Are Multiple Minimal Outgroup Males Readily Associated with Threat?

Humans might have a propensity to associate a collective of multiple outgroup males with threat, even in the context of minimally defined groups. We tested this hypothesis using a fear-conditioning paradigm (Study 1) and a signal detection paradigm (Study 2). Results of Study 1 suggest that stimuli showing ingroup males are more easily associated with threat than stimuli showing outgroup males. Results of Study 2 suggest a bias to perceive single males (both ingroup and outgroup) as more threatening than multiple outgroup males. We discuss the contrast with results of previous studies.</jats:p

Dissecting causal asymmetries in inductive generalization

Suppose we observe something happen in an interaction be- tween two objects A and B. Can we then predict what will hap- pen in an interaction between A and C, or between B and C? Recent research, inspired by work on the “causal asymmetry”, suggests that people use cues to causal agency to guide object- based generalization decisions, even in relatively abstract set- tings. When object A possesses cues to causal agency (e.g. it moves, remains stable throughout the interaction), people tend to predict that what happened will probably also occur in an interaction between A and C, but not between B and C. Here we replicate and extend this work, with the goal of identify- ing the cues that people use to determine that an object is a causal agent. In four experiments, we manipulate three prop- erties of the agent and recipient objects. We find that people anchor their inductive generalizations around the agent object when that object possesses all three cues to causal agency, but removing either cue abolishes the asymmetry

Cross cultural regularities in the cognitive architecture of pride

Pride occurs in every known culture, appears early in development, is reliably triggered by achievements and formidability, and causes a characteristic display that is recognized everywhere. Here, we evaluate the theory that pride evolved to guide decisions relevant to pursuing actions that enhance valuation and respect for a person in the minds of others. By hypothesis, pride is a neurocomputational program tailored by selection to orchestrate cognition and behavior in the service of: (i) motivating the cost-effective pursuit of courses of action that would increase others' valuations and respect of the individual, (ii) motivating the advertisement of acts or characteristics whose recognition by others would lead them to enhance their evaluations of the individual, and (iii) mobilizing the individual to take advantage of the resulting enhanced social landscape. To modulate how much to invest in actions that might lead to enhanced evaluations by others, the pride system must forecast the magnitude of the evaluations the action would evoke in the audience and calibrate its activation proportionally. We tested this prediction in 16 countries across 4 continents (n = 2,085), for 25 acts and traits. As predicted, the pride intensity for a given act or trait closely tracks the valuations of audiences, local (mean r = +0.82) and foreign (mean r = +0.75). This relationship is specific to pride and does not generalize to other positive emotions that coactivate with pride but lack its audience-recalibrating function

A computational framework for social valuation inference

Organisms in a social species constantly need to make trade-offs between their own welfare and that of conspecifics. An emerging body of research suggests that the regulation of such trade-offs is an important function of social cognition. In particular, the mind has mechanisms designed to regulate tradeoffs between the welfare of the self and that of specific others, and in consequence, the mind also contains mechanisms designed to construct representations of the degree to which another individual values the welfare of the self.Existing evidence suggests that such representations of “social valuation” play an important role in various cognitive processes such as reciprocity, partner choice, categorization and emotion. However, little is known about how people construct these representations. Because of its adaptive importance, I hypothesize that the process by which we infer social valuation is approximately consistent with normative standards of inference under uncertainty. To test this hypothesis, I construct a Bayesian ideal observer for a simple task in which the observer, having seen the decisions made by a partner in a simple welfare-tradeoff game, needs to predict the decisions made by that partner in other rounds of the game. In a first set of studies, I find that people make predictions that closely track the predictions made by the ideal observer in that task. Additionally, participants’ reports of anger toward the partner are well-predicted by the social valuation inferences made by the ideal observer, even when the different partners inflict the same opportunity cost on the participant. I also find tentative evidence that anger ratings in that task are independently driven by deviations from expectations: individual differences in the amount by which the decisions of a partner deviated from the participant’s expectations track individual differences in anger toward that partner.In a second set of studies, I study whether people are spontaneously curious about the situations which potentially contain the most information about another person’s valuation of the self. I present participants with pairs of dilemmas that another individual faced in a simple welfare-tradeoff game; for each pair, I ask them to choose the dilemma for which they would most like to see the decision that the individual had made. I find that on average, people spontaneously select the choices that have the potential to reveal the most information about the individual’s valuation of the participant, in the sense of allowing the ideal observer model to draw the richest inferences. These results strengthen the thesis that representations of social valuation are a core component of the conceptual architecture of human social cognition