Research Report
Toward socially inspired social neuroscience
Alexander Todorov, Lasana T. Harris, Susan T. Fiske⁎
Psychology Department, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA
A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T
Article history:
Accepted 30 December 2005
Available online 15 February 2006
Social neuroscience, often viewed as studying the neural foundations of social cognition,
has roots in multiple disciplines. This paper argues that it needs a firmer base in social
psychology. First, we outline some major opportunities from social psychology—the power
of social context and social motives in shaping human behavior. Second, as the social
cognition field moves away from studying only deliberate, explicit processes to studying
also automatic, implicit processes, adopting a dual-process perspective, social neuroscience
also lends itself to both automatic and controlled processes. Finally, social neuroscience is
especially suited to study the efficiency and spontaneity of social judgments. All this brings
social behavioral grounding to cognitive neuroscience. Among the implications for social
neuroscience: Social cognition intrinsically evokes affect, so social cognitive affective
neuroscience glues together a variety of fields in psychological and neurosciences.
© 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Keywords:
Social cognitive-affective
neuroscience
Person perception
Impression formation
Social psychology
1. Introduction
Social neuroscience, studying neural foundations of social
cognition, is one of the most recent and exciting developments
in the fields of psychology and cognitive neuroscience.
One of the first attempts to develop a neural model of social
cognition was largely divorced from research in social
psychology (Brothers, 1990). In fact, at the time, the major
source of data and inspiration was research on single cell
recording from the monkey brain showing that specific
neurons in the inferotemporal cortex responded to faces
(e.g., Gross et al., 1972; Perrett et al., 1982). Since then, with the
accessibility of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)
technology, there has been a proliferation of papers exploring
processes relevant to the study of social cognition.
The first researchers who started developing neural
models of social cognition processes using brain imaging
were inspired by developmental psychology and not social
psychology (e.g., Fletcher et al., 1995; see Frith and Frith, 1999
for an early review). One of the important developmental
findings was that children become able to represent the states
of other minds at about age of 4 (Wimmer and Perner, 1983), an
ability that remains out of reach for many people born with
autism (Baron-Cohen, 1995; Frith, 2001). This finding served as
a basis for the development of models of “theory of mind”
(Gallagher and Frith, 2003). Another line of relevant research
came from work with patients who have brain lesions. Despite
this research providing fascinating examples of dissociations
between implicit and explicit processes (e.g., Schacter, 1987)—
a topic of central interest in social cognition (Bargh, 1994;
Greenwald and Banaji, 1995)—social psychologists were
largely uninterested in work with patients with brain lesions
(but see Klein et al., 1996).
The field of social neuroscience started capturing the
attention of many social psychologists in the last 5 years
(Ochsner and Lieberman, 2001), with the accessibility of fMRI
equipment. Other techniques (EEG, GSR, heart rate) were
important, long-standing exceptions in the field (e.g.,
Cacioppo et al., 1996), but brain-imaging techniques captured
broader scientific imagination. A quick search on PsycINFO,
B R A I N R E S E A R C H 1 0 7 9 ( 2 0 0 6 ) 7 6 – 8 5
⁎ Corresponding author.
E-mail address: sfiske@princeton.edu (S.T. Fiske).
0006-8993/$ – see front matter © 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.brainres.2005.12.114
available at www.sciencedirect.com
www.elsevier.com/locate/brainres
the major search database for psychologists, reveals more
than 100 publications referring to social neuroscience. All but
seven of them were published after 2000. Since then, social
neuroscience research is represented at every major social
psychology conference and several active research groups
come from mainstream social psychology.
We believe that one of the major virtues of the new field of
social neuroscience is that it brings together scientists across
different disciplines, each discipline providing unique insights
about social cognition. This special issue exemplifies this
inter-disciplinary endeavor. In this paper, we have three
objectives. First, we describe some major lessons of social
psychology for a socially inspired social neuroscience. Second,
we detail the changing metaphors in the social cognition field
and some of the basic characteristics of social judgments. All
sections argue the relevance of social behavioral theory and
experiments for social neuroscience.
