4 levels of analysis

by Tinbergen 

·     mechanistic: determined by physical processes alone, causation

(algorithm vs. implementation)

o   disgust

o   major histocompatibility complex

o   women prefer men w/opposite MHC

·      ontogenetic (development) (critical but underdeveloped):the development of an individual organism or anatomical or behavioral feature from the earliest stage to maturity

o   siblings who lived together longer – found it more disgusting to have sex with their siblings

·      phylogenetic the evolutionary development and diversification of a species or group of organisms, or of a particular feature of an organism

(less useful for our purpose)

captures all evolutionary explanations other than function/adaptation

·      adaptive:become adjusted to new conditions, (function) Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection is the only scientific explanation for why an animal’s behavior is usually well adapted for survival and reproduction in its environment.

·      Explanations

o   Temperature

o   Slavery

o   Poverty

o   “culture of honor”: Nisbett & Cohen 1995

§  scotch-irish to Appalachia (violent)

§  “purring” – violent sport

§  weddings “bride abduction”

§  well-defined cultural type

o   Causes

§  Scarce resources crucial to survival

§  Resource protection difficult

o   Consequences

§  Close-knit kin groups, blood revenge

§  Extreme emphasis on honor

§  Adaptation – who murders?

§  Mechanism – what is the proximate cause of violence…prediction: insults to honor

§  Ontogenetic – boys in the south were encouraged by their parents to fight back against bullies

How Experiments Go Wrong

•    False positives, false negatives
•   “The File Drawer Effect”
•   Fraud
•    Experimenter bias- hoping for or expecting an outcome can influence the effects of a study
•  Participant bias
•  Placebo effects
•  Evaluation apprehension
•   Task demand
• Good subject,  Spiteful subject, Self-conscious subject, Convicted subject
• To get around this:
• “Natural” Experiment
•  Covert Experiment
• Reaction Time
•  Psychophysiology (physical cues)
• WEIRD People
• White, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic, 68% from U.S, 96% from N America, Europe, Australia, Israel
•  Weird experimenters too

o   Design Artifacts and Interpretation: elements of data that you never tested, disagreements in data interpretation

•  Emotions are motivational systems
• Adaptive biological and behavioral response (innate systems)
• Support learning
• Communicate
• Functional Properties of Emotion
•  Faces made during surprise or disgust actually work in your favor
• Facial expressions aren’t arbitrary
• Fear= withdraw, surprise= orient, disgust= reject, anger= aggress, happiness=repeat, sadness=avoid
• Love, guilt- don’t have specific expressions

·      Responsible for early knowledge about electrical impulses

·      Fascinated with muscular contractions of the face-> different emotions displayed on the face

·      The Duchenne smile

• Although many different types of smiles have been identified and studied, researchers have devoted particular attention to an anatomical distinction first recognized by French physician Guillaume Duchenne. While conducting research on the physiology of facial expressions in the mid-19th century, Duchenne identified two distinct types of smiles. A Duchenne smile involves contraction of both the zygomatic major muscle(which raises the corners of the mouth) and the orbicularis oculi muscle(which raises the cheeks and forms crow's feet around the eyes). A non-Duchenne smile involves only the zygomatic major muscle. “Research with adults initially indicated that joy was indexed by generic smiling, any smiling involving the raising of the lip corners by the zygomatic major…. More recent research suggests that smiling in which the muscle around the eye contracts, raising the cheeks high (Duchenne smiling), is uniquely associated with positive emotion.”^[

·      Parasympathetic v Sympathetic systems

·      Sympathetic: flight or fight, amygdala

o   Prefrontal cortex -> amygdala -> hypothalamus -> periaquiductal gray -> autonomic response

o   Amygdala= fear, ventral striatum = reward, insula = disgust, mid-cingulate= pain

·      Parasympathetic: rest and digest

·      Can suppress emotions- deception

Behavior modification is the use of empirically demonstrated behavior change techniques to increase or decrease the frequency of behaviors, such as altering an individual's behaviors and reactions to stimuli through positive and negative reinforcement of adaptive behavior and/or the reduction of behavior through its extinction, punishment and/or satiation. Most behavior modification programs currently used are those based onApplied behavior analysis (ABA), formerly known as the experimental analysis of behavior which was pioneered by B. F. Skinner.

Social Learning of Emotions

·      not all emotions are innate, you learn some through social interaction

·      Disgust is often culturally determined

·      Modify others behavior

·      Teach appropriate emotions

·      Signal commitment

Exaptation

•  Adaptations meant for one thing become useful for something else
• Disgust
•   Food taboos
•  Moral vegetarianism
• Sexual taboos
• Incest avoidance
•  Political conservatism
•  Pain
• Physical pain = pain from not getting ball passed to you

o   Fire together, wire together”

o   creating false memories

o   Rescorla-Wagner

o   Prediction error signal

o   Rats hearing tone, getting shocked, learn to expect a particular outcome

o   Reinforcement learning

Hebbian theory is a scientific theory in biological neuroscience which explains the adaptation of neurons in the brain during the learning process. It describes a basic mechanism for synaptic plasticity wherein an increase in synaptic efficacy arises from the presynaptic cell'srepeated and persistent stimulation of the postsynaptic cell. Introduced by Donald Hebb in 1949, it is also called Hebb's rule, Hebb's postulate, and cell assembly theory, and states:

Let us assume that the persistence or repetition of a reverberatory activity (or "trace") tends to induce lasting cellular changes that add to its stability.… When an axon of cell A is near enough to excite a cell B and repeatedly or persistently takes part in firing it, some growth process or metabolic change takes place in one or both cells such that A's efficiency, as one of the cells firing B, is increased.

The theory is often summarized as "Cells that fire together, wire together." (Carla Shatz, Stanford University). It attempts to explain "associative learning", in which simultaneous activation of cells leads to pronounced increases in synaptic strength between those cells. Such learning is known as Hebbian learning.

Parkinson’s Disease

- impairs reward prediction error behavior, lose ability to generate voluntary action 

 Thus, dopamine neurons seem to encode the prediction error of rewarding outcomes. In nature, we learn to repeat behaviors that lead to maximizing rewards. Dopamine is therefore believed to provide a teaching signal to parts of the brain responsible for acquiring new behavior.

Several important diseases of the nervous system are associated with dysfunctions of the dopamine system. Parkinson's disease, an age-related degenerative condition causing tremor and motor impairment, is caused by loss of dopamine-secreting neurons in the substantia nigra

 “Irrational” Aversions and how is aversion encoded by reward predictions?

o   cyanide water bottle

o   dog poo shaped fudge

o   How is aversion encoded by reward predictions?

