Norms and Development:Interdisciplinary Approach

Week 4.

Emotion: A key-concept in

Gene-Culture Coevolution of Social Norms

What We Have Discussed So Far In order to explain the existence of social norms,

we used simple theoretical models. We identified under which conditions social norms are maintained .

But, what does it matter to us? They are pure theoretical models. No real human psychology was investigated.

The goal of this talk is to consider the implications of these theoretical models for psychological scientists with developmental and life-span perspectives. This further provides a bridge to Monika's seminars.

Culture of Honor as a Social Norm

It's socially shared rules about(?) how to react to insult.

Norm-violation that did not retaliate to insults incurs contempt widely from the group members.

It was once an adaptive (=backwardly rational) trait in the history. Remember the story of Mr. Emotional introduced two weeks ago.

It has a strong emotional grip on human mind (see Elster, 1989).

How to Acquire Culture of Honor?Imagine a child raised in the culture of honor.

1. He observed his brother was insulted from unknown guys and fearlessly stood up to them (observational learning).

2. He was insulted from his schoolmates and did not react against them. His brother was observing that event and showed explicit contempt to him (individual learning/teaching).

Imagine that he acquired culture of honor through these experiences. It’s a quite likely story.

Observational Learning and Emotion What was transmitted? a script in which his

brother stood up for demanding the withdrawal of insults.

Why didn't he just mimic behavioral patterns/rules in the script without learning emotional arousal? Why could he learn emotional arousal just from observing the scenes?

What mechanisms are underlying here?

Individual Learning and Emotion

What did he learn? if-then rule; “if you are insulted, then you must stand up against it.”

Why didn't he just learn the mere behavioral rules? Why could he learn emotional arousal just from being punished for not feeling emotional arousal?

What mechanisms are underlying here?

We know social/individual learning are quite common mechanisms. It is easy to imagine that social norms, viz., behavioral rules are acquired through these mechanisms.

However, emotion is a key component of social norms; Violations of social norms induce punitive sentiment. Normative actions are (often) motivated by anticipation of negative emotion such as shame or guilt.

How emotions, but not behavioral rules, are culturally transmitted? Let's consider this question.

We'll come back to this question in a few slides. Before considering it, let us discuss the implication of theoretical models for empirical research on psychological mechanisms underlying social norms.

Innate(?) Constraints in Word Learning

Quine (1960): How can a child connect the sound "bunny" with a category of rabbit but not with color, movement or body parts of a rabbit?

Children are constrained to assume that a new word represents the whole object (whole object principle; Markman, 1989).

This kind of principle constraints hypothesis-space and save a learner from testing infinite numbers of hypotheses on word-object relationships.

Innate(?) Constraints in Word Learning How can children learn the word segmentation

from continuous speech? learning of transition probabilities. If TP(AB) is high, A-B is judged to belong a word (e.g., pretty or baby). If TP(BC) is low, B and C are judged to belong to different words (e.g., ttyba).

However, computer simulations on the database of child-directed English sentences showed that non-constrained learning mechanism fail to learn the words effectively. It is necessary to constrain learning with a rule such as “one word has only one primary stress” (Yang, 2004). .

Payoff-bias vs. Conformity-bias

Remember social learning theory by Bandura et al.(1963).

When two different behaviors are presented to children, one is supported by majority but is not rewarded and another is supported by minority but is rewarded, which behavior is imitated by children?

Innate(?) Constraints in Social Learning I

Innate(?) Constraints in Social Learning II

Parental vs. Extraparental Transmission

Remember the controversy on the roles of shared vs. non-shared environment in behavioral genetics:

In Gintis (2003), extraparental transmission was assumed to be large enough so that the influence of parental transmission is overridden. The validity of this assumption, however, is still under the discussion.

Some people asked "if the model assumptions are doubtful, how can we believe the results derived from the models?"

This question, at the same time, raises what questions empirical research must answer if we want to escape from the disorder with the help of theoretical models.

Inspection of the past research on psychological mechanisms underlying social norms further reveals questions.

Cultural Transmission of Emotion

Remember the question raised in the story of a child living in culture of honor. We can think of two basic psychological mechanisms that enables children acquire emotional arousal from the mere observation of the others.

1st Mechanism: BehaviorEmotion

Strack, Martin & Stepper (1988): People who held a pencil with teeth and stimulated zygomaticus muscle (used for smiling) reported more amusement than people who held a pencil with lips.

A possibility that behavioral (especially facial) imitation may directly induce the corresponding emotion and results in the acquisition of emotional reactions.

2nd Mechanism: EmotionEmotion Emotional contagion (Hatfield et al., 1994):

Automatic and direct transfer of emotional states (cf. mirror neuron on motor actions).

Singer et al. (2003): Female subjects who received electronic shock showed the activation in (what is called) pain matrix. The same subjects who observed (cues indicating that) their boyfriends received the same shock showed the activation only in a part of this matrix which is related subjective affective dimension of pain.

Direct transmission of emotion might play important role in cultural transmission of social norms.

The point here is that, regardless of the importance of emotion as a key component of social norms, its transmission processes have not yet been fully understood. We know only the possible routes of emotion socialization.

For instance, can we apply the same mechanisms for explaining how a child acquire feeling of guilt about violating a promise with her friends? Does she acquire such context-dependent feeling by observing adults who violated promises and exhibited their feeling of guilt? This sounds implausible, however, as guilt is not exhibited facially or behaviorally.

We don't know, furthermore, if several biases in social learning also exists in emotion socialization processes. Remember that they are crucial parameters in theoretical models.

Can we provide evolutionary explanations why the psychological mechanisms underlying acquisition of social norms exists? Remember Gintis (2003) and Henrich & Boyd (1996). Do we need to construct new gene-culture coevolution models?

The term “socialization” is also a catch-all word that distracts our attentions from the underlying psychological mechanisms.

Roles of Emotion in Socio-Moral Norms

Moral judgment task 1:"A trolley is running out of control and five people will be killed. You have a switch changing the direction of the trolley so that it will kill only one person while saving five people" people immediately select to push a switch.

Moral judgment task 2:"You are standing on a footbridge. If you push down an incredibly fat guy, you will kill him but can stop the trolley and save five people" people feel difficult to make the judgment and typically select do nothing.

Roles of Emotion in Socio-Moral Norms

Greene et al. (2001) observed the brain with fMRI while the subjects answering the tasks in the task 2, medial frontal gyrus (BA 9/10; related to emotion processing) was more activated than in the task 1.

Subjects who judged “one should push off a fat guy” took much longer time than those who judged “one should not push him off.” Such a difference in response time was not observed in the task 1.

Interpretation of Greene et al.'s experiment is rather difficult but it suggests that, when making moral judgment, emotion interferes rational reasoning (e.g., five lives > one life) and strongly influences an action.

Remember that it is often argued that the existence of social norms is revealed when it is violated – social norms are often implicit in our mind. This also implies not reasoning but intuition or emotion are core components of norms.

How to Fill the Gaps Between Psychological and Social Science

Looking back psychological research on social norms from the view of gene-culture coevolution, we realized our ignorance of many core questions that are important for both us and them.

Psychological scientists may pay too much attention to the very details of psychological processes without asking how those mechanisms affect the transmission of memes. It is crucial to know not only the processes but also the consequences of those mechanisms.

That's all. In the next three weeks, Gerd will further discuss the implications of social rationality (evolutionary perspective) on social norms. Monika's seminars follow and the questions raised here are further discussed.