L14 The social animal

• Darwin’s universality hypothesis: emotional expressions have the same meaning for everyone.

  Supporting evidence:

  • People are fairly accurate at judging the emotional expressions of members of other cultures.
  • Blind people make the same facial expressions.
  • Two Day old infants who have had virtually no exposure to human faces smile and show disgust (Steiner, 1973, 1979)
• Study: chimpanzees and orangutans on a similar level to toddlers on space, quantity, causality activities. However, toddlers perform drastically higher on the social learning task. Issue: monkeys may learn in a different way, it may be geared towards humans.
• Sociality is not an evolutionary default. Benefits may have been coordinating defenses against threats, hunting gathering and child rearing in groups, and passing on knowledge.
• The social brain hypothesis:

  •  ‘the cognitive demands of living in complexly bonded social groups selected for increases in executive brain (principally neocortex).’
  • The more social information, the larger the capacity in specific brain areas.
• Testing the social brain hypothesis:

  • Dunbar’s suggestion was to look at species’ group size, and see if it is associated with neocortex size.
  • A study found there was a strong correlation between neocortex ratio and mean group size (Barrett et al. 2002) The study was conducted on monkeys and apes
  • The difficulty with humans is we do not seem to have a typical group size.
• Dunbar also suggested that if we know the neocortex ratio of humans we can estimate the ‘natural’ group size based on the cross-species trend. The estimation of the ratio is 150 (Dunbar’s number), which is much higher than the other species.
• Humans also evolved the ability to create imagined realities, what philosophers call ‘social reality’. We care about things with no objective reality for example money, brands. This ability to share imagined realities enabled large-scale cooperation, beyond Dunbar’s number. For example, people can form militaries and fight for the same ‘country’, employers assume you possess certain skills based on your ‘degree’
• What is attribution?

  how we intuitively explain behaviour.
• What is dispositional attribution?

  stable, dispositional causes for example 'he's not providing good answers; he must not be very competent'
• What is situational attribution?

  referring to transient, situational causes e.g. 'he's not providing good answers; he must be nervous'. External factors.
• • We are generally not very accurate at attribution and tend to disregard situational causes and are biased towards dispositional attributions. This is correspondence bias or fundamental attribution bias, and is stronger among Western people. Why? Situational attribution is more effortful and more easily disrupted.
• • Fixed and growth mindsets are linked to individual differences in how biased you are towards dispositional attributions.