Norms and Development: Interdisciplinary Approach

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Norms and DevelopmentInterdisciplinary Approach

• Week 4.
• Emotion A key-concept in
• Gene-Culture Coevolution of Social Norms

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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.

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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).

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How to Acquire Culture of Honor?

• Imagine a child raised in the culture of honor.
• He observed his brother was insulted from unknown
  guys and fearlessly stood up to them
  (observational learning).
  
• 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. Its a quite likely
story.
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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?

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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?

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• 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.

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• 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.

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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.

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Innate(?) Constraints in Word Learning

• How can children learn the word segmentation from
  continuous speech? ? learning of transition
  probabilities. If TP(A?B) is high, A-B is judged
  to belong a word (e.g., pre?tty or ba?by). If
  TP(B?C) is low, B and C are judged to belong to
  different words (e.g., tty?ba).
• 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). .

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Innate(?) Constraints in Social Learning I

• 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?

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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.

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• 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.

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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.

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1st Mechanism Behavior?Emotion

• 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.

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2nd Mechanism Emotion?Emotion

• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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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.

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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.

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• 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.

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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.

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• 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.