Core social motives explain responses to collective action issues

Managing collective action issues such as pandemics and climate change requires major social and behavioral change. Dominant approaches to addressing these issues center around information provision and financial incentives to shift behavior, yet, these approaches are rarely effective without integrating insights from psychological research on motivation. By accurately characterizing human motives, social scientists can identify when and why individuals engage, and facilitate behavior change and public engagement. Here, we use the core social motives model to sort social psychological theories into five fundamental social motives: to Belong, Understand, Control, self-Enhance, and Trust. We explain how each motive can improve or worsen collective action issues, and how this framework can be further developed towards a comprehensive social psychological perspective to collective action issues.     

No interpretation without representation: the role of domain-specific representations and inferences in the Wason selection task

The Wason selection task is a tool used to study reasoning about conditional rules. Performance on this task changes systematically when one varies its content, and these content effects have been used to argue that the human cognitive architecture contains a number of domain-specific representation and inference systems, such as social contract algorithms and hazard management systems. Recently, however, Sperber, Cara & Girotto (Sperber, D., Cara, F., & Girotto, V. (1995). Relevance theory explains the selection task. Cognition, 57, 31-95) have proposed that relevance theory can explain performance on the selection task - including all content effects - without invoking inference systems that are content-specialized. Herein, we show that relevance theory alone cannot explain a variety of content effects - effects that were predicted in advance and are parsimoniously explained by theories that invoke domain-specific algorithms for representing and making inferences about (i) social contracts and (ii) reducing risk in hazardous situations. Moreover, although Sperber et al. (1995) were able to use relevance theory to produce some new content effects in other domains, they conducted no experiments involving social exchanges or precautions, and so were unable to determine which - content-specialized algorithms or relevance effects - dominate reasoning when the two conflict. When experiments, reported herein, are constructed so that the different theories predict divergent outcomes, the results support the predictions of social contract theory and hazard management theory, indicating that these inference systems override content-general relevance factors. The fact that social contract and hazard management algorithms provide better explanations for performance in their respective domains does not mean that the content-general logical procedures posited by relevance theory do not exist, or that relevance effects never occur. It does mean, however, that one needs a principled way of explaining which effects will dominate when a set of inputs activate more than one reasoning system. We propose the principle of pre-emptive specificity - that the human cognitive architecture should be designed so that more specialized inference systems pre-empt more general ones whenever the stimuli centrally fit the input conditions of the more specialized system. This principle follows from evolutionary and computational considerations that are common to both relevance theory and the ecological rationality approach.     

Perspective effects in nondeontic versions of the Wason selection task

Perspective effects in the Wason four-card selection task occur when people choose mutually exclusive sets of cards depending on the perspective they adopt when making their choice. Previous demonstrations of perspective effects have been limited to deontic contexts--that is, problem contexts that involve social duty, like permissions and obligations. In three experiments, we demonstrate perspective effects in nondeontic contexts, including a context much like the original one employed by Wason (1966, 1968). We suggest that perspective effects arise whenever the task uses a rule that can be interpreted biconditionally and different perspectives elicit different counterexamples that match the predicted choice sets. This view is consistent with domain-general theories but not with domain-specific theories of deontic reasoning--for example, pragmatic reasoning schemas and social contract theory--that cannot explain perspective effects in nondeontic contexts.     

Social cognition in simple action coordination: A case for direct perception

In this paper we sketch the outlines of an account of the kind of social cognition involved in simple action coordination that is based on direct social perception (DSP) rather than recursive mindreading. While we recognize the viability of a mindreading-based account such as e.g. Michael Tomasello’s, we present an alternative DSP account that (i) explains simple action coordination in a less cognitively demanding manner, (ii) is better able to explain flexibility and strategy-switching in coordination and crucially (iii) allows for formal modeling. This account of action coordination is based on the notion of an agent’s field of affordances. Coordination ensues, we argue, when, given a shared intention, the actions of and/or affordances for one agent shape the field of affordances for another agent. This a form of social perception since in particular perceiving affordances for another person involves seeing that person as an agent. It is a form of social perception since it involves perceiving affordances for another person and registering how another person’s actions influence one’s own perceived field of affordances.     

社会场景下联合表征的整合机制

人们在交互过程中会同时表征自我和他人相关的信息,形成社会性联合表征.然而,自我和他人相关信息是以整合还是分离的形式存在,这一问题尚未厘清.本研究以工作记忆蓬佐错觉为指标展开了探讨.实验中要求两名被试分别记忆部分构成蓬佐错觉的线段并回忆.结果发现,竞争和合作场景下的个体不仅表征了他人相关的信息,还将其和自身相关的信息进行了整合,形成工作记忆蓬佐错觉效应,表明社会交互条件下会自动整合成社会性共同表征.     

