analogical reasoning from their own case. Moreover, it is around
the same period that we see the first signs of creative symbolic play, for
which children need the self-reflective capacity to know that they are making
one thing stand for another. Social knowledge transforms and augments
intellectual as well as social life.
THE CASE OF AUTISM
Against this background, consider young children with autism. In the very
first description of the syndrome of autism, Kanner (1943) pinpointed the

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pathognomonic disorder as “the children’s inability to relate themselves in the
ordinary way to people and situations from the beginning of life” (p. 242,
Kanner’s italics). He described how “people, so long as they left the child
alone, figured in about the same manner as did the desk, the bookshelf, or
the filing cabinet” (p. 246). Kanner recorded a number of instances in which
the children treated people like things, or related not to what another person
had just done, but to the hand that was in the way or the foot that stepped
upon the child’s blocks. Often the children failed to appreciate how linguistic utterances were anchored to the perspective of the person who uttered
them: for example, when one child stumbled and nearly fell, he said of himself: “You did not fall down.” Kanner also noted the children’s difficulty in
using language to convey meaning to others, their often inflexible use of
words and abnormal use of the personal pronouns “I” and “you,” and the
lack of variety in their spontaneous activity including a dearth of creative
symbolic play.
Controlled studies of young children with autism have highlighted their
atypicalities in one-to-one personal interaction, and their tendency not to
engage in sharing or in coordinating their attitudes with those of other people
in relation to shared surroundings (e.g., Loveland & Landry, 1986; Mundy,
Sigman, Ungerer, & Sherman, 1986). For example, Sigman, Kasari, Kwon, &
Yirmiya (1992) videotaped young children with and without autism in the
presence of an adult who appeared to hurt herself by hitting her finger with a
hammer, simulated fear toward a remote-controlled robot, and pretended to
be ill by lying down on a couch for a minute, feigning discomfort. The results
were that children with autism were unusual in rarely looking at or relating
to the adult. When the adult pretended to be hurt, for example, children with
autism often appeared unconcerned. When a small remote-controlled robot
moved toward the child and stopped about four feet away, the parent and
the experimenter, who were both seated nearby, made fearful facial expressions, gestures and vocalizations for 30 s. Almost all the children without
autism looked at an adult at some point, but fewer than half the children
with autism did so, and they seemed unaffected as they continued playing
with the robot.
Studies involving older children with autism have suggested that they
have limited “theory of mind,” for example in their appreciation of what
it means to “believe” or to see things a certain way (e.g. Baron-Cohen,
Tager-Flusberg, & Cohen, 2000). However, it is open to question whether
cognitive/conceptual limitations, rather than (as Kanner suggested) restricted
capacities for relatedness, are fundamental to the children’s impaired communication and symbolic functioning—and correspondingly, how much
biologically given modes of relatedness may contribute to the origins of
thinking and personality in typically developing human beings.

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CUTTING-EDGE RESEARCH
In order to grasp the implications of what follows, it is necessary to appreciate that autism is a syndrome, that is, a constellation of clinical features
that tend to co-occur. For the present purposes, I take the view that the combination of social-relational and intellectual abnormalities in autism has an
intimate developmental relation to one another, an assumption that is controversial (e.g., Brunsdon & Happé, 2014; Hobson, 2014). I shall present just
some of the evidence that a weakened propensity to identify with the attitudes of others—a limitation that in the large majority of cases has a biological basis—underlies a broad sweep of affected children’s difficulties in the
communicative and intellectual as well as social domains. Autism reveals
how young children need the mental equipment for specific forms of early
interpersonal engagement if they are to participate fully in shared intellectual and cultural life. Since the topic of identifying-with has been almost
totally neglected in academic research, I shall need to draw on our own programmatic studies in order to illustrate points of methodological as well as
empirical importance.
IDENTIFICATION AND IMITATION
The first study concerns children’s propensity to imitate self/other orientated
actions (Meyer & Hobson, 2004). Matched groups of school-aged children
with and without autism were shown simple actions that afforded the potential for role-reversal. For example, a tester might pick up a small box near
herself and rest it on another box near the participant, and then return it to
its initial position; or she might pick up the box near the participant and rest
it on the box nearest to herself, and then replace it back as before. The child
was told simply: “Watch this,” and then after the object(s) were returned to
their original positions: “Now you.”
As predicted, children with autism copied the actions but were significantly less likely to imitate the self-other orientation shown by the tester (for
example, by copying the tester’s close-to-herself orientation by completing
the actions close-to-themselves). This appeared to be a direct reflection of
their lesser propensity to identify with the tester.
On the other hand, the group differences were not absolute and enough
variability was present in each group to consider patterns of individual
difference. We examined whether children’s propensity to imitate self-other
orientation was related to another aspect of social relations we believe to be
shaped by identification—interpersonal engagement involving sharing of
experience (Hobson & Hobson, 2007). In sharing experiences with someone
else, something of the experience of the other is encompassed alongside

