Social Baseline Theory: the social regulation of risk and effort
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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