2. Social context
According to Allport's (1954) famous definition, social psychology
studies how the actual, imagined, or implied presence
of other people influences an individual's thoughts, feelings,
and behaviors. One of the major discoveries of early social
psychology experiments was that this influence is much
greater than people realize. If we have to extract one principle
from social psychology, this will be the principle of situationism
or the power of the situation over behavior (see Lieberman,
2005; Ross and Nisbett, 1991; for similar perspectives).
Consider some of the most famous studies in social psychology.
In Sherif's (1935) studies on norms, after observing the
apparent motion of a single point of light in a darkened room,
participants in groups converged to stable norms about the
illusory movement of the light. In Asch's (1956) studies on
conformity, participants provided incorrect responses to a
simple perceptual task (comparing the length of lines) after
several confederates provided the same incorrect response. In
Darley and Latané's (1968) studies on bystander intervention,
the probability of helping a person in an emergency decreased
with the presence of other people. Participants were using the
behavior of others to infer the seriousness of the situation. In
Milgram's (1963) studies of obedience to authority, participants
were willing to deliver incredibly strong electric shocks
to a stranger despite his protest at multiple points during the
experiment (in reality, a confederate ostensibly in the role of
learner who is penalized for giving wrong answers to a word
leaning test). They did this because the situation required it.
All these studies demonstrate the power of the situation over
individual behavior. Decades of social psychological research
have confirmed that the situation must be taken into account
when describing human behavior (Fiske, 2004).
Most relevant here, the social context differentially affects
behavior elicited by the same stimuli. Lewin (1938, 1951), one
of the founding fathers of social psychology, was well aware
of the impact of social context at the most basic perceptual
level. He observed that common objects could evoke
different reactions from a person depending upon the
presence of others. For example, Lewin showed that
housewives would cook organ meats in war-time scarcity
only if their peers did so. Lewin (1951) elaborated a
psychological field theory in discussing situational effects
on behavior, from which he derived his ideas of life space.
He argued that the effect of a given stimulus on the
perceiver depends on the stimulus constellation, or properties
of the stimulus, and the state of the perceiver. Though
form, size, and color are inherently perceptual features, the
perception of the stimulus depends on its visual background
and the rest of the visual field. What is more, the same
stimulus acquires a different valence (affective charge)
depending on the perceiver's goals. Behavior is a joint
function of person and situation, and the situation is
primarily social.
The basic rules of studying how the thought, feelings, and
behavior of individuals are influenced by the actual,
imagined, or implied presence of others do not change
along with the researchers, dependent variable, or measurement
technique. As we move into the realm of neuroscience,
the power of the social context continues to matter.
Immediate reactions to a social stimulus depend to a large
extent on the context (Trope, 1989), and further interpretation
of the stimulus is also derived from the context (Lewin,
1951; Trope, 1986, 1989). For instance, an emotional expression
may be perceived as positive or negative depending
upon the social context. Seeing an ambiguous facial
expression in the context of learning that the person is a
coach whose team is losing is interpreted as anger but in the
context of learning that the person is a coach whose team is
winning is interpreted as happiness (Trope, 1986). This
interpretation affects subsequent judgments of the person
(e.g., how angry this person is in general).
Recreating the social context in the constrained conditions
of an fMRI experiment is a challenging but not
impossible task. The same concerns are valid for social
psychology experiments. Experimental research with its
focus on internal validity necessarily sacrifices external
validity. However, it is possible to design experimental
situations with real meaning to participants. After all,
experiments do not need to physically resemble real life
situations (what Aronson and Carlsmith, 1968 called mundane
realism) but only to create psychologically meaningful
situations. Social neuroscience already shows such research
can be done.
For example, a study on social decision making (Sanfey et
al., 2003) created a realistic social context. Participants met the
experimenter and the “other participants” (confederates) in
the lobby of the psychology building before the scanning
session. They were then told that their interactions in the
scanner would be with the people they just met. Participants
even saw pictures of the confederates in the scanner before
each social decision, a strong remainder of the social context.
Sanfey et al. found that people had stronger negative
emotional reactions, as indicated by neural activity in the
anterior insula (an area of the brain associated with disgust),
to unfair offers made by a person than to unfair offers made by
a computer program.
