Chapter 13

Social Brain Hypothesis

Many scientists believe that the primate brain evolved to be disproportionately large,
compared to other species, in order to support processes of social cognition that are
necessary for successful group living.

Social Influence
People have a tendency to shift their judgments in line with the judgments of other
people, a phenomenon known as conformity. Conformity may function to increase the
correctness of judgments (informational conformity) or to enhance group
belongingness (normative conformity).

Neural mechanisms of conflict detection, that is, in the anterior cingulate cortex, are
activated when people perceive that their judgments differ from those of a social group.
Conversely, reward pathways are activated when people perceive that their judgments
align with the judgments of a social group.

• Activation of the Medial prefrontal Cortex

o When one’s opinion is not consistent with the group’s opinion
o Other studies: activation of this region by tasks requiring decision making
in the face of conflict
• Activation of the Ventral Striatum
o When one’s opinion is consistent with the group’s opinion
o Important brain region for reward processing and reinforcement learning
Hypothesis: Social Disagreement is perceived as error, Social Agreement as a reward

Social norms describe written or unwritten rules of social behavior, including codes of
etiquette as well as formal laws governing behavior. Deviance from social norms is a
characteristic of some clinical conditions, such as orbitofrontal brain damage, Tourette’s
syndrome, and autism. Deviance may result from a variety of processing difficulties,
including difficulties in the comprehension of or memory for norms, motivation to
comply, or inhibitory control needed to comply.

• Patients with damage in the frontal lobe and especially in the orbitofrontal
cortex (OFC)
o Show socially inappropriate behaviour like undressing in public, shouting
out
o Are unable to rate there behavior on video as socially inappropriate
o Have difficulties in judging whether behavior in a narrative vignette is
socially appropriate or not

Economic games, such as the ultimatum game, have been used to study social norm
compliance. Such games focus on the “fairness norm,” the idea that rewards should be

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fairly shared. Perceived violations of the fairness norm are associated with activity in
regions involved in disgust and conflict processing.

When a person is deciding how much to share in an economic game, the orbitofrontal
cortex may assist in representing the potential costs of unfair behavior. Manipulations
of activity in lateral prefrontal cortex during decisions about sharing can shift behavior
toward selfishness or altruistism.

• Fairness is also seen as a social norm

• Ultimatum Game to examine how fairly people act as givers and how they react
as receivers:
o Activation of the anterior insula (plays a big role in registering disgust) when
treated unfairly
o Stimulation of the Lateral prefrontal Cortex

Understanding Other Minds

• Two main theories for how we understand others:
o Acting like others to understand how they feel
o Having a cognitive representation of other people’s mental states,
including their feelings and their knowledge.
These theories are not exclusive

One way that we understand the mental states of others is through mimicking those
states. Mimicry, or imitation, calls upon regions in the “mirror neuron system,” including
inferior frontal cortex.
The degree of mimicry or mirroring can depend on the degree of interpersonal similarity
or closeness between two people.
• More engagement in mimicry, when
o talking to friends or likeable people (Chartrand & Lakin, 2013)
o just experienced social exclusion (Lakin et al., 2008)
o having direct eye contact to the imitated person (Wang, Newport, and
Hamilton, 2011)
• Brain parts responsible for imitation and simulation:
o Mirror neurons in the inferior frontal cortex

Theory of mind describes the ability to understand the beliefs of others, even when
those beliefs are known to be false. Theory of mind is assessed with a variety of tasks,
including the classic false belief task, which tends to activate both the temporoparietal
junction and medial prefrontal cortex.

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Empathy can be considered to have three main aspects: emotional contagion, cognitive
perspective-taking, and pro-social behavior. Emotional contagion draws primarily upon
neural mirroring processes, whereas cognitive perspective-taking draws primarily upon
processes of mentalizing in the temporoparietal junction and medial prefrontal cortex.
Pro-social behavior has not been as well studied from a cognitive neuroscience
perspective.

The ability to understand other minds may have evolved to make social environments
more predictable and to enable the social bonding, cooperation and group problem
solving necessary for group-living primates.

We can mentalize about ourselves as well as mentalizing about others, and doing so
activates overlapping regions of medial prefrontal cortex. Factors such as temporal
perspective (past, present, or future self) and degree of closeness with the other person
can modulate the degree to which patterns of activity are distinct when thinking about
one’s self versus others.

Autism and Social Cognition

Autism spectrum disorder is currently defined by two main categories of symptoms: (1)
impairment in social interaction (deficits in social reciprocity, nonverbal communicative
behavior, development of social relationships) and (2) restrictive or repetitive activities
or interests (repetitive motor actions, fixated narrow interests, inflexibility in the face of
changes in routine, hyper- or hyposensitivity to sensory information in the
environment). Symptoms are present in early development, evident across settings, and
cannot be attributed to global intellectual delay.