Representing task context: proposals based on a connectionist model of action

Representations of task context play a crucial role in shaping human behavior. While the nature of these representations remains poorly understood, existing theories share a number of basic assumptions. One of these is that task representations are discrete, independent, and non-overlapping. We present here an alternative view, according to which task representations are instead viewed as graded, distributed patterns occupying a shared, continuous representational space. In recent work, we have implemented this view in a computational model of routine sequential action. In the present article, we focus specifically on this model's implications for understanding task representation, considering the implications of the account for two influential concepts: (1) cognitive underspecification, the idea that task representations may be imprecise or vague, especially in contexts where errors occur, and (2) information-sharing, the idea that closely related operations rely on common sets of internal representations.     

集群行为：界定、心理机制与行为测量

集群行为有两个特征：以群体行为的姿态出现; 行为的目的在于提升群体的利益。集群行为理论、精细化社会认同理论和去个性化理论都分别从不同的角度对集群行为的形成、发展及维持进行了解释。其中, 社会认同、愤怒情绪以及效能感描述了集群行为发生前的心理准备状态; 群际间不良的互动模式以及志同道合者的出现, 是大规模集群行为得以引爆的重要条件; 而在集群行为爆发后, 群体内所形成的暂时性的、情境性的“规则”则是集群行为得以维持的关键。目前集群行为研究常用的方法有：特定情境下的参与行为意向测量和对历史数据的回溯。西方集群行为的理论与研究对于探讨我国群体性事件具有一定借鉴意义。     

Domain-specific reasoning: social contracts, cheating, and perspective change.

What counts as human rationality: reasoning processes that embody content-independent formal theories, such as propositional logic, or reasoning processes that are well designed for solving important adaptive problems? Most theories of human reasoning have been based on content-independent formal rationality, whereas adaptive reasoning, ecological or evolutionary, has been little explored. We elaborate and test an evolutionary approach. Cosmides' (1989) social contract theory, using the Wason selection task. In the first part, we disentangle the theoretical concept of a "social contract" from that of a "cheater-detection algorithm". We demonstrate that the fact that a rule is perceived as a social contract--or a conditional permission or obligation, as Cheng and Holyoak (1985) proposed--is not sufficient to elicit Cosmides' striking results, which we replicated. The crucial issue is not semantic (the meaning of the rule), but pragmatic: whether a person is cued into the perspective of a party who can be cheated. In the second part, we distinguish between social contracts with bilateral and unilateral cheating options. Perspective change in contracts with bilateral cheating options turns P & not-Q responses into not-P & Q responses. The results strongly support social contract theory, contradict availability theory, and cannot be accounted for by pragmatic reasoning schema theory, which lacks the pragmatic concepts of perspectives and cheating detection.     

On Distinguishing Epistemic from Pragmatic Action

We present data and argument to show that in Tetris—a real-time, interactive video game—certain cognitive and perceptual problems are more quickly, easily, and reliably solved by performing actions in the world than by performing computational actions in the head alone. We have found that some of the translations and rotations made by players of this video game are best understood as actions that use the world to improve cognition. These actions are not used to implement a plan, or to implement a reaction; they are used to change the world in order to simplify the problem-solving task. Thus, we distinguish pragmatic actions—actions performed to bring one physically closer to a goal—from epistemic actions—actions performed to uncover informatioan that is hidden or hard to compute mentally. To illustrate the need for epistemic actions, we first develop a standard information-processing model of Tetris cognition and show that it cannot explain performance data from human players of the game—even when we relax the assumption of fully sequential processing. Standard models disregard many actions taken by players because they appear unmotivated or superfluous. However, we show that such actions are actually far from superfluous; they play a valuable role in improving human performance. We argue that traditional accounts are limited because they regard action as having a single function: to change the world. By recognizing a second function of action—an epistemic function—we can explain many of the actions that a traditional model cannot. Although our argument is supported by numerous examples specifically from Tetris, we outline how the new category of epistemic action can be incorporated into theories of action more generally.     

