The Price of Being Social: The Role of Emotions in Feeding and Minimizing Conflicts - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 100

1999 ): in this view, hierarchical constraints contain the natural competitive instincts.
This fact has a very important consequence, that is, long-term cooperation requites
individuals in survival terms. Specifically, individuals living in a group gain benefits
from cooperating in various activities, for instance, in locating food, rearing
offspring, or identifying predators (Aureli and de Waal 2000 ). These benefits explain
the sacrifice of individual interests in favor of a collective interest.
Nevertheless, group life also entails costs. Living in close proximity to other
members of the same species implies the simultaneous exploitation of resources,
the coordination of activities, the negotiation of the status of group members, and
several conditions that make competition and clashes of interests likely (Aureli and
de Waal 2000 ). In this way, social stratification may be a source of new conflicts.
To this extent, in order to preserve the benefits of group living, individuals need to
maintain a balance between cooperative components and competitive components
inherent to the organism—actually, in evolutionary terms, the organism's survival,
namely, the selfish interests, matters above all.
A key question concerning this topic is the following: which cognitive mech-
anisms lead the capacity of keeping this balance? Traditionally, and intuitively, a
prevalent theoretical frame of reference has claimed that rational argumentation
plays the leading role in negotiation. More generally, the overriding function of
rational argumentation has been thought to deal with all high mental capacities,
especially including negotiation among others. For instance, Aristotle in Ethics
regards emotion with suspicion comparing it to the foolish slave and conceiving
reason as the wise master. This heavy dichotomy between rationality and feeling to
the detriment of the latter has been in part overcome; a solid tradition established
by Darwin ( 1872 ) underlines the crucial role of emotions in interactional cohe-
siveness (Gratch et al. 2006 ; Shamay-Tsoory et al. 2002 ) and conflict management
(Seehausen et al. 2014 ) as forces that bind and drive social groups. In particular, the
embodied perspective (e.g., Iacoboni 2008 ; Rizzolatti et al. 2004 ) has emphasized
the constitutive link between emotions and the construction of a “we-centric space”
(Gallese 2009 ). Specifically, a mechanism of emotional resonance allows people
to capture each other's mental world in a direct way, representing a biological
immediate social glue.
A heavy evidence consistent with the hypothesis that emotions are preconditions
of social abilities comes by some studies that investigate emotions in psychopatho-
logical conditions. The works of Jonathan Cole ( 1998 ) on subjects with Mobius
syndrome have shown the interrelation between the ability of expressing and
comprehending emotional states and the development of social interactions. This
congenital form of facial paralysis makes people unable to express their emotions
through their face; in consequence of this impairment, the subjects do not live a
normal social life. Some of them report the feeling of being spectators rather than
protagonists of their social experiences. Moreover, Shamay-Tsoory and colleagues
( 2002 ) have suggested that subjects with ASD exhibit difficulties in the emotional
field that in turn might be a cause of their social impairment.
This intertwined relation between sociality and emotions appears to be
widespread in the animal kingdom. In fact, glancing at the phylogenesis, an