Articles about Social Cognition

Adolphs, R. (2003).Cognitive Neuroscience of Human Social Behaviour.Download Cognitive Neuroscience of Human Social Behaviour. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 4(3), 165–178. Adolphs, R. (2009). The social brain: neural basis of social knowledge + Download The social brain: neural basis of social knowledge. Annual Review of Psychology, 60, 693-716. Amodio, D. M. (2014). The neuroscience of prejudice and stereotyping + Download The neuroscience of prejudice and stereotyping. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 15(10), 670–682.

Social Brain Hypothesis

In primates: size of frontal lobe correlates with size of social networks

• Humans have ca 150 meaningful relationships

  • Correlations within e.g. amygdala

Perceiving others

Recognizing faces

• The core face system

  • Consists of:

    • Occipital face area

      • Low-level perceptual attributes - recognizing a face as a face

    • Fusiform face area

      • Face identity, regardless of low-level features

    • Superior temporal sulcus

      • Changeable aspects of face - e.g. mimics

  • Interacts with:

    • Other brain regions forming “the extended system” - to extract meaning from faces

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Effects of Expertise in the FFA

• The FFA has been suggested to be an area for visual expertise

  • Comprising faces in humans, but can also extend to experize (e.g. in birds)

    • Meaning that activation in FFA correlates with being able to discriminate between indviduals/objects if you are “an expert” in that field

Judging others

Trustworthiness

• Judgements of trustworthiness can be made extremely quickly - after 100ms

  • Ratings after only seeing a face for 100ms are similar to ratings when seeing the picture for a long while

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• Amygdala is involved in judgements of trustworthiness

  • When participants do a task unrelated to trustworthines - e.g. sorting faces into gender - bilateral amygdala is activated by less trustworthy faces (as they were later asked to divide the faces into)

  • Patients with amygdala damage have impaired judgements of trustworthiness

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Can faces decide elections?

• Experiment:

  • Not knowing the candidates, were asked to judge the candidates’ trustworthiness when seing the face for 1s

    • The answers correlated with/predicted the outcome of the election

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Baby-face bias

• Round, youthful, soft faces are seen as naive and innocent, and clumsy

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Beauty-is-good stereotype

• Beautiful people are seen as more intelligent, warm, trustworthy and morally good

• Signals in the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and the insula correlates perceived goodness and attractiveness

  • OFC: more active when perceiving faces judged as more beautiful + more active when perceiving goodness

  • Insula: more active when perceiving a face as ugly + more active when perceiving badness - a sort of “stress/pain” reaction in the brain

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PFC in evaluation - changing the schema of how you perceive a person

• Orbitofrontal prefronal cortex

  • Predict reward and value

    • First impression determining what a person means for you in terms of reward

• Ventromedial prefrontal cortex

  • Interprets nonverbal behavior and social value outcomes

    • Intepreting what is happening in the moment

• Dorsomedial prefrontal cortex

  • Updates knowledge and impressions of others

    • Updating how you perceive the person in relation to the initial prediction - influencing how you perceive the person in future encounters

      • Inhibiting or enhancing activity in the vmPFC

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Point displays

• Just by looking at a persons’ point-walkers, you can determine their emotion, gender, sexual orientation, weight and identity (for acuaintances)

Feeling & understanding others

Empathy

• What it is:

  • An affective state, caused by sharing of the emotions or sensory states of another person - isomorphic with other’s state, but in an embodied manner

• Often tested by watching others receive painful stimuli

  • Since pain is such a universal experience

• Insula involved in empathy

  • Interoception - monitoring the state of the body

  • Used to construct how we would feel in a situation

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Theory of Mind (ToM)

• Cognitively infering the state of other’s minds

• Aka - mentalizing or perspective taking

• Tested in “false belief tasks”

• Absent in very young children - but developed at ca 4-6 years

  

• Neural correlates of empathy & ToM

  • Empathy - orange

    • Anterior cingulate cortex (ACC)

    • Anterior insula

    • Secondary somatosensorial cortex

  • ToM - green

    • Medial frontal cortex

    • Temporo-parietal junction

    • Superior temporal sulcus

    • Temporal pole

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Mirror Neurons

• Some neurons in premotor cortex responds similarly to executing and observing an action

• Perception-action-coupling model

  • By mirroring actions, we can build up a representation of their experience, and then infer reasond and intentions behind the action

• Most convincingly shown in monkeys

Reducing social complexity

Ingroups and Outgroups

• Ingroups - “those like me”

• Outgroups - “those unlike me”

