Norms and Development:
Interdisciplinary Approach
Week 4.
Emotion: A key-concept in
Gene-Culture Coevolution of Social Norms
What We Have Discussed So Far
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In order to explain the existence of social norms,
we used simple theoretical models. We identified
under which conditions social norms are
maintained .
But, what does it matter to us? They are pure
theoretical models. No real human psychology was
investigated.
The goal of this talk is to consider the implications
of these theoretical models for psychological
scientists with developmental and life-span
perspectives. This further provides a bridge to
Monika's seminars.
Culture of Honor as a Social Norm
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It's socially shared rules about(?) how to react to
insult.
Norm-violation that did not retaliate to insults incurs
contempt widely from the group members.
It was once an adaptive (=backwardly rational) trait
in the history. Remember the story of Mr. Emotional
introduced two weeks ago.
It has a strong emotional grip on human mind (see
Elster, 1989).
How to Acquire Culture of Honor?
Imagine a child raised in the culture of honor.
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He observed his brother was insulted from
unknown guys and fearlessly stood up to them
(observational learning).
He was insulted from his schoolmates and did
not react against them. His brother was
observing that event and showed explicit
contempt to him (individual learning/teaching).
 Imagine that he acquired culture of honor through
these experiences. It’s a quite likely story.
Observational Learning and Emotion
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What was transmitted?  a script in which his
brother stood up for demanding the withdrawal of
insults.
Why didn't he just mimic behavioral
patterns/rules in the script without learning
emotional arousal? Why could he learn emotional
arousal just from observing the scenes?
What mechanisms are underlying here?
Individual Learning and Emotion
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What did he learn?  if-then rule; “if you are
insulted, then you must stand up against it.”
Why didn't he just learn the mere behavioral
rules? Why could he learn emotional arousal
just from being punished for not feeling
emotional arousal?
What mechanisms are underlying here?
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We know social/individual learning are quite
common mechanisms. It is easy to imagine that
social norms, viz., behavioral rules are acquired
through these mechanisms.
However, emotion is a key component of social
norms; Violations of social norms induce punitive
sentiment. Normative actions are (often)
motivated by anticipation of negative emotion
such as shame or guilt.
How emotions, but not behavioral rules, are
culturally transmitted? Let's consider this
question.
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We'll come back to this question in a few slides.
Before considering it, let us discuss the
implication of theoretical models for empirical
research on psychological mechanisms
underlying social norms.
Innate(?) Constraints in Word Learning
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Quine (1960): How can a child connect the sound
"bunny" with a category of rabbit but not with
color, movement or body parts of a rabbit?
Children are constrained to assume that a new
word represents the whole object (whole object
principle; Markman, 1989).
This kind of principle constraints hypothesisspace and save a learner from testing infinite
numbers of hypotheses on word-object
relationships.
Innate(?) Constraints in Word Learning
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How can children learn the word segmentation
from continuous speech?  learning of transition
probabilities. If TP(AB) is high, A-B is judged to
belong a word (e.g., pretty or baby). If
TP(BC) is low, B and C are judged to belong to
different words (e.g., ttyba).
However, computer simulations on the database
of child-directed English sentences showed that
non-constrained learning mechanism fail to learn
the words effectively. It is necessary to constrain
learning with a rule such as “one word has only
one primary stress” (Yang, 2004). .
Innate(?) Constraints in Social Learning I
Payoff-bias vs. Conformity-bias
Remember social learning theory by Bandura
et al.(1963).
When two different behaviors are presented to
children, one is supported by majority but is not
rewarded and another is supported by minority
but is rewarded, which behavior is imitated by
children?
Innate(?) Constraints in Social Learning II
Parental vs. Extraparental Transmission
Remember the controversy on the roles of
shared vs. non-shared environment in behavioral
genetics:
In Gintis (2003), extraparental transmission was
assumed to be large enough so that the
influence of parental transmission is overridden.
The validity of this assumption, however, is still
under the discussion.
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Some people asked "if the model assumptions
are doubtful, how can we believe the results
derived from the models?"
