The Price of Being Social: The Role of Emotions in Feeding and Minimizing Conflicts

Abstract

Although, as many scholars state, hierarchical social groups arose in order to manage conflicts among individuals (Sapolsky R (1999) Hormonal correlates of personality and social contexts: from nonhuman to human primates. In: Panter-Brick C, Worthman C (eds) Hormones, health and behavior. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp 18–46), it is clear that social stratification may be a source for new conflicts. Thus, societies can exist only on a condition that an equilibrium between conflicting and cooperative factors is maintained. What are the cognitive mechanisms underlying this balance? Among the models facing this issue, some lay a crucial function on emotional devices. Intuitively it may seem that rational argumentation plays the leading role in negotiation, but there is an interesting tradition introduced by Darwin (Darwin CR (1872) The expression of the emotions in man and animals. John Murray, London) that highlights the importance of emotions in interactional cohesiveness (Gratch J, Mao W, Marsella S (2006) Modeling social emotions and social attributions. In: Sun R (ed) Cognition and multi-agent interaction: extending cognitive modeling to social simulation. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge).

In this article, we discuss the reasons why the hypothesis that a main system grounding the rise of societies and the negotiation of conflicts is represented by emotions seems to be persuasive. Specifically, in a phylogenetic perspective, we will make reference to a specific phenomenon characterized by emotional elements that have had an adaptive value in terms of cohesion and cooperation among groups: ritual (Alcorta and Sosis, Hum Nat 16:323–359, 2005; De Waal FBM, Aureli F (1996) Consolation, reconciliation, and a possible cognitive difference between macaques and chimpanzees. In: Russon AE, Bard KA, Parker ST (eds) Reaching into thought: the minds of the great apes. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge; De Waal F, Lanting F (1997) Bonobo: the forgotten ape. University of California Press, Berkeley). However, some scholars point out that such cohesive property is combined with another opposite feature: namely, the emotional nature of ritual can feed conflict by turning the symbols of groups into sacralized values (Ginges et al. Proc Natl Acad Sci 104:7357–7360, 2007). In this sense, the deep emotions that engender group cohesion are also elements advancing out-group hostility (Wilson EO (2012) The social conquest of earth. Liveright Publishing Corporation, New York).

In light of these considerations, the analysis of the emotional components tied to collective rituals gives an interesting interpretation of the relationship between conflicts and integration.