文化影响自我解释的神经机制

自我解释是指个体如何思考自我及其与他人的关系。在集体主义-个人主义维度下, 东西方人分属于典型的相依性-独立性自我解释：自我参照任务中, 东亚人的自我和重要他人(如母亲)均表征于内侧前额叶皮质(MPFC), 西方人的自我和重要他人分表征于不同脑区; 偶发任务和词-音不一致任务中, 相依性自我解释程度分别调节P3和N400的活动; 文化启动任务中, 双文化被试可通达相应的自我解释。社会脑假设、文化-基因协同进化论和神经-文化交互作用模型对此进行了阐释。未来应研究中国人的关系自我, 尤其是探索本土化的理论和研究方法。     

Finding "meaning" in psychology: a lay theories approach to self-regulation, social perception, and social development

Much of psychology focuses on universal principles of thought and action. Although an extremely productive pursuit, this approach, by describing only the "average person," risks describing no one in particular. This article discusses an alternate approach that complements interests in universal principles with analyses of the unique psychological meaning that individuals find in their experiences and interactions. Rooted in research on social cognition, this approach examines how people's lay theories about the stability or malleability of human attributes alter the meaning they give to basic psychological processes such as self-regulation and social perception. Following a review of research on this lay theories perspective in the field of social psychology, the implications of analyzing psychological meaning for other fields such as developmental, cultural, and personality psychology are discussed.     

Joint attention,shared goals,and social bonding

There has recently been interest in the ways in which coordinated movements encourage coactors to feel socially closer to one another, but this has generally overlooked the importance of necessary precursors to this joint action. Here we target two low‐level behaviours involved in social coordination that may mediate a relationship between joint actions and social bonding, namely joint attention and shared goals. Participants engaged in a simple reaction time task while sitting next to a partner performing the same task. In a joint attention condition, both participants attended to stimuli presented on the same half of a computer screen, while in a control condition, they attended to opposite sides of the computer screen. Shared goals were manipulated by giving participants the instruction to keep below a threshold score for both individual response times and accuracy (individual goal), or their joint mean response time and accuracy (i.e., averaging their mean response time and accuracy with that of their partner: shared goal). Attending to the same side of the screen led to higher ratings on a composite social bonding index directed towards a partner, while shared goals did not cause any effects on partner ratings. Joint attention was sufficient to encourage social closeness with an interaction partner, which suggests that any activities which encourage attending to the same point in space could have some influence on how connected coactors feel about one another.     

The Effect of General Creative Personality and Freedom of Task Choice on Adolescents' Social Creativity

This study investigated the effect of general creative personality and freedom of task choice on the social creativity of adolescents. The results indicated, first, that senior high school students scored higher than junior high school students. Second, girls scored higher than boys on originality, fluency, flexibility, appropriateness, and utility with regard to creative social problem‐solving. Third, freedom of task choice and its interaction with creative personality had significant effects on the originality, appropriateness, utility, flexibility, and fluency of social creativity. Adolescents who completed the task voluntarily scored higher on these dimensions than adolescents who completed it reluctantly and, among the voluntary adolescents, those with high and medium creative personality scored higher than those with low creative personality, whereas no such difference was found among the reluctant adolescents. Adolescents were more likely to show social creativity, and their general creative personality was more likely to be brought into effect under the freedom of task choice condition.     

教师的存在能否促进视频学习?

随着网络教学和视频学习的普及, 近期大量研究关注视频学习过程中教师角色的作用。真人教师对学习的作用存在不同的理论解释：准社会交往理论、社会存在理论和社会代理理论支持真人教师能够促进学习; 而多媒体学习认知理论、认知负荷理论等则认为教师的存在会阻碍视频学习。汇总以往实证研究发现：第一, 教师对视频学习效果有比较弱的促进效应, 这主要体现在保持测验(d = 0.23)和迁移测验(d = 0.1)中; 第二, 教师对视频学习主观体验的影响主要体现在学习感知(d = 0.49), 学习兴趣(d = 0.5)和学习满意度(d = 2.21)上, 显示中等及大的效应; 第三, 教师的存在会降低学习者对视频学习材料的注视时间(d = -2.02)。未来研究仍需要从真人教师呈现方式、学习者特征、学习材料特征以及测量方式等方面加以探讨。     

Pandora's box reopened? The assessment of social skills

Social skills are viewed as an organizing principle for relating a variety of superficially dissimilar behaviors under a single megaconstruct. The underlying theme of this article is that since social skills are a megaconstruct we must be constantly vigilant lest we begin to regard them as a static, invariant dispositional-trait-like unit. Within this context, various theoretical-definitional issues are discussed and reduction of these issues is urged for any particular assessment task if adequate assessment is to be achieved. Social skills are viewed as response capabilities inferred from performance. Since performance is influenced by other parameters (e.g., cognitive factors — emotional states), these other parameters may need to be measured depending on the assessment task. The advantages and disadvantages of both molar unit and molecular unit recording of social skills are discussed. It is concluded that neither type of unit should be regarded as the proper measurement unit. The proper unit size is an empirical question which may differ as a function of the assessment task. An analogy is provided regarding the assessment of the megaconstruct of intelligence. It is hoped that we can profit from an examination of the strategies employed in intellectual assessment. Behavior assessors are urged to refamiliarize themselves with various psychometric theories and strategies to increase their methodological sophistication with respect to the assessment of social skills.     

