Cross-cultural regularities in the cognitive architecture of pride.
Pride occurs in every known culture, appears early in development, is reliably triggered by achievements and formidability, and causes a characteristic display that is recognized everywhere. Here, we evaluate the theory that pride evolved to guide decisions relevant to pursuing actions that enhance valuation and respect for a person in the minds of others. By hypothesis, pride is a neurocomputational program tailored by selection to orchestrate cognition and behavior in the service of: (i) motivating the cost-effective pursuit of courses of action that would increase others' valuations and respect of the individual, (ii) motivating the advertisement of acts or characteristics whose recognition by others would lead them to enhance their evaluations of the individual, and (iii) mobilizing the individual to take advantage of the resulting enhanced social landscape. To modulate how much to invest in actions that might lead to enhanced evaluations by others, the pride system must forecast the magnitude of the evaluations the action would evoke in the audience and calibrate its activation proportionally. We tested this prediction in 16 countries across 4 continents (n= 2,085), for 25 acts and traits. As predicted, the pride intensity for a given act or trait closely tracks the valuations of audiences, local (meanr= +0.82) and foreign (meanr= +0.75). This relationship is specific to pride and does not generalize to other positive emotions that coactivate with pride but lack its audience-recalibrating function.
Center for Evolutionary Psychology, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106-9660; dsznycer2@gmail.com.|Department of Psychology, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287-1104.
Daniel
0000-0002-6510-3313
D
Sznycer
Department of Psychology, Bilkent University, 06800 Bilkent, Ankara, Turkey.|College of Life Sciences, Institute for Advanced Study Berlin, 14193 Berlin, Germany.
Laith
L
Al-Shawaf
Department of Psychology, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva 84105, Israel.
Yoella
Y
Bereby-Meyer
Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology, University of Oxford, Oxford OX2 6PN, United Kingdom.
Oliver Scott
OS
Curry
Department of Interdisciplinary Study of Law, Private Law, and Business Law, Ghent University, B-9000 Ghent, Belgium.
Delphine
D
De Smet
Department of Neurology, School of Medicine, University of Maryland, Baltimore, MD 21201.
Elsa
E
Ermer
Center for Evolutionary Psychology, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106-9660.
Sangin
S
Kim
Gongneung Welfare Center, Nowon-gu, Seoul 01851, Republic of Korea.
Sunhwa
S
Kim
School of Social Sciences, Singapore Management University, Singapore 178903.
Norman P
NP
Li
Facultad de Psicología, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, 5000 Cordoba, Argentina.
Maria Florencia
MF
Lopez Seal
Institut de Biologie, Université de Neuchâtel, CH-2000 Neuchatel, Switzerland.
Jennifer
J
McClung
School of Social Sciences, Singapore Management University, Singapore 178903.
Jiaqing
J
O
Department of Psychology, Graduate School of Humanities, Kobe University, Kobe 657-8501, Japan.
Yohsuke
0000-0003-2074-0244
Y
Ohtsubo
Center for Evolutionary Psychology, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106-9660.
Tadeg
T
Quillien
Department of Political and Social Sciences, European University Institute, 50014 Florence, Italy.
Max
M
Schaub
School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Griffith University, Mount Gravatt, QLD 4122, Australia.
Aaron
A
Sell
Department of Political Science, Aarhus University, DK-8000 Aarhus, Denmark.
Florian
F
van Leeuwen
Center for Evolutionary Psychology, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106-9660.
Leda
L
Cosmides
Center for Evolutionary Psychology, Department of Anthropology, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106-3210.
John
J
Tooby
D002755:Choice Behavior; D003071:Cognition; D003431:Cross-Cultural Comparison; D004644:Emotions; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009042:Motivation; D012919:Social Behavior
culture; decision-making; emotion; pride; valuation