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This chapter reviews findings in various fields that may provide the basis for the development of theories of foraging by social groups. The power of cooperation is related to the amount of diversity of the information foragers. Greater diversity leads to greater returns for the group and the individual. This is related to the notion that brokerage (diverse social contacts) provides social capital, and there is evidence which suggests that brokers in the flow of information are more likely to be sources of innovative discoveries. Although there are benefits to co-operation, those benefits trade against interference effects that ultimately seem to limit the size of groups. In addition, because of the diversity of individuals and because of the way people associate with like-minded people, information is typically likely to flow to small finite-sized groups. The chapter presents mathematical models that capture the basic elements of these results.

To navigate their social worlds successfully, humans must coordinate their own behavior with the behaviors of others. Because human behavior takes place in a complex social world, it imposes high demand on cognitive capacity. Yet the cognitive resources available to humans to meet this demand are relatively limited. Selectivity is a crucial element in social cognition. Only through informational selection are humans able to make decisions that are simultaneously adaptive and efficient. This chapter reviews evidence from social cognition research which demonstrates that humans are selective in the social information they attend to, the manner in which they process this information, and the behaviors they ultimately enact. This selectivity in social attention, social thinking, and social behavior is an adaptive tool that helps humans successfully maneuver through their complex social worlds.

This chapter reviews the literature on mechanisms that underlie the onset and evolution of adolescent anxiety disorders as they relate to the development of anxiety in youth. It begins by examining adolescents' increased risk for anxiety disorders and the roles that social and biological, particularly neural, changes may play in its onset. Particular attention is given to the Social Information Processing Network (SIPN) which has both early (emotional) and later maturing (cognitive control) components. It then considers alterations in patterns of cognition that are associated with adolescent anxiety disorders, as well as their putative underlying neural mechanisms. The chapter describes an approach to studying the intersections among adolescent psychopathology, emotion and cognition, and underlying neural substrates. Finally, possible prevention approaches that integrate neuroscience and clinical research are presented.

This chapter discusses ways in which Information-Foraging Theory could be extended to include a broader range of psychological and social phenomena and a broader range of information technologies. Topics covered include social information foraging, fine-grained details of cognition, perception, and attention (e.g. eye movements), expertise, learning, individual differences, and a more inclusive set of tasks related to information-foraging.

A neuroethological approach to decision making posits that neural circuits mediating choice evolved through natural selection to link sensory systems flexibly to motor output in a way that enhances the fit between behavior and the local environment. This chapter discusses basic prerequisites for a variety of decision systems from this viewpoint, with a focus on two of the best studied and most widely represented decision problems. The first is patch leaving, a prototype of environmentally based switching between action patterns. The second is social information seeking, a behavior that, while functionally distinct from foraging, can be addressed in a similar framework. It is argued that while the specific neural solutions to these problems sometimes differ across species, both the problems themselves and the algorithms instantiated by biological hardware are repeated widely throughout nature. The behavioral and mathematical study of ubiquitous decision processes like patch leaving and information seeking thus provides a powerful new approach to uncovering the fundamental design structure of nervous systems.

This chapter suggests that social interaction is changing, as increasingly greater portions of human creativity, conversations, and social ties are digitized and mediated by computers. The chapter examines this “netification” process, and discusses its consequences for the online presentation of the self and of the other, and also for groups online. The present effects of the laws that govern information on cognition and social behavior are discussed, and some of the major societal and personal consequences of “netification” on work and leisure, on the private and public, and on space and time are reviewed. The chapter makes recommendations for multifaceted research as well as social cognition considerations in systems design.

Defined as the invariance of system structure or function following a nontrivial perturbation to one or more important system components, robustness is a characteristic property of all adaptive systems. This chapter reviews the theory of robustness in biology, the design of experiments used to assay robustness (including the functional behavior or outputs of a system), and the adaptive response of those parts or components which are compromised by a perturbation. Emphasis is given to a rigorous logic of measurement that carefully factors apart the many causal contributions to robust function. Insights from the study of robustness in biology are applied to the social and decision-making domains, and modifications of experimental design and theory are proposed to account for challenges unique to human agents.

This chapter defines the different terms and processes that are the main themes of the book. This chapter starts by explaining how perturbations increase uncertainty, which pushes individuals to update and gather information. In social animals, this information is shared through the social network, which is used to make a decision about staying or leaving the patch. Finally, this decision is not going to be made individually but rather based on decisions made by others. Perturbations may accumulate until surpassing a tipping point; then the first individuals may start to disperse and the rest copies this behaviour, which cascade as long as more individuals disperse. This autocatalytic process is termed runaway dispersal, which may result in nonlinear population dynamics, such as hysteresis, critical transitions, and transient phenomena. These dynamics should occur at the local level (e.g. patch collapse) and metapopulation level (e.g. extinction–colonization turnover).

Research on social learning has focused traditionally on whether animals possess the cognitive ability to learn novel motor patterns from tutors. More recently, social learning has included the use of others as sources of inadvertent social information. This type of social learning seems more taxonomically widespread and its use can more readily be approached as an economic decision. Social sampling information, however, can be tricky to use and calls for a more lucid appraisal of its costs. In this four-part review, we address these costs. Firstly, we address the possibility that only a fraction of group members are actually providing social information at any one time. Secondly, we review experimental research which shows that animals are circumspect about social information use. Thirdly, we consider the cases where social information can lead to incorrect decisions and finally, we review studies investigating the effect of social information quality. We address the possibility that using social information or not is not a binary decision and present results of a study showing that nutmeg mannikins combine both sources of information, a condition that can lead to the establishment of informational cascades. We discuss the importance of empirically investigating the economics of social information use.

