Adopted Utility Calculus: Origins of a Concept of Social Affiliation

Abstract

To successfully navigate their social world, humans need to understand and map enduring relationships between people: Humans need a concept of social affiliation. Here I propose that the initial concept of social affiliation, available in infancy, is based on the extent to which one individual consistently takes on the goals and needs of another. This proposal grounds affiliation in intuitive psychology, as formalized in the naive-utility-calculus model. A concept of affiliation based on interpersonal utility adoption can account for findings from studies of infants’ reasoning about imitation, similarity, helpful and fair individuals, “ritual” behaviors, and social groups without the need for additional innate mechanisms such as a coalitional psychology, moral sense, or general preference for similar others. I identify further tests of this proposal and also discuss how it is likely to be relevant to social reasoning and learning across the life span.

Simplicity and validity in infant research

“…Though such questions are certainly not new, in recent years there has been a relative explosion of research into infants' and young children's understanding of the social world (Banaji & Gelman, 2013). In addition to examining the development of relatively more basic social cognitive questions such as whether infants distinguish agents from non-agents and how individual agents are perceived and understood (for reviews see Carey, 2009;Krogh-Jesperson & Woodward, 2016), researchers have increasingly been exploring whether and when infants possess complex social concepts, those which are uniquely instantiated within the interactions between multiple agents (see e.g., Hamlin & Sitch, 2020;Powell, 2021;Ting, Dawkins, Stavans, & Baillargeon, 2019). To date, these concepts have included social goals and relationships such as "helping," "fairness," "group membership," and "dominance," amongst others, and results from studies like these have led some (but by no means all) researchers to conclude that preverbal infants possess one or more foundational systems for understanding and evaluating the social world (e.g., Geraci & Surian, 2011;Hamlin, 2013;Powell & Spelke, 2013;Premack & Premack, 1997;Schmidt & Sommerville, 2011;Thomsen et al, 2011).…”

Triadic conflict “primitives” can be reduced to welfare trade-off ratios

“…Mutually high welfare trade-off ratios are likely to be a strong cue to social group composition across many contexts, and often sufficient to define a social group on their own. They may also be developmentally privileged, serving as the core of infants' and young children's concepts of social affiliation (Noyes & Dunham, 2020; Powell, 2021). But, despite having more range than Pietraszewski's conflict-based primitives, welfare trade-off ratios still seem insufficient to capture the full range of social groups created and recognized by human adults.…”

Advantages and limitations of representing groups in terms of recursive utilities

“…Pietraszewski argues that the representation of a group is defined by four ways a third person can be drawn into a dyadic conflict. We agree that such triadic interactions can lead to group representations, but propose that representations of groups are defined in terms of an abstract, recursive utility calculus (Kleiman-Weiner, Saxe, & Tenenbaum, 2017; Powell, 2021). By recursive utility we mean: People represent individuals as valuing (i.e., adopting, or weighting) the utilities of other individuals.…”

“…For example, given the pattern of utilities described above observers can predict that C is more likely to respond to A's needs than to B's needs, outside of conflict. Observing C helping or caring for A would provide some evidence of how much C values A's utilities (Powell, 2021). Then, at the first sign of a conflict between A and B, an observer would predict C's role, even though no previous conflict-related behaviour had ever been observed.…”

“…The inferential links between Pietraszewski's primitives are symmetric: When C is drawn into the conflict between A and B, and attacks B, all of three remaining primitives are predicted to the same degree. However, C attacking B provides more evidence of how much C values A relative to B, than about how much A values C. The weights individuals put on each others' utilities do not need to be symmetric (Powell, 2021). Recursive utilities allow observers to represent cases where C would always ally with A against B, but A would not reciprocate.…”