Pride and shame: Key components of a culturally universal status management system

Seeking Communal Emotions in Social Practices That Culturally Evolved to Evoke Emotions: Worship, Kitten Videos, Memorials, Narratives of Love, and More

In many instances, emotions do not simply happen to people by chance. Often, people actively seek out an emotion by engaging in practices that have culturally evolved to evoke that emotion. Such practices tend to be perpetuated and spread if people want to experience the emotion, like to recall it and tell others about it, want to give the emotion to others and experience it together, and/or regard the emotion as a sign of something wonderful. We illustrate this with a newly delineated emotion, kama muta. Many social practices around the world are structured to evoke kama muta. In those culturally evolved practices, and outside them, what typically evokes kama muta is a sudden intensification of communal sharing, or a sudden shift of attention to a communal sharing relationship. It seems probable that other social-relational emotions are also evoked by sudden changes in relationships or the sudden salience of a relationship. This change or saliencing may be incorporated in social practices that are perpetuated because they evoke the sought-after emotion. We suggest that such practices, as well as sudden changes in relationships that occur elsewhere, are especially promising places to discover social-relational emotions.

The Shame System Operates With High Precision

Previous research indicates that the anticipatory shame an individual feels at the prospect of taking a disgraceful action closely tracks the degree to which local audiences, and even foreign audiences, devalue those individuals who take that action. This supports the proposition that the shame system (a) defends the individual against the threat of being devalued, and (b) balances the competing demands of operating effectively yet efficiently. The stimuli events used in previous research were highly variable in their perceived disgracefulness, ranging in rated shame and audience devaluation from low (e.g., missing the target in a throwing game) to high (e.g., being discovered cheating on one's spouse). But how precise is the tracking of audience devaluation by the shame system? Would shame track devaluation for events that are similarly low (or high) in disgracefulness? To answer this question, we conducted a study with participants from the United States and India. Participants were assigned, between-subjects, to one of two conditions: shame or audience devaluation. Within-subjects, participants rated three low-variation sets of 25 scenarios each, adapted from Mu, Kitayama, Han, & Gelfand (2015), which convey (a) appropriateness (e.g., yelling at a rock concert), (b) mild disgracefulness (e.g., yelling on the metro), and (c) disgracefulness (e.g., yelling in the library), all presented un-blocked, in random order. Consistent with previous research, shame tracked audience devaluation across the high-variation superset of 75 scenarios, both within and between cultures. Critically, shame tracked devaluation also within each of the three sets. The shame system operates with high precision.

Status-impact assessment: is accuracy linked with status motivations?

Status hierarchies are ubiquitous across cultures and have been over deep time. Position in hierarchies shows important links with fitness outcomes. Consequently, humans should possess psychological adaptations for navigating the adaptive challenges posed by living in hierarchically organised groups. One hypothesised adaptation functions to assess, track, and store the status impacts of different acts, characteristics and events in order to guide hierarchy navigation. Although this status-impact assessment system is expected to be universal, there are several ways in which differences in assessment accuracy could arise. This variation may link to broader individual difference constructs. In a preregistered study with samples from India (N = 815) and the USA (N = 822), we sought to examine how individual differences in the accuracy of status-impact assessments covary with status motivations and personality. In both countries, greater overall status-impact assessment accuracy was associated with higher status motivations, as well as higher standing on two broad personality constructs: Honesty-Humility and Conscientiousness. These findings help map broad personality constructs onto variation in the functioning of specific cognitive mechanisms and contribute to an evolutionary understanding of individual differences.

Displaying pride: Variation by social context, ethnic heritage, and gender?

Pride is universal; however, the complexities linked to its social status functions and implications for social relationships suggest the possibility of variation in its display. Drawing from empirical evidence, this study examined whether displayed pride would vary by social context (i.e., whether the target was a competitor or a loved one), ethnic heritage (i.e., membership in individualistic or collectivistic cultural groups) and by gender. Young adults (N = 145) verbally described a pride experience to an imagined competitor, loved one, stranger or in a no-context control condition. Results showed similarity in displayed pride across the four contexts. However, some ethnic group and gender variations were observed. Latino/a/x Americans displayed less pride verbally than European Americans while women displayed more than men. These findings contribute to a better understanding of how people manage the display of pride and suggest that ethnic and gendered motivations for managing pride displays are relevant to a comprehensive understanding of interpersonal emotion regulation.

