What determines social behavior? Investigating the role of emotions, self-centered motives, and social norms.


Special issue of Frontiers in Human Neuroscience edited by Corrado Corradi-Dell’AcquaLeonie KobanSusanne Leiberg and Patrik Vuilleumier: “In the last decade, a growing research effort in behavioral sciences, especially psychology and neuroscience, has been invested in the study of the cognitive, biological, and evolutionary foundations of social behavior. Differently from the case of sociology, which studies social behavior also at the group level in terms of organizations and structures, psychology and neuroscience often define “social” as a feature of the individual brain that allows an efficient interaction with conspecifics, and thus constitutes a possible evolutionary advantage (Matusall, 2013). …

In the last decades, psychologist and neuroscientists invested a considerable amount of research to investigate the ability to act “socially”, which is considered an evolutionary advantage of many species (Matusall, 2013). The present Research Topic is a collection of a large number (38) of original contributions from an interdisciplinary community which together highlight that determinants of individual social behavior should be best understood along at least two different dimensions. This general perspective represents the backbone for a comprehensive and articulated model of how people and their brains interact with each other in social contexts. However, despite its appeal, it remains unclear how the model put forward in this editorial relates to particular paradigms with high ecological value, where it is more difficult to neatly disentangle the relative contribution of personal/environmental or stable/transient determinants. This is for instance the case of Preston et al. (2013) who investigated hospitalized terminal patients, measuring the emotional reactions elicited in observers and whether they were related to the frequency with which aid was delivered. In this perspective, a great challenge for future research in social psychology and neuroscience will indeed be to develop more accurate predictive models of social behavior and to make them applicable to ecologically valid settings….(More)”