Behavioral and neuro-cognitive bases for emergence of norms and socially shared realities via dynamic interaction

Abstract

In the digital era, new socially shared realities and norms emerge rapidly, whether they are beneficial or harmful to our societies. Although these are emerging properties from dynamic interaction, most research has centered on static situations where isolated individuals face extant norms. We investigated how perceptual norms emerge endogenously as shared realities through interaction, using behavioral and fMRI experiments coupled with computational modeling. Social interactions fostered convergence of perceptual responses among people, not only overtly but also at the covert psychophysical level that generates overt responses. Reciprocity played a critical role in increasing the stability (reliability) of the psychophysical function within each individual, modulated by neural activity in the mentalizing network during interaction. These results imply that bilateral influence promotes mutual cognitive anchoring of individual views, producing shared generative models at the collective level that enable endogenous agreement on totally new targets–one of the key functions of social norms.

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“…These results seem to indirectly support the idea that explicit teaching and verbal communication to convey information about the model's expertise and behavior, which is often difficult to obtain only through passive observation, plays a key role in cumulative cultural evolution of humans (Caldwell et al, 2018;Csibra & Gergely, 2009Dean et al, 2012;Derex et al, 2013;Fogarty et al, 2011;Kameda et al, 2022;Lucas et al, 2020;Morgan et al, 2015;Osiurak et al, 2023). Furthermore, a recent neurocognitive experiment has also shown that bilateral interaction, which was absent in the current unilateral setting (i.e., information flowed only from the demonstrator to the participant), is critical for emergence of social norms and long-lasting socially-shared realities (Kuroda et al, 2022;Naito et al, 2022). An important direction for future research is to clarify how such bilateral interaction (e.g., Csibra & Gergely, 2009 may facilitate adaptive use of social information under the explorationexploitation trade-off in the context of intergenerational transmission.…”