L16 Social Motives

• Motivation: what drives animals to do anything. A state of arousal that promotes goal-directed behaviour.

  Motives: specific internal drivers of behaviour
• Freud:

  • The Id is the source of basic drives
  • The superego pushes the person towards behaving in a socially appropriate way.

  Maslow:

  • Hierarchy of needs is a set of motives
• Maslow - the need to belong:

  • Online interactions reflect this
  • In the past the need to belong to a group was life/death situation.
  • Cyberball experiment: online game where two other players either include or exclude the participant. In the exclusion condition the participants feel social pain. Follow ups - still felt social pain when excluded by the KKK and when they lost money when included and kept money when excluded
• The need to belong:

  We use words associated with physical pain to describe social pain - do they share a fundamental commonality in the brain? The dorsal subdivision of the anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) is involved with physical pain and is activated with Cyberball study.

  • People who experience early social trauma report more physical pain later in life
• Sexual selection:

  • Intrasexual selection = competition for sexual access
  • Intersexual selection = mate choice based on traits that signal gene quality and/or health
• Existential anxiety:

  • Terror management theory = many things we do are geared towards reducing the ‘terror’ associated with the knowledge of mortality.
  • Cultural anxiety buffers e.g. religion provide ways of achieving symbolic immortality to reduce anxiety.
• Mortality salience hypothesis = people who are reminded of their own mortality will work to reinforce their cultural worldviews, e.g. become more patriotic