The University of Chicago
Department of Psychology
5848 South University Avenue
Chicago, IL, 60637
Office Phone: (773) 702-1962
Fax: (773) 702-4580
Office: 406 Kelly Hall
Labs: BPSB 422A
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John T. Cacioppo
Position
Tiffany & Margaret Blake
Distinguished Service Professor
Director, Center for Cognitive
and Social Neuroscience
Director, Arete Initiative of the Office of the
Vice President for Research & National Laboratories
Field Specialties
Social Neuroscience
Social Isolation & Connection
Affect, Attitudes, and Emotion
Neuroeconomics
Research
As a social species, humans create emergent organizations beyond the individual - structues that range from dyads, families, and groups to cities, civilizations, and international alliances. These emergent structures evolved hand in hand with genetic, neural, and hormonal mechanisms to support them because the consequent social behaviors helped humans survive, reproduce, and care for offspring sufficiently long that they too survived to reproduce. Cacioppo's research is focused on understanding these mechanisms and their effect on the mind, behavior, and health - an approach he and Gary Berntson termed social neuroscience (Cacioppo & Berntson, 1992, 2004; Cacioppo et al., 2000, 2002). There have been important advances in our understanding of the links between the mind, brain, and behavior over the past century, but it has been conventional to conceptualize individuals as somewhat isolated units of analysis. As a social species, however, humans create emergent organizations beyond the individual - structures that range from dyads, families, and groups to cities, civilizations, and cultures. These emergent structures evolved hand in hand with neural and hormonal mechanisms to support them because the consequent social behaviors helped these organisms survive, reproduce, and care for offspring sufficiently long that they too survived to reproduce. Social neuroscience represents an interdisciplinary approach devoted to understanding how biological systems implement social processes and behavior and to using biological concepts and methods to inform and refine theories of social processes and behavior. We use a variety of methods in our research, including functional magnetic resonance (fMRI), standard and high density electroencephalography and event-related brain potentials, psychophysiological assessments, and neuroendocrine and immune assays, and in collaboration with colleagues we also have begun to bring quantitative genetics to bear on our research questions.
To better understand the human need for social connection, we are investigating how social isolation or perceived social isolation (loneliness) gets under the skin to affect social cognition and emotions, personality processes, brain, biology, and health (e.g., Cacioppo & Patrick, 2008; Hawkley & Cacioppo, 2008). Prospective studies have revealed that loneliness is a major risk factor for psychological disturbances and for broad-based morbidity and mortality, yet the behavioral, psychological, and biological mechanisms are not well understood. A meta-analysis of the literature on social support and physiology revealed that feelings of social isolation in adults were related to elevated blood pressure and sympathetic tonus. In follow-up studies of loneliness in young adults, Cacioppo and colleagues found that individuals who were chronically lonely were characterized by elevated mean salivary cortisol level across the course of a normal day, suggesting elevated activation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocorticol axis. Loneliness was unrelated to health behaviors (e.g., smoking, exercise, alcohol consumption) in this sample of young adults but loneliness was related to behavioral styles associated with cardiovascular disease (e.g., hostility, pessimism, insecure attachments and interactions with others) and inferior sleep (e.g., less efficient sleep, more micro-awakenings, feelings of sleepiness and fatigue during the day). Importantly, an experimental study in which loneliness was manipulated and longitudinal studies using cross-lag panel analyses suggests that an individual’s construal of their social relationships, and not invariant individual differences per se, are underlying these effects.
The past decade has even seen a virtual explosion of research on the neural networks underlying human emotions and, for the most part quite separately, on the neural substrates underlying social perception, reasoning, and behavior. Less attention has been devoted to the relationship between these neural systems, however, despite the essential role emotions play in social development and discourse, however. We have conceptualized the affect system as shaped by the hammer and chisel of adaptation and natural selection. Physical limitations constrain behavioral expressions and incline behavioral predispositions toward a bipolar (good/bad; approach/withdraw) organization, but these limiting conditions lose their power at the level of underlying mechanisms. According to the model of evaluative space (Cacioppo & Berntson, 1994; Cacioppo et al., 2005), the common metric governing approach/withdrawal is generally a single dimension at response stages which itself is the consequence of multiple operations, such as the activation function for positivity (appetition) and the activation function negativity (aversion), at earlier affective processing stages. This formulation has revealed features and consequences of affective processing that were not discernible using traditional conceptualizations or measures. Current research on this topic focuses on individual differences in affective processing, and the neural substrates of affective and socioemotional processing.
