Elsevier

Current Opinion in Psychology

Volume 1, February 2015, Pages 87-91
Current Opinion in Psychology

Social Baseline Theory: the social regulation of risk and effort

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2014.12.021Get rights and content

Highlights

  • The human brain assumes proximity to social resources.

  • Social relationships are construed as bioenergetic resources available to the self.

  • Relational partners are incorporated into neural representations of the self.

  • Relationship loss damages self-related representations and personal efficacy.

  • Recovery from relationship loss entails ungrafting of the other from the self.

We describe Social Baseline Theory (SBT), a perspective that integrates the study of social relationships with principles of attachment, behavioral ecology, cognitive neuroscience, and perception science. SBT suggests the human brain expects access to social relationships that mitigate risk and diminish the level of effort needed to meet a variety of goals. This is accomplished in part by incorporating relational partners into neural representations of the self. By contrast, decreased access to relational partners increases cognitive and physiological effort. Relationship disruptions entail re-defining the self as independent, which implies greater risk, increased effort, and diminished well being. The ungrafting of the self and other may mediate recovery from relationship loss.

Section snippets

Social relationships decrease the predicted cost of the environment

Abundant evidence suggests that the likelihood of a behavior is optimized by calculating its metabolic cost against its perceived payoff, given prevailing personal bioenergetic resources [11]. For example, human subjects tend to view hills as steeper, and distances as further away, if fatigued, sleepy, physically less fit, stressed, wearing a heavy backpack, or even simply in a low mood [12, 13]. It is thought that these perceptual shifts regulate the motivation to walk up hills. Steeper hills

Risk, effort, and the expanded self

SBT describes at least two reasons for the regulation of perception and effort by social proximity: risk distribution and load sharing. Colloquially speaking, risk distribution is simply safety in numbers. In a vast array of species, individual threat vigilance decreases as group size increases [16]. But social species also benefit from load sharing, which entails not only the distribution of risk, but also the distribution of effort applied to shared goals [17], often to great mutual

Relationship loss increases the predicted cost of the environment

We have suggested that an important aspect of SBT is the neural integration of self and other [27], consistent with self-expansion views of close relationships [26]. Evidence supporting shared neural representations of self and other informs our understanding of how intact relationships economize behavior, and suggests new questions about relationship loss. Many view relationship loss as a loss of self. According to SBT, this diminishment of the self is more literal than figurative. Framed in

Tentative conclusions

SBT suggests (1) that the human brain assumes proximity to social relationships characterized by shared goals, interdependence, and trust; and (2) that the human brain construes social relationships as bioenergetic resources, encoding others as part of the self. This allows humans to, in effect, outsource everything from probabilistic risk to threat vigilance, emotional responding, and a host of other demanding neural and behavioral activities [35]. Thus, proximity to social resources regulates

References and recommended reading

Papers of particular interest, published within the period of review, have been highlighted as:

  • • of special interest

  • •• of outstanding interest

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