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Otherness and Belonging

Teddy Warner| 2024 | 4-6 mins

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Ive been thinking alot about the neuroscience of otherness and belonging. Here are my notes, I’ll write a nice piece on this at some point.

• Maslow’s Motivation Model
  • Foundational needs must be met or a person feels deficient.
• Belonging is an emotion.
• Complex Emotions
  • Socially or culturally learned.
• Motivational drives and emotions help humans maintain homeostasis.
• William James
  • “We feel afraid because we tremble, we do not tremble because we are afraid.”
  • Physical response to a stimulus is interpreted as an emotion by your brain.
  • See Strack, Mertin, and Stepper (1988)
• Gut bacteria play some role?
  • Enteric Nervous System
• Theory of Mind (ToM)
  • Sally-Anne Test
• Mirror Neuron
  • Not only replicates actions, but the intention or indication (i.e. sound, smell, etc.) of an action.
  • Purposed based, not just a read of another kinematics
  • We can mirror/emulate things that we can do, once outside of personal experience we cannot mirror.
    • Once experience is acquired, the mind may mentalize to aid in the simulation of another’s actions. (a.k.a when the goal is impossible, you imagine, but you must be exposed to the action before you can mentalize it)
  • Can mirror somatosensory experiences.
  • Either excess ability to empathies causes additional mirroring or vise versa.
• Chameleon Effect
• Social pain triggers the same brain region as physical pain.
  • Less so in extroverts, as extroverts endure social pain to remain successful extroverts.
    • Can be trained - Introverts can train to become extroverts, humans may become desensitized to pain (i.e. soldiers, doctors, etc.)
  • Females tend to have higher physical pain tolerance, yet lower social pain tolerance.
  • Watching another experience social pain triggers Mirror Neurons and thus triggers your pain matrix.
• Emotions guide decisions
  • Somatic Marker Hypothesis
    • You cannot divorce emotion processing from decision making.
  • Emotions give us remorse, and thus guide future decisions: Emotions allow for learning with regards to decision making.
• Moral Decisions - picking the best of the worse scenario
  • Neuroeconomics
    • The brain makes decision based upon value, value in moral decisions is derived from emotions.
  • The Trolley Problem
    • Personal vs. Impersonal actions illicit different responses to moral questions, even if the economics of the situation are the same, as more personal actions illicit a stronger emotional response.
    • How would a self driving car make the decision?
• Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
• Competence & Warmth drive perceptions of others
  • Moral foundations theory
    • Dehumanization is derived from neural mechanisms for disgust.
  • Humans start to develop social polarization at 6 months.
• You can train yourself to resist dehumanization and demonization
  • Primary via admittance and experience.
• The Altruistic Personality by Oliner & Oliner, 1992
  • The three best predictors of altruistic behavior are:
    1. Expansiveness of ones social group
    2. Sense of agency
    3. A “Habit” of helping behavior

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