A multilevel selection model for prosocial well-being

This article proposes an evolutionary model for well-being informed by multilevel selection. We posit that people's subjective assessment of their own quality of life is the sum their happiness, which is related to individual selection, and their sense of having a meaningful life, which is related to group selection. Conceptualizing life quality as "Happiness + Meaning = Well-being" offers insights into how the human well-being system helps people navigate between individual and group needs. We define happiness as the cluster of affects that reward individuals for solving adaptively relevant problems. We approach meaning as a reward individuals experience when contributing to their community. While people derive happiness from cooperation and competition, meaning originates from prosocial (cooperative/altruistic) behavior. Since increased within-group competition often reduces societal well-being, public policy should aim at cooperative means for good living. Our model brings attention to these dynamics. The Nordic countries, which score highest on quality of life, facilitate multilevel well-being, that is, individual prosperity and altruistic opportunity. Our preliminary quantitative study confirmed the correlation between some markers of prosociality and well-being at a national level. To investigate the psychological mechanisms behind this correlation, we conducted in-depth interviews of Nordic and Slavonic helpers of Ukrainian refugees in Norway (n = 32). A primary ambition was to illuminate how the human quest for meaning contributes both to individual flourishing and group selection. In line with Nesse's view on happiness not as an affect meant to be maximized, but an evolutionary signal, we use a qualitative approach that allows for a deeper understanding of how individuals adapt to these signals. Our findings suggest that happiness is transient so that the well-being system's signal sensitivity can be preserved. Meaning is enduring since it assesses and reinforces social belonging. These insights are relevant for our era's turn toward more holistic development policies. Compared to often materialistic, competition-driven happiness pursuits, meaning-driven well-being is a more sustainable alternative for individuals, communities, and the planet.

The evolution of shame and its display

The shame system appears to be natural selection's solution to the adaptive problem of information-triggered reputational damage. Over evolutionary time, this problem would have led to a coordinated set of adaptations - the shame system - designed to minimise the spread of negative information about the self and the likelihood and costs of being socially devalued by others. This information threat theory of shame can account for much of what we know about shame and generate precise predictions. Here, we analyse the behavioural configuration that people adopt stereotypically when ashamed - slumped posture, downward head tilt, gaze avoidance, inhibition of speech - in light of shame's hypothesised function. This behavioural configuration may have differentially favoured its own replication by (a) hampering the transfer of information (e.g. diminishing audiences' tendency to attend to or encode identifying information - shame camouflage) and/or (b) evoking less severe devaluative responses from audiences (shame display). The shame display hypothesis has received considerable attention and empirical support, whereas the shame camouflage hypothesis has to our knowledge not been advanced or tested. We elaborate on this hypothesis and suggest directions for future research on the shame pose.

Third-Party Perceptions of Male and Female Status: Male Physical Strength and Female Physical Attractiveness Cue High Status

Status is a universal feature of human sociality. A lesser-studied adaptive problem surrounding status is assessing who has which levels of status in a given group (e.g., identifying which people possess high status). Here, we integrate theory and methods from evolutionary social science, animal behavior, and social psychology, and we use an emotion inference paradigm to investigate what cues render people high status in the eyes of social perceivers. This paradigm relies on robust associations between status and emotion display—particularly the anger display. If a target is expected to enact (but not necessarily feel) anger, this would suggest that social perceivers view that target as higher status. By varying target attributes, we test whether those attributes are considered status cues in the eyes of social perceivers. In two well-powered, pre-registered experiments in the United States (N = 451) and India (N = 378), participants read one of eight vignettes about a male or female target—described as high or low in either physical strength or physical attractiveness (possible status cues)—who is thwarted by another person, and then reported expectations of the target’s felt and enacted anger. We find that people expected physically stronger (versus less strong) men and more (versus less) physically attractive women to enact greater anger when thwarted by a same-sex other. Strength had no significant effect on estimations of female status and attractiveness had no significant effect on estimations of male status. There were no differences in expectations of felt anger. Results suggest that people use men’s strength and women’s attractiveness as status cues. Moreover, results underscore the notion that focusing on male-typical cues of status might obscure our understanding of the female status landscape. We discuss how this paradigm might be fruitfully employed to examine and discover other unexplored cues of male and female status.

Evolution of Self-Awareness and the Cultural Emergence of Academic and Non-academic Self-Concepts

Schooling is ubiquitous in the modern world and academic development is now a critical aspect of preparation for adulthood. A step back in time to pre-modern societies and an examination of life in remaining traditional societies today reveals that universal formal schooling is an historically recent phenomenon. This evolutionary and historical recency has profound implications for understanding academic development, including how instructional practices modify evolved or biological primary abilities (e.g., spoken language) to create evolutionarily novel or biologically secondary academic competencies (e.g., reading). We propose the development of secondary abilities promotes the emergence of academic self-concepts that in turn are supported by evolved systems for self-awareness and self-knowledge. Unlike some forms of self-knowledge (e.g., relative physical abilities) that appear to be universal and central to many people's overall self-concept, the relative importance of academic self-concepts are expected to be dependent on explicit social and cultural supports for their valuation. These culturally contingent self-concepts are contrasted with universal social and physical self-concepts, with implications for understanding variation students' relative valuation of academic competencies and their motivations to engage in academic learning.

