An Interdisciplinary Approach to Reducing Disparities in Social Captial

社会、行为和经济科学司提供博士后研究奖学金，为最近的博士毕业生提供获得额外培训的机会，在知名科学家的赞助下获得研究经验，并扩大他们在本科和研究生训练之外的科学视野。博士后奖学金的进一步设计是为了帮助新科学家指导他们跨越传统学科线的研究工作，并利用他们自己独特的研究资源、地点和设施，包括在国外的研究地点。这个博士后奖学金奖励支持一个新兴的跨学科学者，以扩大研究员的经验超越传统的学科界限，专注于一个广泛感兴趣和重要的关键心理问题。该研究员将研究人们如何发展社会资本——通过与其他人的关系收集到的可用资源。社会资本的例子包括贷款、工作、时间和建议。社会资本为个人提供了至关重要的优势，但经济上处于不利地位的人往往也难以获得社会资本，限制了他们的社会流动性。人们对导致这些差异的心理过程知之甚少。在这项工作中，研究员将产生一个社会资本不平等的实验室模型，并测试一种干预措施来增加公平的社会资本。在此过程中，本研究将借鉴社会心理学、认知神经科学和社会学，跨越传统学科界限，描述人们如何相互了解和发展社会资本。通过描述和改善社会资本的差异，该提案可能会给个人和整个社会带来好处。通过发展跨学科的方法，该项目为几个领域提供了新的见解，促进了科学进步。这个项目在几个学科的交叉点上发展了一个子领域：工具性社会学习，或研究人们如何通过互动了解他人。这一子领域可以为其母领域认知神经科学和社会心理学提供新的见解，并可以将个体心理学与社会学模式联系起来。首先，拟议的工作将测试人们如何在互动中形成彼此的印象，以及互动如何影响后来帮助他人的决定。通过研究人们如何通过积极的经验了解他人，这个项目将印象形成与决策和基于奖励的学习的神经模型联系起来。其次，拟议的工作强调了这样一个事实，即除了了解他人给自己带来的物质利益外，人们还可以通过体验他人有价值的社会品质（如慷慨）来学习。第三，目前的建议将测试社会心理干预是否会影响基于奖励的学习，这通常是在孤立的社会背景下研究的。最后，这些发现将把个人学习和决策的心理过程与社会资本的广泛社会学模式联系起来，将社会认知“向下”与学习的神经模型联系起来，将“向上”与社会层面的结果联系起来。拟议中的研究将社会资本的差异与个人通过互动了解彼此的方式联系起来，研究人们如何建立能够促进互惠的社会关系。具体来说，目前的研究测试了人们是否会与那些通过互动给他们带来物质回报的人进行更多的回报，而不是那些表现出积极性格特征和意图的人（实验1和2）。此外，本研究还测试了社会心理干预（共情心态）对基于奖励的学习模式的影响（实验3）。为了宣传这项研究的影响，研究员将通过期刊和会议向科学界传播研究结果，并通过科学传播渠道向公众传播研究结果。为了促进跨学科科学的发展，该研究员将为社会心理学研究人员创造定量工具，以使用社会学习和决策的计算模型。

The Directorate of Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences offers postdoctoral research fellowships to provide opportunities for recent doctoral graduates to obtain additional training, to gain research experience under the sponsorship of established scientists, and to broaden their scientific horizons beyond their undergraduate and graduate training. Postdoctoral fellowships are further designed to assist new scientists to direct their research efforts across traditional disciplinary lines and to avail themselves of unique research resources, sites, and facilities, including at foreign locations. This postdoctoral fellowship award supports a rising interdisciplinary scholar in order to expand the Fellow's experience beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries and focus on a key psychological problem of broad interest and importance. The Fellow will study how people develop social capital-the collected resources available through relationships with other people. Examples of social capital include loans, jobs, time, and advice. Social capital proffers crucial advantages to individuals, but economically disadvantaged people often also suffer from poor access to social capital, limiting their social mobility. Little is known about psychological processes that lead to these disparities. In this work, the fellow will generate a laboratory model of social capital inequality, and test an intervention to increase equitable social capital. In doing so, this research will draw from social psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and sociology, crossing traditional disciplinary lines to characterize how people learn about one another and develop social capital. By characterizing and ameliorating disparities in social capital, the proposal may offer benefits to individuals and society as a whole. By developing an interdisciplinary approach, this project offers new insights to several fields, promoting scientific progress. This project develops a subfield at the intersection of several disciplines: instrumental social learning, or the study of how people learn about others through interaction. This subfield can offer new insights to its parent fields of cognitive neuroscience and social psychology, and can link individual psychology to sociological patterns. First, the proposed work will test how people form impressions of one another during interaction and how interactions influence later decisions to help others. By examining how people learn about others through active experience, this project links impression formation to decision-making and to neural models of reward-based learning. Second, the proposed work highlights the fact that people learn by experiencing the valuable social qualities of other people, such as generosity, in addition to learning about material benefits others bring to the self. Third, the present proposal will test whether social psychological interventions shape reward-based learning, which has most often been studied in isolation of social context. Finally, these findings would tie psychological processes of learning and decision-making within individuals to broad sociological patterns of social capital, linking social cognition "down" to neural models of learning and "up" to societal-level outcomes. The proposed research links disparities in social capital to the way in which individuals learn about one another through interaction, examining how people build social ties that can promote reciprocity. Specifically, the current research tests whether people reciprocate more with others who bring them material rewards through interaction, above and beyond those who display positive character traits and intentions (Experiments 1 and 2). In addition, the present proposal tests a social psychological intervention (empathic mindsets) to shape patterns of reward-based learning (Experiment 3). To propagate the impact of this research, the Fellow will disseminate findings to the scientific community through journals and conferences, and to the public through science communication outlets. To facilitate the development of interdisciplinary science, the Fellow will create quantitative tools for researchers in social psychology to use computational models of social learning and decision-making.