§  Amgydala (part of brain associated with sense of smell) and fear learning

Research indicates that, during fear conditioning, sensory stimuli reach the basolateral complexes of the amygdalae, particularly the lateral nuclei, where they form associations with memories of the stimuli. The association between stimuli and the aversive events they predict may be mediated by long-term potentiation, a sustained enhancement of signalling between affected neurons

Insula: Disgust, Pain and more 

The anterior insular processes a person's sense of disgust both to smells^[40] and to the sight of contamination and mutilation^[41] — even when just imagining the experience.^[42] This associates with a mirror neuron like link between external and internal experience.

The availability heuristic is a phenomenon (which can result in a cognitive bias) in which people predict the frequency of an event, or a proportion within a population, based on how easily an example can be brought to mind.

o   K the first letter versus the third, think as first letter is more common because easier to think of

o   Describing 6 vs 12 instances when you felt assertive (the more you have to think of, the less assertive you think you are)

Representativeness Heuristic

·      Representativeness heuristic: the process whereby judgments of likelihood are based on assessments of similarity between individuals and group prototypes or between cause and effect

o   Like resembles like, that a member of a given category ought to resemble the category prototype, an effect ought to resemble its cause

o   Base-rate information: information about the relative frequency of events or of members of different categories in the population, this is the highly relevant info that should be taken into consideration

o   The planning fallacy: the tendency for people to be unrealistically optimistic about how quickly they can complete a project

o   Fluency: the feeling of ease associated with processing information

Recipe written in harder font makes people think recipe is harder

a phenomenon wherein people judge the probability or frequency of a hypothesis by considering how much the hypothesis resembles available data. In causal reasoning, the representativeness heuristic leads to a bias toward the belief that causes and effects will resemble one another (examples include both the belief that "emotionally relevant events ought to have emotionally relevant causes", and magical associative thinking

o   Conjunction fallacy: the conjunction of the two properties is less common than the one property

o   Lisa as a feminist bank teller vs bank teller based on description of her

o   Base rate neglect

• people underutilize "consensus information" (the "base rate") about how others behaved in similar situations and instead prefer simpler dispositional attributions.

a tendency of people to favor information that confirms their beliefs or hypotheses.^{[Note 1][1]} People display this bias when they gather or remember information selectively, or when they interpret it in abiased way. The effect is stronger for emotionally charged issues and for deeply entrenched beliefs.

o   Forming a false causal relationship

o   Trying to find evidence to confirm what you think

Intertemporal choice is the study of the relative value people assign to two or more payoffs at different points in time. Most choices require decision-makers to trade-off costs and benefits at different points in time. 

o   Temporal discounting

o   Immediate reward v waiting for a greater reward

o   Separate neural systems value immediate and delayed monetary rewards

o   Men can be more impulsive after seeing ‘hot’ images

§  More likely to make risky tricks skateboarding

Working Memory

o   Rule, goal, information

o   “ironic effects” of thought suppression= try to not think of something, think of it even more

when you are tyrying to remember a phone number, you have to keep working on it

Working memory has been defined as the system which actively holds information in the mind to do verbal and nonverbal tasks such as reasoning and comprehension, and to make it available for further information processing.^[1] Working memory tasks are those that require the goal-oriented active monitoring or manipulation of information or behaviors in the face of interfering processes and distractions. The cognitive processes involved include the executive and attention control of short-term memory which provide for the interim integration, processing, disposal, and retrieval of information. Working memory is a theoretical concept central both to cognitive psychology and neuroscience.

Functions of Controlled Thought

•  Reasoning
•    Control
• Top-down control

• Goal, flexibility, training
•   Communication

• Cultural transmission

Corpus Callosum

a wide, flat bundle of neural fibers beneath the cortex in the eutherian brain at the longitudinal fissure. It connects the left and right cerebral hemispheres and facilitates interhemispheric communication. 

·      Operation of getting it cut in half

·      Language faculties localized to the left side of the brain

·      Right side of brain controls left side of body and vice versa

·      Presenting images of spoons, the word heart, chicken foot, naked woman and getting conflicting responses from each side of the brain

perform the behavior for one reason, when asked to explain behavior, give an entirely different reason for it

·      Ex: Ramachandran 1996, Anosognosia

·      False Confession

o   Compliance

o   Internalization

o   Confabulation

·      Memory vs confabulation

o   Illusion of Will: Owning a rubber hand, people believe the rubber hand is their own

Perceptual vs Conceptual

·      Unconscious cause of thought leads to unconscious cause of action with leads to action

·      Or unconscious cause of thought leads to thought and then to action

·      Priority principle: causation is perceived when one event follows quickly from another

·      Ouija board experiment: manipulating thought leading to action

      Psychologist Dan Wegner:He is known for applying experimental psychology to the topics of mental control (for example ironic process theory) and conscious will,^[2][1] and for originating the study of transactive memory and action identification.

Facilitated Communication

·      Can get autistic children to communicate through electronic Ouija, but facilitators deceived themselves, their unconscious thought processes allowed themselves to guide the childrens’ hands

“What is Emotion?” by William James, 1884

·      “bodily changes follow directly the perception of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur is the emotion”

·      reading our emotions off our behavior

·      ex: laughter comes and then you think its funny

An experiment that tests how people misattribute emotions when on a drug 

•  Gave some participants a shot and told the effects of the suproxin
• Gave some a shot and not told effects
• Confederate comes and acts either angry or very excited
•  Experiments expect that:
• Participants feel happy
• when they are physiologically aroused and did expect to
•  when the confederate comes and acts happy (euphoria condition)
•  Participants feel angry
• When they were physiologically aroused from the shot but did not expect to be
• Anger condition with confederate, which would provide an anger-related interpretation of their arousal
•   All true except the informed participants, were less emotional than subjects who received no injection. They over attributed their arousal to the drug, discounting any arousal symptoms because they thought they knew how the symptoms had originated

Misattribution of arousal: attributing arousal produced by one cause to another stimulus in the environment

The experiment that deals with misattribution of emotion

Dutton & Aron, 1974·   

   Capilano Suspension Bridge

·      Attractive woman placed in middle or at the end

·      People misattribute fear of bridge to arousal of beautiful woman

·      Intense emotional feeling

Examples of the Availability Heuristic causing misattribution

·      Asking the questions how many dates have you had in the last month and how happy are you these days in a specific in that order changes the response given verse the opposite order

