The Neurosociology of Reward Release, Repetition, and Social Emergence

Abstract

The neurosciences have identified three different patterns of reward release in the human body. The three patterns revolve around what to do with repeated attractive stimuli and arouser variety. These patterns are associated with three human social structures not seen in other primate species—religion, ascriptive inequality, and serial novelty in economic production. This association is not coincidental. The emergence of these three social structures is based in part on a common underlying dynamic in which humans take advantage of these reward release patterns to create special packages of stimuli that are able to trigger yet more rewards from the body. There is a social evolutionary sequence in the emergence of these social structures.