The Social Network: How Other’s Behaviors affect our Everyday Social interactions
Basil Davies
Fordham University
Cognitive Neuroscience
Introduction:
Humans are social beings, and there are groups of nerve cells in the brain that are influenced by social experiences. Due to neuroplasticity, which is the brain’s ability to rearrange connections between various groups of brain cells (Ward, 2015), the brain can control how the regions of your brain can interact with each other. Neuroplasticity is important for a lot of your brain functions, especially those involving cognition, emotions, and memory. These connections between new and old brain cells helps the brain change and adapt with each social interaction. Each social interaction changes how your brain cells interact with one another.
By studying the brain one will find that there are many sections to it. And each section plays its own important part, but in some cases the sections interact with each other and influence each other. The Social and Emotional sections of the brain goes hand in hand. Emotions are necessary to be social beings, which humans are. The brain needs social interaction not to go deteriorate. Especially for the elderly. In order for the elderly to keep their mental functions working at peak capacity, they will need to have constant social activity. Social activity is essential. Too much time with yourself and cutting yourself off from the outside world will have a deteriatory effect on your psyche. Which is why solidarity is such an effective punishment in prison. It is through interactions with others your brain learns and develops. This paper will look at how the behavior of our peers affect our social interactions, and it will look at how behaviors on social media will affect our social interactions as well. It will apply Attribution Theory into Social Interactions.“Attribution theory deals with how the social perceiver uses information to arrive at causal explanations for events. It examines what information is gathered and how it is combined to form a causal judgment” (Fiske, & Taylor, 1991) Attribution Theory plays a central role in understanding cognitive processes that use emotions such as social interactions.
The connection between how our brain perceives others behaviors and applies it interactions between others is a fascinating topic with frankly not that much research done on it. Especially with the online component of Social Media. It is an interesting topic because of the importance of social activity on the brain. The study Adolph et al. (2009) looks at the Social Brain: “The social brain hypothesis attempts to explain the extraordinary size and complexity of the human brain by appeal to particular pressures that a species adapted to social interaction would have had to face, ranging from deception to cooperation to ways of obtaining food and ensuring offspring.” This definition of the Social Brain is what I want to test. I want to test how prevalent the behaviors of others are in our own social interactions. I hypothesize that
Literature review:
As stated above:“Attribution theory deals with how the social perceiver uses information to arrive at causal explanations for events. It examines what information is gathered and how it is combined to form a causal judgment” (Fiske, & Taylor, 1991) and Attribution Theory is essential to understand this study. Prior studies such as Decety et al. 2006 researched how neuroscience affects social interactions.. This study shows that “data from recent functional-imaging studies in support of such a model and highlight the role of specific brain regions, notably the insula, the anterior cingulate cortex, and the right temporo-parietal region. Because this model assumes that empathy relies on dissociable information-processing mechanisms, it predicts a variety of structural or functional dysfunctions, depending on which mechanism is disrupted.” A study conducted in 1998 ventured to find how many children entering Kindergarten exhibit positive social behaviors when interacting with their peers. As shown in the graph below it can be seen that due to this social interaction, most of the children portrayed positive behaviors.
One study that looks at not just physical behaviors and how they affect social behaviors but behaviors through social media and technology is Kovacs (2017). “The purpose of this study is to use framing theory to examine how collectively significant events are incorporated into media representations and how collective memories are used in commemorating specific historical events, namely the death and the funeral of King Michael I.” (Kovacs, 2017)
Methods:
Participants:
I plan to take a group of about 400 adolescents aged 15-20, mixed gender’ (Half male, half female) and race, and survey them about their social activity. The ages 15-20 were chosen because enough brain development has been done that can help the subjects identify changes in behaviors but they are still vulnerable to having Attribution Theory affect their development. Those with any mental or physical disorders will be left out. Participants will hopefully come from Universities and High Schools around the country so there can be no regional biases’. There will be no gender restrictions or sexuality restrictions. These demographics will all be reported through a nationwide survey. For those under the age of 18 there will be a consent form handed out, for their guardians to sign. Every participant will get a 50$ voucher to use in school bookstores. (This is an education based study)
Procedure:
After I get the results of this initial survey, I will split the group of adolescents by their average hours of social activity per week Social activity in this study would be defined as any amount of time spent with a group of friends or acquaintances during the week, including online (any social media). There will be four groups: less than 5 hours of social activity, 5-8 hours of social activity, 8-12 hours of social activity, and 12+ hours of social activity. With these groups I will give them a separate survey, asking them about their average studying time, grades, hours spent with friends, and strength of their social lives. I would also have my prospective subjects ask their friends and parents to take a survey which asks questions about how they are around them, how their behavior has changed over the years and questions that describe themselves.(the friends and families) These questions will be focused on finding out the types of behaviors that the people who spend the most time with the participants portray and that will help me figure out the correlations.
After I get the results of the final survey, and my room for error is reduced. Each participant will be given then be put into a one-way ANOVA through SPSS to figure out the variance between data sets. SPSS is a statistical software created by IBM which can conduct tests using statistics. The one-way ANOVA is used to find out if there is a significant difference between two or more means of independent groups. This ANOVA test will show me if there are any outliers or anomalies in my dataset. I will then check it with a Bonferroni Test to make sure of my findings.
I will also conduct a correlational matrix through SPSS to find the significant correlations between behaviors of others and social interaction.
Analytical Plan:
Predicted Results:
I expect to get results that prove my hypothesis. I believe that using attribution theory we will find out that our brains use the information that we get from those we are closest to and applies it to our everyday social interactions. I believe that this study will find that there is a significant correlation between a behaviors of those closest around you and how you interact socially. I expect big effect sizes due to the age variability and population dynamics of this study. Also social interactions are different in each person. So there will be a lot of variability.
Tests:
As stated above: I will surveys and these surveys will be put into a correlational test. The results of the correlational test will then be put into a one-way ANOVA through SPSS to figure out the variance between data sets. SPSS is a statistical software created by IBM which can conduct tests using statistics. The one-way ANOVA is used to find out if there is a significant difference between two or more means of independent groups. This ANOVA test will show me if there are any outliers or anomalies in my dataset. I will then check it with a Bonferroni Test to make sure of my findings. I will also conduct a correlational matrix through SPSS to find the significant correlations between behaviors of others and social interaction.
Discussion:
References:
Decety, J., & Jackson, P. L. (2006). A social-neuroscience perspective on empathy. Current directions in psychological science, 15(2), 54-58.
Fiske, S. T., & Taylor, S. E. (1991). McGraw-Hill series in social psychology. Social cognition (2nd ed.). New York, NY, England: Mcgraw-Hill Book Company.
Kovacs, D. (2017). Using attribution theory to identify how media and the public frame Romanian religious leaders. Romanian Journal of Journalism & Communication/Revista Romana de Jurnalism si Comunicare-RRJC, 12.
Lieberman, M. D., Gaunt, R., Gilbert, D. T., & Trope, Y. (2002). Reflexion and reflection: A social cognitive neuroscience approach to attributional inference. In Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 34, pp. 199-249). Academic Press.
Ward, J. (2015). The student’s guide to cognitive neuroscience, 3rd
Edition. London: Psychology Press.
Wong, N. M., Yeung, P. P., & Lee, T. M. (2018). A developmental social neuroscience model for understanding loneliness in adolescence. Social neuroscience, 13(1), 94-103.
“Archived Indicator: Kindergartners' Social Interaction Skills.” Child Trends, www.childtrends.org/indicators/kindergartners-social-interaction-skills.