·      Misattribution meets morality

o   Told people given suproxin or supraxin

o   Given impossible test and told they should be getting a high score

o   More cheating on test with suproxin than supraxin

o   Another experiment where kids can be led to think that they are guilty or that the experimenter thinks they’re guilty

Self-Deception

·      People don’t cheat to the full extent so they themselves won’t realize that they are cheating

·      People stubbornly stick to low level of cheating even if hard to get caught, want to protect self image of being an honest person, don’t want to admit to themselves that a cheater

·      people who cheat turn it into a justifiable behavior

·      Why do we self deceive?

o   Positive view of self

§  because it is rewarding

§  because it is adaptive

  Cognitive Dissonance

o   Leon Festinger: responsible for the development of the Theory of Cognitive Dissonance

o   We seek coherent models

o   Worms are yucky but I eat worms = dissonance

o   You revise your model/preference to change an element and make consonance

o   Performing an action can change a preference

·      Theory: if you observe yourself looking at someone again and again, you are going to infer that you find them attractive

o   Experiment with flashing faces

o   Whoever is looked at more is rated as more attractive

o   Gaze bias both reflects and influences preference

o   Model: you must have looked because you were attracted

o   Effect: preference adjustment

o   Your preference for the two faces is changed because of your behavior, this phenomenon is called cognitive dissonance.

·      The Formula

o   1. Get a person to X

o   Make the best model, “I like X”

o   Preference for X should increase

 Cognitive Consequences of Forced Compliance

o   People do a very boring task, then asked to lie and say it was fun

o   Given 20$ to lie: a person tells themselves, I did it for the money

o   Given 1$ to lie: a person tells themselves, it wasn’t a lie

o   1$ people, it changes their preference for the task

•   Why I didn’t do it

o   Severe threat: I didn’t play with it because of threat

o   Mild threat: I didn’t play with it because it stinks anyway

Choosing to suffer as a consequence of expecting to suffer: Why do people do it?

o   Choice to hold up weight for a certain amount of time or eat a worm

o   Others are forced to eat worm and think about it for 10 minutes, then say you have an option to do weight, people choose worm

§  People think: yummy worms, I’m brave or I’m guilty

o   Or say forget about worm, would you rather hold weight or experience electric shock? People are split between the two

§  I’m brave or guilty go with shock, worms are yummy people go with weight

Free Choice Paradigm by Brehm 1956

o   225 female students rated a series of common appliances and were then allowed to choose one of two appliances to take home as a gift. A second round of ratings showed that the participants increased their ratings of the item they chose, and lowered their ratings of the rejected item. This can be explained in terms of cognitive dissonance. When making a difficult decision, there are always aspects of the rejected choice that one finds appealing and these features are dissonant with choosing something else. In other words, the cognition, "I chose X" is dissonant with the cognition, "There are some things I like about Y."

o   vacation trip example

o   horse racing example

o   the more effort you put into something, the more likely you are to rationalize that you like it later on

o   Hazing

o   Sorority girls have to say uncomfortable words, the more severe the hazing, the higher they rate the sorority, even though the sorority is awful

 Ben Franklin Effect

  By asking a person to do a favor, the person thinks “by exerting effort for [ben franklin], I must like him”

Experiment that shows Ben Franklin effect

•   Jecker and Landy 1969

•   Subjects do study, get paid
• Experimenter: short on money, I need yours back vs they say nothing vs they say department needs money
•  Subjects evaluate experimenter
•  Prefer experimenter if they made the personal request for a favor

 Extrinsic Reward

§  Getting a reward for action, you know you’re doing it for reward not because you like it

§  Kids have more intrinsic preference for coloring when they don’t think anyone is watching them or that they’re not doing it for a reward

Cognitive Dissonance vs Self-Perception

o   Festinger: cognitive dissonance, motivation to reduce dissonance leads to change in preferences

o   Daryl Bem: self perception, we guess at our preferences, and then choose based on our guesses

o   Neural activity predicts attitude change in cognitive dissonance

o   Agreement between two theories: we constantly seek to construct models of ourselves

 Amnesiacs

the process of establishing preferences is separate from the process of forming memories.

o  In experiment, amnesiacs still increase preference for object that they chose, and decreasing preference for object they didn’t, even though they have no memory of it

o   This suggests that in the moment of choice itself we are trying to drive apart of value of objects

How do we explain human behavior?

·      Same as everything else- causual models that explain everything or

·      Differently than everything else

o   Difference between humans and inanimate world

·      Same process, different content

o   Psychology of interpersonal relations by fritz heider

o   Impersonal causation: how objects interact with each other, accidents

o   Personal causation: intentional actions

o   “folk psychology”: theories that ordinary people have about how other people think

What does the shapes fighting video show us?

oHeider & Simmel 1944  

Shapes fighting video

o   People attribute human characteristics to inanimate objects- shows how much we attribute all the time

 Teleological Explanation (for human behavior)

o   Kehleman 1999

o   Shows kids picture of sharp rock

o   Says:

§  They were pointy because bits of stuff piled up on top of one another for a long time

§  They were pointy so that animals wouldn’t sit on them and smash them

§  They were pointy so that animals like cryptoclidus could starch on them when they get itchy

o   Younger kids are more willing to express goals and intentions for inanimate objects

o   Evidence of a preference for teleological explanations in patients with alzheimer’s disease

§  Inside of us is a mode of personal causality

§  Can be used to explain phenomenon like religion

 Origins of Goal Attribution

o   6 month old babies shown two objects going to a box, baby will look longer if box is shown to have only one object

o   Woodward 1998, habituation

§  Hand reaching for ball or bear

§  Kids surprised if hand reaches to new goal, less surprised if hand reaches to different location

Rational Planning

-Rational Action

a process for making logically sound decisions.^[1] This multi-step model and aims to be logical and follow the orderly path from problem identification through solution.

o   Desire or belief lead to intention, intention or control lead to intentional action

o   Personal causation vs impersonal causation

o   Situations can lead to unintentional action

•  At 12 months can you pursue a goal in a rational manner
•  Chart amount of time kids spent looking at ball bouncing
•   Ball jumps over barrier or jumps for no apparent reason
• More surprising when ball jumps for reason, because not rational
•   Another experiment
•  Shows kids him hitting head on thing and it lighting up
• Kids come over and do the same instead of hitting with hand, still do head
•  Tried again, when person’s hands were occupied, kids hit it with hand- rational inference
•  She wants to turn on the light, she has chosen the most efficient plan
•  Interpreting person by their plan/intention

  Kelley “Covariation Model”

