Modern
science was founded on the mechanistic perspective which conceptualizes nature
as a kind of machine. The important thing about machines is that they operate
according to rules, and we can figure out those rules. It’s a good metaphor.
Unfortunately, it is a metaphor that has sometimes been applied too concretely
– especially when the organic world has been conceptualized as being no more
than an incredibly complex kind of clock.  In contrast to clocks, organic
machines are interactive machines that develop over time.  The interactive and
developmental difference between them and clocks makes all the difference in
the world.  One of the key themes of Essays in Social Neuroscience is
that if we want to understand more about creatures such as mammals by studying
their nervous systems, unless we study these nervous systems in their social
contexts, our understanding will be empirically inadequate.  Figuring out the
workings of the nervous system requires methodologies different from the
engineering type approaches that would be used to figure out the workings of a
clock.  A second theme is that the methodological tools for developing an
‘ecologically valid’ understanding of nervous system functioning are becoming
increasingly available.

This
interactive viewpoint is common to various theoretical models, including
general systems theory, the biopsychosocial model, the biosocial model, neural
Darwinism, developmental psychopathology, evolutionary psychology, and the
ecology of neuroscience.  The term ‘social neuroscience’ is intended to carry
an echo of the cognitive neuroscience revolution, and hint that social
neuroscience is the next big frontier.  Although the aim of the larger project
is to reduce the mutual antipathy between conventional neuroscientists and
social scientists, the primary audience of this book is neuroscientists.  The
new frontier clearly has to be initially settled by those neuroscientists, cognitive
neuroscientists, affective neuroscientists, biological psychologists, ethologists,
and health psychologists whose research questions have direct biological
concomitants.

Cacioppo
and Bernston make a persuasive claim that we will not be able to model nervous
system functioning as it works over time unless we consider the role played by
social factors. Important individual differences in how nervous systems work
appear only when we examine psychosocial context. If we ignore that context,
significant variance will be mistaken for error variance, i.e., important
biological events will be invisible to us even though they are quite evident
when studied from the appropriate vantage point.

In
theory, social neuroscience should begin to inform social psychology as well. 
One (but not the only) way that social neuroscience might influence research at
a molar level of analysis is suggested by Daniel Schacter.  His main point can
be summarized as a claim that scientific psychologists seeking to understand
cognitive processes are always looking for new and improved ways to categorize
their subject matter, and sometimes suggestions for lumping and splitting the
phenomenon of interest in better ways can be gleaned from research at a lower
level of analysis, such as one of the various neuroscience levels. 
Scientifically, we should be open to using any and all information that helps
us better understand human psychology. Schacter’s example shows how the broad
construct of semantic encoding can be decomposed into psychologically relevant
subcomponents based partly on neuroimaging research.

A
prior tome titled Foundations in Social Neuroscience collected 83
previously published papers.  The current slim volume contains a short chapter
by all 12 editors of the larger book.  These chapters are also surprisingly
uneven – in a way that goes beyond the fact that a diverse range of specialities
is represented.  Based on a pattern established early in the book, it looks as
if the plan was for each chapter to begin with a personal account of how the
author began doing research that could be called ‘social neuroscience,’
followed by a nontechnical summary of her or his research program.  What counts
as a personal account and what counts as nontechnical was, however, interpreted
in different ways.  The personal accounts run the gamut from autobiographical
self-disclosures about important inspirations and influences on their work,
through more bland academic biographies to no mention of personal history at
all.  Many chapters are relatively technical – and these more
biologically-based chapters require a background in genetics, endocrinology,
and anatomy that many social scientists are unlikely to have. 

With
respect to the notion that we cannot understand nervous system function without
studying social context, the more technical the chapter, the better it seems to
exemplify social neuroscience.  Many of the early chapters delve into basic
biological details, and they are the better chapters because they are more
conceptually rich with respect to the purpose of the book.  A few competently
written chapters are nontechnical without being dumbed down, but they are also
less relevant to social neuroscience per se.  These would be chapters by
Daniel Schacter and Richard Davidson.  Ralph Adolphs wrote a chapter that could
be classified with the two just mentioned, with the exception that it is also
relevant to social neuroscience.

The
book includes a fascinating array information that, as a whole, should alter
our ideas of how organic machines operate.  For example, Michael Meaney
demonstrates that some mammals exhibit individual differences in reactivity to
stressful events that can be traced to the functioning of their endocrine
system. Differences in how the endocrine system is regulated are partly
influenced by whether a certain section of DNA that promotes gene activation
was turned on during a critical period in development. The turning on of this
sequence is directly related to the specific kind of maternal care the mammal
receives during that critical period.  There is some reason to believe that
this fine tuning of the stress response is calibrated by maternal care because
the quality of that care is itself affected by the environment and is a
reliable predictor of the kind of environment the animal will face throughout
life.  Technical concepts such as epigenesis, chromatin remodeling, glucocorticoid
receptor expression, and methylation of cytosine are crucial aspects of the
argument, and their inclusion enhances the persuasiveness of the social
neuroscience proposal.

