[Post-print] Reconciliation in human adults: A video-assisted naturalistic observational study of post conflict conciliatory behaviour in interpersonal aggression

Pietraszewski provides a compelling case that representations of certain interaction-types are the “cognitive primitives” that allow all tokens of group-in-conflict to be represented within the mind. Here, I argue that the folk concept GROUP encodes shared intentions and goals as more central than these interaction-types, and that providing a computational theory of social groups will be more difficult than Pietraszewski envisages.

Section: Referencementioning

confidence: 99%

Shared intentionality and the representation of groups; or, how to build a socially adept robot

Phillips¹

2022

“…Behaviours which are aimed at conflict reduction are equally as “primitive” as those that seek power and dominance. In fact, there are good grounds to argue that behaviours which indicate conciliation and care are likely to be as diagnostic (if not more diagnostic) of group relationships in conflicts (Liebst et al, 2019; Philpot, 2017; Philpot, Liebst, Lindegaard, Verbeek, & Levine, 2020b). People watching others in conflict – and people engaging in conflict themselves – are exposed to a more complex sequence of aggressive and conciliatory acts from the antagonists and third parties to conflict than Pietraszewski allows.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Conciliation and meta-contrast are important for understanding how people assign group memberships during conflict situations

Levine¹,

Philpot²

2022

Self Cite

Pietraszewski misrepresents both the nature of behaviour in conflict and the ability of psychology to theorise the relational properties of group designation. At the behavioural level, he focusses exclusively on “attack,” when consolation/care in conflict is equally present and important. At the theoretical level, he ignores existing psychological work on how group perception is shaped by the meta-contrast principle.

Toward a computational theory of social groups: A finite set of cognitive primitives for representing any and all social groups in the context of conflict

Pietraszewski

2021

We don't yet have adequate theories of what the human mind is representing when it represents a social group. Worse still, many people think we do. This mistaken belief is a consequence of the state of play: Until now, researchers have relied on their own intuitions to link up the concept social group on the one hand, and the results of particular studies or models on the other. While necessary, this reliance on intuition has been purchased at considerable cost. When looked at soberly, existing theories of social groups are either (i) literal, but not remotely adequate (such as models built atop economic games), or (ii) simply metaphorical (typically a subsumption or containment metaphor). Intuition is filling in the gaps of an explicit theory. This paper presents a computational theory of what, literally, a group representation is in the context of conflict: it is the assignment of agents to specific roles within a small number of triadic interaction types. This “mental definition” of a group paves the way for a computational theory of social groups—in that it provides a theory of what exactly the information-processing problem of representing and reasoning about a group is. For psychologists, this paper offers a different way to conceptualize and study groups, and suggests that a non-tautological definition of a social group is possible. For cognitive scientists, this paper provides a computational benchmark against which natural and artificial intelligences can be held.