• Personal traits vs the situation, use the data to see what it depends on

is an attribution theory in which people make causal inferences to explain why other people and ourselves behave in a certain way. It is concerned with both social perception and self-perception 

The covariation principle states that, "an effect is attributed to the one of its possible causes with which, over time, it covaries"  That is, a certain behaviour is attributed to potential causes that appear at the same time. This principle is useful when the individual has the opportunity to observe the behaviour over several occasions^[2]. The number of observations made can be as small as two^[3] or more than two^[4]. The three causes which behaviour is attributed to are Person (actor), Object (action) and Context (situation), and attribution is made based on three criteria: Consensus, Distinctiveness and Consistency

 Moral Virtue Scale

•   Martijn, Spears, van der Pligt & Jakobs, 1992
•  People are more biased by negative virtue than positive virtue
•   General negativity bias
•  Ex: steals from babies vs gives to charity
•  Morally bad people do good and bad, good people only do good

 Intelligence Scale

•  Positive bias
•   Ex: throws out her own wallet vs designs iphone app
•  Smart people do smart and dumb things, dumb people do only dumb things

Fundamental Attribution Error

• ·      Fundamental attribution error: the tendency to believe that a behavior is due to a person’s disposition, even when there are situational forces present that are sufficient to explain the behavior

   

  o   Experiment about writing essays about Castro. People rate the writer’s attitude as more favorable towards Cuba if they read a pro-Castro essay, even though they know they didn’t get to pick the side

  o   People tend to assign too much responsibility to the individual for great accomplishments and not enough responsibility to the particular situation, broader societal forces, or pure dumb luck

   

  o   Causes of the fundamental attribution error:

  §  Motivational influence and the belief in a just world

  ú  Just world hypothesis: the belief that people get what they deserve in life and deserve what they get

  §  The differential salience (noticability) of people and situations

  ú  The elements of the environment that more readily capture our attention are more likelyt o be seen as potential causes of an observed effect

  §  The cognitive mechanics of attribution

  ú  Situational information is not weight simultaneously along with the behavioral information

   

   

•  Aka correspondence bias
•   describes the tendency to over-value dispositional or personality-based explanations for the observed behaviors of others while under-valuing situational explanations for those behaviors. The fundamental attribution error is most visible when people explain the behavior of others

An experiment that shows the fundamental attribution error

•  Jones and Harris 1967

•  Subjects read pro- and anti-Fidel Castro essays. Subjects were asked to rate the pro-Castro attitudes of the writers. When the subjects believed that the writers freely chose the positions they took (for or against Castro), they naturally rated the people who spoke in favor of Castro as having a more positive attitude towards Castro. However, contradicting Jones and Harris' initial hypothesis, when the subjects were told that the writer's positions were determined by a coin toss, they still rated writers who spoke in favor of Castro as having, on average, a more positive attitude towards Castro than those who spoke against him. In other words, the subjects were unable to see the influence of the situational constraints placed upon the writers; they could not refrain from attributing sincere belief to the writers.
• Fundamental attribution error

 Stanley Milgram

• The Milgram experiment on obedience to authority figures was a series of notable social psychology experiments conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram, which measured the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts that conflicted with their personal conscience
•  A panel of psychiatrists: 20% will go to 150 volts, 1% will go to 330 volts
•   Reality: 62.5% go to 450 volts
•   Replicated experiment in 2009

Social Inference

 social inference consists of an initial characterization stage and a subsequent correction stage : Perceivers draw character inferences from behavior ("Gus is a gloomy guy") and then correct those inferences with information about the context in which the behavior occurred ("But given that be just came from his mother's funeral, be may be a more upbeat person than be seems today")

• ·      Actor-observer difference: a difference in attribution based on who is making the causal assessment: the actor (who is relatively disposed to make situational attributions) or the observer (who is relatively disposed to make dispositional attributions)

•   Jones & Nisbett 1972
•  Tendency to overestimate someone’s internal traits to explain behavior
•  Prisoners vs Prison Guards
• Saulnier & Perlman 1981
•  Advice Columns
• Schoeneman & Rubanowitz 1985
• When you write for advice, you see the behavior of the people around as indicative of their character, but you see yourself as a product of the situation

“Top of the Head” Phenomenon

·      Taylor/Fiske 1978

·      Two people had a conversation, asked to what extent where you guiding the conversation?

·      Most people feel the other person was guiding the conversation

·      When we interpret another person’s behavior, we don’t look at the environment we focus on the person

o   Committed murder, sentenced to prison

o   Bank plan, kills boys and laughs, eats their lunch

o   Inmates have a party to celebrate his execution

o   We attribute these traits to him as a person

o   Situationally: alcohlic, violent father, delivered at 6.5 months with no heartbeat, sisters beaten and sexually abused, mother blames him for abuse/rejects him, in prison at 14 years he was raped multiple times

Fundamental Attribution Error and Culture

·      Westerners place more emphasis on the individual

·      East Asian art, the focal object tends to occupy a significantly smaller portion in the artwork in comparison to western artwork

·      Experiment, western children group two animals together, asian children pair cow with grass

·      Asians focused on relationship

·      Situational Salience and Cultural Differences in the Correspondence bias and Actor-Observer Bias

Two Dimensions of Mind

·      Gray, Gray and Wegner 2007

Participants compared the mental capacities of various human and nonhuman characters via online surveys. Factor analysis revealed two dimensions of mind perception, Experience (for example, capacity for hunger) and Agency (for example, capacity for self-control). The dimensions predicted different moral judgments but were both related to valuing of mind.

·      Two basic dimensions on which people attribute mental states

·      Stuff having to do with goals, desires: agency

·      The other dimension is experience

·      Agentic mental states: planning, control, desire, thought: lead to behavior

·      Experiential mental states: pain, fear, hunger, pleasure: tied to the situation

Theory of Mind

·      Theory of mind is the ability to attribute mental states—beliefs, intents, desires, pretending, knowledge, etc.—to oneself and others and to understand that others have beliefs, desires and intentions that are different from one's own

·      Theory of mind appears to be an innate potential ability in humans, but one requiring social and other experience over many years to bring to fruition. Different people may develop more, or less, effective theories of mind. Empathy is a related concept, meaning experientially recognizing and understanding the states of mind, including beliefs, desires and particularly emotions of others, often characterized as the ability to "put oneself into another's shoes."

   Representational Theory of Mind

o   the representational theory of mind postulates the actual existence of mental representations which act as intermediaries between the observing subject and the objects, processes or other entities observed in the external world. These intermediaries stand for or represent to the mind the objects of that world.

o   For example, when someone arrives at the belief that his or her floor needs sweeping, the representational theory of mind states that he or she forms a mental representation that represents the floor and its state of cleanliness.