This chapter reviews the psychophysical and neurophysiological findings regarding the perception of social information from large-scale bodily movements. It shows that the human visual system integrates human and non-human motions differently over time. It also shows that visual processing is affected by the similarity between the perceived image features of motion representations in the observer and the observed actor. Thus, the human visual system is regarded as an inherently social organ that allows people to read bodily expressions of others with ease in their daily lives.

This chapter illustrates how integrating knowledge about animals' natural behavior, ecology, and evolutionary history with the powerful empirical techniques of experimental psychology has helped us to understand the use of social information by different bird species. To understand these mechanisms and to define the ways in which they differ between species, an integrative approach must be adopted combining the 3Es with knowledge of experimental psychology, to obtain rigorous experimental validity. More comparative work is clearly needed to determine the influence of ecology and evolutionary history on social information use, and experiments using different tasks should shed light on whether the capacity to use social information is domain specific. The knowledge of the 3Es can thus be used to influence a particular species' life history, not only to drive the development of appropriate research questions and methodology but also to provide post hoc explanations of successes and failures in psychological experiments.

This chapter describes some of the promising frameworks in the social science literature that can help mitigation professionals identify substantive differences in how defendants evaluate information and choose among subjectively available response choices. It begins with a brief review of the law of criminal provocation. It then examines recent developments in self-control theory that call into question a number of traditional ways of framing issues of choice and hostile (reactive) aggression. Next, it turns to the social information processing (SIP) model of human decision-making processes. It considers how the SIP framework can help practitioners identify dysfunctions in social cognitive processes and how these social cognitive processes interact with latent cognitive structures (attitudes, values, and beliefs), and non-conscious processes that are significantly influenced by a person's social and cultural background.

This chapter explores a variety of facets of computer-mediated persuasion and the gaining of compliance. The chapter opens with a discussion of two important theoretical frameworks that have influenced the contemporary study of persuasion and compliance gaining online: The heuristic—systematic model and social information processing theory. A new sociotechnical influence model is proposed, and is used to frame the current research in the study of online persuasion and compliance gaining. Finally, several implications and new directions suggested by this model are explored including the development of interpersonal credibility impressions online, the strength of online cues, and the ways that communication in online spaces may have self-influential effects on attitudes.

This chapter examines the contributions that evolutionary theory can make to an integrated science of decision making. It begins with a discussion of classical decision theory and analyzes the conceptual and empirical failures of this approach. Mechanistic explanations, which do not explicitly invoke evolutionary arguments, are presented to account for these failures. Thereafter, evolutionary approaches to decision making are examined and the failures revisited in light of evolutionary theory. It is shown that in some cases “irrational” behavior might be adaptive. The chapter concludes by exploring the open questions, levels of analysis, and policy implications that an evolutionary approach can bring to decision making.

In behavioral ecology, the behavioral consequences of individuals (exploiters) using the investments of others (investors), rather than investing time or effort in procuring a resource themselves, has been traditionally studied using the producer–scrounger (PS) model—a simple evolutionary game theoretic model in which producers (investors) search for resources while scroungers (exploiters) use the resources found by producers. A key assumption in the PS model is that the producer remains passive toward scroungers. As the presence of scroungers is costly, evidence is reviewed that one major consequence of having exploiters is the adoption by producers of strategies that reduce the benefits of scroungers, giving rise to countermeasures by scroungers. Scroungers also affect population structure by generating consistent differences among individuals and affecting spatial preferences within groups. Reviewing the impact of scrounging on populations should help generate parallels to explore the consequences of exploitative behavior in economics and public health.

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is associated with an array of negative health consequences that can include poor general health status, increased health service utilization, stress-related conditions, physical injuries, and death. Common mental health consequences include depression and posttraumatic stress disorder. Many factors, at biological, psychological, and social levels of influences, are correlated with IPV perpetration, yet prominent theoretical models are narrow in focus. This chapter explicates the need for a biopsychosocial model of IPV that is integrative and coherent, and it argues that the social information processing approach can provide an organizing framework for this effort. Factors such as neurocognitive deficits, trauma exposure, and acute alcohol intoxication influence risk for IPV by altering the decoding and interpretation of relationship events and the generation, selection, and evaluation of responses. A more integrative approach to IPV will enhance our ability to understand, prevent, and treat this vexing public health concern.

This chapter takes a broad view of misinformation: the spread of factually false claims is as old as cultural transmission itself, and to assess the real danger represented by social media we need to understand what kind of cognitive triggers are activated by successful information, online or offline. The chapter critically reviews some hypotheses for which digital media are especially suited for the spreading of misinformation, and then it explores in detail the idea that some cultural traits possess features that make them particularly well suited to be retained and transmitted, conferring on them a selective advantage relative to other traits. From this perspective, misinformation can be manufactured building on features that make it attractive in an almost unconstrained way, whereas true news cannot, simply because it needs to correspond to reality. Misinformation can be designed to spread more than real information does,—whether this is consciously planned or not.

Marilynn B. Brewer discusses three of her studies: the first she considers her most underappreciated work, the second received a delayed appreciation, and the third is appreciated but misunderstood. Her most underappreciated contribution was a concept in evolutionary biology, in which she argued that the profound ambivalence between personal self-gratification and self-sacrifice for collective welfare is not a conflict between internal biological motives and external social constraints but rather an internal biological dualism that reflects human evolutionary history as a social species. Her second work was Ethnocentrism and Intergroup Attitudes: East African Evidence, a book on ethnocentric attitudes and intergroup perception in post-colonial East Africa. The book did not garner a reasonable amount of attention in the field of social psychology until more than fifteen years later. Brewer's third work was an article titled “A dual process model of impression formation,”, which describes two distinct modes of processing social information: a category-based (top-down) processing mode and a person-based (bottom-up) processing mode.