So is it all just biology? Our Social networks and underlying neural mechanisms

When I hear about empirical social and psychological studies, I always like to think that it has a neural implication. It allows me to think that human can at some level of research by truly understood, but of coruse we all know that’s not possible. Last semester I got involved in a field called neuroeconomics. It combines the main theories of decision making in psychology and economics with neuroimaging to hopefully make sense of what we do. There is some progress albeit quite slow, especially about decisions pertaining to risk and uncertainty, but I think we are finally in the right direction. We need to "aggregate our fields of knowledge." Please see my wiki article (yep.. doing my aggregation part!) .

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroeconomics

Throughout this semester, the amazing blend of social and psychological theory kept me always wondering and reexamining the nature of my reality (networks, homophily, diversity, contagion, small worlds, weak ties, polarization, cascades, collective aggregation,..). But more importantly, my second question was, as always, is there a biological basis for this. There is actually research ongoing right here at NU trying to ask this very question. The results were published in Nature Neuroscience.

http://www.northeastern.edu/news/stories/2011/01/social_brain.html.

I also later found it published in my favorite psychology today.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/choke/201102/when-it-comes-our-social-networks-brain-size-matters

The basic finding is that the volume of a brain structure called the amygdala was found to be correlated with the size of one’s social network . It was known that primates who live in larger social groups have larger amygdalas, and now this has been confirmed in humans.

They gathered the network data similar to many studies we read in class, by asking particiapnts about their contacts, how strong they are and to what groups they belong. They found the same results even after controlling for brain and body size. Of course this brings the question of causation. Is it the amygdala that is causing the large social network, or is it the later enlarging the amygdala?

I like how this ties to what Christakis proposed at the beginning of his book, and how our location in the network affects us, but we also affect our network.

I wonder if we can answer many of the intriguing concepts in this course with similar studies.

-Why do some people have more weak ties than others?

-are some people more prone to social cascades?

-can certain groups be genetically inclined to polarization

-Why do some ideas/behaviors diffuse through networks while others don’t?

There might already be answers out there for these that I’m not aware of, and there is always the possibility that some things just can’t put be tested in a lab, and so we might never know the causality. In either case, it keeps me wondering, and I enjoy that!