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| The faces of former poster-child Big Don leading up to and immediately following yesterday's expulsion - start in lower right corner and go left, then upper right corner and go left - top middle is shit&shoe epiphany moment |
ucla | While human emotions are clearly derived from a psychological foundation shared by social mammals, we likely possess some emotions that are considerably less developed, or wholly absent, in other creatures. Humans are unique in the extent of their reliance on socially transmitted information in coping with physical and social environments.
An important class of emotions consists of those which mediate the acquisition, use, and dissemination of cultural information. Admiration of successful persons involves a desire for proximity and a willingness to provide client services to obtain it, as well as a desire for close observation and imitation.
These patterns lead individuals to adopt ideas and practices of probable local utility. At a larger scale, conformity to cultural values, beliefs, and practices makes behavior predictable and allows for the advent of complex coordination and cooperation; shame and pride motivate an assessment of prevailing norms, an awareness of the presence of observers, and conformity to pervasive expectations when under observation. Conversely, contempt and moral outrage motivate publicizing the actions of nonconformists, excluding them from cooperative endeavors, and inflicting costs upon them. A richer understanding of the evolution of contempt and moral outrage is needed given that punishment plays a key role in maintaining cooperation.
Finally, while considerations of kin selection and reciprocal altruism indicate that many animals should experience emotions in a corporate fashion (i.e., harm to kin or allies is experienced as harm to self, etc.), humans link their identities to group membership at scales not explicable in terms of kin selection or reciprocal altruism, suggesting that the benefits of coordination and cooperation favored the evolution of highly developed human corporate sensibilities.