 False Beliefs

o   Wimmer and Perner 1983

o   “Sally Anne task”

-children hid marble, then marble is moved

-The child passes the task if she answers that Sally will look in the basket, where she put the marble; the child fails the task if she answers that Sally will look in the box, where the child knows the marble is hidden, even though Sally cannot know, since she did not see it hidden there. In order to pass the task, the child must be able to understand that another’s mental representation of the situation is different from their own, and the child must be able to predict behavior based on that understanding.

o   Critical transition between 3 years old and 4 years old, where you develop representational theory of mind* (theory from before)

o   One of the most important milestones in theory of mind development is gaining the ability to attribute false belief: that is, to recognize that others can have beliefs about the world that are diverging. To do this, it is suggested, one must understand how knowledge is formed, that people’s beliefs are based on their knowledge, that mental states can differ from reality, and that people’s behavior can be predicted by their mental states

Autism

o   Social disconnect from ordinary social functioning

o   “an anthropologist on Mars”- Temple Grandin, she has to interpret human behavior as an anthropologist would on mars

o   focus impairment on their ability to attribute mental states to people or to determine what they are thinking

o   can’t ascribe a false belief

o   Before you can’t get a child before 4 to pass false belief test

o   Onishi and Baillargeon 2005

o   Measured surprise of a person reaching to find watermelon where it is vs where they think it should be

o   Tested nonverbally

o   At 15 months old, pattern of surprise indicated by children’s looking patterns, shows that they were able to reason false beliefs

o   But not in autistic infants

 Primate Theory of Mind

• Povinelli and Eddy 1996
• Chimpanzees totally failed the test
•  Conclusion non human primates failed to have a theory of mind in the most dramatic sense possible
• Hare, Call and Tomasello 1996
•   Cooperation vs competiton
•   Subordinate and dominant, subordinate can reason that the other can’t see the banana and so it will be fine to take it
•    Flombaum & Santos 2005
•   Domain specificity
•   For non human primates, cooperation is not a problem it has to deal
• Always faces competitive context, so they have a capacity to solve theory of mind tasks in that way
•   Santos, Nissen & Ferrugia 2006
• If experimenter doesn’t look, monkey goes for silent box
•  If he is looking, monkey does not show preference for silent box

 The Neural Basis of Theory of Mind

In case you don't remember: Theory of mind is the ability to attribute mental states—beliefs, intents, desires, pretending, knowledge, etc.—to oneself and others and to understand that others have beliefs, desires and intentions that are different from one's own.^[1] Though there are philosophical approaches to issues raised in such discussions, theory of mind as such is distinct from the philosophy of mind. 

•    A study with patients suffering from a lesion of the temporoparietal junction of the brain (between the temporal lobe and parietal lobe) reported that they have difficulty with some theory of mind tasks. This shows that theory of mind abilities are associated with specific parts of the human brain. However, the fact that the medial prefrontal cortex and temporoparietal junction are necessary for theory of mind tasks does not imply that these regions are specific to that function

•   Labeled pie cherry because she though it was cherry, but was actually strawberry

•   Saxe and Powell 2006
•   Large network of brain reaons that are more active for false beliefs than false photographs
• Right temporoparietal junction- selectively responds about info for other people’s thoughts, but not about bodily sensations or appearance

•   Young et al 2010
•   Cranial magnetic
•  Local scrambling of the brain temporarily
•   Put magnet on rtj
•  People make significantly different moral beliefs
•   Less likely to condemn bad behavior
•   Disrupted their ability to see harmful intent

 Simulation Theory

o   The theory holds that humans anticipate and make sense of the behavior of others by activating mental processes that, if carried into action, would produce similar behavior. This includes intentional behavior as well as the expression of emotions.

o   Niedenthal et al 2001

§  Shown faces transition from happy to sad or neutral

§  Want person to identify when transition occurs

§  If holding pen in mouth, you can’t mimic the expression they make, impairs your ability to detect a change in their expression

o   To what extent do we share the pain of others? Insight from the neural bases of pain empathy

  “Mirror Neurons”

 a neuron that fires both when an animal acts and when the animal observes the same action performed by another.Thus, the neuron "mirrors" the behaviour of the other, as though the observer were itself acting. Such neurons have been directly observed in primate and other species including birds. In humans, brain activity consistent with that of mirror neurons has been found in the premotor cortex, the supplementary motor area, the primary somatosensory cortex and the inferior parietal cortex.

-goes under simulation theory

Infants' grasp of others' intentions

• Sommerville, Woodward & Needham 2005
• 6 months old understand grabbing because they can grab themselves
•   put Velcro mittens on 3 months old, now they can pick things up, now they can succeed
•  proof that your capacity to interpret others behavior depends on your ability to mirror the behavior

·      Gallup 1977

o   Chimp is aware that it can see itself in mirror, exploring body parts that it wouldn’t normally

·      Also works with dolphins, elephants, corvids

·      Human infants acquire self awareness of body at 16-18 months

Self-Awareness Theory states that when we focus our attention on ourselves, we evaluate and compare our current behavior to our internal standards and values. We become self-conscious as objective evaluators of ourselves.

§  Negative affect: change or avoidance

§  Positive affect: maintain behavior and seek it out

§  Depends on how we view ourself, and then observation of our own behavior from a third party. The comparison between the idealized standard and the observed self is the essence of objective self-awareness

·      Baumeister 1991

o   Escaping the self

o   People don’t want to confront parts of themselves that they are uncomfortable with

o   People partake in these behaviors: Alcohol abuse, binge eating, sexual masochism, workaholism, suicide, in order to avoid being self-aware

binge eating is motivated by a desire to escape from self-awareness. Binge eaten suffer from high standards and expectations, especially an acute sensitivity to the difficult (perceived) demands of others. When they fall short of these standards, they develop an aversive pattern of high self-awareness, characterized by unflattering views of self and concern over how they are perceived by others. These aversive self-perceptions are accompanied by emotional dis- tress, which often includes anxiety and depression. To escape from this unpleasant state, binge eaters attempt the cognitive response of narrowing attention to the immediate stimulus environ- ment and avoiding broadly meaningful thought. This narrowing of attention disengages normal inhibitions against eating and fosters an uncritical acceptance of irrational beliefs and thoughts. The escape model is capable of integrating much of the available evidence about binge eating.

