by Ben Slotznick
1/31/2024
I’ve previously discussed the work of Randall Collins, Robert Putnam, and Paul Zak. What do they have in common?
These three researchers Randall Collins, Robert Putnam, and Paul Zak looked at social connections – between individuals, within groups, and among communities. They each brought with them the viewpoints of distinct social sciences with distinct methodologies and terminology: sociology, political science (with a heavy dose of econometrics) and neuroeconomics (a mix of neuroscientific investigations in experimental economics set-ups). They all found evidence of the same phenomena:
When people do stuff together – in pairs, within groups, or among communities – something is generated which helps further bind the collective together.
What is this “thing”?
- For Collins, it’s a collective emotive “effervescence”, first investigated over a century ago by Emile Durkheim – an emotional energy to which group members become habituated.
- For Putnam, it’s social capital, which strongly and positively correlates with child welfare, education, public health, individual health, happiness, citizenship, volunteering, and philanthropic giving.
- For Zak, it’s oxytocin (and serotonin) and their activation of dopamine reward circuits in the brain – which are linked to habituation, and which Zak imputed to “trust” and “love”.
Each of these researchers found that similar activities generated this social glue (e.g., cheering, dancing, singing for Collins and Zak; participatory and spectator sports, picnics and parties for Putnam). Putnam and Collins also found that the strength of this social glue deteriorated over time, unless it continued to be reinforced by continued participation in group activities. (Collins felt once a week was optimal; Putnam felt between once a week and once a month.)
My take?
- The emotive energy observed by Collins, and aspects of love described by Zak, are some of the ways people articulate their experience of the oxytocin/dopaminergic surge generated by prosocial activities.
- The social capital and civic virtue observed by Putnam, the trust imputed by Zak, and the emotional entrainment observed by Collins are manifestations of the collective-but-individual craving for and habituation to the triggering of prosocial dopaminergic reward circuits.
- The strength of this prosocial “pull” will vary, along with it’s “half-life”, because habituation varies by individual, and presentation depends upon circumstance and framing. However the pull of “community” it is based to a large extent upon a person’s own neurologic reward circuits (i.e., preferences over surges in his or her own neurotransmitters), rather than altruistic preferences for benefiting others.
Whether and the extent to which individuals maximize or satisfice prosocial fixes of dopamine does not appear to have been addressed in these lines of research.