Intuitive sociology

How do humans intuitively understand the structure of their society? How should psychologists study people's commonsense understanding of societal structure? The present chapter seeks to address both of these questions by describing the domain of "intuitive sociology." Drawing primarily from empirical research focused on how young children represent and reason about social groups, we propose that intuitive sociology consists of three core phenomena: social types (the identification of relevant groups and their attributes); social value (the worth of different groups); and social norms (shared expectations for how groups ought to be). After articulating each component of intuitive sociology, we end the chapter by considering both the emergence of intuitive sociology in infancy as well as transitions from intuitive to reflective representations of sociology later in life.

Neural dynamics of pride and shame in social context: an approach with event-related brain electrical potentials

The neural underpinnings of social emotions such as pride and shame are largely unknown. The present study aims to add evidence by exploiting the advantage of event-related brain electrical potentials (ERP) to examine the neural processes as they unfold over time. For this purpose, a dot-estimation task was adapted to explore these emotions as elicited in a simulated social context. Pride prompted an early negativity seemingly originated in medial parietal regions (precuneus) and possibly reflecting social comparison processes in successful trials. This was followed by a late positivity originated in medial frontal regions, probably reflecting the verification of singularly successful trials. Shame, in turn, elicited an early negativity apparently originated in the cuneus, probably related to mental imagery of the social situation. It was followed by a late positivity mainly originated in the same regions as the early negativity for pride, then conceivably reflecting social comparison processes, in this occasion in unsuccessful trials. None of these fluctuations correlated with self-reported feelings of either emotion, suggesting that they instead relate to social cognitive computations necessary to achieve them. The present results provide a dynamic depiction of neural mechanisms underlying these social emotions, probing the necessity to study them using an integrated approach with different techniques.

Are Emotions Natural Kinds After All? Rethinking the Issue of Response Coherence

The synchronized co-activation of multiple responses-motivational, behavioral, and physiological-has been taken as a defining feature of emotion. Such response coherence has been observed inconsistently however, and this has led some to view emotion programs as lacking biological reality. Yet, response coherence is not always expected or desirable if an emotion program is to carry out its adaptive function. Rather, the hallmark of emotion is the capacity to orchestrate multiple mechanisms adaptively-responses will co-activate in stereotypical fashion or not depending on how the emotion orchestrator interacts with the situation. Nevertheless, might responses cohere in the general case where input variables are specified minimally? Here we focus on shame as a case study. We measure participants' responses regarding each of 27 socially devalued actions and personal characteristics. We observe internal and external coherence: The intensities of felt shame and of various motivations of shame (hiding, lying, destroying evidence, and threatening witnesses) vary in proportion (i) to one another, and (ii) to the degree to which audiences devalue the disgraced individual-the threat shame defends against. These responses cohere both within and between the United States and India. Further, alternative explanations involving the low-level variable of arousal do not seem to account for these results, suggesting that coherence is imparted by a shame system. These findings indicate that coherence can be observed at multiple levels and raise the possibility that emotion programs orchestrate responses, even in those situations where coherence is low.

Creating a Compassionate World: Addressing the Conflicts Between Sharing and Caring Versus Controlling and Holding Evolved Strategies

For thousands of years, various spiritual traditions and social activists have appealed to humans to adopt compassionate ways of living to address the suffering of life. Yet, along with our potential for compassion and self-sacrifice, the last few thousand years of wars, slavery, tortures, and holocausts have shown humans can be extraordinarily selfish, callous, vicious, and cruel. While there has been considerable engagement with these issues, particularly in the area of moral psychology and ethics, this paper explores an evolutionary analysis relating to evolved resource-regulation strategies that can be called "care and share" versus "control and hold." Control and hold are typical of primates that operate through intimidatory social hierarchies. Care and share are less common in non-human primates, but evolved radically in humans during our hunter-gatherer stage when our ancestors lived in relatively interdependent, small, mobile groups. In these groups, individualistic, self-focus, and self-promoting control and hold strategies (trying to secure and accumulate more than others) were shunned and shamed. These caring and sharing hunter-gatherer lifestyles also created the social contexts for the evolution of new forms of childcare and complex human competencies for language, reasoning, planning, empathy, and self-awareness. As a result of our new 'intelligence', our ancestors developed agriculture that reduced mobility, increased group size, resource availability and storage, and resource competition. These re-introduced competing for, rather than sharing of, resources and advantaged those who now pursue (often aggressively) control and hold strategies. Many of our most typical forms of oppressive and anti-compassionate behavior are the result of these strategies. Rather than (just) thinking about individuals competing with one another, we can also consider these different resource regulation strategies as competing within populations shaping psychophysiological patterns; both wealth and poverty change the brain. One of the challenges to creating a more compassionate society is to find ways to create the social and economic conditions that regulate control and hold strategies and promote care and share. No easy task.

