Social Cognition

Humans are immensely social beings. Some important social behaviors are strongly influenced by genetic factors, and much of our brains are devoted to social domains/tasks. For example, specific areas in the brain are devoted to the perception and recognition of faces and the emotions that they represent. Some parts of the brain are devoted to social aspects of motion, rather than just motion generally.

Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) involve a deviation from the norm of social cognition/interaction. Persons with ASD don’t pick up on biological/social movement in the same way, and often don’t partake in empathetic activity. They often do not focus on the eyes of those who are speaking of them. (ASD is on the rise, and researchers struggle to pinpoint a specific cause. It is likely multiply caused by various factors.) But, as with other people with “disabilities,” people with ASD often are highly skilled in other areas. Their strengths seem to counteract their weaknesses. This relates to Howard Gardner’s notion of Multiple Intelligences.

Emotion and sociality can be seen in the evolutionary lineage/different animals. Psychological and anthropological studies have confirmed that emotions are generally expressed through the same facial expressions across all cultures. Hence, the core of human emotions are innate and universal.

Mirror neurons, discovered by Giacomo Rizzolati through research with macaque monkeys, fire both when you do an action and when you observe others doing the same action. This shows that the motor system and the sensory system are not separate, as once thought. This gives us the ability to imitate, which leads to social learning, which leads to culture, which leads to cultural evolution and human history.

This ability of advanced social cognition also underlies the fact that humans have a great capacity for empathy. Nevertheless, the animal world, including that of humans, is fraught with fighting, forms of argument, and aggressive/social dominance behaviors. Aggression is natural during resource-limited situations. Competition is a core part of nature. Hierarchy solves certain distribution and decision-making problems. Therefore, many mechanisms of our social perception, cognition, and behavior are used for good or ill, for cooperation or competition.