Not all social neuroscience studies that successfully
recreate a powerful social context require such extravagant
deception. An exploration of the neural bases of social
rejection (Eisenberger et al., 2003) simply gave participants a
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cover story stating that the other players in the game were
in other fMRI scanners as well. Instead of photographs of
people, these researchers employed animated players in a
“cyberball” world that represented the participants themselves
and the “other players.” It is noteworthy that the
cyberball paradigm replicated a previous behavioral paradigm
(Williams et al., 2000) that explored the effects of
ostracism and social exclusion. In fact, it seems essential that
experimental paradigms be tested for their behavioral effects before
implementing them in an fMRI environment. Eisenberger et al.
were able to create a social context believable enough to
replicate behavioral effects and gain insights into the neural
correlates of their phenomenon. Specifically, they found that
social rejection in the game (not having the ball thrown to
you by the other two animated players) activated areas of
the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and the right ventral
prefrontal cortex, areas activated in neuroimaging studies of
physical pain.
These studies show ways to create meaningful social
context in fMRI experiments. The future belongs to fMRI
experiments able to study real social interaction in real time. One
of the exciting recent methodological developments in the
field is hyperscanning (King-Casas et al., 2005). In hyperscanning,
people in different fMRI scanners can interact with each
other, and neural activity during the interaction can be
measured in real time. So far, the methodology focuses on
economic games involving limited interactions (e.g., making
monetary offers), but its potentials for the study of social
cognition are far reaching.
3. Social motives
Considering social context requires an appreciation of the
motivated perceiver. The Lewinian and “New Look” tradition
argued that social motives inevitably influence people's
thoughts, feelings, and behavior (Fiske, 2004), suggesting a
“Warm Look” or consideration of affect and motives in any
social context (Sorrentino and Higgins, 1986). Personality and
social psychologists have repeatedly uncovered a few essential
motives that are necessary in explanations of social
behavior across a range of phenomena over the past 100
years, potentially useful to neuroscience.
The core social motive is belonging, from which stem the
cognitive motives understanding and controlling and the
affective motives self-enhancing and trusting (Fiske, 2002,
2004; Stevens and Fiske, 1995). Belonging highlights people's
need to fit in to different social groups. Derived from the
belonging need are the motives understanding, a desire to
make a socially shared sense of the world, and controlling, a
need to feel effective contingencies between one's actions and
one's outcomes. Belonging also spawns the affective selfenhancing
motive, a desire to feel oneself as worthy or at least
improvable, and the trusting motive, a desire to feel that
ingroup others will be benign. These ideas have resonated
within social psychology and guided research for decades.
Effective work in social neuroscience must also take these
ideas into account.
For example, the cited Eisenberger et al. (2003) study
suggests some possible neural mechanisms of social belonging
and social rejection. The cited Sanfey et al. (2003) study
suggests some neural mechanisms of interpersonal trust
and its violation. We suspect that violations of socially
shared understanding, effective social control, and positive
self-views will also prove fruitful venues of truly social
neuroscience.
4. Social context, motives, and research on
race perception
As a specific example of applying neuroscience approaches
to motivated social cognition, consider perceptions of racial
outgroups. Brain imaging and event-related potential (ERP)
studies on race perception have relied on the rich literature
in social psychology as a watershed for exploring the neural
dynamics involved in stereotyping, prejudice, and other
forms of outgroup perception. This stands in sharp contrast
to initial attempts within neuroscience to understand race
as a biological difference manifested in differences in brain
size and shape (see Eberhardt, 2005 for a review of this
literature). In prejudice studies, white participants saw
European-American and African-American faces (Hart et
al., 2000; Phelps et al., 2000). Participants showed greater
amygdala and insula activation to unfamiliar black than to
unfamiliar white faces, especially if they scored high on
implicit measures of prejudice. Similar findings were
revealed when white participants were exposed to black
faces for 30 ms but were significantly reduced when that
exposure time was lengthened to 525 ms (Cunningham et
al., 2004). Along similar lines, Lieberman et al. (2005)
showed that this amygdala effect also occurred in black
as well as white subjects. The authors suggested that this
may be evidence that prejudice results in part from social
learning.
