ReviewPhysics of life reviews2021
The sense of should: A biologically-based framework for modeling social pressure.
Review in Physics of life reviews, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 47 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
47 citing papers in PubMed.
- Failing Others' Expectations: Negative Emotions and Behavior Change in Daily Life.Affective science · 2026Article
- Impression management in distributive justice: balancing fairness and social perception.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Expectations of Reciprocal Generosity Are Specific to Equal Relationships.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2026Article
- Review
- Spontaneous fluctuations in global connectivity reflect transitions between states of high and low prediction error.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Neural Processes Linking Interoception to Moral Preferences Aligned with Group Consensus.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Neural representations in MPFC and insula encode individual differences in estimating others' preferences.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2025Article
- Social contexts are associated with higher emotional awareness than nonsocial contexts: Evidence in a sample of people with and without major depressive disorder.Emotion (Washington, D.C.) · 2025Article
- Moral emotions and auditory verbal hallucinations in schizophrenia.Schizophrenia (Heidelberg, Germany) · 2025Review
- An Active-Inference Approach to Second-Person Neuroscience.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2024Review
- Interoception in pregnancy: Implications for peripartum depression.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2024Review
- The "Dark Side" of Community Ties: Collective Action and Lynching in Mexico.American sociological review · 2024Article
- In search of animal normativity: a framework for studying social norms in non-human animals.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2024Article
- Consensus-building conversation leads to neural alignment.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Updating beliefs about pain following advice: Trustworthiness of social advice predicts pain expectations and experience.Cognition · 2024Article
- Understanding the cognitive and neuroimaging bases underlying the detrimental impact of sleep deprivation on reciprocity.iScience · 2024Article
- Human and nonhuman norms: a dimensional framework.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- The psychological, computational, and neural foundations of indebtedness.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Distinguishing fast change in social norms and slow change in personal norms in cooperative decision-making.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Rethinking Norm Psychology.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2024Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
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.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.