Language, Interaction and Frontotemporal Dementia - Reverse Engineering the Social Mind - Andrea W. Mates
Dispassionate Heuristic Rationality Fails to Sustain Social Relationships
Language, Interaction and Frontotemporal Dementia - Reverse Engineering the Social Mind - Andrea W. Mates
Alan Page Fiske
UCLA
Description
This chapter proposes three interconnected theses. The first is that the behavioral variant of frontotemporal dementia is the result of loss of social motives and moral emotions, while other non-social motives and emotions and most other components of cognition remain intact. The second thesis is that the heuristics and biases of human reasoning make it impossible to sustain meaningful social relationships in the absence of social motives and moral emotions. Social motives and moral emotions are adaptations that evolved because they enable people to sustain important relationships. Studies of the conversations of FTD patients, together with participant observation, demonstrate what happens when social motives and moral emotions fade away. The analyses of the neurobiology of these patients reveals that intrinsically motivated relationships cease to function when the right orbitofrontal cortex and right temporal pole degenerate.