·      Duval, Wicklund, & Fine 1972

o   Said going to test “surgency”, told one group very important psychological aspect, told other group very negative psychological aspect

o   Then gave positive vs negative feedback

o   Being told surgency good thing, positive affect. Being told surgency bad thing, negative effect.

o   Mirror in room influences exit time, people who have positive affect stay longer in room

o   Conclusion: idealized version of self is full of positive, when given reality that doesn’t match that, they want to avoid self

·      Greenberg 1983

o   Manipulation: equitable vs inequitable distribution of money

o   Room with a mirror vs no mirror

o   Finding: inequity considered fair in absence of mirror, unfair in presence

o   Seeing yourself forces you to admit something is inequitable

·      Batson & Colleagues

o   Two tasks for one person to assign to self and other person, one is better than the other, can just pick or can flip a coin to decide

o   People decide not to mess with coin at 80% rate

o   People assigned themselves to negative, think they are moral

o   Assigned themselves to positive, think not moral

o   People become more moral in the presence of the mirror

o   Those that scored higher on moral reason were hypocrital-wanting to appear moral but not wanting to pay the costs of being moral

attention that is focused upon environmental characteristics. In subjective self-awareness the person is the "subject" who is observing and perceiving the various aspects of their environment. However, given this, it may seem more accurate to say that a subjectively self-aware individual is actually environment-aware rather than self-aware

Subjective self-awareness arises directly from the experience of oneself as the source of perception and action.

Flow is the mental state of operation in which a person in an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity.

·      Example: when playing sports

·      Causes:

o   skills stretched but not exceeded

o   clear goals and feedback

·      Consequences

o   Intense, focused concentration

o   Merging of action and awareness

o   Loss of self-consciousness

o   Sense of control

o   Loss of time

o   Experience of intrinsic reward

People in an ex- periment by Duval and Wicklund (1973) were asked to make attributions for hypothetical events (a hypothetical item: “Imagine you are rushing down a narrow hotel hall- way and bump into a housekeeper who is backing out of a room”). When asked to decide who was responsible for such events, they assigned more causality to themselves if they were making the judgments while they were self-con- scious. Self-consciousness was manipulated in this study by having the participants sit facing a mirror, but other con- trivances – such as showing people their own video image or having them hear their tape-recorded voice – also en- hance causal attribution to self (Gibbons 1990).

This tendency to perceive oneself as causal when think- ing about oneself is a global version of the more specific process that appears to underlie apparent mental causation.

·      Losing Flow

o   Baumeister 1984

§  Playing ball drop game

§  Focus on ball or hand

§  Lose flow when attention is oriented towards yourself

§  More pressure in comparison to female makes people do worse

·      People think they’re better than people around them

·      Ex: newt gingrich

·      People overestimate their own capacity

·      Joachim Kreuger

o   Every student in class thought they would score above average on the midterm

o   47% claimed, “for a logical problem that 20% of brown students solve, they will come up with themselves”

·      Epley and Whitchurch 2008

o   Took picture of people

o   Morphed it with pictures to make less and more attractive

o   People recognize themselves as more attractive than they actually are, doesn’t have an effect for strangers’ faces

DOES HIGH SELF-ESTEEM CAUSE BETTER PERFORMANCE, INTERPERSONAL SUCCESS, HAPPINESS, OR HEALTHIER LIFESTYLES?

o   Task force in California to improve self esteem, so they needed to test whether high self esteem actually would help

·     

Baumeister, Campbell, Krueger & Vohs 2003

o   School performance- wrong causation (high self esteem is the RESULT of good school performance)

o   Work performance- wrong causation

o   Relationships- nothing

o   Violence- nothing

The answer is not really! also people with high self-esteem can just be narcissists 

-Overall, the benefits of high self-esteem fall into two cate- gories: enhanced initiative and pleasant feelings. We have not found evidence that boosting self-esteem (by therapeutic in- terventions or school programs) causes benefits. Our findings do not support continued widespread efforts to boost self- esteem in the hope that it will by itself foster improved out- comes. In view of the heterogeneity of high self-esteem, indis- criminate praise might just as easily promote narcissism, with its less desirable consequences. Instead, we recommend using praise to boost self-esteem as a reward for socially desirable behavior and self-improvement.

·      Self handicapping: the tendency to engage in self-defeating behaviors in order to prevent others from drawing unwanted attributions about the self as a result of poor performance

o   Self destructive behaviors protect our public identity in the event of failure

·      Tice 1991

o   Failure meaningful vs success meaningful

o   People who have high self esteem, they say if I can succeed even tho ive handicapped myself, I feel really good

o   Handicap myself when success is meaningful, if I succeed without even trying that will be awesome

o   People with low self esteem handicap themselves when failure is meaningful, so its not a reflection me, but on the fact that I handicapped myself

o   People with low self esteem spend less time practicing when failure is meaningful, people with high self esteem spend less time practicing when success if meaningful

Cultural Differences in Self Esteem

·      Westerners: whats important is how they do as a person in the world

·      Asians are more concerned with how they fit into the world, their relationships with other people and the environment

·      Amy Chua, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother

o   Western child rearing practices are more geared towards raising kid to think they’re wonderful and special

·      Americans score higher on individualistic traits over collective traits

·      A theory of self-esteem

a hypothesis that maintains that self-esteem is an internal, subjective index or marker of the extent to which we are included or looked on favorably by others 

·      Leary and colleagues

·      See also, social comparison theory, festinger and colleagues (Social comparison theory: the hypothesis that we compare ourselves to other people in order to evaluate our opinions, abilities and internal states)

·      You see yourself through the eyes of other people

·      Your self esteem depends on how other people treat you

The Pain of Social Exclusion

·      Eisenberger, Liberman and Williams 2003

·      Computer doesn’t throw ball to you

·      Neural activation activates normally when you see physical pain

·      Self reported distress can be calmed by Tylenol (dewall et al 2010)

·      Conclusion: Social exclusion equivalent to physical pain

·      Baldwin, Carrell, & Lopez 1990

o   2ms subliminal presentations of Bob Zajonc (creepy looking) vs kindly post doc

o   took catholic female undergrads and had them read a story called “a girl’s sexual dream”

o   then showed pictures of pope vs bob zajonc

o   people’s self concept is depressed if shown pope if high practicing catholic

·      Elkind 1967

o   The idea that someone is watching you at all times

o   Adolescents think that everything is about them, have pleasure thinking about how people would regret it if you died