However, in keeping with our emphasis on social context
and social motives, the increased amygdala response to
African-American faces most reliably occurred when the
white participants were engaged in a one-back recognition
task, a categorical same/different task, or a gender categorization
task (Hart et al., 2000; Phelps et al., 2000), or in a
categorical judgment about the faces, whether the person
fell into one or another age social category (Harris and
Fiske, unpublished; Wheeler and Fiske, 2005). When participants
were asked to change their social goal and make
individuating judgments (what are the person's likes and
dislikes) or perform a visual search task (is there a dot on
the face), the increased activation in the amygdala to black
faces diminished below significance. Converging evidence
from ERP studies also demonstrates that, once the social
goals are changed, the processing of the same faces
changes within the first 200 ms (Ito and Urland, 2003; Ito
et al., 2004). What is striking about these studies is that
participants were exposed to exactly the same stimuli, but
the nature of processing clearly differed as a function of
their social goals. People's social goals even carried over to
subsequent nonsocial tasks as whites' efforts to appear
nonprejudiced cost them executive control in a purely
cognitive (Stroop) task afterwards (Richeson et al., 2003).
Social goals and motives change the interpretation of social
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and nonsocial stimuli from the earliest moments until
afterwards.
5. Attribution theory and the changing
metaphors in social cognition
Another example of social context comes in people's inferences
about other people's personality traits. How people
understand other people has been a central question for social
psychology (Heider, 1958), and attribution research has been at
the fore of the field. Attribution theory is grounded in the more
cognitive social motives of understanding and control. Unlike
the perception of objects, perceiving people is at its most basic
reciprocal process; the person serves as both the perceiver and
the target. Heider (1958) captured this special feature of person
perception and contributed the idea that a person as an object
in a social environment is unique. Other major differences
include the fact that people are also “action centers” (p. 21),
agents capable of doing something that affects the perceiver.
They can act purposefully and willingly, can harm or benefit
the perceiver, and vice versa. Furthermore, they have wishes,
abilities, and sentiments while they continue to perceive each
other. Therefore, Heider argues, as “naive scientists,” perceivers
are intuitively aware of these factors and take them into
account when perceiving another individual (see Fiske and
Taylor, 1991 for a review).
An established intellectual tradition in social psychology
has matured around attribution theory since Heider,
evidenced in the work of Gilbert and Malone (1995), Jones
(1979), Kelley (1972), and Ross (1977). The classic attribution
models (Kelley, 1972) assumed that people perform a complicated
analysis of the co-variance of potential causes and
effects of behavior to arrive at a causal attribution. Decades of
research on how people make causal inferences from behavior
have outlined the principles of attribution: consensus across
actors, consistency over time, and distinctiveness over
entities (Ferguson and Wells, 1980; McArthur, 1972; Orvis et
al., 1975; Pruitt and Insko, 1980; Zuckerman, 1978). Consensus
(social desirability) and distinctiveness (unique effects) similarly
matter when people ask whether a single behavior is
attributable to an underlying disposition (Jones and Davis,
1965).
A parallel line of research in developmental psychology,
theory of mind (ToM), similarly concerns understanding
how people infer the mental states of others (Saxe et al.,
2004). A false belief paradigm is often used to understand
the neural mechanisms involved. For example, in the “Sally
Ann” task (Wimmer and Perner, 1983), participants are
asked to guess where a character in a cartoon (Sally Ann)
will look for an object (a ball) that had been moved from its
previous location while she was away. Researchers interpret
a correct response of “the original location” as an understanding
by the participant of the mental state of Sally Ann.
False belief paradigms may not be sufficient to unearth the
process of inferring the mental states of others (e.g., Saxe
and Wexler, 2005), so researchers in the ToM tradition have
studied how people infer goals from bodily action, attention
from eye gaze, and emotion from the expressions of others
(Frith and Frith, 2001). Across a number of studies, a
network of brain regions—medial prefrontal cortex, superior
temporal sulcus, and anterior temporal poles—has been
consistently identified to be active in thinking about other
people.
