Hints of beauty in social cognition: Broken symmetries in mental dynamics

Date

2008-03-01

Author

Bolender, John

Metadata

Show full item record

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Item Usage Stats

183
views

0
downloads

It is a widely held assumption that social cognition is wholly the result of natural selection and learning, debates arising over how much was naturally selected versus how much is learned. I argue here, however, for there being a third factor, namely physics, specifically symmetries and symmetry breakings in neural dynamics. These symmetries manifest themselves in social judgments in a fairly direct way as descending chains of subgroup types in mental social schemata. These schemata are the four models of Alan Page Fiske's relational-models typology. Descending chains of subgroup types are a phenomenon widely observed in nature; their presence in social cognition is consistent with there being a relevant neural network, the activity of which can undergo symmetry breakings. This would be analogous to the neural activity that has been computer modeled in an attempt to explain animal locomotion. This should encourage work towards specifying the particular symmetry groups in social cognition as a step towards devising computer models of the relevant neural mechanism. Approaches to animal locomotion suggest at least the broad outlines of how to proceed. Evidence of symmetry groups in social schemata also supports the view that the innate aspects of social cognition are at least partly structured by dynamics without being encoded in genes, just as the shape of the protective shell of some viruses results from dynamics without being genetically encoded.

Subject Keywords

Psychology (miscellaneous), General Psychology

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/64032

Journal

NEW IDEAS IN PSYCHOLOGY

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.newideapsych.2007.01.001

Collections

Department of Philosophy, Article

Suggestions

OpenMETU
Core

Wisdom in relation to ecopsychological self Şahin, Rukiye; Baloğlu, Mustafa; Erdem, Ahmet; Erdem, Şefika (Springer Science and Business Media LLC, 2020-01-01) Theoretical and empirical studies on wisdom continue to interest researchers in various fields. Studies have long pointed out the empirical operationalization of the construct, which has been speculated on since ancient Greece. In addition to numerous theoretical conceptualizations and operational measures, investigations between wisdom and other variables such as positive human traits, dispositional, situational, and environmental variables have helped us understand the concept better. The wisdom developme...
Children's Social Inclusion Judgments in the Context of Gender Gonul, BUSE; Şahin Acar, Başak (Turk Psikologlar Dernegi, 2018-01-01) In the present study, it was aimed to examine how children evaluate social inclusion in context of gender. In total, 150 children were recruited. Along with the two vignettes about a boy and a girl who both want to be part of a ballet group, these children were presented with two study conditions as having equal and unequal qualifications. In order to assess their decisions, children were asked whom to include, the girl or the boy, into the ballet group. Later on, they were also asked for the justifications...
The Relationship Between Perceived Parental Attitudes and Shyness among Turkish Youth: Fear of Negative Evaluation and Self-esteem as Mediators KOYDEMİR ÖZDEN, SELDA; Demir, Ayhan Gürbüz (Springer Science and Business Media LLC, 2009-09-01) The aim of this study was to evaluate the relationship between three perceived parental attitudes and shyness, testing self-esteem and fear of negative evaluation as mediators. The study used a total of 492 undergraduate students in Turkey. Data was collected through measures of shyness, fear of negative evaluation, self-esteem, and perceived parental attitudes. The proposed model was estimated using path analysis. Goodness of fit statistics showed that the model fit the data well. Results indicated that pa...
The Relationships Between Motivations of Intergroup Differentiation as a Function of Different Dimensions of Social Identity Tasdemir, Nagihan (SAGE Publications, 2011-06-01) This article aims to classify social identity-based theories of intergroup differentiation in terms of different dimensions of social identity to understand further the motivational bases of intergroup differentiation. For this purpose, I attempt to incorporate three lines of research in social psychology: (a) theories examining intergroup differentiation as a function of social identity, namely social identity theory and SCT; (b) studies suggesting social identity as a multidimensional construct; and (c) m...
Self-organization in the development of social cognition: Symmetry breaking and the relational-models framework Bolender, John (Psychologia Society, 2007-12-01) Alan Page Fiske has made a strong empirical case that social cognition is structured by four elementary mental schemata, the "relational models". Fiske argues that the four models are innate, and he thus concludes that they are encoded in the genome. But work on self-organization suggests that biological structures can be innate without being genetically encoded. Plausibly, the four models result from principles of self-organization, specifically a sequence of symmetry-breaking bifurcations. The evidence fo...

Citation Formats

J. Bolender, “Hints of beauty in social cognition: Broken symmetries in mental dynamics,” NEW IDEAS IN PSYCHOLOGY, pp. 1–22, 2008, Accessed: 00, 2020. [Online]. Available: https://hdl.handle.net/11511/64032.