·      Kleck and Strenta 1980

o   Manipulation: confederate believes partner sees scar, knows about allergy or knows about epilepsy

o   Person goes in thinking they have scar on their face

o   The person has to rate how much they think the other person is tense, liking, talking, eye contact, attraction etc, rate more tense if scar of epilepsy

festinger·    

  Morse and Gergen 1970

·      You compare yourself to other people

·      The yardstick by which you measure yourself is against other people

·      Mr Clean and Mr Dirty

·      People’s self esteem changes in a positive direction when they’re in the room with mr dirty, versus in room with mr clean

Effects of Self-Awareness: Stereotype Threat (two experiments)

·      Steele & Aronson 1995

·      Taking a test, will be helpful to u based on your weaknesses

·      Take a test, just helpful for life

·      Black and white individuals take both types of test

·      Gap in performance between black and white individuals when weaknesses brought up

·      Black and white complete it equally when just regular test

·      Aronson et al 1998

·      Give whites a test where they say Asians are better at math, measured degree to which math is important to self concept

The more you think its important to you, the worse these white males will do if they are told if Asians tend to do well 

·      Cohen et al 2006

o   Write about most important value and why it is important to you vs least important value and why important to someone else. Both conditions rate degree to which value is influential in lives

o   Measured gpa at the end of the year and stereotype availability (_ACE = FACE OR RACE)

·      Manipulation

o   Dar Nimrod & Heine 2006

o   Told no male female difference

o   Told female do worse

o   Told female do worse due to genes

o   Told female do worse due to life experience/environment

o   No difference= no stereotype threat

o   Told difference= stereotype threat

o   No difference if told due to experience

·      Our automatic processes place a lot of value on things in near future

·      The decisions we make today for tomorrow are not he decision we will make when tomorrow is today

·      10$ is today or $11 in a year

·      10$ in 10 years or 11$ in 11 years

·      Read Lowenstein and Kalyanaraman 1999

o   Watch four weddings and a funeral or schindler’s list

o   Making a decision to watch tonight, you’ll watch fun easier one, but making a decsion to watch in one week or two week

·      People magazine can charge a lot for newsstand price because its instant and fun, but not a lot for subscription price. The opposite is true for foreign affairs magazine

o   Manipulating Attention: Mischel and Ebbesen 1970

§  Told you can eat a pretzel when I come back and ring bell

§  Next if you wait for me to come back you can eat 3 extra cookies

§  kids use tactics to distract themselves so they won’t eat a cookie

§  then told kids think about something else or think about the cookies

§  you can wait longer if told to distract yourself

Explored the role of attentional processes in voluntary delay of reward by manipulating children's attention to the rewards for which they were waiting in a delay-of-gratification paradigm. 32 preschool children waited for a preferred but delayed reward while facing either the delayed reward, a less preferred but immediately available reward, both rewards, or no rewards. The dependent measure was the amount of time they waited for the preferred outcome before forfeiting it for the sake of the less desired but immediately available one. Results contradict predictions from psychodynamic theory and from speculations concerning self-instructions during time binding. Unexpectedly, but in accord with frustrative nonreward theory, voluntary waiting time was substantially increased when Ss could not attend to rewards during the waiting period. Implications are discussed for a theory of the development of delay of gratification

o   Later in Life

§  Shoda Mischel and Peake 1990

§  The kids performance as a kid can be predicted by their traits as a 14 year old

§  Questions like how likely is your child to be sidetracked

The term cognitive load is used in cognitive psychology to illustrate the load related to the executive control of working memory (WM). Theories contend that during complex learning activities the amount of information and interactions that must be processed simultaneously can either under-load, or overload the finite amount of working memory one possesses. All elements must be processed before meaningful learning can continue

o   Shiv and Fedorikhin 1999

§  Told to remember 9287502 or 27

§  Had to walk down hall

§  Could get chocolate cake or fruit salad

§  Sometimes actual food or just pictures of food

§  People choose the cake more if have to remember harder number, less self-control

§  Individuals more likely to choose cake under high than lower cognitive load

·      Ego depletion: a state produced by acts of self control, where we don’t have the energy or resources to engage in further acts of self control

·      Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Muraven and Tice 1998

o   Put cookies and radishes on test

o   Tell them it’s a taste testing test, will be testing radishes or cookies, only taste the one we’ve asked you to taste

o   Gave them anagrams with no solution

o   If you picked radishes, you used up your willpower, won’t spend long on anagrams

·      Difficult Decisions are Depleting

o   Baumeister, Bratslvasky, Murvaen and Tice 1998

o   Rise in tuition

o   Give speech about it, experimenter says please give a speech in favor of the rise

o   If you’re forced to give a speech that goes against your own values, you spend less time on puzzle

o   Making a choice at all to make the speech depletes willpower and makes you spend less time on puzzle

o   Mauraven Baumeister and Tice 1999

This study examined the results of repeated exercises of self-control in relation to self-regulatory strength over time. A sample of 69 U.S. college students spent 2 weeks doing 1 of 3 self-control exercises: monitoring and improving posture, regulating mood, or monitoring and recording eating. Compared with a no-exercise control group, the participants who performed the self-control exercises showed significant improvement in self-regulatory capacity as measured by quitting faster on a hand-grip exercise task following a thought-suppression exercise.

o   Finkel et al 2009

§  Told to improve posture

§  Or to not say like and ya

 Robust experimental evidence demonstrates that self-control failures frequently predict aggression and, conversely, that bolstering self-control decreases aggression

o   Galliot et al 2007

§  People brought into lab, not allowed to eat before they come in

§  Gives kool aid, some has real sugar some has fake sugar

§  Shows video with random words, for some says don’t read the random words

§  People make less errors with glucose

o   Wang and Dvorak 2010

§  10$ today or 11$ in a year

§  people who get glucose, show normal temporal discounting levels

Wang and Robert D. Dvorak found that people with lower blood sugar levels were more likely to opt for immediate rewards, while people with higher blood sugar counts tended to opt for more distant, but larger, rewards.

o   Danziger Levav Avnaim Pesso

o   Judges more likely to give favorable decision when they’re not hungry

·      Avoid temptations

(ways to improve self-control):  

   Set up near term punishments and rewards

·      Make good behavior the default behavior 

·      Leverage Social Support

o   Different rates in people opting to be organ donor, higher in countries where the default is you are

o   Christakis and Fowler 2007

§  You’re level of obesity is associated with who you interact with a lot 

An implementation intention (II) is a self-regulatory strategy in the form of an if-then-plan (“If situation X arises, I will perform response Y”) that can lead to better goal attainment. It is subordinate to goal intentions as it specifies the when, where and how of a goal-directed behavior.

