The Price of Being Social: The Role of Emotions in Feeding and Minimizing Conflicts - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 99

Chapter 6
The Price of Being Social: The Role of Emotions
in Feeding and Minimizing Conflicts

Alessandra Chiera

6.1 Rationality Over Feeling?

Since the time of Aristotle, humans have been considered to be social beings in
nature. More interestingly, the social label seems to apply in a special way to them
to the extent that it makes the human species completely different from any other
one. As the Greek philosopher points out in Politics ,
Man is by nature a social animal; an individual who is unsocial naturally and not
accidentally is either beneath our notice or more than human. Society is something that
precedes the individual. Anyone who either cannot lead the common life or is so self-
sufficient as not to need to, and therefore does not partake of society, is either a beast or
a god.

In this sense, in spite of the fact that animals are endowed with certain social
abilities, those held by humans are of a different nature. Though sharing the idea
that sociality represents a peculiar trait of human nature, in this article, we aim to
probe the biology of human social relations by defining them in continuity with
the capacities of other animals. For this purpose, we will make reference to the
debate concerning the nature and the mechanisms underlying social experience in a
phylogenetic perspective.
From an evolutionary point of view, a quite common consideration is that
sociality has been selected because it promoted the organism's fitness by weakening
conflicts among individuals (e.g., Tomasello 1999 , 2009 ). According to many
theories, eusociality—namely, the highest form of social organization characterized
by hierarchical social groups—functions as a tool that minimizes conflicts (Sapolsky