Constant, A; Ramstead, MJD; Veissière, SPL; Friston, K; (2019) Regimes of Expectations: An Active Inference Model of Social Conformity and Human Decision Making. Frontiers in Neuroscience , 10 , Article 679. 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00679.

Preview

Text Friston_Regimes of Expectations. An Active Inference Model of Social Conformity and Human Decision Making_VoR.pdf - Published Version Download (3MB) | Preview

Abstract

How do humans come to acquire shared expectations about how they ought to behave in distinct normalized social settings? This paper offers a normative framework to answer this question. We introduce the computational construct of ‘deontic value’ – based on active inference and Markov decision processes – to formalize conceptions of social conformity and human decision-making. Deontic value is an attribute of choices, behaviors, or action sequences that inherit directly from deontic cues in our econiche (e.g., red traffic lights); namely, cues that denote an obligatory social rule. Crucially, the prosocial aspect of deontic value rests upon a particular form of circular causality: deontic cues exist in the environment in virtue of the environment being modified by repeated actions, while action itself is contingent upon the deontic value of environmental cues. We argue that this construction of deontic cues enables the epistemic (i.e., information-seeking) and pragmatic (i.e., goal- seeking) values of any behavior to be ‘cached’ or ‘outsourced’ to the environment, where the environment effectively ‘learns’ about the behavior of its denizens. We describe the process whereby this particular aspect of value enables learning of habitual behavior over neurodevelopmental and transgenerational timescales.

Download activity - last month

Export as CSVXMLJSON

Download activity - last 12 months

Export as CSVXMLJSON

Downloads by country - last 12 months

Export as XMLJSONCSV

Archive Staff Only

View Item