I totally want a copy of this book, though for now the review is by itself plenty to chew on. In The Self-Organizing Social Mind "Bolender's discussion builds on the work of cognitive anthropologist Alan Page Fiske, who has provided considerable evidence that people rely on four elementary cognitive schemata ('models') to structure and coordinate most of their social relationships." The models are:
- communal sharing - people are treated as equivalent and undifferentiated
- authority ranking - people are ordered in some linear hierarchy
- equality matching - social relationships are monitored for balance
- market pricing - relationships are structured by proportions
But Bolender goes way beyond Fiske. "What explains the spontaneous symmetry breakings of the basic social-relational models? Bolender suggests that they are produced by (in fact, identical with; p. 120) spontaneous symmetry breakings in the firing patterns of a single neural network in the brain -- a 'social pattern generator'."
- communal sharing - people are treated as equivalent and undifferentiated
- authority ranking - people are ordered in some linear hierarchy
- equality matching - social relationships are monitored for balance
- market pricing - relationships are structured by proportions
But Bolender goes way beyond Fiske. "What explains the spontaneous symmetry breakings of the basic social-relational models? Bolender suggests that they are produced by (in fact, identical with; p. 120) spontaneous symmetry breakings in the firing patterns of a single neural network in the brain -- a 'social pattern generator'."
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