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one’s own experience in a relational event that has a special phenomenology
as well as an essentially interpersonal structure (Campbell, 2002).
We went back to the videotapes of the children and tester during the
demonstration and imitation phases of each of the eight trials with three
a priori predictions, as follows: (i) children with autism would contrast
with control participants in spending more time looking at the objects
acted-upon and less time looking at the tester; (ii) participants with autism
would show fewer “sharing” looks toward the tester; and, critically, (iii)
within each group, individual differences in sharing looks (only) would
be associated with imitation of self-other orientation. “Sharing looks” (as
opposed to “checking looks” and “orienting looks”) were defined as those
looks directed to the tester that could be seen as a means to share experience
through interpersonal contact. Critically, two independent judges showed
excellent agreement on these ratings.
Results were that the children with autism looked at the objects for a higher
percentage of time, and they looked at the tester for less than half as much
time as children in the comparison group. Eleven of the 16 children with
autism compared with only five of the comparison children failed to engage
in a single sharing look. The percentage of time spent looking at the tester
overall, as well as frequency of checking and orienting joint attention looks,
were not related to the propensity to imitate self-other orientation in either
group. By contrast, sharing looks were specifically and significantly associated with the children’s propensity to adopt a self-other orientation when
imitating, both within and across the two groups.
The results suggest that a certain quality of interpersonal engagement
implicated in sharing looks is associated with a certain quality of imitation,
namely, that in which identifying with the other leads to the other person’s
self/other orientation being transposed to the imitator’s own stance. This
particular mode of imitation appears to make explicit the structure of
self-other experience implicated in sharing— not a merging, but a structure
that entails role-shifting.
IDENTIFICATION AND COMMUNICATION
A second study concerned nonverbal communication between adolescents
with and without autism as they had a conversation with an adult who was
conducting a semi-structured interview (García-Pérez, Lee, & Hobson, 2007).
The results were in keeping with previous studies (Capps, Kehres, & Sigman,
1998), in that there were surprisingly few and seemingly marginal group
differences on behavioral ratings such as smiles or gestures. Despite this,
clear group differences emerged on reliable “subjective” ratings of affective
engagement and smoothness of reciprocal interaction between the conversational partners.

