Mechanisms of social change: Examining the basic learning of social behaviors in harsh environments

The experience of living in a threatening, volatile and under-resourced – so called harsh – environment can hamper pro-social and increase anti-social behaviors towards strangers.

Despite research on the consequences of harsh environments on social behavior, it remains unknown if and how harshness affects the basic learning principles shaping core social behaviors and norms.

Here, we address this question by leveraging experimental methods in the laboratory and across four global, and understudied cultural populations.

Specifically, we aim to: (1) Study the effects of environmental harshness on learning and decision-making during social coordination, retaliatory punishment, and observation of social confrontations; (2) Examine the generalizability of these effects across geographical regions; and (3) Describe these effects in terms of their behavioral, psychophysiological, and computational mechanisms.

The same tasks will be used at two time-points, a year apart, in selected harsh and abundant/safe environments in Brazil, Bosnia and Herzegovina, China and Sweden, as well as in the laboratory where harshness will be experimentally simulated.

Behavioral data will be analyzed using reinforcement learning models to test hypotheses about environment-dependent changes in learning.

Information will be gathered about environmental conditions, and attention and arousal will be measured in the laboratory to gain understanding of the learning mechanisms.