In
another of these early chapters, Stephen Suomi discusses the biosocial
underpinnings of aggression in monkeys.  He shows how behavioral outcome is a
function of both genes and social environment.  In genetics, the concept of pleiotropy
refers to situations where the same string of DNA has different effects
depending on where and when it is transcripted.  In a parallel fashion, Suomi
show that different versions of the same gene can lead to better and worse
behavioral outcomes depending on the attachment context in which they operate. 
Monkeys with a short version of a particular gene do much worse socially if
raised by peers compared to peer-raised monkeys with a longer version of that
gene.  Those same short allele monkeys do better socially than the long allele
monkeys if both are raised by a mother and develop a secure attachment to her. 
He notes that the maternal behaviors regulating the nature of attachment are
themselves socially ‘inherited’ from generation to generation, leading to the
interesting deduction that a genetically influenced propensity to aggression is
regulated by a nongenetic mechanism of inheritance.

The
first six chapters jointly cover how biological architecture is partly a
consequence of specific social events, how we are designed for certain kinds of
social contexts, and how those contexts regulate biological function.  Maternal
care figures heavily in these chapters, but ongoing relationships and the
cumulative stresses to which we are exposed throughout life are also
mentioned.  No three page summary can adequately communicate the extent to
which these are not merely vague speculations. Important details about
physiological and neuropsychological structure are unambiguously related to
events that can only be conceptualized from a molar social perspective.  
Included in this group are also chapters by Esther Sternberg, Bruce McEwan, C.
Sue Carter and Martha McClintock.

It
isn’t a long book, and I don’t intend to write a long review.  There is a very
nice concluding chapter by Shelley Taylor call The Accidental Neuroscientist.
In it she recounts how her work in clinical health psychology raised some
questions about the workings of the immune system which, unexpectedly, led her
to develop a specialization in a new kind of biological psychology, namely psychoneuroimmunology. 
The account is well written, and summarizes a theme that runs through many of
the personal accounts, specifically, that research currently labeled as
belonging to social neuroscience was not originally intended to occupy this
territory.  The editors, I suspect, intend to leave readers with the impression
that research in social neuroscience should not be left to chance.  Rather than
emerging haphazardly in a diverse set of specialties, it should be a specialty
itself.  The accidental social neuroscientists of this generation should spawn
the intentional social neuroscientists of the next generation.  Developing this
specialty may require a different kind of training – one that is more
interdisciplinary than is common in other areas of scientific psychology. 

It
is a good plan, and hopefully it will come to fruition.  With this in mind, I
would like to offer a few critical comments about the initial mapping of the
terrain, and in doing so agree with some points made by Ralph Adolphs in his
own chapter.  More than one author in this collection extols the virtues of
interdisciplinary collaboration and how their own research program gained depth
by drawing on the intellectual resources developed by experts in related areas.
It is better to not reinvent any wheels. As Adolphs suggests, and congruent
with the intellectual tradition of the Damasio environ in which he works, the
intellectual resources developed by specialists in the philosophy of science
and the philosophy of mind should also be a part of the interdisciplinary
matrix.

In
what could be considered a manifesto of the social neuroscience movement, Cacioppo
and Bernston make a distinction between what they call substitutionism and
reductionism. By substitutionism they mean the attempt to eliminate a higher
level of analysis in favor of a lower level of analysis. By reductionism they
mean a kind of pluralism in which information from multiple levels of analysis
cross-fertilize each other.  Social neuroscience encourages
neuroscientists to not ignore social factors, and this revised definition of reductionism
attempts to make biological research more palatable to social scientists.  I
don’t believe that words have fixed meanings, and agree that creative changes
of meaning are a part of intellectual progress.  All the same, there are
well-developed traditions in philosophy that go by the names of nonreductive
materialism and supervenience theory, not to mention explanatory pluralism, and
these traditions have been talking about understanding higher levels of
analysis in terms of lower levels without eliminating the higher level for
quite some time. Eliminativism itself is an incredibly fertile
perspective with roots in scientific psychology prior to its adoption in
philosophy.  It has even been called the disappearance form of the identity
theory, but conventional usage has settled on eliminativism. 

Idiosyncratic
uses of terminology and hasty distinctions can work against interdisciplinary
perspectives because rather than agreeing to use a common language, a new speciality
begins on a trajectory that over time makes it more difficult to integrate the
intellectual resources that were not consulted in the first place. A one
sentence definition of substitutionism lacks the depth of an incisive Churchland-type
eliminativism, and those who are limited to the abridged notion of ‘substitutionism,’
are less likely to benefit from the careful critiques of eliminativism that
have been developed by philosophers. 

One
would not want an emerging area to adopt some of the regrettable prejudices of
experimental psychology with respect to the value of professional philosophical
thinking.  These prejudices have been resisted by many researchers working in
the cognitive neurosciences.  If their lead is followed by practitioners of
social neuroscience, and backed up with respect for the efforts of professional
philosophers in addition to an interest in philosophy, it will enhance the
chances that conceptual progress in this terrain will be less ‘accidental.’

© 2005 Peter Zachar

Peter Zachar, Ph.D. is
an associate professor of psychology at Auburn University Montgomery.  He is a
licensed psychologist with additional specializations in psychological
measurement, the philosophy of science, and the philosophy of psychiatry.  He
is the author of Psychological
Concepts and Biological Psychiatry: A Philosophical Analysis. 

Categories: Philosophical, Psychology