The “broken mirror theory” of autism posits that the mirror neuron system is
dysfunctional in autism. Research indicates deficiencies in imitation, but those
deficiencies tend to be restricted to imitation of emotional expressions.
Imitation of emotional facial expressions results in less activation of premotor areas in
autistic individuals.
People with autism tend not to perceive social cues, such as facial expressions, in the
same way as other people do. For example, they do not look at faces for as long, they
are not as sensitive to gaze direction in the eyes, and they do not activate face
processing areas such as the fusiform gyrus to the same degree as do control
participants.

People with autism have difficulty with mentalizing tasks, such as the false belief task.
On even simple mentalizing tasks such as the Heider–Simmel illusion, people with

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autism do not show the normal degree of activation in mentalizing regions such as
temporoparietal junction and medial prefrontal cortex.

People with autism may have difficulty with the cognitive perspective-taking component
of empathy, but they can experience emotional contagion in response to others’
emotional states and can express pro-social behavior.

Face Processing
Imaging studies have shown
• No engagement of the normal face processing neural machinery when presented
with pictures of faces
• Lower activity in both the amygdala and the fusiform face area
A task sensitive to gaze direction activates superior temporal sulcus in control
participants but not autistic participants

Processing Social Cues

• less activity in response to direct gaze versus averted gaze in regions such as
medial prefrontal cortex, temporoparietal junction, and superior temporal sulcus
• lower temporal lobe response to voices of people, compared to non-autistic
people
• no difference in their responses to non-vocal sounds

Empathy
Dissociation between emotional and cognitive empathy
• Lack of activation in typical brain areas when attempting to understand the
viewpoint/motivations of others
Cognitive empathy
• Pictures of people in pain activated the brain regions thought to be involved in
the experience of pain
Emotional empathy

Adults with Asperger syndrome

• have difficulty in inferring the emotional state of a person depicted in a picture
• show normal empathic emotional reactions once they are told what emotion the
picture portrays
• report more concern for people labeled as more sad

Perceiving and Judging Social Groups

People have a strong tendency to categorize others into “in-groups” and “out-groups.”
Some social categories are pervasive in society (e.g., age, race, gender), and others can
be established in a single experimental session based on seemingly trivial differences
between people.

ERP studies indicate that social categories such as race and gender are distinguished
very quickly (within about 200 ms) when viewing faces or other social stimuli.
• ERPs in response to faces of different races

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 • At ~170ms
• face-specific N170 peak was bigger for faces regardless of the racial category
• at ~250 ms response was larger in response to faces of racial in-group members
than out-group members – in both white and black participants
• Difference in ERPs in response to arbitrary groups

People tend to show stronger empathic responses, measured both behaviorally and
neutrally, to others whom they perceive to belong to their own “in-group.”

Stereotyping refers to the tendency to assume that certain characteristics are

universally true of group members, whereas prejudice refers to a negative attitude
about a particular social group, and discrimination refers to biased behavior toward a
person depending on their social group. Biases about social groups can be implicit.

Implicit negative biases about social groups are associated with the increased activity in
the amygdala, possibly because of its role in responding to threatening information.
• is associated with processing by the amygdala, which is implicated in fear and
high-arousal emotional reactions
• unconscious bias was measured using a behavioral method that quantifies the
speed of association between pictures of other-race faces and negative words
• ERN was significantly higher when participants made racially charged errors (e.g.,
mistakenly pressing the button for “gun” rather than “tool” when primed by an
African-American face)

Cognitive control regions, such as anterior cingulate and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex,
are engaged when people try to regulate their own behavior to prevent biases.

Stereotype threat refers to the phenomenon in which activation of a stereotype about

a group leads to changes in the group members’ performance. Performing under
stereotype threat conditions can alter the neural regions engaged during the task, in a
pattern that suggests a decrease in activity in task-relevant regions and an increase in
activity during self-monitoring regions. Thus, stereotype activation can have
consequences for cognitive performance in members of stereotyped groups.

Examples
• if the concept of race is made especially salient, blacks perform more poorly on
cognitive tasks relative to whites compared to control condition
• women perform more poorly on math tests if they are first reminded of their
gender

fMRI study: brain activity during a math test among women who had either been primed
or not with a stereotype about women’s poor math performance

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Theories
• stress of being reminded of a negative stereotype may activate physiological
arousal
• additional effort to regulate stereotype-related thoughts
Extra cognitive baggage may interfere with performance itself