ToM research and attribution research study the same
problem of understanding other people, but, until recently,
there has not been an explicit dialogue between developmental
and social psychologists (Malle et al., 2001). Recently, using
a classic attribution paradigm within social psychology
(McArthur, 1972), we demonstrated that dispositional inferences
(the person caused the behavior)—but not other social
inferences—activated medial prefrontal cortex (Harris et al.,
2005), a key region in the “mentalizing” network identified in
ToM research. This work points to the possibility of fine
delineation between different types of person inferences.
Behavioral paradigms developed in social psychology can
also map these types of inferences (e.g., Mitchell et al., 2004).
Both lines of research—ToM and classic attribution research—study
conscious, deliberate thinking about other
people. Attribution of mental states and dispositions follows
well-defined inference rules, the person sometimes is a “naive
scientist.” However, thinking about other people often does
not comply with these rules. In the history of social cognition,
the “naive scientist” view, which dominated the 1970s, was
followed by the “heuristics-and-biases” view (Nisbett and
Ross, 1981). People used minimal, often superficial, information
to arrive at a quick, often biased, judgment. In the
subsequent decades, two new metaphors of social cognition
were introduced—first, the “cognitive miser” (Fiske and
Taylor, 1984), and second, the “motivated tactician” (Fiske
and Taylor, 1991). The “cognitive miser” view acknowledged
that heuristic judgments are functional—relying on fewer
attentional resources in the service of fast action. The
“motivated tactician” view acknowledged the importance of
goals and context—people operate in often functional, flexible
ways, depending on their goals.
The changes in the guiding metaphors were not a result of
paradigm shifts but a result of often unexpected experimental
findings. In the first study documenting the fundamental
attribution error (Ross, 1977) or the correspondence bias
(Gilbert and Malone, 1995), Jones and Harris (1967) set out to
show that people would not make dispositional attributions
for a person's behavior in the presence of strong situational
pressures limiting one's behavioral options, i.e. would acknowledge
the power of the situation. In the particular
experiment, participants were asked to infer a person's true
attitude (pro- or anti-Cuba) from an essay (pro-Castro) that the
person either decided to write on hew own or was assigned to
write in a class. The normative analysis prescribes that people
should infer correspondence between the attitude and the
essay only when the latter was written under free choice. Alas,
people inferred correspondence in both conditions (free vs.
forced choice), insufficiently adjusting for the influence of the
situation. This puzzle has generated detailed process theories
of dispositional inferences (Gilbert, 1998; Gilbert et al., 1998;
Trope, 1986; Trope and Alfieri, 1997; Trope and Gaunt, 2000).
Crudely stated, according to these theories, whereas behaviors
are categorized automatically in dispositional categories (e.g.,
“aggressive”), adjustments for the constraining effect of the
situation require attentional and motivational resources. The
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field of person perception has moved from assigning a greater
role to deliberative processes to a greater role to spontaneous,
automatic processes (Uleman et al., 2005). What we have
discovered along the way is that many of the processes
involved in person perception are automatic, anticipating
social neuroscience opportunities.
As experimental findings accumulated, the importance of
goals and context became evident; although automatic
processes might be the initial default, often-preferred mode,
people evidently go beyond them, giving rise to metaphors of
the perceiver as a “motivated tactician” (Fiske and Taylor,
1991), flexible enough to use more than one strategy, including
more thoughtful, deliberate, control overlaid on an automatic
substrate. For example, people can form heuristic, categorybased
impressions based on expectations and social categories,
attending to expectancy-consistent information, disregarding
inconsistent information, and forming impressions
based on social category consensus. But, if their outcomes
depend on the other person, they move to a process that
increases attention to inconsistencies, makes personalized
dispositional attributions about the other as a unique individual,
and forms an idiosyncratic impression of the other
person (Erber and Fiske, 1984; Neuberg and Fiske, 1987;
Ruscher and Fiske, 1990). A continuum of impression formation
results, ranging from relatively automatic category-based
to relatively controlled individuated impression formation
(Fiske and Neuberg, 1990). Such results in various laboratories
revived Williams James's pragmatic premise, paraphrased as
“thinking is for doing” (Fiske, 1992).