This question, at the same time, raises what
questions empirical research must answer if we
want to escape from the disorder with the help of
theoretical models.
Inspection of the past research on psychological
mechanisms underlying social norms further
reveals questions.
Cultural Transmission of Emotion
Remember the question raised in the story of a
child living in culture of honor. We can think of
two basic psychological mechanisms that
enables children acquire emotional arousal from
the mere observation of the others.
1st Mechanism: BehaviorEmotion
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Strack, Martin & Stepper (1988): People who
held a pencil with teeth and stimulated
zygomaticus muscle (used for smiling) reported
more amusement than people who held a pencil
with lips.
 A possibility that behavioral (especially facial)
imitation may directly induce the corresponding
emotion and results in the acquisition of
emotional reactions.
2nd Mechanism: EmotionEmotion
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Emotional contagion (Hatfield et al., 1994):
Automatic and direct transfer of emotional states
(cf. mirror neuron on motor actions).
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Singer et al. (2003): Female subjects who received
electronic shock showed the activation in (what is called)
pain matrix. The same subjects who observed (cues
indicating that) their boyfriends received the same shock
showed the activation only in a part of this matrix which
is related subjective affective dimension of pain.
 Direct transmission of emotion might play
important role in cultural transmission of social
norms.
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The point here is that, regardless of the
importance of emotion as a key component of
social norms, its transmission processes have not
yet been fully understood. We know only the
possible routes of emotion socialization.
For instance, can we apply the same mechanisms
for explaining how a child acquire feeling of guilt
about violating a promise with her friends? Does
she acquire such context-dependent feeling by
observing adults who violated promises and
exhibited their feeling of guilt? This sounds
implausible, however, as guilt is not exhibited
facially or behaviorally.
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We don't know, furthermore, if several biases in
social learning also exists in emotion
socialization processes. Remember that they are
crucial parameters in theoretical models.
Can we provide evolutionary explanations why
the psychological mechanisms underlying
acquisition of social norms exists? Remember
Gintis (2003) and Henrich & Boyd (1996). Do we
need to construct new gene-culture coevolution
models?
The term “socialization” is also a catch-all
word that distracts our attentions from the
underlying psychological mechanisms.
Roles of Emotion in Socio-Moral Norms
Moral judgment task 1:
"A trolley is running out of control and five
people will be killed. You have a switch changing
the direction of the trolley so that it will kill only
one person while saving five people"  people
immediately select to push a switch.
Moral judgment task 2:
"You are standing on a footbridge. If you push
down an incredibly fat guy, you will kill him but
can stop the trolley and save five people" 
people feel difficult to make the judgment and
typically select do nothing.
Roles of Emotion in Socio-Moral Norms
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Greene et al. (2001) observed the brain with
fMRI while the subjects answering the tasks 
in the task 2, medial frontal gyrus (BA 9/10;
related to emotion processing) was more
activated than in the task 1.
Subjects who judged “one should push off a fat
guy” took much longer time than those who
judged “one should not push him off.” Such a
difference in response time was not observed in
the task 1.
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Interpretation of Greene et al.'s experiment is
rather difficult but it suggests that, when making
moral judgment, emotion interferes rational
reasoning (e.g., five lives > one life) and strongly
influences an action.
Remember that it is often argued that the
existence of social norms is revealed when it is
violated – social norms are often implicit in our
mind. This also implies not reasoning but
intuition or emotion are core components of
norms.
How to Fill the Gaps
Between Psychological and Social Science
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Looking back psychological research on social
norms from the view of gene-culture coevolution,
we realized our ignorance of many core questions
that are important for both us and them.
Psychological scientists may pay too much
attention to the very details of psychological
processes without asking how those mechanisms
affect the transmission of memes. It is crucial to
know not only the processes but also the
consequences of those mechanisms.
That's all. In the next three weeks, Gerd will
further discuss the implications of social
rationality (evolutionary perspective) on social
norms. Monika's seminars follow and the
questions raised here are further discussed.