Social & Evolutionary Neuroscience Research Group - SENRG

hypothesis is that kinship might be a mechanism for reducing cognitive load in social networks: we only need to remember one fact about kin (that we are related), whereas we need to remember many details about our relationships with individual friends. Kinship might thus allow us to maintain larger networks for a marginal increase in cognitive load. Project 2: Modelling kinship and other constraints on network efficiency

Historically, there is a fundamental question about how humans managed to raise their community sizes from the upper limit of 50 characteristic of monkeys and apes, through the 150 characteristic of contemporary hunter-gatherers to the successive layers of 500 and 1500 and beyond that seems to have been the trajectory since the Neolithic settlement. It seems that what we have done is find ways to add successive layers onto our base social system, and the question is: what cognitive or behavioural mechanisms have made this possible, and how stable are they? As a first step in exploring the implications of this for understanding contemporary large scale societies, we will use agent based modelling to explore the role of kinship in reducing the cognitive load required for maintaining cohesion in personal networks, and then use these models to examine network efficiency and stability in more general terms so as to identify catastrophe points where a phase shift in cognition and/or behaviour had to occur. Project 3: Mechanisms for bonding large scale communities

This project will examine the physiological processes involved in maintaining relationships in large scale communities (i.e. In traditional small scale societies, communities are bonded through a variety of activities as diverse as music and dance, and the rituals of religion, often associated with a form of euphoria that Durkheim referred to as "effervescence". This project will seek to test the hypothesis that, at both the dyadic level and the community level, it is beta-endorphins that underpin social bonding. In previous studies, we have found prima facie evidence that endorphins are involved in several candidate activities (notably laughter and music). In the context of relationships at the community level, synchronised co-action in groups seems to play a particularly important role. However, we also want to take this approach beyond the "normal" scale of personalised relationships to ask whether and how these same mechanisms are used to create a sense of community membership on the very large scale - in effect, allowing us to turn complete strangers into friends. Project 4: Community size, shared culture, and moral partiality

Besides simply knowing who your friends are, sociality depends on a sense of mutual trust and obligation. In traditional societies, community cohesion is in large part generated by a sense of shared common purpose, of being signed up to the same grand project that entails obligations towards, and expectations of appropriate behaviour from, fellow community members in the interests of mutual survival and success. Moral dilemmas provide us with a simple assay of this. Virtually all the work on moral dilemmas has focussed on identifying moral universals - the rules that we all follow (or should follow) and that should be impartial and non-discriminatory. However, everyday experience tells us that we do not always abide by these moral injunctions: instead, we operate a partial morality in which we privilege some individuals over others (e.g. in terms of ethnicity, s*x, social class, or when favouring our own children over other people's, or even one child over another within a family, but most of all when we favour family over friends, and our friends and family over other people's). The transition from small scale communities to large scale societies may be especially critical in influencing both how moral judgments are made and how partially people behave in favouring others or excusing their behaviour. Project 5: Neuropsychology of bonding

This project will use neuroimaging to determine the neurophysiological processes that underlie individual and communal relationships. In our previous imaging studies, we have shown that there are parametric relationships between the volume of neuron bundles in key areas of the brain and both mentalising competences and social network size. These involved classic locations known to be involved in mentalising. However, there is also neuroimaging evidence to suggest that different kinds of relationship do not involve activation in exactly the same brain regions. This is also implied by our own studies showing that kinship and friendship behave in radically different ways. Between them, these findings suggest the novel hypothesis that kinship relationships might be processed through a more direct (implicit?) mechanism than is the case for friendships. Project 6: Communication and bondedness on the large scale

A major constraint on studying interaction processes at the local community scale has been the difficulty of sampling entire networks in any detail in terms of the actual personal relationships involved (as opposed to static descriptions of network structure based on, for example, cellphone traffic). This project will exploit the opportunities offered by digital and online technology (1) to study social processes in complete networks and (2) to gain insights into how the online digital world might change our social world. Past Projects

British Academy Centenary Research Project: Lucy to Language: The Archaeology of the Social Brain [2003-2011]