The widely accepted framework for thinking about person
perception became known as dual-process theories, based on
two-to-three dozen related theories (collected by Chaiken and
Trope, 1999; see also Kahneman, 2003; Smith and DeCoster,
2000). Theories differ in characterizing these processes and on
the defining criteria. However, the general consensus holds
that some social cognitive processes are less effortful, less
deliberate, and faster than other processes. One of the
implications of this dual-systems view is that these processes
depend on different rules and are amenable to different
manipulations. For example, cognitive load should interfere
less with the relatively rapid, automatic, processes than with
relatively slower, controlled, deliberate processes. Bargh (1994)
described four dimensions of automaticity: whether a process
is started intentionally, whether the process is efficient,
whether the process occurs outside of awareness, and
whether the process is controllable. We focus here on two
key features that characterize many inferences about other
people: their spontaneous and their efficient nature, with
direct implications for social neuroscience.
6. Spontaneous nature of social inferences
One of the best classroom demonstrations of spontaneous
social thinking is showing students the apparently selfpropelled,
intentional movement of animated triangles,
following the Heider and Simmel (1944) classic study. Heider
and Simmel found that their participants described these
movements in terms of meaningful social actions. This and
subsequent studies (e.g., Bassilli, 1976; Berry et al., 1992; for
review see Scholl and Tremoulet, 2000) have demonstrated
that people spontaneously perceive the physical movements
in social terms. In fact, the paradigm has been deployed in
fMRI studies (e.g., Castelli et al., 2000, 2002). These studies
have shown that observing the movement of the animated
shapes activates a network of brain regions consistently
recruited in understanding of social action—superior temporal
sulcus and medial prefrontal cortex. Moreover, the
connectivity between the different brain regions seems to be
impaired in individuals with autism (Castelli et al., 2002), who
do not spontaneously understand the actions in social terms.
Evaluation and affect follow directly spontaneous perceptions
of other people, so they are central for social cognition
(Fiske, 1982; Zajonc, 1980). Brain structures implicated in
evaluation of stimuli could be part of the network underlying
spontaneous social understanding. Heberlein and Adolphs
(2004) showed that a patient with bilateral amygdala damage
failed to “see” the social meaning in the Heider and Simmel
stimuli, despite intact visual perception and intact ability to
describe social stimuli. The same patient had also specific
impairments in identifying facial expressions of fear (Adolphs
et al., 2005). Adolphs and colleagues showed that this
impairment was specifically due to the patient's failure to
utilize information from the target faces' eyes. However, when
the patient was instructed to attend to the eyes, his
performance matched the performance of normal participants.
Unfortunately, the patient was able to maintain this
performance only under explicit instructions to attend to the
eyes. In the absence of such instructions, his performance
deteriorated to previous levels. These findings suggest that
amygdala plays a key role in spontaneous social cognition.
They also show that such processes are potentially flexible
and can occur by more than one route.
Understanding of facial gestures also involves spontaneous
processes. Most research has investigated recognition of
expressions of negative emotions, consistent with the view
that negative social stimuli have attention-grabbing power
(Fiske, 1980; Pratto and John, 1991). In an early demonstration,
the identification of angry faces was not affected by the set
size of neutral faces surrounding the angry face (Hansen and
Hansen, 1988), suggesting a spontaneous pop-up of significant
social stimuli. Furthermore, findings of increased amygdala
activation in response to subliminally presented angry or
fearful expressions (Morris et al., 1998; Whalen et al., 1998)
suggest that such expressions were perceived despite the lack
of awareness of the stimuli. People not only effortlessly
recognize expressions of emotions from facial appearance
but also draw trait inferences from such appearance. Probably,
the ability to draw such inferences builds on the ability to read
facial gestures and would rely on similar brain regions. For
example, untrustworthy-looking faces activated amygdala
and anterior insula even when the participant's task was to
judge the age of the faces (Winston et al., 2002). Similarly, basic
affect evaluations (good/bad) are independent of the participant's
task (Cunningham et al., 2003).
