What determines social behavior? investigating the role of emotions, self-centered motives, and social norms
Registro en:
978-2-88919-964-8
10.3389/978-2-88919-964-8
Autor
Corradi-Dell’Acqua, Corrado
Koban, Leonie
Leiberg, Susanne
Vuilleumier, Patrik
Fehr, Ernst
Institución
Resumen
Human behavior and decision making is subject to social and motivational influences such
as emotions, norms and self/other regarding preferences. The identification of the neural and
psychological mechanisms underlying these factors is a central issue in psychology, behavioral
economics and social neuroscience, with important clinical, social, and even political impli-
cations. However, despite a continuously growing interest from the scientific community, the
processes underlying these factors, as well as their ontogenetic and phylogenetic development,
have so far remained elusive. In this Research Topic we collect articles that provide challenging
insights and stimulate a fruitful controversy on the question of “what determines social behavior.”
Indeed, over the last decades, research has shown that introducing a social context to otherwise
abstract tasks has diverse effects on social behavior. On the one hand, it may induce individuals
to act irrationally, for instance to refuse money, but on the other hand it improves individuals’
reasoning, in that formerly difficult abstract problems can be easily solved. These lines of research
led to distinct (although not necessarily mutually exclusive) models for socially-driven behavioral
changes. For instance, a popular theoretical framework interprets human behavior as a result of
a conflict between cognition and emotion, with the cognitive system promoting self-interested
choices, and the emotional system (triggered by the social context) operating against them. Other
theories favor social norms and deontic heuristics in biasing human reasoning and encouraging
choices that are sometimes in conflict with one’s interest. Few studies attempted to disentangle
between these (as well as other) models. As a consequence, although insightful results arise from
specific domains/tasks, a comprehensive theoretical framework is still missing.
Furthermore, studies employing neuroimaging techniques have begun to shed some light on the
neural substrates involved in social behavior, implicating consistently (although not exclusively)
portions of the limbic system, the insular and the prefrontal cortex. In this context, a challenge
for present research lies not only in further mapping the brain structures implicated in social
behavior, or in describing in detail the functional interaction between these structures, but in
showing how the implicated networks relate to different theoretical models.