The Lucy Project (a 7-year programme grant from the British Academy) was a collaboration between evolutionary and social psychologists, evolutionary biologists and Palaeolithic archaeologists. It aimed to use ideas based on the social brain hypothesis and newly developed ideas from primate behavioural ecology and human social behaviour in order to develop new insights into the processes of hominin cognitive and social evolution. The project involved collaborations between Oxford, Liverpool, Southampton and Royal Holloway (London) Universities, with additional collaborators based at the Universities of Edinburgh, Durham and Kent, and at Amsterdam Free University in the Netherlands. Our part of the project began life in the School of Biological Sciences at Liverpool University, but moved to Oxford midway through the project. Postdocs in the Liverpool/Oxford group included Julia Lehmann (now at Roehampton University), Matt Grove (now at Liverpool University), Max Burton (now in Zoology at Oxford University), Susanne Shultz (now at Manchester University); with Anna Machin (see CURRENT PROJECTS) and Anna Frangou as research assistants. Postgraduates funded by or associated with the Oxford group of the Lucy Project included Caroline Bettridge, Katherine Andrews, Ellie Pearce, Kit Opie and Isabel Behnke. Major outputs from the Oxford group included: the development of time budget models for great apes, and their application to fossil australopithecines; ecological models of fission-fusion processes in fossil hominin populations; novel insights into the scaled structure of both social networks and social organisation in humans and other mammals; new analyses of the social brain and its cognitive, social and ecological correlates in primates, other mammals and birds; novel comparative analyses of social network structure and social evolution in the primates; analyses of network structure and fitness in Icelandic Vikings using the historical family sagas as data sources; new findings on patterns of kinship and friendship; functional imaging studies of mentalising competences and network size in humans; experimental studies of the role of laughter and music in social bonding processes; social network analysis and the structure of feral goat groups. Project website: http://www.liv.ac.uk/lucy2003/index.html

Leverhulme Trust: Cercopithecine Models as a Contextual Framework for Human Evolution [2003-2007]

This project was a collaboration with Russell Hill (Durham University) and Sarah Elton (then at York University) aimed at developing an integrated behavioural and morphological approach to cercopithecine biology that could be used to illuminate human evolutionary history. Mandy Korstjens (now at Bournemouth University) was the postdoc in our group, and, in collaboration with Julia Lehmann (see under the Lucy Project) developed a series of time budget models for New and Old World monkeys and great apes that subsequently formed the basis for a series of papers on the biogeography of monkeys and apes and their future prospects under climate change. Project website: http://www.dur.ac.uk/r.a.hill/primate_models_of_human_evolution.htm

EPSRC/ESRC: Developing Theory for Evolving Socio-Technical Systems [2004-2009]

The TESS Project was a collaboration between information scientists and psychologists at Manchester, Oxford and Sheffield Hallam Universities. We also developed a collaboration with the O2/Telefónica research lab in Barcelona. The aim of this project was to use the social brain hypothesis to develop new approaches to understanding social networks, based on both empirical studies and agent-based modelling, in the context of digital communications technology. Sam Roberts (now at Chester University) was the postdoc on this project in the Oxford group, and undertook analyses of a large egocentric personal social networks database and ran an 18-month longitudinal study of social networks and the role of mobile phones in mediating relationships. The project led to new understandings of the structure and dynamics of personal social networks (in particular, the role of kinship and the fact that personal networks are time-constrained). EU-FP7: Social Networking for Pervasive Adaptation [2007-2011]

The SocialNets Project was a collaboration between computer scientists, physicists and social scientists at 7 EU institutions (Cardiff, Cambridge, Oxford, Athens and Aveiro Universities, CNR Pisa, and the Institut Eurécom at Nice). It explored how social networks can be exploited for the delivery and acquisition of content, including issues of security and trust in both online social networks and opportunistic (mobile peer to peer) wireless networks. Among the outputs was the Safebook software system for exploiting trusted social links in peer-to-peer networks. The Oxford postdoc on the project was Oliver Curry. Our contribution involved experimental studies of the nature and dynamics of social networks and the nature of friendship, and led to significant developments in our understanding of the psychological bases on which friendships are built, and their implications for prosociality and altruism. Project website: http://www.social-nets.eu/

EU-FP7: Harnessing ICT-enabled Collective Social Behaviour [2010-2013]

The ICTe-Collective Project is a collaboration between computer scientists, physicists and social scientists at Aaltu University (Finland), Oxford and Warsaw Universities, Budapest University of Technology, and ISI Turin. Its aim is to use modelling and database analyses to develop a general theory of ICT-mediated social systems and group formation and dynamics. We have shown that individuals have distinctive signatures in the way they structure their personal social networks and that these are time-constrained, and analysis of a very large mobile phone dataset was used to show that the changing pattern of social contact frequencies over the lifetime reflect gender-specific reproductive strategies. Project website: http://becs.aalto.fi/ictecollective/

ESRC Seminar series: Darwin's Medicine: Evolutionary Psychology and its Applications [2009-2010]

In collaboration with Mark van Vugt (then at the University of Kent at Canterbury), a very successful series of six one-day workshops on applications of evolutionary psychology were run at Edinburgh (Dominic Johnson and Tom Dickins), London Business School (Nigel Nicholson), UCL (Aubrey Sheiham) and Brunel (Michael Price), as well as Oxford and Canterbury. The workshops were attended by a wide range of people from academia, business, local and national government, NHS, charities, think tanks, and the military.