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

What is striking here is not the bald fact that children with autism have
limited affective engagement—after all, this is what Kanner (1943) considered pathognomic of the syndrome—but rather, the fact that this eludes
measurement by “behavioral” ratings. Moreover, intersubjective engagement proves to be a critical variable for predicting change in other variables
(as in the case of sharing looks, cited above). Here we had raters evaluate the
linguistic content of the videotaped conversations for the degree to which
participant children were able to establish “cognitive linkage” with what
the interviewer was intending to convey (Hobson, Hobson, García-Pérez, &
Du Bois, 2012). Among children with autism (only), there was a positive correlation between a child’s ability to link in with the interviewer’s intended
meanings and independent, reliable ratings of emotional connectedness
between the interlocutors—but not a correlation with verbal mental age.
Therefore a rating of affective engagement was related to these children’s
cognitive/linguistic adjustments in conversation with someone else.
In a final part of this study, we analyzed the exchanges utterance by utterance. Children with autism could pick up and linguistically modify elements
of the interviewer’s speech, but frequently they failed to elaborate upon what
they had adopted in a coherent manner. Often they provided follow-on discourse that was truncated, unexpanded, or vague. Here it may be recalled
that a hallmark of identifying-with is that an individual assimilates the stance
of the other in such a way as to have this available as a new-found part of his
or her own cognitive or affective repertoire. It was in this respect, the ability
to establish fresh cognitive/linguistic foundations on which to build over the
course of conversation, that the children with autism were atypical.
IDENTIFICATION AND SYMBOLIC PLAY
According to the view outlined here, there are cognitive, affective and motivational aspects to coherent underlying intersubjective processes at the core
of communication and social engagement (Hobson, 2008)—and that these
processes are disrupted in autism. In particular, identifying-with is prototypically affective in infancy, but it is also cognitive (for instance, people
are distinguished from things) and motivational (one is moved). Therefore
if identifying-with is weak among children with autism, one would expect
there to be affective and motivational consequences.
In a study of symbolic play, Hobson, Lee, & Hobson (2008) reported that
groups of children and adolescents with and without autism, matched for
age and verbal ability, were similar in demonstrating the mechanics of play.
These particular, relatively able children were equally able to “metarepresent” in the sense of manifesting play in which they invented imaginary
objects and/or made one thing stand for another and/or attributed pretend

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properties, as well as to demonstrate flexibility in using toys. As predicted,
however, the play of children with autism was distinctive for a lack of those
qualities of playful pretend—awareness of self as creating meanings, investment in symbolic meanings, creativity, and fun—that had been hypothesized
to reflect the social-developmental underpinnings of typical creative play.
The nature of their symbolizing seemed different in kind from that of the
comparison children.
KEY ISSUES FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
Intersubjective engagement is not reducible to elements of any individual’s
behavior. Correspondingly, Kanner’s (1943) formulation of autism as an
impairment in affective contact between a child and other people is not
metaphorical. Events within the system of child-in-relation-to-other may
constitute the appropriate “unit of analysis” of social experience and
behavior (Vygotsky, 1962), for typical and atypical early developments.
If this is so, how can one measure intersubjective engagement and the
experiential implications of identifying-with? The appropriate measuring
instrument is a human being. Or rather, at least two human beings, because
a scientific approach requires that independent raters can agree in judging
the phenomena being researched. Some reviewers of the papers cited above
have balked at the possibility that seemingly nonobjective ratings of videotaped human interactions, for example those of emotional connectedness,
sharing looks, or investment and fun in play, can be made reliably—but
they can. In addition, as the results indicated, these were among the critical
variables accounting for what might otherwise have been taken as unrelated
phenomena such as linguistic coordination, imitative role-reversal, and
social-communicative functioning.
Of course, there is nothing magical in rating subjective states that have bodily expression. It is a prejudice to suppose that there is an unbridgeable gap
between what a person’s body expresses and what lies “behind” such behavior. On the contrary, a tenet of the present approach is that human beings read
a range of mental states in and through the expressions of others (Wittgenstein, 1958). It is a prejudice to suppose that we should restrict science to the
measurement of behavior that is somehow stripped of its subjective dimension.
Moreover, infants’ diverse relations with people and things have cognitive,
conative (motivational) and affective aspects, not components. It is a developmental achievement to emancipate thought from will and feeling (something
that is never fully accomplished), or indeed to distinguish thoughts from
what is thought about. No wonder that developmental theories restricted

