Social Neuroscience Experiment

Earlier this week, I participated in my first social psychology experiment.  Naturally, then, I wasn't quite sure what to expect.   

The experimental environment was far simpler than I had expected.  I sat by myself in a soundproof room (intriguing to me, since I'd never been in one), situated in front of a computer equipped with what seemed like a modified Playstation controller.  

The actual experimental task was much simpler than I expected as well.  My job was to fixate on a point in the center of the screen and identify a highlighted image that appeared in an array of blurred objects.  The highlighted image could be either a person, a house, or nothing at all.  The salient object would also be randomly highlighted at the corners by four colored squares (blue or green), with each color indicating a degree of reward associated with getting the image correct (green for high reward, blue for low reward).    

There was a catch, of course: the presented array lasted a very short amount of time, so discerning what object I had seen proved difficult at first.  But over the course of the experiment, I noticed that my accuracy and reaction time increased significantly compared to the first trial.  Moreover, I noticed interesting patterns in my selection behavior emerge: I was a lot faster and a lot more confident in selecting faces than anything else, and I was much more careful to be correct in selecting the green (high-reward) images.

I don't know if these responses were what they were expecting or actually examining; it's entirely possible they were examining something else about my behavior, but what it might be, I can only speculate.  Regardless, it was certainly an interesting experience.  And hey, I contributed to science!  That's pretty awesome in itself.

David Hume

If I had to pick a favorite philosopher, I would probably select the 18^th-century Scottish intellectual David Hume.  Hume is quite rightly a giant in the field, and his arguments, buttressed by cogent reasoning and a sharp wit, have maintained influence to this day.

Perhaps one of Hume’s most interesting intellectual developments was his account of how ideas are generated.  Hume held that whatever non-mathematical ideas we have are ultimately predicated upon experience—upon sense impressions—such that we cannot imagine anything whose constituents are not elements of our prior experience.

This account still allows for an explanation of how we can imagine things that we have not experienced—for example, a golden mountain.  When we have an idea of a golden mountain, we take two ideas, “golden” and “mountain,” and combine them in our mind.  By the same process, we may generate ideas of unicorns, ghosts, and most controversially, God.  Importantly, however, these constituent ideas rely on prior experience, so we could not imagine a mountain of a color of which we are unaware.  In this way and in others, Hume was arguably one of the first to engage in a sort of proto-psychology.

Hume is also famous for his profound skepticism in denying our ability to know causation as anything other than extraordinarily high correlation.  Furthermore, his demonstration that inductive reasoning is circular has been a consistent but convincing thorn in the side of the empirically-inclined ever since. 

I could go on about his support of religious toleration or his commentary on political philosophy, but I believe the ideas I have presented provide enough reason as to why Hume remains perennially fascinating and is perhaps my favorite philosopher.

The Prisoner's Dilemma

Of the economic choice games I’m familiar with, I’m going to have to opt for the classic prisoner’s dilemma as my favorite.  While it’s hard to be emotionally attached to a mathematical model—at least for me, though I’m sure there’s someone out there who is—I believe it rightly inspires awe for the explanatory power it provides. 

It seems as if there’s an almost limitless number of ways to adjust the parameters of the game: you can change the number of players, iterate the game a certain number of times (or assume it’s played indefinitely), alter the reward distributions, alter the participants’ knowledge of their partner’s intentions, and so on.  Each alteration provides the game with new explanatory powers.  I don’t claim to be familiar with all of them, but it’s clear that the prisoner’s dilemma can be used to derive profound insights from fields as varied as political science, economics, and even evolutionary theory. 

The latter is probably my favorite example of how the game can arrive at powerful theoretical explanations.  If applied to evolutionary theory, the prisoner’s dilemma (and, additionally, other economic choice games) can provide a model by which altruistic behaviors may be selected for in nature.  The explanation is perhaps too long to get into here, but the gist of it is that if organisms enter into a game on the assumption that both will cooperate on the first turn, then both will have the greatest opportunity for long-term benefit.  This encourages altruistic behaviors, at least at the outset, though of course rational self-interest can take back over if one of them cheats. 

While I don’t understand every application of the prisoner’s dilemma—there are few who actually do—it continues to intrigue me like no other economic game.  

On Breaking Social Norms

To fulfill this little project, I decided, quite contrary to my normal inclinations, to make this morning’s C-2 ride as obnoxious as possible for every unfortunate soul within earshot.   

Once the bus driver had pulled away from the stop, I pulled out my phone and proceeded to have a very loud conversation with no one.  It went something like this:

“YEAH?”

“I’LL BE THERE IN A SECOND.”

“I’M ON THE C-2.”

“THE C-2.”

“THE C-2.”

“I SAID I’M ON THE C-2.” 

“YEAH, OK.  I’LL SEE YOU SHORTLY.”

