Adopted utility calculus: Origins of a concept of social affiliation

To successfully navigate their social world, humans need to understand and map enduring relationships between people: we need a concept of social affiliation. Here I propose that our initial concept of social affiliation, available to human infants, is based on the extent to which one individual consistently takes on the goals and needs of another. This proposal grounds affiliation in intuitive psychology, as formalized in the naive utility calculus model. A concept of affiliation based on interpersonal utility adoption can account for findings from studies of infants’ reasoning about imitation, similarity, helpful and fair individuals, “ritual” behaviors, and social groups, without the need for additional innate mechanisms such as a coalitional psychology, moral sense, or general preference for similar others. I identify further tests of this proposal, and also discuss how it is likely to be relevant to social reasoning and learning across the lifespan.