subjects were simply watching or imitating individual actions. These
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actions were rarely surrounded by a social context. In the few instances in which we used a social context surrounding the action, the context was composed only of objects, no people. Given our claim that mirror neurons were important neural elements for social behavior, I knew it was important to measure brain responses in mirror neuron areas in an experiment in which the observed actions were highly relevant to human social relations. Talking with Alan about his idea, I envisioned an experimental design for a study that could suit both of our purposes: the only task for the subjects in the scanner would be
Image Courtesy of Flickr Member Reigh LeBlanc
the observation of social relations between people. Of course, we could not bring a bunch of people into the scanner room and stage various
Brain Politics
A
interactions while our subjects watched, so we prepared a set of video
society. Drawing from this fieldwork and from scholarly
uncharted territory. In these cases, a relatively simple experimental
lan Fiske is an anthropology professor at UCLA
30
who has performed a detailed ethnographic analy-
sis of the Moose people of Burkina Faso, a West African work encompassing a variety of disciplines studying a variety of cultures, Alan proposed a model of human social relations, according to which we relate to each other using four elementary forms of social relations:
• communal sharing, in which people have a sense of
clips depicting everyday social interactions. In order to simplify the experimental design, we also decided to focus on only two of the four relational models of Alan’s theory. Once again, we were moving into design is highly advisable. As in the brain imaging experiment on politics performed by Darren Schreiber, in which we picked subjects at the far ends of the political continuum, we picked the two social relational models that seemed at the far ends of a continuum. One was communal sharing, predomi-
common identity;
nantly based on kindness and sharing, and the other one was author-
• authority
communal sharing relations seem inherently positive, while authority
ity ranking, based on hierarchical inequality. The tricky issue was that
ranking, in which people relate to each
other following a hierarchy;
ranking relations are typically perceived in a negative way, especially
• equality matching, in which there is an egalitarian
had to control for, if we were to achieve a pattern of brain activation
by North American subjects. This was a “confounding factor” that we
relationship among peers; and
that truly reflected differences in the way we process social relations,
• market
ended up with thirty-six video clips, a fairly large set for such an ex-
not differences in how Americans feel about authority figures! We
pricing, in which the relationship is medi-
ated by values that follow a market system. Alan contends that these four elementary relational structures and their variations account for all the social
periment, half depicting communal sharing social relations, the other half depicting authority ranking social relations. Some of the clips for each relationship clearly elicited positive emotions, the others elicited negative emotions, thus controlling for the “emotional valence” of the
relations among all humans in all cultures.
clips. Each story was identically structured, introducing one character
Alan published that work in 1991. Eight years ago
interaction-the “relational” segment. The depicted situations were
8
(about a year before Darren Schreiber walked into my office), Alan contacted me about teaming up on an imaging experiment relating to his well-known model of social relations. I found the idea fascinating because he made me realize that those of us in the lab were basically studying responses in mirror neuron areas, while
for “baseline” purposes, then bringing in the second character for the widely variable, from office scenes to basketball courts, from lovers playfully interacting to judges ruling in court.