Cross-cultural differences and similarities in proneness to shame: An adaptationist and ecological approach

People vary in how easily they feel ashamed, that is, in their shame proneness. According to the information threat theory of shame, variation in shame proneness should, in part, be regulated by features of a person’s social ecology. On this view, shame is an emotion program that evolved to mitigate the likelihood or costs of reputation-damaging information spreading to others. In social environments where there are fewer possibilities to form new relationships (i.e., low relational mobility), there are higher costs to damaging or losing existing ones. Therefore, shame proneness toward current relationship partners should increase as perceived relational mobility decreases. In contrast, individuals with whom one has little or no relationship history are easy to replace, and so shame-proneness towards them should not be modulated by relational mobility. We tested these predictions cross-culturally by measuring relational mobility and shame proneness towards friends and strangers in Japan, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Japanese subjects were more shame-prone than their British and American counterparts. Critically, lower relational mobility was associated with greater shame proneness towards friends (but not strangers), and this relationship partially mediated the cultural differences in shame proneness. Shame proneness appears tailored to respond to relevant features of one’s social ecology

Rational inferences about social valuation

The decisions made by other people can contain information about the value they assign to our welfare—for example how much they are willing to sacrifice to make us better off. An emerging body of research suggests that we extract and use this information, responding more favorably to those who sacrifice more even if they provide us with less. The magnitude of their trade-offs governs our social responses to them—including partner choice, giving, and anger. This implies that people have well-designed cognitive mechanisms for estimating the weight someone else assigns to their welfare, even when the amounts at stake vary and the information is noisy or sparse. We tested this hypothesis in two studies (N=200; US samples) by asking participants to observe a partner make two trade-offs, and then predict the partner's decisions in other trials. Their predictions were compared to those of a model that uses statistically optimal procedures, operationalized as a Bayesian ideal observer. As predicted, (i) the estimates people made from sparse evidence matched those of the ideal observer, and (ii) lower welfare trade-offs elicited more anger from participants, even when their total payoffs were held constant. These results support the view that people efficiently update their representations of how much others value them. They also provide the most direct test to date of a key assumption of the recalibrational theory of anger: that anger is triggered by cues of low valuation, not by the infliction of costs.</p

Decisions and the Evolution of Memory: Multiple Systems, Multiple Functions

Memory evolved to supply useful, timely information to the organism’s decision-making systems. Therefore, decision rules, multiple memory systems, and the search engines that link them should have coevolved to mesh in a coadapted, functionally interlocking way. This adaptationist perspective suggested the scope hypothesis: When a generalization is retrieved from semantic memory, episodic memories that are inconsistent with it should be retrieved in tandem to place boundary conditions on the scope of the generalization. Using a priming paradigm and a decision task involving person memory, the authors tested and confirmed this hypothesis. The results support the view that priming is an evolved adaptation. They further show that dissociations between memory systems are not—and should not be—absolute: Independence exists for some tasks but not others

Experimental Induction of Friendship Jealousy: Comparing the Effects of Time versus Mental Coordination with an Interloper

Jealousy is an emotional response to the threat of losing a valued relationship. In this research, we revisit the proposal that jealousy in friendship is an evolved response to the threat of someone else replacing what is unique in this kind of relationship. Burkett (2009) found that most people identify mental coordination—responding to the world as you do—as the feature that makes their best friend uniquely valuable to them. We presented 305 Chilean participants with one of three hypothetical conditions, in which their best friend: i) spent most of their time with a new friend, ii) shared mental coordination with a new friend, or iii) spent most of their time and shared mental coordination with a new friend. We replicated the expected effect in this novel context: Friendship jealousy was evoked more strongly by the threat of losing mental coordination with a friend than by just losing time spent with them, and friendship jealousy was higher for women than to men. We discuss the implications of these findings in order to understand friendships evolutionary basis and psychology, as well as other close relationships, and other types of non-pathological jealousy

Meeting now suggests we will meet again: Implications for debates on the evolution of cooperation

Humans are often generous, even towards strangers encountered by chance and even in the absence of any explicit information suggesting they will meet again. Because game theoretic analyses typically conclude that a psychology designed for direct reciprocity should defect in such situations, many have concluded that alternative explanations for human generosity— explanations beyond direct reciprocity—are necessary. However, human cooperation evolved within a material and informational ecology: Simply adding consideration of one minimal ecological relationship to the analysis of reciprocity brings theory and observation closer together, indicating that ecology-free analyses of cooperation can be fragile. Using simulations, we show that the autocorrelation of an individual’s location over time means that even a chance encounter with an individual predicts an increased probability of a future encounter with that same individual. We discuss how a psychology designed for such an ecology may be expected to often cooperate even in apparently one-shot situations.Psycholog

Naturalizing Institutions: Evolutionary Principles and Application on the Case of Money

In recent extensions of the Darwinian paradigm into economics, the replicator-interactor duality looms large. I propose a strictly naturalistic approach to this duality in the context of the theory of institutions, which means that its use is seen as being always and necessarily dependent on identifying a physical realization. I introduce a general framework for the analysis of institutions, which synthesizes Searle's and Aoki's theories, especially with regard to the role of public representations (signs) in the coordination of actions, and the function of cognitive processes that underly rule-following as a behavioral disposition. This allows to conceive institutions as causal circuits that connect the population-level dynamics of interactions with cognitive phenomena on the individual level. Those cognitive phenomena ultimately root in neuronal structures. So, I draw on a critical restatement of the concept of the meme by Aunger to propose a new conceptualization of the replicator in the context of institutions, namely, the replicator is a causal conjunction between signs and neuronal structures which undergirds the dispositions that generate rule-following actions. Signs, in turn, are outcomes of population-level interactions. I apply this framework on the case of money, analyzing the emotions that go along with the use of money, and presenting a stylized account of the emergence of money in terms of the naturalized Searle-Aoki model. In this view, money is a neuronally anchored metaphor for emotions relating with social exchange and reciprocity. Money as a meme is physically realized in a replicator which is a causal conjunction of money artefacts and money emotions