78. A Primer on Social Neuroscience

Aristotle¹ saw the city—what we now call the state—as a natural community.² Since the whole must necessarily precede the parts—for if you take away the man, you cannot say that a foot or hand remains—the city comes before the family that, logically, heralds the individual. And so, the city is last in the order of becoming but first in the order of being.

Aristotle, a forward-looking naturalist who relentlessly sought the reality behind appearances and all the time expected that it might be different from what it seemed, thought it obvious that man is by nature a social animal (and that whosoever is naturally and not accidentally unfit for society must be either inferior or superior to man). In his Politics and elsewhere—for example, in The History of Animals, Metaphysics, On Memory and Reminiscence, and On the Soul—he stressed the logic of relations between parts and wholes. Had later thinkers such as René Descartes³ followed Aristotle in conceptualizing the mind as an array of powers or potentialities (rather than as a separate entity), attributing thereby physiological or psychological capacities to the whole organism, they would have edged closer to the truth; they would not have become ensnared in intractable problems of interaction between the mind and the body. (Dualism is the condition of being double. In psychology, it is the view that the mind and body function separately, without interchange; Cartesian dualism is summed up in the philosophical statement “Cogito, ergo sum”. [“I think, therefore I am.”]) In the twenty-first century, it is belatedly recognized that human beings are natural: they are part of nature and they are evolving naturally⁴; human thinking too is natural.⁵

Human history is not only social history but also neurobiological history. Throughout most of the twentieth century, social and biological explanations were widely viewed as incompatible. However, from the 1990s, the emergence of social neuroscience ⁶ vindicates Aristotle’s pioneering deductions. The young science accepts that the brain is a single, pivotal component of an undeniably social species and that it is orderly in its complexity. It treats the human brain as a social organ, whose physiological and neurological reactions are directly and profoundly shaped by social interaction. (To a mammal, being socially connected to caregivers is indispensable for survival: this, incidentally, suggests that Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs might need to be revised to ascribe more weight to social needs, e.g., love and belonging, and esteem, in relation to self-actualization.)

Nondualistic and nonreductionistic, social neuroscience, through a multilevel and integrative approach, aims to understand the role of the central nervous system in the formation and maintenance of social behaviors and processes. Spanning the social and biological domains, e.g., molecular, cellular, system, person, relational, collective, and societal, it exploits biological concepts and neurobiological techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging⁷—which measures patterns of blood oxygenation responses in the brain as a subject engages in a particular task, to inform and refine theories of social behavior. In short, it focuses on how the brain mediates social interaction.⁸ (Brain scans captured through functional magnetic resonance imaging show that the same areas are associated with distress, be that caused by social rejection or by physical pain.)

Arguably, the potential benefits of social neuroscience are that it can inform debates in social psychology, provide tools for measuring brain–body activity directly and unobtrusively and provide information that would be impossible to assess using other techniques, and permit the examination of social processes by pointing to the importance of social variables (from context to culture) in altering processes within the brain and body.

Perception is the process of acquiring, interpreting, selecting, and organizing sensory information to attain awareness. It involves cognitive and affective interaction between an organism and the external world. (In the case of people, what someone perceives is a result of interplay between the perceiver,⁹ the situation, and the perceived.) Hence, perception is not a passive reaction to, say, events or circumstances: it is an active, pervasive, and significant process through which the structure and function of the sense organs and nervous system form a vital link between the organism and the external world. In society, perception is all-important because people’s attitudes and behaviors are based on their discernment of what reality is, not on reality itself. The world as it is perceived is the world that is behaviorally important: perception is projection—we all have individual assumptions and theories that help guide us through life.¹⁰

By bringing together biological and psychological models of the brain, social neuroscience confirms that much of human life revolves around pain and pleasure. It should come as no surprise that social behavior is governed by an overarching organizing principle of minimizing threat and maximizing reward, informed by brain networks used for primary survival needs.¹¹ Depending on the environment, these trigger different innate human drives vis-à-vis scarce resources, to which access may be shared or controlled, that Ehin (2000) terms self-centered or other-centered. (More common usage refers to selfishness or altruism.)

Charles Ehin offers a comprehensive framework to understand how human nature can support (or undermine) voluntary workplace collaboration and innovation. He suggests that for these to thrive, organizations must develop an organizational “sweet spot”. To that intent, Rock and Schwartz (Rock 2008) have put forward a brain-based model—reminiscent of Charles Ehin’s innate human drives—that caters to the primary reward or primary threat circuitry (and associated networks) of the brain.¹² The model, which defines five domains of social experience deeply important to the brain—status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, and fairness¹³—allows exploration of what nuanced actions to reduce threats and increase rewards might be taken in each domain to support the expansion of Charles Ehin’s organizational sweet spots (Rock 2009). (Supportive measures lie in the areas of managing oneself,¹⁴ coaching and mentoring,¹⁵ training, leadership development, and organizational systems.) Usefully, David Rock also makes suggestions for further research, which serve to underscore the potential of the approach. Questions that beg answers—and the potential of social neuroscience is such that the list could be endless—include the following:

Astonishingly, the study of the brain and nervous system is starting to allow direct measurement of thoughts and feelings. Inevitably, from applications in psychology, social neuroscience will foray into other fields.¹⁶

Organizational behavior, for one, draws considerably on social psychology and psychoanalysis. (Theories of motivation and personality are rooted in these social sciences.) There, brain-based approaches will help study the building blocks of what professionals do, such as solving complex problems, negotiating transactions, trying to persuade others, promoting change, making decisions under pressure, and sparking creativity and innovation. They can also shed light on the critical matter of giving feedback, which most persons perceive as an attack on their status.¹⁷

Because of its very breadth, social neuroscience will bring new tools, methods, and approaches to the challenges people and their institutions face. It will, for instance, test orthodox thinking about responsibility and blame and will impact social policies. Notwithstanding, if the journey has begun, much work remains to be done before the revolution in neuroscience applies with effect new knowledge to real-world settings.