Topic 14: The Social Animal Flashcards
How are humans specialised for sociality?
We form long term bonds, can remember details about hundredds of people’s lives and can co-operate with strangers.
Human success could be attributed to our capacity for complex sociality.
What is social learning?
Social learning is learning by observing a model. Current research suggests that other ape/monkey species have a significantly reduced capacity for social learning.
What are 4 evolutionary benefits that being social offers?
- Avoiding predation - other members of the group can alert to the presence of a threat.
- Co-ordinating defence against dangerous members of the same species.
- Division of labour - some individuals are more suited to hunting than rearing the young
- Accumulating knowledge and passing it down through generations.
What are 3 risks/issues that increased social complexity introduces?
Increased risk of passing on pathogens.
Power struggles can risk group stability
Intergroup conflict
What is the social brain hypothesis?
Primates unusually large brains can be attributed to the cognitive demands of living in socially complex groups. Research has shown a strong correlation between neocortex ratio (neocortex volume/volume of brain) and mean group size.
What is Dunbar’s insight and dunbar’s number?
Dunbar’s insight - As we know the neocortex ratio of humans we can estimate mean group size pre-cultural revolution.
Dunbar’s number is 150, an educated estimate of mean group size based on the assumption that brain size constrains social cognitive capacity.
What are imagined realities and what advantages do they bring?
Abstractions such as money, a degree, brands etc. that all have no objective, tangible reality.
The ability to percieve and act for imagined realities enables large scale cooperation.
E.g. strangers fighting for the same ‘country’
What basic emotions did Ekman claim are universal and what research did he do to supporrt this?
Ekman proposed that there are 6 basic emotions (fear, anger, disgust, suprise, joy, sadness) and that these are universal across cultures. He tested his hypothesis by investigating individuals in New Guinea who had had little connection with the wider world. One man produced facial expressions to situations that elicited 4 emotions that western individuls were later able to match to the correct picture at a later date.
Why has Ekman’s findings been challenged?
We do not make these chracterised facial expressions very often in real life. His studies included still images that also do not include body language, which is key to how we interpret facial expressions.
What is an attribution?
Attributions are how we intuitively explain the causes of behaviours.
What is a dispositional attribution?
explaining behavioural outcomes by refering to an individuals personality or competency.
E.g. He didn’t revise for his exams because he is lazy
What is a situational attribution?
explaining behavioural outcomes by refering to transient, situational causes.
E.g. He didn’t revise for his exam becuase his laptop got stolen.
What is correspondence bias?
The tendency to favour dispositional attributions when explaining an individual’s behaviour. This bia has been found to be more common in western cultures, eastern cultures are generally more likely to consider situational factors.
What is the actor observer effect?
The tendency to make situational attributions for our own behaviour while making dispositional attributions for others in the same situation.
What is the universality hypothesis?
Developed by Charles Darwin and later added to by Ekman, this hypothesis proposes that emotional expressions have the same meaning around the world. This is supported by blind individual’s emotion expression as their facial expression follows the typical patterns associated with basic emotions.
