Our biased brain

Abstract

The present thesis is concerned with the mechanisms that enable man to successful cope with social challenge. In our studies, we adopted an approach rooted in social neuroscience methods and guided by evolutionary doctrine. The main tenet in the first two parts of this thesis is that human behavior to a certain extent can be described in terms of response biases, the third part explores an alternative to the methodological bias. The studies from part 1 show that automatic response biases enable individual safeguarding as well as the establishment of social coexistence. Successful social coexistence is primarily dependent on the formation of stable social hierarchies, which are in part established through dominance contests, or even aggression. Part 2 therefore focuses on the individual biases in the expression of the motivation to dominate or aggress. Aggressive behavior may to a certain extent be adaptive, in contemporary societies individual success also depends on the amount of control one is able to exert over one’s impulses. Such a functional repertoire might be reflected in the amount of intrinsic individual biological variability, a proposition investigated in part 3.