Individualism versus interactionism about social understanding

In the debate about the nature of social cognition we see a shift towards theories that explain social understanding through interaction. This paper discusses autopoietic enactivism and the we-mode approach in the light of such developments. We argue that a problem seems to arise for these theories: an interactionist account of social cognition makes the capacity of shared intentionality a presupposition of social understanding, while the capacity of engaging in scenes of shared intentionality in turn presupposes exactly the kind of social understanding that it is intended to explain. The social capacity in question that is presupposed by these accounts is then analyzed in the second section via a discussion and further development of Searle’s ‘sense of us’ and ‘sense of the other’ as a precondition for social cognition and joint action. After a critical discussion of Schmid’s recent proposal to analyze this in terms of plural pre-reflective selfawareness, we develop an alternative account. Starting from the idea that infants distinguish in perception between physical objects and other agents we distinguish between affordances and social affordances and cash out the notion of a social affordance in terms of “interaction-oriented representations”, parallel to the analysis of object affordances in terms of “action-oriented representations”. By characterizing their respective features we demonstrate how this approach can solve the problem formulated in the first part.     

守范?失范?——作为参照点的社会规范对决策行为的影响

作为参照点的社会规范指个体为实现群体目标保持活动一致性所建立起来的、视为决策与判断标准的规范。社会规范研究经历了从完全理性到有限理性的转变过程。其对决策行为影响的解释机制包括预期理论、后悔理论、"齐当别"抉择模型、程数说和三参照点理论等,能较好解释避税、见死不救与医患冲突等现象。今后研究注意结合社会认知角度,实现研究思想与范式的转变,侧重探索多重参照点、群体决策机制,丰富跨文化研究等,为转型期的守范与失范行为提供科学的解释。     

Reasonable Partiality Towards Compatriots

Ethical theories normally make room both for global duties to human beings everywhere and special duties to those we are attached to in some way. Such a split-level view requires us to specify the kind of attachment that can ground special duties, and to explain the comparative force of the two kinds of duties in cases of conflict. Special duties are generated within groups that are intrinsically valuable and not inherently unjust, where the duties can be shown to be integral to relationships within the group. Since nations can be shown to meet these conditions, acknowledging special obligations towards compatriots is justified. However for such partiality to be reasonable, it must be balanced against recognition of duties of global justice. These duties include duties to respect human rights and duties of fairness towards non-nationals. Weighing such duties against domestic duties of social justice is not a simple task, and the outcome should depend on the precise specification of the duty at stake. In particular, the duty to respect human rights fragments into four sub-duties whose force when set against local duties is markedly different.     

Why do we do what we do? The Attention–Readiness–Motivation framework

According to many theories of motivation, the principal driver of human behavior is the affectively driven valuation of actions. Actions are valued by maximizing the difference between stimulus value (the benefits and costs inherent in the stimulus outcome that is the expected result of a given action) and action costs (the effort required to perform that action). However, such accounts have difficulty explaining why individuals act inconsistently in what appear to be comparable situations and often act in ways that seem inconsistent with relevant action values. In particular, we highlight several seemingly anomalous default effects which cannot be explained via traditional valuation‐based factors. In this article, we present the Attention–Readiness–Motivation framework, according to which such behavioral anomalies occur because stimulus value and action costs are respectively influenced by endogenous attention and action readiness—cognitive variables that are typically not considered as a part of the valuation calculus.     

Self–other contingencies: Enacting social perception

Can we see the expressiveness of other people's gestures, hear the intentions in their voice, see the emotions in their posture? Traditional theories of social cognition still say we cannot because intentions and emotions for them are hidden away inside and we do not have direct access to them. Enactive theories still have no idea because they have so far mainly focused on perception of our physical world. We surmise, however, that the latter hold promise since, in trying to understand cognition, enactive theory focuses on the embodied engagements of a cognizer with his world. In this paper, we attempt an answer for the question What is social perception in an enactive account? In enaction, perception is conceived as a skill, crucially involving action (perception is action and action is perception), an ability to work successfully within the set of regularities, or contingencies that characterize a given domain. If this is the case, then social perception should be a social skill. Having thus transformed the question of what social perception is into that of what social skill is, we examine the concept of social contingencies and the manner in which social skills structure—both constrain and empower—social interaction. Some of the implications of our account for how social and physical perception differ, the role of embodiment in social interaction and the distinction between our approach and other social contingency theories are also addressed.