Not exactly a match, but Others in Mind: Social Origins of Self-Consciousness makes a variant of this claim, putting an arms race concerning prediction of third-party reactions to hypothetical actions as the driving force of human self-awareness.
Not exactly a match, but Others in Mind: Social Origins of Self-Consciousness makes a variant of this claim, putting an arms race concerning prediction of third-party reactions to hypothetical actions as the driving force of human self-awareness.