The Social Brain

The Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufacturing and Commerce (RSA) launched a Social Brain Project last February. This aims to gather new findings about people's irrational collective behaviour that does not in practise match numerous economic and population theories, and then to revise social policy accordingly:

There are three main strands to the idea that the brain is essentially social.

1) The brain, now it is finally beginning to be understood, turns out to unconsciously execute many of the decision-making processes that were previously thought to be self-consciously produced. The idea that all decisions flow from an executive rational subject, in principle capable of operating in isolation from others, now appears to be at worst false and at best unhelpful.

2) The brain has evolved to develop and function within social networks. For example, a deficit in the neurotransmitter Serotonin (which, amongst other things enables self-control) will result from unstable social environments lacking in qualities like empthy. Or, another example: mirror neurons are designed to enable (amongst other things) altruistic behaviour that facilitates social cohesion and allows an agent to successfully engage with others (and thus to achieve her own goals).

3) Even when we do make self-conscious decisions these are partly constituted by systematic biases that are fundamentally social. For example, behavioural economists have shown that people often indulge in herd behaviour. Game-theorists have also shown that it can be optimally rational to act altruistically because an agent’s good reputation amongst her fellows is massively important for her ability to successfully negotiate the social world. And as neuroscientists like Antonio Damasio have shown, these kinds of socially motivated biases have their basis in the neurology of the brain.

Project Design
In policy circles, the implicitly assumed model of decision-making in the last thirty years or so has been that of ‘rational-choice’. This model, imported from economics, represents people as perfectly rational and wholly self-interested. However, a slew of recent research in the neuro- and behavioural sciences has brought the usefulness of the model into question, showing that people are often systematically ‘irrational’ and not only self-interested. This means we should perhaps be more humble about our rational powers yet more optimistic about our ‘prosocial’ possibilities.

The first phase of the first year (until April 2010) of the RSA’s Social Brain project brings together experts from various disciplines to collaborate on producing a new model of decision-making that is informed by such research. The aim is to make the new model as clear and accessible as possible. The Steering Group’s work will be documented on an ‘openwiki’ that will be available for public viewing once it has been constructed...

RSA - Social Brain