The Social Brain Flashcards
Hallucinations
common effect of solo sailing, sensory deprivation, solitary confinement and bereavement of a spouse
One of most common hallucinations in social isolation is the hallucination of other people
Contact with others is so important to people that the reaction to prolonged periods without contact can be to imagine other people.
Obligate Social Species:
Obligate Social Species: Species in which individuals must be with others in order to survive and are co-evolved in order to interact with others.
Avoid the risk of maldevelopment or even death
Evolved to interact:
Evolved to interact: adaptations appropriate to solve adaptive problems on multiple sides of a relationship: read and produce facial expressions, seek maternal attachment as infants, provide parental security as adults, produce and comprehend language
ex. Infant has psychological adaptations to attach to mother and mother has adaptations to care for the infant
EEA - social skills crucial to live among other people
friendships, monitor allegiances, insults and exploitation, avoid offense and fulfill obligations
Ostracism would have been deadly
Lone human extremely vulnerable to predation, starvation, exposure and exploitation
Community meant life or death
Spitz - interested in learning about the long-term effects of early social isolation on children - orphanage vs. prison
2 groups of children: orphanage with little consistent human contact and prison where mothers were imprisoned - control for effects of growing up in an institution but compare differences
4m - no differences
1st birthday - children no maternal contact - delayed motor and intellectual development, less playful and explored less, more prone to infection
1-3 yrs - mothered group walk and talk, only 2/26 isolated learned to walk and limited language
Harry Harlow Isolation Experiments
Partial or complete isolation of rhesus monkeys to see effects
Partial: lived in cages where they could hear, smell and see other monkeys but never were physically in contact with them
—–Months of this caused abnormal behavior - self-mutilation, catatonia, pacing or circling
Total social isolation: isolation chamber - no experience with other monkeys, couldn’t hear or smell them, non-social needs were met
—30 days in total isolation - enormously disturbed
—1 year - no longer played, explored or rarely moved
—⅙ monkeys for 3m stopped eating and died
When these monkeys became mothers they were incapable of effective parenting and were either neglectful or abusive to their infants
—–Most mothers ignored their infants but some were actively violent towards them
Harry Harlow Isolation Experiment - Rehabilitation Attempts
Attempted to rehabilitate monkeys in total social isolation but not very successful
Placed total social isolation monkeys with normal ones and found severe deficits in every aspect of social behavior
Given to surrogate mothers and showed some improvement but still had social deficits
Most successful therapy - pairing them with a normally reared monkey who was younger - Paired with 3m monkeys - eliminated deficits
poor maternal skills relative to monkeys who were reared by their mothers.
Isolated monkeys were likely to show abusive behavior or to be indifferent towards their own infants. Those who had experience with peers were better mothers than those who had been raised in complete isolation.
Maternal skills did improve with later born infants in cases where the mother had more than one
Brain is costly: - 2
- Brain tissue is expensive energetically and is prioritized above other kinds of tissue when resources are scarce
- The human baby is born 9m early so that the baby’s head can fit through the mother’s pelvis at birth
Why is the human brain so big?
- Ecological Pressures: Evolutionary pressures that derive from ecological circumstances, including the availability of resources and the presence of risks or dangers.
- Social Brain hypothesis: The idea that the large brains of humans, as well as the general intelligence of humans, has evolved in response to social conflicts and challenges that are an inherent part of group living
—-Need a lot of intelligence because of the social cognitive challenges - names, hierarchy, trade, allies, enemies, understand group interactions
Social integration and intelligence probably evolved together, reinforcing each other in an ever-increasing spiral
Selection pressure for social skills
Evidence supports the social brain hypothesis over the ecological hypothesis
Dunbar - humans tended to congregate in groups of about 150 - evolved to have relationships with 150 ppl - want to know major events - close enough connection - want to update and be updated
A hundred and fifty is a large number of people to individuate, remember, have mental impressions of, track favors and insults from, and remember the values and desires of - evolved to do this
In groups larger than that, we are less able to keep track of all of the relationships.
primates rarely live in groups larger than 50
size of a species’ neocortex
(the “newest” part of the brain, associated with relatively high-level cognitive processing)
Correlates with GROUP SIZE
Correlates with CLIQUE SIZE , that is, the individuals you hang out with on a day-to-day basis
DECEPTION USE is used is correlated with neocortex size
Does not correlate with any measure of ecological demands, such as the size of the home range
Herding animals
Humans social cognitive demands are greater than, say, fish, birds, sheep or other herding animals that spend their time in large groups -didn’t experience selection pressure favoring social cognition - not the same social complexity
congregate in order to protect themselves from predators, but they do not know each other as individuals, except perhaps for mother and offspring
Humans - recognize individuals, form alliances, hierarchies, deception
Shultz and Dunbar
Not just the size of the group but also the longevity and complexity of social relationships that should predict brain size.
Bird groups, an individual may come and go without any apparent social obligation interfering with its between-group mobility.
