The social brain

1 Social exchange reasoning

The Wason selection task is a logic puzzle on cards. TODO: discuss significance of this for social reasoning, e.g. social exchange theory (Cosmides and Tooby 1992; Sperber and Girotto 2002).

See also Jeffrey K. Bye, Psychology Classics: Wason Selection Task.

Over at the rhetoric notebook I quoted Henry Farrell summarising some social brain stuff:

Mercier and Sperber’s basic argument is, as I understand it, as follows. First — that reasoning has not evolved in the ways that we think it has — as a process of ratiocination that is intended independently to figure out the world. Instead, it has evolved as a social capacity — as a means to justify ourselves to others. We want something to be so, and we use our reasoning capacity to figure out plausible seeming reasons to convince others that it should be so. However (and this is the main topic of a more recent book by Hugo (Mercier 2020)), together with our capacity to generate plausible sounding rationales, we have a decent capacity to detect when others are bullshitting us. In combination, these mean that we are more likely to be closer to the truth when we are trying to figure out why others may be wrong, than when we are trying to figure out why we ourselves are right. …. We need negative criticisms from others, since they lead us to understand weaknesses in our arguments that we are incapable of coming at ourselves, without them being pointed out to us.

2 Anthropomorphising yourself

Is the Internal Family Systems Model of psychotherapy actually useful? In this system people are encouraged to think of themselves as a family of little sub-people. What would it say about us if this works?.

3 Moral cognition

I like to tall that moral wetware.

4 References