Doctoral student Matthew Gervais (University of California, Los Angeles), under the guidance of Dr. Daniel M.T. Fessler, will investigate the functions of affect within male social relationships. Social relationships are the cornerstone of human adaptation, and converging lines of evidence suggest that affect is integral to the adaptive regulation of social behavior. Yet theoretical treatments of the structure of affect remain impoverished of real world data, and controlled behavioral experiments have rarely been applied to established dyadic relationships in a small-scale society. This study will comprise the first empirical evaluation of a model of social affect grounded in ethnographic, neuroscientific, and evolutionary considerations.
The relationships to be studied can be viewed most clearly in a relatively circumscribed and small-scale social context. Accordingly, the research will be carried out in a fishing-horticultural community on Yasawa Island, Fiji. The researcher will integrate systematic methods from diverse disciplines -- including cultural domain analysis, an implicit attitude measure, and a series of economic games -- to map relational attitudes and emotions onto individual traits and resources, relationship histories, and measured relationship behavior. This multivariate modeling approach will shed light on the causal links among these variables, with a focus on the role of social attitudes in mediating the effects of individual and dyadic variables on behavior within relationships.
This research has broad theoretical significance. It promises to illuminate the affective bases and structure of social relationships, topics central to contemporary debates in anthropology, psychology, neuroscience, and economics. The research also will introduce several methodological innovations that will facilitate the cross-cultural comparison of affect and face-to-face social relationships. In addition to supporting the education of a social scientist, this research will train a member of an underrepresented group, a Pacific Islander, in research methods and data management techniques. It will also extend the research infrastructure of a long-term study of norms and social behavior in a region experiencing the initial stages of market integration.
This project was designed to investigate social emotions and social norms in a small community on Yasawa Island, Fiji. The project made both methodological and theoretical contributions to the scientific study of human social behavior. Methodologically, the project successfully developed and validated three novel "economic games," or experiments that involve participants distributing money among themselves and others according to specific rules. Such games have been used previously to test hypotheses about human social behavior in populations all around the world. However, unlike standard "anonymous" games, in which participants do not know who in their community is receiving the distribution, this project developed games that are among the first to provide participants with full information about the identities of their recipients. Moreover, these games included decisions made towards multiple recipients at the same time -- typically, anonymous games involve dyadic decisions between two people. Including multiple known recipients makes these games powerful tools for investigating how social relationships within social networks -- and the norms and emotions that attend them -- influence resource distribution decisions in real communities. The three games studied distinct aspect of social behavior -- one measured willingness to give to others, one measured willingness to take from others, and one measured willingness to pay a cost to reduce the amount others receive. While the data are still being analyzed, we have found preliminary evidence of giving based on another's need, taking based on another's wealth, and reducing (or "leveling") those who are both wealthy and have a reputation for stinginess. Such norms are a signature of uniquely human egalitarianism. Moreover, we find that such behaviors are abetted in different ways by emotions such as love, respect, and hate. These findings are of great theoretical interest, as they illuminate the interaction of norms and emotions in the regulation of behaviors that are both individually and socially beneficial. Future research will use these games to document variation in social norms across different populations and cultures, which will shed light on how humans, uniquely in the animal kingdom, adapt to widely varying ecological and social conditions. This project also trained an underrepresented indigenous Fijian in research methods, while extending the research infrastructure on Yasawa Island as part of a long-term study of social norms, market integration, and ecological risk.