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

to computer-like representational functioning have difficulty in making representations meaningful to the organism whose representations they are. It
is from human beings’ relations with the world that we need to begin our
account of mental development.
The success of the “emerging trend” I have discussed depends on conceptual as well as methodological innovation. For this reason, there is much to
be gained from interdisciplinary collaboration among philosophers, developmentalists and neuroscientists. For instance, it is in part a logical matter
whether children acquire the conceptual distinction between thoughts (or
more basically, attitudes) and things in interdependence with an understanding of persons and selves. The logic is that to conceive of oneself as a self
among other selves is implicated in understanding how given objects and
events fall under different descriptions-for-persons. These and other matters of philosophy have a direct bearing on developmental theorizing and
research.
For their part, neuroscientists may help to identify various patterns of
neurological dysfunction that either give rise to, or reflect, problems in
the social-communicative domain. Two examples are the tentative and
controversial evidence of abnormal “mirror neuron” functioning in autism
(e.g., Dapretto et al., 2006) and reduced neurofunctional correlates of
empathic functioning (Minio-Paluello, Baron-Cohen, Avenanti, Walsh, &
Aglioti, 2009). However, it is important not to jump to the conclusion that
such abnormalities pinpoint the cause of disorder. Instead they may reflect
atypicalities in current brain functioning for which the developmental
sources are to be found elsewhere.
Finally, it may be worthwhile to signpost a few of the many areas that
invite investigation. To begin with, there is scope to study the varieties of
identifying-with, and their contributions to personality development as well
as social-communicative and intellectual functioning. It is also important to
establish what does and does not depend on identifying-with. Although it is
probable that autistic children’s limited empathy with and concern for others
is linked with their abnormalities in identification, for example, other processes seem to be implicated in their relatively spared potential for forming
attachments and exhibiting jealousy. In addition, many children with autism
develop sophisticated language and thinking, and one needs to investigate
the bases for the children’s abilities as well as disabilities.
Research with other populations of children promises to enrich the developmental picture. The study of autism and “autism-like” features among
congenitally blind children (e.g., Hobson, 2014) has suggested that lack of
vision may deprive individuals of just the kind of co-orientation toward the
(visually specified) world that is also impoverished when young children fail
to identify with others. This may explain why the developmental sequelae of

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11

very early-onset blindness can include a picture closely akin to that of sighted
children with autism.
Another route to studying the biological foundations of human social
relations is to adopt an evolutionary and comparative approach. Already
there is evidence that critical contrasts between humans and nonhuman
primates lie in propensities/abilities to engage in sharing forms of joint
attention, showing empathy, imitating with role-reversals, and symbolizing (e.g., Tomasello & Racokzy, 2003)—and it is at least plausible that in
providing mankind with the ability to identify-with, biology prompted the
small but momentous step toward the evolution of thinking, talking, and
institutionally embedded Homo Sapiens.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am very grateful to the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral
Sciences, Stanford, and the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust,
London, for supporting a sabbatical during which ideas in this the paper
were developed.
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FURTHER READING
Freud, S. (1921). Identification. In J. Strachey (Ed.), The standard edition of the complete
psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. xviii, pp. 105 – 110). London, England:
Hogarth.
Hobson, R. P. (2002). The cradle of thought. London, England: Macmillan(Reprinted in
2004, New York, NY: Oxford University Press).
Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, self, and society. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Tomasello, M. (1999). The cultural origins of human cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

ROBERT PETER HOBSON SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Robert Peter Hobson is Emeritus Professor of Developmental Psychopathology, University College, London, and Honorary Consultant Psychiatrist in
Psychotherapy at the Tavistock Clinic, London. He is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, and has a PhD in Experimental Psychology from the University
of Cambridge. His research interests converge upon the significance of interpersonal relations for understanding the course of human developments,
both typical and atypical, and include programmatic studies of autism and
mother–infant relations. He has written two books on early development and
autism. The first, Autism and the Development of Mind (Erlbaum, 1993),
is rather dense, but the second, The Cradle of Thought (MacMillan, 2002,
and in the United States, Oxford University Press, 2004) was written for a
wider readership. He has also edited and contributed several chapters to
a book on Consultations in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy (Karnac, 2014).

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

Peter was fortunate to benefit from two wonderful sabbaticals at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, and is now
semi-retired and living in California.
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