Daniel L. Ames

Taking Another Person's Perspective Increases Self-Referential Neural Processing

The ability to adopt the perspective of another person has been identified as a critical component of social functioning that predicts level of empathic concern for other individuals (Davis, 1983) and level of category-based responding toward out-groups (Galinsky & Moskowitz, 2000). One explanation for these effects holds that in taking another person’s perspective, one comes to treat that person as more ‘‘selflike’’; indeed, the extent to which perceivers describe another person as sharing their own personality attributes increases after they imagine an event from that person’s perspective (Davis, Conklin, Smith, & Luce, 1996). An alternative explanation, however, is that perspective taking might lead only to a shift in non-self-based social-cognitive processes deployed when considering the minds of others (Mitchell, Heatherton, & Macrae, 2002). How exactly does taking another person’s perspective lead to greater overlap between self and other? Recent neuroimaging findings suggest a novel way to test the proposal that perspective taking increases self-based processing of others. Studies have shown that a region of human ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vMPFC) is preferentially engaged by self-referential mentation, such as introspecting about one’s own personality characteristics (Kelley et al., 2002) or one’s attitudes and preferences (Mitchell, Macrae, & Banaji, 2006). Accordingly, to the extent that perspective taking does lead to greater overlap in the cognitive processes engaged by consideration of self and other, activity in vMPFC should differentiate less between self and a person whose perspective has recently been adopted than between self and a person considered from a more distal vantage.

Medial prefrontal cortex predicts intertemporal choice

People often make shortsighted decisions to receive small benefits in the present rather than large benefits in the future, that is, to favor their current selves over their future selves. In two studies using fMRI, we demonstrated that people make such decisions in part because they fail to engage in the same degree of self-referential processing when thinking about their future selves. When participants predicted how much they would enjoy an event in the future, they showed less activity in brain regions associated with introspective self-reference—such as the ventromedial pFC (vMPFC)—than when they predicted how much they would enjoy events in the present. Moreover, the magnitude of vMPFC reduction predicted the extent to which participants made shortsighted monetary decisions several weeks later. In light of recent findings that the vMPFC contributes to the ability to simulate future events from a first-person perspective, these data suggest that shortsighted decisions result in part from a failure to fully imagine the subjective experience of ones future self.

Neural correlates of stereotype application

Recent research has focused on the disparate mechanisms that support the human ability to “mentalize” about the thoughts and feelings of others. One such process may rely on precompiled, semantic beliefs about the characteristics common to members of a social group, that is, on stereotypes; for example, judging that a woman may be more likely than a man to have certain interests or opinions. In the current study, we identified a pattern of neural activity associated with the use of stereotypes to judge another persons psychological characteristics. During fMRI scanning, participants mentalized about the likely responses of a female and male target to a series of questions, some of which were related to gender stereotypes (e.g., “enjoys shopping for new clothes”). Trials on which participants applied a stereotype were segregated from those on which participants avoided stereotype use. The BOLD response in an extensive region of the right frontal cortex differentiated stereotype-applied from -unapplied trials. Moreover, this neural difference was correlated with a behavioral index of gender associations—the Implicit Association Test—administered after scanning. Results suggest that stereotype application may draw on cognitive processes that more generally subserve semantic knowledge about categories.

Intentional Harms Are Worse, Even When They’re Not

People and societies seek to combat harmful events. However, because resources are limited, every wrong righted leaves another wrong left unchecked. Responses must therefore be calibrated to the magnitude of the harm. One underappreciated factor that affects this calibration may be people’s oversensitivity to intent. Across a series of studies, people saw intended harms as worse than unintended harms, even though the two harms were identical. This harm-magnification effect occurred for both subjective and monetary estimates of harm, and it remained when participants were given incentives to be accurate. The effect was fully mediated by blame motivation. People may therefore focus on intentional harms to the neglect of unintentional (but equally damaging) harms.