·      When implementation plans are specific they work

o   Does not work: if awake, then eat healthy

o   Works: if see vegetable dish on menu, I will pick that

·      When self control is difficult

o   Tasks known to overextend capacity to regulate frontal lobe and schixophrenic patients

·      Milne orbell and sheeran 1999

o   Exactly specify when you will exercise

·      Gollwitzer and brandstatter 1997

o   Report on xmas eve within 24 hours

o   Few people do it with just the goal, if they formed an actual plan they are more likely to do it

o   Had women commit to breast self exam over next month. Goal vs plan. People have increased compliance with plan (picking date and time to do something)

·      Salience of Cue

o   Webb and Sheern 2004

o   Count the fs, miss the ones in of

·      Instant Habit

o   Bayer et al 2004

o   The implementation intention can produce an increase in performance even though the way that it’s exercised is not consciously available

o   Saying if then statement out loud creates automatic routine in our brain that makes goal easier to accomplish

  When do students avoid learning and studying and when do they approach it?

·      Carol Dweck

·      Performance goals: favorable judge of competence, then approach

·      If receive negative feedback they will avoid

·      People think intelligence is fixed (entity theory)

·      Other people think intelligence is incremental, through hard work, those people approach given success or failure

·      Grant and Dweck 2003

o   Columbia freshman general chemistry: hard course

o   Learning goals alone predict final course grad

o   More intrinsic attitude towards learning the better they do

o   People do worse on final exam if bad attitude

·      Perverse effects of praise

o   Mueller and Dweck 1998

o   Give praise to people after test

o   Praise someone’s effort they do better next time

o   Praise someone’s intelligence they do worse next time

o   Intelligence praise people more likely to misrepresent themselves to peers

the fraction of an individual's waking time that is spent in an unpleasantstate.

o   Does marriage make you happy?

§  Stutzer and frey 2004

§  Satisfaction in life goes up until married then it goes down

Affective forecasting is the forecasting of one's affect (emotional state) in the future. This kind of prediction is affected by various kinds ofcognitive biases, or systematic errors of thought also known as "empathy gap" and "impact bias".

o   Gilbert Killingsworth Ayer Wilson 2009

o   Girls get all information about boys before speed dating event

o   Can get a score how happy the last girl was

o   After they’ve met the guy and rate how much they like him

o   People make more errors relying on their own prediction vs someone else’s opinon

 revealed that (i) people can more accurately predict their affective reactions to a future event when they know how a neighbor in their social network reacted to the event than when they know about the event itself and (ii) people do not believe this. Undergraduates made more accurate predictions about their affective reactions to a 5-minute speed date (n = 25) and to a peer evaluation (n = 88) when they knew only how another undergraduate had reacted to these events than when they had information about the events themselves. Both participants and independent judges mistakenly believed that predictions based on information about the event would be more accurate than predictions based on information about how another person had reacted to it.

Model based decision making, so it explains how the rat makes a decision        

V(s,a)= V(s,a) +&(Rs-V(s,a) +V(s1,a1)

V(a,s)= Value of an action in a state

Rs= Reward in state

V(a,s)= V(a,s) +&(Rs-V(a,s))

V(a1,s1)= new variable is reward expected for next action

We developed a behavioral task in rats to assess the influence of risk of punishment on decision-making. Male Long-Evans rats were given choices between pressing a lever to obtain a small, “safe” food reward and a large food reward associated with risk of punishment (footshock). Each test session consisted of 5 blocks of 10 choice trials, with punishment risk increasing with each consecutive block (0, 25, 50, 75, 100%). Preference for the large, “risky” reward declined with both increased probability and increased magnitude of punishment, and reward choice was not affected by the level of satiation or the order of risk presentation. Performance in this risky decision-making task was correlated with the degree to which the rats discounted the value of probabilistic rewards, but not delayed rewards. Finally, the acute effects of different doses of amphetamine and cocaine on risky decision-making were assessed. Systemic amphetamine administration caused a dose-dependent decrease in choice of the large risky reward (i.e. – it made rats more risk-averse). Cocaine did not cause a shift in reward choice, but instead impaired rats’ sensitivity to changes in punishment risk.

Automatic Cognition (Three kinds)

·      Unconscious thinking versus conscious thinking

·      Visual Perception

o   Optical illusions

·      Motor Control

o   How to tie your shoes…conscious deliberate part of your brain is turned off

·      Decision making

o   Using people’s perception of who looks more confident can predict senate elections

§  competence example with the faces of two senators…subjects are presented with 2 pictures of senators and asked which looks more competent

o   People like easier to pronounce companies (in stock market)

§  Alter and Oppenheimer 2006 because of automatic cognition because we want them to be almost like words

ú  E.g. AMGN, BRKS versus BRCM

Processes that require attention; it is often difficult to carry out more than one controlled process at a time.

One example: multiplication

·      Conscious

·      Attention-demanding

·      Rule-based

·      Sequential

·      Working memory

·      Override automatic responses

a Dutch ethologistand ornithologist 

He is well known for originating the four questions he believed should be asked of any animal behaviour, which were:

Proximate mechanisms:

• 1. Causation (Mechanism): what are the stimuli that elicit the response, and how has it been modified by recent learning? How do behaviour and psyche "function" on the molecular, physiological, neuro-ethological, cognitive and social level, and what do the relations between the levels look like? (compare: Nicolai Hartmann: "The laws about the levels of complexity")
• 2. Development (Ontogeny): how does the behaviour change with age, and what early experiences are necessary for the behaviour to be shown? Which developmental steps (the ontogenesis follows an "inner plan") and which environmental factors play when / which role? (compare: Recapitulation theory)

Ultimate mechanisms:

• 3. Evolution (Phylogeny): how does the behaviour compare with similar behaviour in related species, and how might it have arisen through the process of phylogeny? Why did structural associations (behaviour can be seen as a "time space structure") evolve in this manner and not otherwise?*
• 4. Function (Adaptation): how does the behaviour impact on the animal's chances of survival and reproduction?

In ethology and sociobiology causation and ontogeny are summarized as the "proximate mechanisms" and adaptation and phylogeny as the "ultimate mechanisms". They are still considered as the cornerstone of modern ethology, sociobiology and transdisciplinarity in Human Sciences.

·      Cognitive Dissonance vs Self-Perception

o   Festinger: cognitive dissonance, motivation to reduce dissonance leads to change in preferences

o   Daryl Bem: self perception, we guess at our preferences, and then choose based on our guesses

o   Neural activity predicts attitude change in cognitive dissonance

o   Agreement between two theories: we constantly seek to construct models of ourselves