Membership is stable over time, and belonging to a group has value to an individual- One would not be equally welcome in a different group should he choose to abandon the current group
bonded social structure
brain size (controlled for body size) is related to the amount of time spent in social activity during the day and the extent to which a species has a “bonded social structure,” meaning the extent to which two individuals develop a committed relationship
Social Complexity and Brain Size
brain size increases with the complexity of the social group, progressing from solitary to pair-bonded (a male–female couple), to a sole-male, multifemale harem to a multi-male group
Brain size is correlated with
Deception
Longevity and complexity of social relationships
Coalition size - who alliance is
Bonded social structure - male and female that are partners
What Would Piaget Say about Social Cognitive Development? - Three Mountain Task
Preoperational stage: Egocentrism: Piaget’s term for a child’s inability to appreciate other points of view besides their own.
THREE MOUNTAIN TASK
When asked to select pictures of what the doll could see, young children typically selected the photo showing their own vantage point.
Children younger than 9 or 10 years old - couldn’t understand viewpoints
Piaget took this as evidence of their extreme egocentrism.- failure understanding other’s mental states- different knowledge and have visual access to different objects, a sign of social cognitive immaturity
What Would Piaget Say about Social Cognitive Development? - Egocentrism in Speech
Preschool-aged children routinely report events without providing enough information for the listener to understand - i broke it - whats it?
“parallel” conversation, which at first sounds like a regular conversation until you realize that they are not responding to each other’s content. A child may respond to “We went to the beach yesterday” with “My grandma has three cats.”
What Would Piaget Say about Social Cognitive Development? - animism was
related to egocentrism
Attribution of mental states to inanimate objects (which he called animism) and the attribution of physical and mechanical characteristics to mental entities (which he called realism)
his own child thought the moon was animate because it moved across the sky. - cognitive immaturity.
For Piaget, animism was related to egocentrism: Because the child had a point of view, mental states, and feelings, they attributed such to other objects that they saw in the world and in nature.
The moon, the sun, waterfalls, and other natural objects were seen as goal-directed, intentional characters.
What Would Piaget Say about Social Cognitive Development? - egocentrism reexamined
Challenge the idea that infants and young children are completely perceptually bound and that they do not understand that others may be able to see things that they cannot see themselves, or vice versa.
18m - asked to show an adult something when that adult is covering her eyes with her hands. The infant may try to remove the adult’s hands from her face, or to insert the object between the adult’s hands and face- understands that there needs to be a direct line of vision between the adult’s eyes and the object
Flavell - 2 and 3 years - Level 1 understanding of perspective: They know whether or not you can see something but do not know that you may be looking at it differently than they are
- A person’s eyes have to be open and there has to be a clear line of sight in order for the person to see an object.
4 or 5 years - Level 2 understanding: She understands that another person might see an object but see it differently. A picture that lies flat on a table between the two appears right-side up to one person and upside-down to the other
What Would Associationists Say?
Watson believed that children’s personalities and temperaments were determined by their social environments, primarily via simple but general learning mechanisms by 4 or 5 years
Social Learning Theory - emphasizes observation and imitation rather than reward and punishment - know a lot about driving before driving
Where to put the key, what the steering wheel does - learn through observation in a domain that they have never operated in
BANDURA - BOBO DOLL Four-year-old children who watched an adult behave aggressively toward a doll were more likely to attack the doll than children in a control condition. Children even imitated the specific aggressive behaviors of the adult models, including hitting the doll with a mallet, sitting on it and punching it in the face, and kicking it
Human Specific Social Cognition Experiment
humans have species-specific cognitive skills, even compared to our closest relatives
Chimpanzee, orangutan, 2.5 yr old humans
Researchers found that the three groups were equal on performance on the physical cognitive tasks
The human children outperformed adult orangutans and adult chimpanzees on the social cognitive task
evidence that humans have social cognitive skills that are unique to humans - species specific
Psychological Adaptations For Culture
that humans are the only species that can live in virtually all habitats
Unique characteristics of human culture that allows the development of such valuable strategies and technologies is that human culture is cumulative. No one individual could have invented the iPod or the space shuttle.
Generations of communication - could not do this without the social skills human have
Indeed, no individual could have created a bow and arrow or a knit cap.
By adding new innovations to learned innovations, cultures develop gradually and cumulatively.
Social transmission of behavior has been observed in many species - EXAMPLES
EX.
Old female vervet monkey dip an Acacia pod into a pool of water that had gathered in a dead tree. After several minutes, the pod was soft and pliable, and the monkey was able to open it and eat the seeds.
Within nine days, four other monkeys were doing this, and eventually 10 of the monkey’s group members were using this strategy although no vervet monkey, in any group, had been seen doing this before
EX.
Chimpanzees in only one part of the Ivory Coast use stones to open nut shells, and chimpanzees in only one area of Tanzania use twigs or blades of grass to extract and eat termites and ants
Learned songs of male songbirds
Still, culture is unique to humans. Despite examples of social learning in various animals, only humans have cumulative culture because only humans have the cognitive machinery to permit and support the evolution and transmission of culture