• Can be formed by any size and criterion

• Minimal group paradigm:

  • Arbitrary group assignment in experiments

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Effects of groups

• Entativity/similarity

  • Outgroup perceived as more homogenous

• Face memory

  • Worse memory for outgroup faces - e.g. other race effect

• Empathy

  • Reduced neural reaction and less helping behavior for outgroup

• Social support

  • More likely to allocate rewards to ingroup

• Schadenfreude

  • Relishing on other’s misfortune

• Predictions

  • Stereotypes and prejudice

• Memory

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Stereotypes and prejudice

• Stereotypes:

  • Generalized characteristics ascribed to a social group

  • Dual-process theory of stereotypes

    • Stereotype activation

      • Thinking of traits and characteristics that are commonly associated with a particular social group

      • Automatic and difficult to inhibit and control

    • Stereotype application

      • Evaluations, judgements, and behaviors toward people based on the activated stereotypes

      • More controlled and can be inhibited

• Prejudices

  • Negative evaluations and prejudgements of others in accordance with stereotypes

  • Self-regulatory processes

    • Despite persistence of stereotypes and prejudices in society, people frequently engage in self-regulatory processes to mitigate the effects of bias on their behavior

  • Examples of prejudice playing out

    • Misclassification of tools as gun

      • More often get misclassified when preceded by a black face

      • Bias can be implicit! - tested by IAT

• Prejudice network

  • Affective, wuick emotional judgements

  • Consists of:

    • Amygdala, striatum and OFC

      • Involved in the initial emotional evaluation response

    • Insula

      • More strongly activated in response to ingroups than outgroups (empathy)

    • vmPFC

      • More engaged towards ingroup than outgroup members (mentalizing and perspective taking)

• Stereotype network

  • More cogntive and slow - so more top-down involvement

  • Constists of:

    • Anterior Temporal Lobe (ATL), temporal poles

      • Representing stereotype-related knowledge

      • The knowledge is activated and biases first impression formation in the brain

    • Lateral PFC

      • Associated with goal representation and response inhibition - controls the application of stereotypes to behavior

• Regulation network

  • Reasoning and rationality

  • Consists of:

    • Anterior cingulate cortex (ACC)

      • Involved in the detection of conflict between biased tendencies and internal goals or external cues

    • Medial PFC

      • Involved in perspective taking and mentalizing - providing further representation of interpersonal cues to guide regulatory processing

    • dlPFC

      • Selects appropriate responses and the inappropriate responses are inhibited by the dorsal inferior frontal gyrus

      • Stereotypes and prejudices are then not implemented in behavior

        

        
        

• Antidotes

  • Focusing on other group memberships

    • E.g. when making university affiliation more salient than race —> mitigation of other race effect

  • Moral exemplar intervention

    • Showing people highly moral outgroup members - e.g. risking their lives to save a member of the persons watching’s ingroup - leading to long term change in perception of the outgroup

  • Intergroup contract & focusing on other identities

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Groups in our memories

Better encoding in ingroup

• Group reference effect

  • Material is remembered better when encoded in reference to ingroup

  • Ingroup > outgroup - especially for positive traits

  • Potentially stronger when ingroup identification is stronger

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More additions to established memories in ingroup

• Social contagion

  • When we discuss an event with others, we are more likely to unconsciously incorporate wrong details in the updated version of the event if they were brought forward in the discussion by ingroup rather than outgroup members

    • - meaning that we trust ingroup members more

• Memory conformity

  • Same effect in a more forensic literature - conforming to the ingroup members recollection because of social factors and not an unconsciously adoption of the recollection

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More forgetting of unmentioned elements in ingroup

• Socially shared retrieval-induced forgetting

  • Listening to somebody else retrieving some of the learned material, but not retrieving som relevant elements - resulting in forgetting of the information not being retrieved

  • E.g. Coman et al., (2014)

    • US-american participants forget unmentioned justifications of atrocoties of Afghan solders, but not of US soldiers

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Collective memories

• Individuals’ personal memories of events are also shared across a community - a shared experience

• Narrative templates

  • Schematic narrative templates transcending events form collective memory - influencing retelling of a historical event

    • E.g. russian “expulsion of foreigners” narrative

      • First, Russia as peaceful

      • Then, foreign enemy attacks without provocation

      • Then, RU almost loses everything in defeat

      • At last, heroism and against all odds triumphs

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Are worse memories always bad?

• Sharing memories fulfils social function

• Having memories of certain events indicates group membership

• Shared stories, narratives, and myths can increase group cohesion