Contextual alignment of cognitive and neural dynamics

Effective real-world communication requires the alignment of multiple individuals to a common perspective or mental framework. To study how this alignment occurs at the level of the brain, we measured BOLD response during fMRI while participants (n = 24) listened to a series of vignettes either in the presence or absence of a valid contextual cue. The valid contextual cue was necessary to understand the information in each vignette. We then examined where and to what extent the shared valid context led to greater intersubject similarity of neural processing. Regions of the default mode network including posterior cingulate cortex and medial pFC became more aligned when participants shared a valid contextual framework, whereas other regions, including primary sensory cortices, responded to the stimuli reliably regardless of contextual factors. Taken in conjunction with previous research, the present results suggest that default mode regions help the brain to organize incoming verbal information in the context of previous knowledge.

Outcome dependency alters the neural substrates of impression formation

How do people maintain consistent impressions of other people when other people are often inconsistent? The present research addresses this question by combining recent neuroscientific insights with ecologically meaningful behavioral methods. Participants formed impressions of real people whom they met in a personally involving situation. fMRI and supporting behavioral data revealed that outcome dependency (i.e., depending on another person for a desired outcome) alters previously identified neural dynamics of impression formation. Consistent with past research, a functional localizer identified a region of dorsomedial PFC previously linked to social impression formation. In the main task, this ROI revealed the predicted patterns of activity across outcome dependency conditions: greater BOLD response when information confirmed (vs. violated) social expectations if participants were outcome-independent, and the reverse pattern if participants were outcome-dependent. We suggest that, although social perceivers often discount expectancy-disconfirming information as noise, being dependent on another person for a desired outcome focuses impression-formation processing on the most diagnostic information, rather than on the most tractable information.

Perceived intent motivates people to magnify observed harms

Significance This paper examines how detecting harmful intent creates downstream consequences for assessing damage, magnifying its cost. If intentional harms seem worse, society may spend more money on them than on objectively more damaging unintentional harms or on naturally occurring harms. Why might this occur? Various psychological theories identify the cause as motivation; however, the presence of this motivation has been inferred indirectly. Drawing on animal-model research, we present more direct evidence for blame motivation, and discuss how it may help to explain the magnification of intentional harms. This approach acknowledges the nonrational biases in damage estimates and potential policy priorities. Existing moral psychology research commonly explains certain phenomena in terms of a motivation to blame. However, this motivation is not measured directly, but rather is inferred from other measures, such as participants’ judgments of an agent’s blameworthiness. The present paper introduces new methods for assessing this theoretically important motivation, using tools drawn from animal-model research. We test these methods in the context of recent “harm-magnification” research, which shows that people often overestimate the damage caused by intentional (versus unintentional) harms. A preliminary experiment exemplifies this work and also rules out an alternative explanation for earlier harm-magnification results. Exp. 1 asks whether intended harm motivates blame or merely demonstrates the actor’s intrinsic blameworthiness. Consistent with a motivational interpretation, participants freely chose blaming, condemning, and punishing over other appealing tasks in an intentional-harm condition, compared with an unintentional-harm condition. Exp. 2 also measures motivation but with converging indicators of persistence (effort, rate, and duration) in blaming. In addition to their methodological contribution, these studies also illuminate people’s motivational responses to intentional harms. Perceived intent emerges as catalyzing a motivated social cognitive process related to social prediction and control.

A Potential Path to Integration of Blame Judgments

In the target article, Malle, Guglielmo, and Monroe (this issue) present a Path Model of Blame. This model characterizes blame judgments as arising within a set of nested social-cognitive processes. These processes proceed in a default order, beginning with the detection of a norm violation, followed by a determination of whether an agent is causally responsible for the violation. If agent causal responsibility is present, the perceiver next determines whether the agent’s actions were intentional or unintentional, and all subsequent blame processing proceeds along one of two discrete paths according to this intentionality decision. The authors convincingly demonstrate that many components of their proposed model comport nicely with existing evidence. Although the critical tests of the model as a whole have not yet been published, the unpublished work appears to provide the evidentiary crux of the model (most notably with respect to the order in which the processes occur and how judgments are updated). The descriptions of these experiments are promising, and this evidence may well be quite compelling; however, it would be premature to evaluate the strength of experiments that we have not read—and, by extension, to offer firm conclusions about a theory that rests on these experiments. We look forward to evaluating this evidence as it becomes available. In the meantime, we outline two broad strengths of the model and then attempt to help identify aspects of the model that we feel would benefit from further clarification. We also respond to the authors’ comments on our own work and describe briefly some recent experiments that relate closely to certain points the authors raise with regard to this work.