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Social Neuroscience - Key Terms ALL chapters 1-11 from the book 'The Student’s Guide to Social Neuroscience'
Social Neuroscience - Key Terms chapters 8-11 from the book 'The Student’s Guide to Social Neuroscience'
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Clinical Psychology
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2020-2021
Utrecht University
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Chapter 7 Interacting with others ........................................................................................................... 2
Chapter 8 Relationships .......................................................................................................................... 9
Chapter 9 Groups and identity .............................................................................................................. 17
Chapter 10: morality and antisocial behavior ....................................................................................... 25
Chapter 11: developmental social neuroscience .................................................................................. 34
,Chapter 7 Interacting with others
Interactions
= a dyadic behavior in which the participants actions are interdepend such that each actor’s behavior
is both a response to and a stimulus for the other participants behavior.
Two forms of interactions
1. Cooperation: sharing of commodities, knowledge, providing helping behavior (= altruism).
2. Competition: keeping commodities and knowledge for oneself and not providing help to others (=
survival of the fittest.
You need a combination of cooperation and competition to gain longer-term benefits.
At least cooperative interaction between individuals are predicated upon trust.
Knowing who to trust is a complex decision depends on:
- the ability to understand that others have similar mental states to our own, and our ability
to form shared goals.
- particular situation.
- prior knowledge of how others have behaved in the past.
Freeloaders
= people who receive the benefits of cooperation but do not contribute to the group themselves.
-> groups typically impose sanctions on those who freeload, such as social exclusion, physical
punishment etc.
Why we cooperate (the motivations)
1. There is an intrinsic desire to help others: helping others is personally rewarding. Capacity for
empathy.
2. The benefits of reciprocity: you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.
3. Punishment for non-cooperation: altruistic punishment: being selfless is altruistic.
4. A desire to conform: by sharing in a group-level identity.
Evolution of altruism
-> kin selection: helping others who are related to us.
-> Reciprocal altruism: who provide help to others in order to obtain help from others in the future.
-> sexual selection: assumes that displays of wealth and generosity enhance that mating success of
altruists.
-> indirect reciprocity: only needs to help individuals who are likely to help you.
Kin selection
= the theory that we help others who are related to us.
-> survival of the fittest trait, not the fittest person.
-> if an individual helps their kin, there is a greater chance that the helping trait will survive, because
there is a greater chance that their kin also carry this same trait.
-> only when the benefits of helping are greater than the costs.
C<r*B
C: helping behavior can spread
through a population if the
costs of the organisms own
reproduction is offset by the
benefit.
B: the reproduction of its kin
member
r: the probability that the kin
,Reciprocal altruism (direct reciprocity)
= based on the economic concept of trade.
-> for example: exchanging food for protection is most often delayed, so a cost to an individual
initially will be a benefit to the individual at some later point.
-> it requires an ability to distinguish between conspecifics and to remember their previous behavior.
Research of Axelrod and Hamilton
Computer stimulation of evolution of cooperation: they stimulated agents with different kinds of
behavior.
- some agents always cooperate.
- some never cooperate.
- some employ various mixed strategies.
What did they found?
-> if one sets up a stimulation consisting of some agents who always freeload, then over time, one
ends up with a population in which cooperation is bred out and everyone freeloads.
-> this occurs even if the population consists of lots of cooperators and only a tiny number of
freeloaders.
-> non-cooperation is an evolutionary stable solution of this model and lots of species employ this
tactic by being solitary.
-> cooperation emerges as an alternative stable solution by having agents who selectively cooperate.
-> tit-for-tat strategy
= a strategy which cooperation leads to cooperation and non-cooperation leads to non-cooperation
on a trail by trail basis.
- tit-for-tat is trusting and it is forgiving.
- this solution maximizes the benefits of cooperation but without running a high risk of
exploitation.
Sexual selection
= another biologically based explanation of altruism: the presence of a trait is selected for during
evolution because it attracts mating partners.
-> altruism could be regarded as a display of wealth, or other positive attributes that are regarded as
attractive, hence increasing the reproduced success of altruists.
-> both the costs and the benefits lie with the altruist.
-> there is some evidence that humans, particularly females rate altruistic traits as desirable.
Indirect reciprocity
= based on helping people who you have never interacted with before, and may never interact with
again.
Two forms: helping the helper and helping after being helped.
1. Helping the helper: this needs to based on selective cooperation rather than indiscriminate
cooperation. But how do you choose who to cooperate with who you’ve never interacted?
-> helping others increases ones reputation (image score) as well as incurring cots (the costs to
oneself).
2. Helping after being helped
This appears to be a case of misplaced reciprocity.
Kin selection, reciprocity altruism, sexual selection, indirect reciprocity are all evolutionary biological
approaches which are essentially mathematical models of those situations in which cooperation
predominates over pure competition. This is based on cots and benefits over generations.
, Some scientist argue that only humans are fully capable of indirect reciprocity, because:
- the decision to help involves consideration of the reputations of the individuals involved.
- this knowledge may be obtained via language and social norms.
- reputation also involves thinking about what others think of us.
- humans reflect on their helping behavior and they appear to have some degree of control over their
decision to help other of not (this is not fully true: process of making decisions could be
automatically).
Empathy is the key component of helping others
-> there are inbuilt motivational mechanisms that drive pro-social behavior.
Model of Piliavin: witnessing a distressing situation leads to physiological arousal and emotional
contagion.
-> the motivation to help others is egoistic rather than altruistic: you wan to reduce one’s own
distress.
The empathy-altruism model of Batson
The motivation to help is considered to be primary other-oriented, rather than self-oriented.
-> based on empathic concern for others.
-> empathic concern was found to predict helping behavior even when taking into account selfish
motivates such as desire to escape aversive feelings, social disapproval, guilt, shame and sadness.
Critic on the empathy-altruism model of Batson
-> Methodologically: people can accurately reflect on their own feelings and actions in imaged
scenario’s.
-> Theoretically: assumptions that there are clear distinctions between self and others.
Adding a questionnaire measure of “including others in the self”to the experiment of Batson.
This measure included predicted helping behavior but not empathic concern.
-> there are shared neural substrates for processing self and others and its relevance to empathy.
-> mirror system, medial prefrontal cortex.
-> responding to other people only when they are considered similar to one’s self.
-> the ideas of selfless altruism and selfless empathy are not very meaningful.
Altruistic decision-making in fMRI
Research/experiment: choosing to donate to a charity.
-> activation of ventral and dorsal striatum, even when giving incurs a cost to onseself = joy of giving
effects.
-> region in ventromedial prefrontal cortex responded when participants decided to donate (but not
to pure reward).
-> region in orbitofrontal cortex was activated by decisions not to donate.
Voluntary donations vs. involuntary donations to the same good cause
-> both forms of giving were linked to the insula and the striatum.
-> linked to individual differences.
- involuntary giving: those who had a greater response in the ventral striatum to personal
gains, tended to be less in their voluntary donations.
- those with an allele leading to more rapid turnover of post-synaptic dominance, donated
twice as much to charity.
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