The role of social cognition in decision making

Successful decision making in a social setting depends on our ability to understand the intentions, emotions and beliefs of others. The mirror system allows us to understand other people's motor actions and action intentions. ‘Empathy’ allows us to understand and share emotions and sensations with others. ‘Theory of mind’ allows us to understand more abstract concepts such as beliefs or wishes in others. In all these cases, evidence has accumulated that we use the specific neural networks engaged in processing mental states in ourselves to understand the same mental states in others. However, the magnitude of the brain activity in these shared networks is modulated by contextual appraisal of the situation or the other person. An important feature of decision making in a social setting concerns the interaction of reason and emotion. We consider four domains where such interactions occur: our sense of fairness, altruistic punishment, trust and framing effects. In these cases, social motivations and emotions compete with each other, while higher-level control processes modulate the interactions of these low-level biases

Integrating Two Epistemological Goals: Why Shouldn’t We Give It Another Chance?

As Beller, Bender, and Medin (in press) pointed out in their target article, in the contemporary study of culture in psychology, anthropology is virtually invisible. In this commentary, I traced this invisibility to a root conflict in epistemological goals of the two disciplines: Whereas anthropologists value rich description of specific cultures, psychologists aspire to achieve theoretical simplicity. To anthropologists, then, to understand culture is to articulate symbolic systems that are at work in a given location at a given time. In contrast, to psychologists, to understand culture amounts to identifying socio‐cultural variables that moderate psychological effects. These divergent epistemological goals dictate both theoretical perspectives and empirical approaches in both disciplines. Yet, the two goals are both valid and in fact complementary. A renewed effort toward integration of the two goals may enrich both disciplines.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/92388/1/j.1756-8765.2012.01201.x.pd

Disrupting the dynamics of oppression in intercultural research and practice

In this special issue we focus on exploring the tensions, challenges and possibilities for working in contexts where relationships between groups are characterized by dominance and resistance. Some of the impetus lies in our own struggles and frustrations with models, guidelines and ‘recipes’ that have been developed to guide sensitive, competent and empowering research and practice across boundaries of ‘race’, ethnicity and culture. These models and guidelines are often framed as tools that will enable culturally competent transactions across these boundaries

Alternative Knowledges and the Future of Community Psychology: Provocations from an American Indian Healing Tradition

In the early years of this globalized century, alternative health knowledges and wellness traditions circulate faster and farther than ever before. To the degree that community psychologists seek collaboration with cultural minority and other marginalized populations in support of their collective wellbeing, such knowledges and traditions are likely to warrant attention, engagement, and support. My purpose in this article is to trace an epistemological quandary that community psychologists are ideally poised to consider at the interface of hegemonic and subjugated knowing with respect to advances in community wellbeing. To this end, I describe an American Indian knowledge tradition, its association with specific indigenous healing practices, its differentiation from therapeutic knowledge within disciplinary psychology, and the broader challenge posed by alternative health knowledges for community psychologists.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/135430/1/ajcp12046.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/135430/2/ajcp12046_am.pd

Disgusting but harmless moral violations are perceived as harmful due to the negative emotions they elicit

Harmless but disgusting moral violations can be justified as harmful to others due to the negative emotions they elicit. The relationship between the emotions of anger and disgust and the harm associated to these emotions as a result of a moral violation was investigated. Results showed that a disgusting moral violation (taboo violation) described as harmless to others is more related to disgust than to anger. Such violation created a presumption of harm of three different types: to the community, nature, and the individual. Disgust was a mediator between the taboo violation and the presumption of harm to nature, whereas anger was a mediator between the taboo violation and the presumption of harm to the individual. In general, results also showed that in moral violations that are harmless to others, the emotions of anger and disgust allow people to presume harm to symbolic entities such as nature and the community as a result of such violations

Agent-based Social Psychology: from Neurocognitive Processes to Social Data

Moral Foundation Theory states that groups of different observers may rely on partially dissimilar sets of moral foundations, thereby reaching different moral valuations. The use of functional imaging techniques has revealed a spectrum of cognitive styles with respect to the differential handling of novel or corroborating information that is correlated to political affiliation. Here we characterize the collective behavior of an agent-based model whose inter individual interactions due to information exchange in the form of opinions are in qualitative agreement with experimental neuroscience data. The main conclusion derived connects the existence of diversity in the cognitive strategies and statistics of the sets of moral foundations and suggests that this connection arises from interactions between agents. Thus a simple interacting agent model, whose interactions are in accord with empirical data on conformity and learning processes, presents statistical signatures consistent with moral judgment patterns of conservatives and liberals as obtained by survey studies of social psychology.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figures, 2 C codes, to appear in Advances in Complex System

Cultural Psychology and Deconstructing Developmental Psychology

This paper looks at points of convergence and divergence between the different branches of cultural psychology and Burman's ideas in Deconstructing Developmental Psychology (DDP). The paper discusses the relationship between the developing ideas in cultural psychology over time and some of the shared theoretical and conceptual criticisms put forward in DDP. This takes into account some of the differences between symbolic approach, activity theory and an individualistic approach to cultural psychology. In turn, some of the bigger themes within the book are discussed such as the role of 'normalisation' and demarcation of age, and studying the child in context and how these relate to the different account of cultural psychology and the influence these themes have had on the author's own work. Since this paper details a personal research journey, examples are taken from work on home-school mathematics education, child language brokering and young caring. Using these examples, the paper examines how cultural psychology is interested in the mediation between culture and the person, whilst DDP asks us to question the stories and assumptions embedded within developmental psychology