15 April -  Alan Fiske UCLA Anthropology
Socio-Moral Emotions Provide the Self-Control Necessary to Sustain Social Relationships     This talk describes a proxy theory of emotions as motivational representations of the expected value of relationships and relational strategies.  Social relationships are crucial for human well-being and evolutionary fitness, and are essential constituents of societal structure.  But relationships require effective self-control, because people repeatedly face tempting opportunities to defect, cheat, or shirk. Self-interested motives-including powerful drives for food, sex, aggression, and pain avoidance-constantly jeopardize relationships. To sustain long-term relationships, people must consistently overcome the lure of tantalizing temptations, forego immediate pleasures, and endure current hardships.  Learning from personal experience is impractical where the penalties for transgression may be devastating.  Because of numerous biases whose effect is to reduce estimates of the likelihood of detection and punishment, human reasoning is deficient, and judgments of preferences are temporally inconsistent.  Consequently, even the most intelligent dispassionate cognizers are excessively attracted by present opportunities and erroneously discount future social benefits and sanctions. As a result, dispassionate cognizers-such as psychopaths-cannot sustain functional, reliable relationships. To sustain essential relationships, people must experience culturally mediated social emotions as guides for present action. Social emotions are proximate motivations to endure the privations, sustain the arduous efforts, and exert the self-control necessary for effective participation in social relationships.  Human emotional proclivities are culturally mediated adaptations, requiring socially transmitted complements that shape emotions to fit local implementations of  universal relational forms. This is why people experience-and need to experience-relational emotions such as love, devotion, awe, honor-pride, anger, loneliness, shame, guilt, pollution disgust, jealousy, and fears of witchcraft, sorcery, and supernatural sanctions. Emotions are proxies representing the expected long-term value of social relationships, safeguarding people from succumbing to temptations that jeopardize the relationships they need.