In addition, two cornerstones of classic economic theory are the assumptions that individuals are rational decision makers and individuals have purely self-regarding preferences. These assumptions fly in the face of most psychological theories, where individuals are depicted as characterized by bounded rationality if not also by bounded self-interests. Our theoretical and empirical work has focused on both, and of late particularly the latter. Imagine a scenario in which someone approaches you to offer $100 that was money you had already spent. Perhaps spending this money was not even originally your choice-you had to spend the money for a tax or a fee or being overcharged. Imagine the person approaching you is a known public figure. Under these circumstances, who would not accept the return of their own money? It appears intuitive that no one would be so irrational as to reject the money. Certainly Bill Frist, the Senate Republican Majority leader in 2006, thought that taxpayers would readily accept a $100 "rebate", given the soaring price of gas. This was an offer to return $100 to taxpayers with no strings attached. The response was completely unexpected by Senator Frist: Senators received direct feedback from taxpayers rejecting the offer. Constituents were angry and insulted by the offer of $100. In some sense, the failed Senate Republican proposal has the structure of a simple game that is used in behavioral economics research, the ultimatum game. In this game, two players are apprised of the size of a pot of money. One player (the Allocator) makes an offer about how to split the pot. The other player (the Responder) decides whether to reject or accept the offer. If the offer is accepted, both players get their respective parts of the pot. If the offer is rejected, neither player gets anything. From the perspective of a rationalist economist, the best offer for the Allocator is a penny (or the smallest offer possible) regardless of the size of the pot and the Responder should accept this offer. Why give up a penny and get nothing when you can keep a penny? However, people do not usually act in this fashion. In general, most Allocators make much larger (and therefore irrational) offers than predicted and Responders reject offers that seem insulting relative to some standard of fairness. Furthermore, brain imaging studies indicate that the brain system involved in reward is activated when Responders (in a similar game) spend money to punish unfair partners. This finding has been interpreted as signifying "altruistic punishment," meaning that people are deriving personal pleasure from foregoing their rational self-interests and pursuing what is in the interest of the collective. That is, the behavioral and neuroimaging evidence suggest the operation of bounded rationality and for bounded self-interests.
Not all individuals respond similarly, of course. Understanding the relationship between psychological processes and biological variation in neural mechanisms provides an important data source for theory construction and theory testing, and understanding these individual differences is essential in the legal domain where courts must address the culpability of non-normative acts. For more than a decade, we have studies individual differences in perceived social isolation (loneliness) because of its implications for bounded self-interests and bounded rationality. Individuals who perceive themselves to be socially isolated are more negative and hostile in social interactions than their counterparts even though the former have a greater desire to connect with others. In a study using the ultimatum game, we sought to determine the extent to which individual differences in perceived isolation affect cooperation after fair versus unfair treatment. Participants played the responder role of the Ultimatum game, which entailed either accepting or rejecting offers of varying levels of fairness. A median split was performed on UCLA Loneliness scale scores to classify participants as high or low in perceived social isolation. Our results showed that participants high and low in perceived isolation accepted comparable numbers of fair offers, but those high in isolation accepted more unfair offers than those low. That is, they appeared more cooperative in response to unfair treatment or, in economic terms, more rational. Given the extant evidence that individuals high in perceived isolation expect to be betrayed and act toward others in a fashion that fulfills this expectation even when treated fairly, it is difficult to accept the interpretation that these individuals are the paragons of homo economicus without considering alternative interpretations. Rather than being more rational, individuals who feel socially isolated (and who are motivated to connect with others) may be willing to incur greater costs to connect socially; and by doing so they may create or enter into more exploitive relationships than those who already feel socially connected. The deeper question being asked in this research is for which individuals, under what conditions, through what specific psychological and neural mechanisms, and with what long term effects does an individual's self-interest succumb to the greater good, and how malleable are these mechanisms by endogenous (e.g., self-regulation) and exogenous (e.g., legal consequences) forces.
Biography
Cacioppo is the Tiffany and Margaret Blake Distinguished Service Professor at The University of Chicago, the Director of the University of Chicago Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience, and the Director of the Arete Initiative at the University of Chicago. He has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Society of Experimental Psychologists, the Society of Experimental Social Psychology, and a Distinguished Member of Psi Chi, and he is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science (Charter Member), the American Psychological Association (Divisions 1, 3, 6, 8, 23, & 38), American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Behavioral Medicine Research, World Innovation Foundation, International Organization of Psychophysiology, Society for Personality and Social Psychology, and Society of Behavioral Medicine. He received the Distinguished Scientific Award for an Early Career Contribution to Psychophysiology, an honorary Doctor of Science degree from Bard College, the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association, the Troland Research Award from the National Academy of Sciences, the Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions to Psychophysiology from the Society for Psychophysiological Research, the Donald Campbell Award from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, the Keynote Speaker at the 2002 Annual Meeting of the Association for Psychological Science, and the Patricia R. Barchas Award from the American Psychosomatic Society. Cacioppo is the former Editor of Psychophysiology and a former Associate Editor of Psychological Review, Perspectives on Psychological Science, and Psychophysiology. He has previously served as President of the Association for Psychological Science, the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, the Society for Psychophysiological Research, and the Society for Consumer Psychology, and he is a past member of the Board of Directors of the Association for Psychological Science, the Ohio State University Research Foundation, the Society for Psychophysiological Research, and the National Advisory Council on Aging of the US Department of Health and Human Services. He is currently a member of the External Scientific Advisory Board for the Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois, an Associate Editor of Social Neuroscience, a member of the MacArthur Foundation Law and Neuroscience Project, a member of the Science Advisory Board of eHarmonyLabs, a member of the Data Monitoring Board of the Health and Retirement Study, Director of the Chicago-Templeton Research Network, and a member of the MacArthur Foundation Aging Society Network.
For copies of selected reprints, click on the tab labeled "Publications" to the right.