I’m not sure how many people realized the conversation was fake, but the higher-than-is-acceptable volume of my voice had a demonstrable effect.  I was the target of a number of dirty looks, and the guy sitting across from me moved down a few seats.  Needless to say, there’s probably not much chance of me making friends with anyone on that bus.  (And thank God I didn’t know anyone.)

What was particularly interesting about this little venture was just how difficult it was to actually do it and break the social norm governing volume in a public place.  I was incredibly nervous before making my fake call and while making it.  I was trying the whole time to talk myself out of doing it, and because of that, I almost didn’t follow through.  And even after I had finished the ordeal, I could feel (and see, when I extricated my gaze from my lap) everyone on the bus staring daggers at me.  My cheeks flushed with the shame of my (truthfully very mild) transgression.

After a taste of the inward and outward shame afforded me by this incident, I can only imagine how hard doing something seriously offensive would be for me.

Social Neuroscience Talk: Susan Fiske

Earlier in the academic year, I had the pleasure of attending a lecture by Princeton’s Susan Fiske titled “Varieties of (De)Humanizing: Divided by Status and Competition.”  Dr. Fiske focused primarily upon the thesis that social cognition and dehumanization, or the tendency of people to view members of outgroups as less-than-human, varies along predictable dimensions. 

These dimensions, warmth and competence, may be familiar from class.  Warmth represents how we view the social intent of the agent in question—whether they mean us good or ill—and competence represents how able the targeted person is capable of bringing about what they intend.  Dr. Fiske explained how high/low degrees of warmth and competence could be represented in a 2x2 grid, the quadrants of which correspond to certain social emotions.  These are pride (high warmth/high competence), corresponding to ingroup members; envy (low warmth/high competence); pity (high warmth/low competence); and disgust (low warmth/low competence), reserved for social outgroups like the homeless and drug addicts.

What was particularly fascinating was Dr. Fiske’s explanation of how changing the context of a person assessment changes how an experimental subject perceives that person neurologically, primarily in the medial prefrontal cortex.  For example, if researchers explained that an apparent drug addict were given a story in which they were attempting to go to rehab or something similar, the subject’s evaluation of that person would increase in warmth.  Moreover, if people with injuries (in the “pity” category) were explained to have been responsible for their injury, sympathy for that person diminished.  And amusingly, people seem to exhibit schadenfreude for people in the envy category (bankers, lawyers, etc.): they seem to enjoy the idea of bad things happening to them.

The talk was, in sum, a thoroughly engrossing experience and a testament to the explanatory power of social neuroscience to enthrall.

Hormones

In 9^th grade, when I was 14, my rather poor running technique caused me to develop shin splints after only a week or two in gym class.  One trip to the doctor later, and I was prescribed a mild steroid to treat the feeling of knives digging into my shins. 

I don’t particularly remember what steroid it was specifically, nor do I have concrete memory of how it was administered (though I believe it was in pill form).  In any case, taking this anonymous steroid certainly diminished the pain of walking significantly, though I began to notice other, mild changes in my behavior.  Now, one could possibly chalk this up to the placebo effect and my prior expectations of what steroids do (I remember thinking it was strange and oddly funny that I was taking steroids), but I definitely noticed little things.  I remember being more irritable, and I was less inhibited in trying the more “macho” aspects of gym class. 

Again, these were mild steroids, so the effects probably wouldn’t have been anything too significant.  Certainly, I didn’t experience anything close to “’roid rage,” but I was still happy to finally get off of them once my shin splints healed, and my mood seemed to improve noticeably.

A Brief Overview of Emotion

It seems that the answer to the question “what is emotion?” changes depending upon the perspective invoked.  From the perspective of the layman, emotion encompasses various states of mind from happy and sad to angry and fearful.  Explaining what emotions are usually seems to elicit a description of experiencing these feelings without a hypothesis as to what underlies them.

Of course, there are other, more intricate perspectives which are too numerous to explore here.  However, it is perhaps most appropriate to consider emotions from a neuroscientific standpoint, and I think any scientifically useful definition of emotion must draw upon its neurological underpinnings.  The issue is hardly settled, but I’ve seen theories explaining emotion as cognitive interpretations of bodily states as well as heuristics that provide information or motivation without having to refer directly to conscious cognition.  As to whether emotions arise from interpretations of bodily states or are the result of cognitive processes causing these states, I do not know enough to speak.  However, the heuristic model of emotion seems to make sense from an evolutionary perspective.  For example, it would seem more adaptive for an organism to experience fear immediately and react to that motivation rather than having to reason through the situation before responding.

In any case, I believe that a definition of emotion must involve an evolutionary understanding of its function (from its possible role as a social signal as well as its role in motivating action) as well as an understanding of the underlying biology and neurobiology.