CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 202Embodied and Extended CognitionEvolutionary Psychology and Human BehaviorChild and Animal Learning Development

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 345 of the 349 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

The sense of should: A biologically-based framework for modeling social pressure

Open access
Theriault, Jordan E., Young, Liane, Barrett, Lisa Feldman·2021·Physics of Life Reviews
DOI 10.1016/j.plrev.2020.01.004PMC PMC8645214

Published version of a preprint

Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

What is social pressure, and how could it be adaptive to conform to others' expectations? Existing accounts highlight the importance of reputation and social sanctions. Yet, conformist behavior is multiply determined: sometimes, a person desires social regard, but at other times she feels obligated to behave a certain way, regardless of any reputational benefit-i.e. she feels a sense of should. We develop a formal model of this sense of should, beginning from a minimal set of biological premises: that the brain is predictive, that prediction error has a metabolic cost, and that metabolic costs are prospectively avoided. It follows that unpredictable environments impose metabolic costs, and in social environments these costs can be reduced by conforming to others' expectations. We elaborate on a sense of should's benefits and subjective experience, its likely developmental trajectory, and its relation to embodied mental inference. From this individualistic metabolic strategy, the emergent dynamics unify social phenomenon ranging from status quo biases, to communication and motivated cognition. We offer new solutions to long-studied problems (e.g. altruistic behavior), and show how compliance with arbitrary social practices is compelled without explicit sanctions. Social pressure may provide a foundation in individuals on which societies can be built.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1016/j.plrev.2020.01.004

Cites

345 of 345 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

4 of the 349 references couldn’t be matched to a known paper.

Research works printed but not linked: 4

  1. Kant, 2003, The critique of pure reason, Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
  2. Moreno, 2003, From basic adaptivity to early mind: the origin and evolution of cognitive capacities, Evol Cogn, 9, 12
  3. Moreno, 2015, vol. 12
  4. Pavlov, 2018, Nobel lecture: physiology of digestion, NobelPrize.Org

Cited by

Sorted by citations

See all 202

Related

See all

Metadata

Authors
Theriault, J. E., Young, L., & Barrett, L. F.
Affiliations
  • Northeastern University (US)
  • Boston College (US)
Corresponding author
Theriault, Jordan E.
ORCID
Venue
Physics of Life Reviews
Publisher
Elsevier BV
Published
2021-03
Volume
36
Pages
100-136
ISSN
1571-0645 (ISSN-L)
DOI
10.1016/j.plrev.2020.01.004
PMC
PMC8645214
OpenAlex
W3002114662
Cited by
201
References
349
Citations by year
2026: 13 · 2025: 34 · 2024: 30 · 2023: 30 · 2022: 29 · 2021: 18
FWCI
4.12
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Licence
Locations
  • Physics of Life Reviews (publishedVersion)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
  • PubMed Central (acceptedVersion)
  • PsyArXiv (OSF Preprints) (submittedVersion)
  • PsyArXiv (OSF Preprints) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
Funders
National Institutes of Health
Topics
  • Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Embodied and Extended Cognition
  • Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior
  • Social Sciences › Psychology › Developmental and Educational Psychology › Child and Animal Learning Development
Keywords
social pressure, conformity, social expectations, metabolic cost, prediction error, predictive brain, social sanctions, reputation, status quo bias, motivated cognition, altruism
MeSH terms
Altruism, Brain, Cognition, Emotions, Female, Humans, Interpersonal Relations, Social Behavior

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review