Читать книгу Social Psychology - Daniel W. Barrett - Страница 95

By now the importance of the studying the brain for understanding social behavior should be clear. As appealing and important as social neuroscience is, one can, however, be easily seduced by the ahhh! factor and captivated by the beauty and power of these powerful technologies (Satel & Lilienfeld, 2013). In fact, we may even be tempted to reduce social behavior to its brain biology and point to a particularly vivid region on a multicolored, three-dimensional brain image and claim there it is, the root of prejudice (or some other social behavior)! However, the brain processes that occur during social behavior are just one component of a much larger social psychological explanatory framework with multiple levels of analysis. In other words, we cannot even come close to an adequate understanding of social behavior if we engage in such reductivism—which is the assumption that we need only study the brain to understand the causes of social behavior. Many prominent social neuroscientists have argued instead the importance of examining social behavior from multiple perspectives (Decety & Cacioppo, 2011; Lieberman, 2010). The unique contributions of social neuroscience to our understanding of specific social behaviors are important, but they are only part of the story. Indeed, social neuroscience, in addition to deepening our understanding of social behaviors, is highly relevant to the six fundamental questions of human existence.