Regimes of Expectations: An Active Inference Model of Social Conformity and Human Decision Making

How do humans come to acquire shared expectations about how they ought to behave in distinct normalized social settings? This paper offers a normative framework to answer this question. We introduce the computational construct of ‘deontic value’ – based on active inference and Markov decision processes – to formalize conceptions of social conformity and human decision-making. Deontic value is an attribute of choices, behaviors, or action sequences that inherit directly from deontic cues in our econiche (e.g., red traffic lights); namely, cues that denote an obligatory social rule. Crucially, the prosocial aspect of deontic value rests upon a particular form of circular causality: deontic cues exist in the environment in virtue of the environment being modified by repeated actions, while action itself is contingent upon the deontic value of environmental cues. We argue that this construction of deontic cues enables the epistemic (i.e., information-seeking) and pragmatic (i.e., goal- seeking) values of any behavior to be ‘cached’ or ‘outsourced’ to the environment, where the environment effectively ‘learns’ about the behavior of its denizens. We describe the process whereby this particular aspect of value enables learning of habitual behavior over neurodevelopmental and transgenerational timescales

Thinking Through Other Minds: A Variational Approach to Cognition and Culture

The processes underwriting the acquisition of culture remain unclear. How are shared habits, norms, and expectations learned and maintained with precision and reliability across large-scale sociocultural ensembles? Is there a unifying account of the mechanisms involved in the acquisition of culture? Notions such as 'shared expectations', the 'selective patterning of attention and behaviour', 'cultural evolution', 'cultural inheritance', and 'implicit learning' are the main candidates to underpin a unifying account of cognition and the acquisition of culture; however, their interactions require greater specification and clarification. In this paper, we integrate these candidates using the variational (free energy) approach to human cognition and culture in theoretical neuroscience. We describe the construction by humans of social niches that afford epistemic resources called cultural affordances. We argue that human agents learn the shared habits, norms, and expectations of their culture through immersive participation in patterned cultural practices that selectively pattern attention and behaviour. We call this process "Thinking through Other Minds" (TTOM) - in effect, the process of inferring other agents' expectations about the world and how to behave in social context. We argue that for humans, information from and about other people's expectations constitutes the primary domain of statistical regularities that humans leverage to predict and organize behaviour. The integrative model we offer has implications that can advance theories of cognition, enculturation, adaptation, and psychopathology. Crucially, this formal (variational) treatment seeks to resolve key debates in current cognitive science, such as the distinction between internalist and externalist accounts of Theory of Mind abilities and the more fundamental distinction between dynamical and representational accounts of enactivism