How pride works

The emotion of pride appears to be a neurocognitive guidance system to capitalize on opportunities to become more highly valued and respected by others. Whereas the inputs and the outputs of pride are relatively well understood, little is known about how the pride system matches inputs to outputs. How does pride work? Here we evaluate the hypothesis that pride magnitude matches the various outputs it controls to the present activating conditions - the precise degree to which others would value the focal individual if the individual achieved a particular achievement. Operating in this manner would allow the pride system to balance the competing demands of effectiveness and economy, to avoid the dual costs of under-deploying and over-deploying its outputs. To test this hypothesis, we measured people's responses regarding each of 25 socially valued traits. We observed the predicted magnitude matchings. The intensities of the pride feeling and of various motivations of pride (communicating the achievement, demanding better treatment, investing in the valued trait and pursuing new challenges) vary in proportion: (a) to one another; and (b) to the degree to which audiences value each achievement. These patterns of magnitude matching were observed both within and between the USA and India. These findings suggest that pride works cost-effectively, promoting the pursuit of achievements and facilitating the gains from others' valuations that make those achievements worth pursuing.

Impact of Spectators’ Perceptions of Corporate Social Responsibility on Regional Attachment in Sports: Three-Wave Indirect Effects of Spectators’ Pride and Team Identification

The professional sports events industry is becoming immensely popular due to a global social shift toward larger numbers of spectators at sports events and an ever-increasing variety of such events. This study aimed to investigate the impact of spectators’ perception of corporate social responsibility on regional attachment by applying social identity theory. The present study introduces two mediators, namely, spectators’ pride and team identification, to enlighten the relationship between spectators’ perception of corporate social responsibility and regional attachment, thus contributing to the literature on corporate social responsibility in sports. This quantitative study used a time-lagged approach to collect data in three waves at a time interval of one week and the final sample consisted of 511 respondents (i.e., spectators). Hierarchical regression analysis bootstrapping approach was utilized to analyze the hypothesis. We found that the spectators’ perceptions of corporate social responsibility positively influenced their team identification, and this relationship was mediated by spectators’ pride. In addition, spectators’ pride positively influences regional attachment, and this relationship is mediated by team identification. These findings provide new directions for understanding corporate social responsibility, team identification, spectators’ pride, and regional attachment in sports contexts. The practical and theoretical implications are discussed.

Psychological foundations of human status allocation

Competing theories of status allocation posit divergent conceptual foundations upon which human status hierarchies are built. We argue that the three prominent theories of status allocation-competence-based models, conflict-based models, and dual-pathway models-can be distinguished by the importance that they place on four key affordance dimensions: benefit-generation ability, benefit-generation willingness, cost-infliction ability, and cost-infliction willingness. In the current study, we test competing theoretical predictions about the relative centrality of each affordance dimension to clarify the foundations of human status allocation. We examined the extent to which American raters' (n = 515) perceptions of the benefit-generation and cost-infliction affordances of 240 personal characteristics predict the status impacts of those same personal characteristics as determined by separate groups of raters (n = 2,751) across 14 nations. Benefit-generation and cost-infliction affordances were both positively associated with status allocation at the zero-order level. However, the unique effects of benefit-generation affordances explained most of the variance in status allocation when competing with cost-infliction affordances, whereas cost-infliction affordances were weak or null predictors. This finding suggests that inflicting costs without generating benefits does not reliably increase status in the minds of others among established human groups around the world. Overall, the findings bolster competence-based theories of status allocation but offer little support for conflict-based and dual-pathway models.

Context-aware experience sampling reveals the scale of variation in affective experience

Emotion research typically searches for consistency and specificity in physiological activity across instances of an emotion category, such as anger or fear, yet studies to date have observed more variation than expected. In the present study, we adopt an alternative approach, searching inductively for structure within variation, both within and across participants. Following a novel, physiologically-triggered experience sampling procedure, participants' self-reports and peripheral physiological activity were recorded when substantial changes in cardiac activity occurred in the absence of movement. Unsupervised clustering analyses revealed variability in the number and nature of patterns of physiological activity that recurred within individuals, as well as in the affect ratings and emotion labels associated with each pattern. There were also broad patterns that recurred across individuals. These findings support a constructionist account of emotion which, drawing on Darwin, proposes that emotion categories are populations of variable instances tied to situation-specific needs.