CCPR Seminar

Neural mechanisms lie behind the emergence of dyadic affective reciprocity and transitive closure in human groups

This talk considers a set of findings from socializing cognitive social neuroscience that captures neural and social network data at multiple time points for a group of students who volunteered to organize workers in very difficult social situations on the 50th anniversary of Freedom Summer, in the Summer of Respect project. We identify a neural mechanism for the emergence of affective reciprocity, the building block of social solidarity. We show that we can predict from neural signatures who group members will like five months in the future. We extend this work to a discussion of transitivity, or balance. Time permitting, we discuss how a neural signature of self-enhancement (narcissism) predicts becoming peripheral in small groups, supporting the idea that there is "no I in team".

Co-sponsored by the Sociology Department