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| Dale Miller, a social psychologist at Stanford University
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| we have learned that people are self-interested
Miller, D. T., & Ratner, R. K. (1998). The disparity between the actual and assumed power of self-interest.
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| when people are asked why they have engaged in prosocial behaviors
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http://www.pleasantmorningbuzz.com/blog/1122061
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| the first modern texts on psychology
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| To first demonstrate this penchant for everyday mindreading
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| our tendency to see others in terms of minds guiding behavior
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| To date, no chimpanzee has shown definitive evidence
Call, J., & Tomasello, M. (2008). Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind? 30 years later.
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| converted Dennett’s Punch and Judy thought experiment into a real one
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| The results from many studies provide strong converging evidence
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| younger and younger children also show some evidence of this sort of social skill
Buttelmann, D., Carpenter, M., & Tomasello, M. (2009). Eighteen-month-old infants show false belief understanding in an active helping paradigm.
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| Chimpanzees show evidence of precursors of this ability
Cheney, D. L. (2011). Extent and limits of cooperation in animals.
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| our general ability for abstract reasoning and effortful thinking supported by the prefrontal cortex
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| identified regions in the lateral prefrontal cortex
Goel, V., & Dolan, R. J. (2004). Differential involvement of left prefrontal cortex in inductive and deductive reasoning.
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| Countless fMRI studies of working memory
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| the same lateral frontoparietal regions involved in working memory and reasoning
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| why shouldn’t it support reasoning about other minds
Indeed an early neuropsychological case study linked lateral prefrontal damage to deficits in Theory of Mind types of tasks; however, it is believed in retrospect that this deficit had more to do with the general difficulty of the task rather than Theory of Mind, per se. Price, B., Daffner, K., Stowe, R., & Mesulam, M. (1990). The comportmental learning disabilities of early frontal lobe damage.
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| the brain typically handles these two kinds of thinking using very different neural systems
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| produced activity in lateral prefrontal regions associated with language and working memory
Rottschy, C., Langner, R., Dogan, I., Reetz, K., Laird, A. R., Schulz, J. B., … , & Eickhoff, S. B. (2011). Modelling neural correlates of working memory: A coordinate-based meta-analysis.
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| they produced selective activity in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (DMPFC) and the temporoparietal junction (TPJ)
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| One of my favorite mentalizing studies
St. Jacques, P. L., Conway, M. A., Lowder, M. W., & Cabeza, R. (2011). Watching my mind unfold versus yours: An fMRI study using a novel camera technology to examine neural differences in self-projection of self versus other perspectives.
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| two things have remained pretty constant
Lieberman, M. D. (2010). Social cognitive neuroscience. In S. T. Fiske, D. T. Gilbert, & G. Lindzey (Eds).
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| whenever a person is given a moment of peace in the scanner, between cognitive tasks
Raichle, M. E., MacLeod, A. M., Snyder, A. Z., Powers, W. J., Gusnard, D. A., & Shulman, G. L. (2001). A default mode of brain function.
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118
| the same regions that “turn on” when we dream
Braun, A. R., Balkin, T. J., Wesenten, N. J., Carson, R. E., Varga, M., Baldwin, P., … , & Herscovitch, P. (1997). Regional cerebral blood flow throughout the sleep-wake cycle. An H2 (15) O PET study.
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118
| our social focus on other people’s minds
Spunt, R. P., Meyer, M. L., & Lieberman, M. D. (under review). Social by default: Brain activity at rest facilitates social cognition.
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118
| Previous studies have demonstrated that the default network
Harrison, B. J., Pujol, J., López-Solà, M., Hernández-Ribas, R., Deus, J., Ortiz, H., … , & Cardoner, N. (2008). Consistency and functional specialization in the default mode brain network.
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| it is mostly something that gets in the way, making us more error prone
Anticevic, A., Repovs, G., Shulman, G. L., & Barch, D. M. (2010). When less is more: TPJ and default network deactivation during encoding predicts working memory performance.
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| always for the sake of my doing”
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| ran a neuroimaging study on a version of this task, called
Stag Hunt
Yoshida, W., Seymour, B., Friston, K. J., & Dolan, R. J. (2010). Neural mechanisms of belief inference during cooperative games.
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122
| captured this mentalizing arms race phenomenon
Coricelli, G., & Nagel, R. (2009). Neural correlates of depth of strategic reasoning in medial prefrontal cortex.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106
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| it is linked to the mentalizing system in the brain
Psychologists would probably disagree that guessing 0 represents the most strategic answer in the above scenario. Presumably there would be a mix of nonstrategic, mildly strategic, and very strategic participants, and assessing that mix would give you a higher number than 0 as the optimal answer.
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124
| To examine this, we had people lie in a scanner
Falk, E. B., Morelli, S. A., Welbourn, B. L., Dambacher, K., & Lieberman, M. D. (in press). Creating buzz: The neural correlates of effective message propagation.
Psychological Science.
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| How effortlessly does our mentalizing system work?
Spunt, R. P., & Lieberman, M. D. (in press). Automaticity, control, and the social brain. In J. Sherman, B. Gawronski, & Y. Trope (Eds.).
Dual Process Theories of the Social Mind.
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Psychological Science, 17
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| like a working memory system, a
social working memory system
Meyer, M. L., Spunt, R. P., Berkman, E. T., Taylor, S. E., & Lieberman, M. D. (2012). Social working memory: An fMRI study of parametric increases in social cognitive effort.
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126
| to greater increases in mentalizing system activity than easier trials
Mckiernan, K. A., Kaufman, J. N., Kucera-Thompson, J., & Binder, J. R. (2003). A parametric manipulation of factors affecting task-induced deactivation in functional neuroimaging.
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