People also make spontaneous trait inferences from
behaviors (Uleman et al., 1996). Moreover, these trait inferences
from minimal information (e.g., “Jessica threw a chair at
her classmate.”) are bound to the faces of those who enacted
the behavior (Carlston and Skowronski, 1994; Carlston et al.,
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1995; Todorov and Uleman, 2002, 2003, 2004) even if the
explicit memory for the behavior is lost. An important
question is whether such trait knowledge is spontaneously
retrieved in face perception. In fact, in one of the first papers
attempting to describe a neural model of social cognition,
Brothers (1990) argued that dispositional knowledge about a
person is automatically retrieved in face perception. Consistent
with this hypothesis, perception of personally familiar
individuals (e.g., close friends) activates a distributed network
of brain regions that extend beyond the visual memory of a
face (Gobbini et al., 2004). These regions include precuneus,
superior temporal sulcus, and medial prefrontal cortex. In the
Gobbini et al. study, the person knowledge was acquired over
extended periods of time and multiple interactions. Todorov
et al. (in press) showed that trait inferences acquired in a
minimal interaction context were spontaneously retrieved in
face perception. These studies used one-back repetition task,
in which participants decided whether each face was the same
as or different from the previous face, to make sure that the
task neither required person evaluation nor retrieval of person
knowledge. Nevertheless, neural activity was modulated by
the knowledge associated with the face. Furthermore, the
retrieved knowledge is highly specific (Todorov et al., in press).
For example, faces that were associated with disgusting
behaviors evoked stronger activity in anterior insula than
faces associated with aggressive behaviors, consistent with
studies suggesting that processing of disgust-related stimuli
activates anterior insula (Calder et al., 2000; Murphy et al.,
2003; Phan et al., 2002; Phillips et al., 1997).
Behavioral experiments have identified a number of
processes that occur spontaneously, and recent neuroimaging
studies have started to explore the neural structures that
underlie these processes. For a truly social neuroscience,
exciting issues lie ahead. For example, differential neural
processing of facial expressions of emotions is relatively easy
to understand in terms of facial features (Ekman, 1982). In
these cases, as well as in cases of differential neural responses
to trustworthy and untrustworthy faces (Winston et al., 2002)
or attractive and unattractive faces (Aharon et al., 2001),
neural responses depend on the visual appearance of the face.
A computational mechanism that links particular perceptual
features (or a configuration of features) to conceptual representations
could account for differential neural responses.
However, trait inferences triggered by behaviors are not
directly readable from the perceptual input. Observing dissociations,
where the same face triggers a distinctive neural
response as a function of prior associations, poses new
challenges for research.
Probably, the most important question is how bottom–up,
stimuli-driven processes and top–down, knowledge-driven processes
interact. This is an issue also central for research on
recognition of expressions of emotions. Although a number
of studies (e.g., Blair et al., 1999; Calder et al., 2000, 2001;
Kesler/West et al., 2001; Morris et al., 1996; Phillips et al., 1997;
Sprengelmeyer et al., 1998) have attempted to isolate typical
brain markers for detecting expressions of emotions (e.g., fear
—amygdala, disgust—anterior insula), it is far from clear that
this strategy has been completely successful (Feldman
Barrett, in press). Most social stimuli are inherently ambiguous,
and their disambiguation can occur rapidly and outside
of conscious awareness (Trope, 1986; Trope and Alfieri, 1997).
Consider the expressions of basic emotions. A typical Ekman
face expressing fear is identified by more than 75% of people
as expressing fear. However, if the face is preceded by a short
behavioral description (e.g., a woman whose long-prepared
plans to treat her sister are frustrated), more than 75%
identify the face as expressing anger (Carroll and Russell,
1996). The same processes are at play when people perceive
ambiguous behaviors (Trope and Alfieri, 1997).
