11.1.3: Do We Use Our Own Behavior to Help Us Understand Others?

Classifying someone into a social group then activating the associated stereotype is one way to make inferences about others. However, it is not the only method. Another strategy is to imagine what our own thoughts, feelings, and behaviors would be in a similar situation. Then we can use our simulated reaction as a best guess about how someone else will respond (Goldman, 2005). After all, we are experts in our own feelings, thoughts, and tendencies. It might be hard to know what other people are feeling and thinking, but we can always ask ourselves how we would feel and act if we were in their shoes.

There has been some debate about whether simulation is used to get into the minds of others (Carruthers & Smith, 1996; Gallese & Goldman, 1998). Social neuroscience research has addressed this question by looking at the brain areas used when people think about themselves and others. If the same brain areas are active for the two types of judgments, it lends support to the idea that the self may be used to make inferences about others via simulation.

We know that an area in the prefrontal cortex called the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) – located in the middle of the frontal lobe – is active when people think about themselves (Kelley, Macrae, Wyland, Caglar, Inati, & Heatherton, 2002). This conclusion comes from studies using functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI. While EEG measures the brain’s electrical activity, fMRI measures changes in the oxygenation of blood flowing in the brain. When neurons become more active, blood flow to the area increases to bring more oxygen and glucose to the active cells. fMRI allows us to image these changes in oxygenation by placing people in an fMRI machine or scanner (Figure 3), which consists of large magnets that create strong magnetic fields. The magnets affect the alignment of the oxygen molecules within the blood (i.e., how they are tilted). As the oxygen molecules move in and out of alignment with the magnetic fields, their nuclei produce energy that can be detected with special sensors placed close to the head. Recording fMRI involves having the subject lay on a small bed that is then rolled into the scanner. While fMRI does require subjects to lie still within the small scanner and the large magnets involved are noisy, the scanning itself is safe and painless. Like EEG, the subject can then be asked to think about different topics or engage in different tasks as brain activity is measured. If we know what a person is thinking or doing when fMRI detects a blood flow increase to a particular brain area, we can infer that part of the brain is involved with the thought or action. fMRI is particularly useful for identifying which particular brain areas are active at a given point in time.

Figure 3. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner used to image the brain while people perform tasks. The scanner allows researchers to view the changes in blood oxygenation in specific locations in the brain during a task. Images are collected using powerful magnets and radio waves that shift the position of atoms in oxygenated blood that rushes to areas involved in performing the task. MRIs are non-invasive and there are no known risks from exposure to the magnetic fields or radio waves. Subjects lay on the while bed with their head inside the head coil, then the bed is moved into the scanner. [Image: Janne Moren, https://goo.gl/MKb2jn, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0, https://goo.gl/Toc0ZF]

The conclusion that the mPFC is associated with the self comes from studies measuring fMRI while subjects think about themselves (e.g., saying whether traits are descriptive of themselves). Using this knowledge, other researchers have looked at whether the same brain area is active when people make inferences about others. Mitchell, Neil Macrae, and Banaji (2005) showed subjects pictures of strangers and had them judge either how pleased the person was to have his or her picture taken or how symmetrical the face appeared. Judging whether someone is pleased about being photographed requires making an inference about someone’s internal feelings – we call this mentalizing. By contrast, facial symmetry judgments are based solely on physical appearances and do not involve mentalizing. A comparison of brain activity during the two types of judgments shows more activity in the mPFC when making the mental versus physical judgments, suggesting this brain area is involved when inferring the internal beliefs of others.

There are two other notable aspects of this study. First, mentalizing about others also increased activity in a variety of regions important for many aspects of social processing, including a region important in representing biological motion (superior temporal sulcus or STS), an area critical for emotional processing (amygdala), and a region also involved in thinking about the beliefs of others (temporal parietal junction, TPJ) (Gobbini & Haxby, 2007; Schultz, Imamizu, Kawato, & Frith, 2004) (Figure 4). This finding shows that a distributed and interacting set of brain areas is likely to be involved in social processing. Second, activity in the most ventral part of the mPFC (the part closer to the belly rather than toward the top of the head), which has been most consistently associated with thinking about the self, was particularly active when subjects mentalized about people they rated as similar to themselves. Simulation is thought to be most likely for similar others, so this finding lends support to the conclusion that we use simulation to mentalize about others. After all, if you encounter someone who has the same musical taste as you, you will probably assume you have other things in common with him. By contrast, if you learn that someone loves music that you hate, you might expect him to differ from you in other ways (Srivastava, Guglielmo, & Beer, 2010). Using a simulation of our own feelings and thoughts will be most accurate if we have reason to think the person’s internal experiences are like our own. Thus, we may be most likely to use simulation to make inferences about others if we think they are similar to us.

Figure 4. The areas of the brain most commonly associated with processing of self and others. Panel A is a sagittal view, looking at the inside of the brain as if it were sliced in half. Panel B is a lateral view, showing the brain from the outside. The medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) (Structure 1) is commonly activated when thinking about one’s self and when thinking about similar others. Additionally, the amygdala (Structure 2) is important for learning about and detecting important things in our environments and plays an important role in fear learning and expression. The temporal parietal junction (TPJ) (Structure 3), located at the intersection of the parietal and temporal lobes, is activated when people think about the beliefs of others. Activity in the superior temporal sulcus (STS) (Structure 4) is commonly observed when people view biological motion. The common activation of this network of regions when people think about the feelings, thoughts, and intentions of others indicates that the processing of others involves a number of complex psychological processes.

This research is a good example of how social neuroscience is revealing the functional neuroanatomy of social behavior. That is, it tells us which brain areas are involved with social behavior. The mPFC (as well as other areas such as the STS, amygdala, and TPJ) is involved in making judgments about the self and others. This research also provides new information about how inferences are made about others. Whereas some have doubted the widespread use of simulation as a means for making inferences about others, the activation of the mPFC when mentalizing about others, and the sensitivity of this activation to similarity between self and other, provides evidence that simulation occurs.

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Social Neuroscience by Tiffany A. Ito and Jennifer T. Kubota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available in our Licensing Agreement.