The social life of Pavlovian learning

This article proposes that Pavlovian learning contributes to the formation and stabilization of social beliefs and collective commitments. We argue that associative processes linking reward and threat to social cues shape how beliefs acquire affective salience, motivational persistence, and resistance to revision. Within this framework, social cognition is conceptualized not as a purely inferential process, but as one constrained by affective learning mechanisms operating across distributed neural systems involved in reward, threat processing, and contextual regulation. Appetitive learning may promote affiliation and shared expectations, whereas threat-related learning may stabilize existing commitments by rendering alternative interpretations affectively aversive or psychologically unsafe. We further suggest that the integration of Pavlovian signals within expanded prefrontal networks allows associative learning processes to influence higher-order social representations, including norms, identities, and group affiliations. Reconsidering social cognition through the lens of associative learning may help bridge affective neuroscience, social neuroscience, and contemporary models of belief persistence and social behaviour.