BCCCD22

Slack: ​https://bcccd.slack.com/archives/C02PHE21C7Q​​​

Denis Tatone
Department of Cognitive Science, Central European University, Vienna, Austria

The gamut of social interactions can be organized along an interdependence continuum, from byproduct mutualism (surface coordination directed at individual goals) to full-fledged altruism (prosocial acts directed at increasing the utility of social partners). These interactions are defined by specific payoff structures, with mutualism yielding local utility-positive outcomes (the rewards that each participant reaps outweigh the participation costs), and altruism yielding local utility-negative ones.

I shall argue that young children use differences in payoff structure to infer the existence of stable social relationships from the observation of episodic interactions. Specifically, I hypothesize that children should be more likely to interpret interactions yielding utility-negative outcomes as indicative of associations in which individual participation costs are directly or indirectly recouped over time.

I suggest two routes through which these relational inferences may be carried out: via interaction schemas or online (social) utility calculus. In the former, relational inferences are automatically supplied through the activation of schemas prepared to identify relationship-relevant encounters. In the latter, they are worked out by analyzing the payoff distribution of an observed interaction.

While the first route allows young learners to infer relationships without requiring genuine utility computations, its scope is limited to the number and kinds of schemas that children possess. Conversely, while the second route provides an open-ended analysis of social interactions, it presupposes the ability to produce nested utility functions. I shall discuss the early understanding of “giving” and “helping” interactions to critically illustrate these two mechanisms and draw predictions about their developmental timelines.

• Session 8, Thursday, 13 Jan, 07:00 - 08:30 (UTC +0)
• Session 6, Wednesday, 12 Jan, 13:00 - 14:30 (UTC +0)