Reframing social categorization as latent structure learning for understanding political behaviour.

Affiliating with political parties, voting and building coalitions all contribute to the functioning of our political systems. One core component of this is social categorization-being able to recognize others as fellow in-group members or members of the out-group. Without this capacity, we would be unable to coordinate with in-group members or avoid out-group members.

Social structure learning in human anterior insula.

Humans form social coalitions in every society, yet we know little about how we learn and represent social group boundaries. Here we derive predictions from a computational model of latent structure learning to move beyond explicit category labels and interpersonal, or , similarity as the sole inputs to social group representations. Using a model-based analysis of functional neuroimaging data, we find that separate areas correlate with dyadic similarity and latent structure learning.

Discovering social groups via latent structure learning.

Humans form social coalitions in every society on earth, yet we know very little about how social group boundaries are learned and represented. We derive predictions from a computational model of latent structure learning to move beyond explicit category labels and mere similarity as the sole inputs to social group representations. Four experiments examine (a) how evidence for group boundaries is accumulated in a consequential social context (i.

fMRI Repetition Suppression During Generalized Social Categorization.

Correctly identifying friends and foes is integral to successful group living. Here, we use repetition suppression to examine the neural circuitry underlying generalized group categorization-the process of categorizing in-group and out-group members across multiple social categories. Participants assigned to an arbitrary team (i.

Decoding "us" and "them": Neural representations of generalized group concepts.

Humans form social coalitions in every society on earth, yet we know very little about how the general concepts us and them are represented in the brain. Evolutionary psychologists have argued that the human capacity for group affiliation is a byproduct of adaptations that evolved for tracking coalitions in general. These theories suggest that humans possess a common neural code for the concepts in-group and out-group, regardless of the category by which group boundaries are instantiated.

Overcorrection for Social-Categorization Information Moderates Impact Bias in Affective Forecasting.

Plural societies require individuals to forecast how others-both in-group and out-group members-will respond to gains and setbacks. Typically, correcting affective forecasts to include more relevant information improves their accuracy by reducing their extremity. In contrast, we found that providing affective forecasters with social-category information about their targets made their forecasts more extreme and therefore less accurate.

The value of victory: social origins of the winner's curse in common value auctions.

Auctions, normally considered as devices facilitating trade, also provide a way to probe mechanisms governing one's valuation of some good or action. One of the most intriguing phenomena in auction behavior is the winner's curse - the strong tendency of participants to bid more than rational agent theory prescribes, often at a significant loss. The prevailing explanation suggests that humans have limited cognitive abilities that make estimating the correct bid difficult, if not impossible.