Several recent theories postulate communicative functions for cognitive mechanisms previously thought to have individualistic functions—in particular, reasoning and metacognition. These theories join older theories suggesting that many of our behaviors have communicative functions, for instance to communicate emotions or to influence how people perceive us. Using the framework of the evolution of communication, we offer a series of questions to test these hypotheses. The first question is whether the mechanism enables effective communication. The second question takes into account the different strategic incentives between agents who send signals and those who receive them, asking whether receivers can discriminate beneficial from harmful signals. However, serving a function well is not sufficient evidence that a mechanism evolved to this end in particular. Accordingly, the third question bears on whether the mechanism serves other purported functions well and the fourth on whether some of its features can be explained as specifically serving a communicative function. An overview of the literature suggests that these questions have been experimentally addressed for some cognitive mechanisms (reasoning in particular) but not others. This framework thus opens up avenues for further research that will enable researchers to better test hypotheses regarding the communicative functions of cognitive mechanisms.
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