Context can modify the neural representations of emotional
expressions. Kim et al. (2003) showed that faces
expressing surprise activated the amygdala but only when
they were perceived as negative. A subsequent study (Kim et
al., 2004) obtained similar findings when participants saw
explicit contextual information (“She just lost $500.”) disambiguating
the meaning of surprise. Given that the blood
oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) response peaks on
average 6 s after the presentation of the stimulus, fMRI studies
will be most likely insufficient to completely identify the
processes at play, so more temporally sensitive methods will
be crucial. For example, the initial process could be bottom–
up, driven by facial features (identifying a unique emotion),
but then this process is quickly overwritten by top–down
processes. Furthermore, the bottom–up processes most likely
do not reach conscious awareness at all.
7. Efficiency of social inferences
Social category information such as gender, race, and age is
accessed very rapidly from faces (Ito et al., 2004; Ito and
Urland, 2003; Fiske, 1998). As outlined in the previous section
on attribution theory, behaviors are automatically categorized
in trait categories (Gilbert et al., 1998; Lupfer et al., 1990; Smith
and Lerner, 1986; Todorov and Uleman, 2003; Winter et al.,
1985). Cognitive load (e.g., rehearsing digits while reading the
behavior information) interferes with dispositional inferences
(e.g., is this person aggressive) but does not interfere with the
trait categorization of the behavior (e.g., aggressive behavior).
To return to the example of the coach observing his team
(Trope, 1986), the identification of the emotional expression
within the particular context (losing vs. winning) is independent
of cognitive or attentional load.
Most relevant to socially inspired neuroscience, people
extract surprising amounts of personality information from a
minimal contact with strangers (Albright et al., 1988; Ambady
and Rosenthal, 1992; Ambady et al., 1995; Borkenau and
Liebler, 1992; Kenny et al., 1992). In fact, people extract such
information from facial appearance in the absence of any
contact (Hassin and Trope, 2000; Zebrowitz, 1999). These
person inferences are highly efficient and often can have
important consequences. For example, 1-s exposure to the
faces of political candidates for the US Senate was sufficient
for participants to decide who looks more competent, and
these competence judgments predicted about 70% of the
election outcomes (Todorov et al., 2005). Moreover, 100-ms
exposure to faces is sufficient for people to make a variety of
trait inferences (Willis and Todorov, in press). In this study,
attractiveness was included to serve as a benchmark for other
social judgments. Surprisingly, judgments of trustworthiness
81B R A I N R E S E A R C H 1 0 7 9 ( 2 0 0 6 ) 7 6 – 8 5
were as easily made as judgments of attractiveness. In fact,
these judgments did not improve with increased presentation
of the faces, i.e. 100-ms and 1000-ms exposure produced
equivalent results. The efficiency of trustworthiness judgments
is consistent with findings implicating amygdala in the
computation of these judgments (Winston et al., 2002). In fact,
Adolphs et al. (1998) have shown that patients with bilateral
amygdala damage fail to discriminate between trustworthy
and untrustworthy looking individuals. The findings suggest
that trait inferences from faces are relatively automatic, made
fairly rapidly from minimal information, and computed in
brain regions dedicated to evaluation of stimuli. They also
support the importance of a core social motive to ascertain the
trustworthiness of others.
A number of unresolved issues await further research. In
the case of trait inferences from faces, we do not know what
facial features make a face look trustworthy or competent. The
finding that such inferences can be made after 100-ms
presentation suggests that people can use specific facial
features. Whalen et al. (2004) have shown that the larger size
of fearful eye whites (sclera) is sufficient to modulate neural
activity in the amygdala. Whether such features can be
identified in the case of trait inferences from faces is an
empirical question.
In the case of trait inferences from behaviors, we do not
know what brain structures are involved in the computation
of the inferences. Mitchell and his colleagues (Mitchell et al.,
2004, 2005) have conducted a series of fMRI studies modeled
upon behavioral studies on impression formation. Participants
were presented with faces and behaviors and asked
either to form an impression of the person or to memorize the
sequence of behaviors. Mitchell et al. found robust activity in
medial PFC only when people had an impression goal. Given
the behavioral literature that trait inferences from behaviors
are independent of the participants' goals (Todorov and
Uleman, 2002, 2003), this finding suggests that medial PFC is
involved in explicit deliberate impression formation (e.g.,
Harris et al., 2005) but not necessarily in spontaneous
impression processes. These are only few of the unresolved
questions, and they all deal with the nature of first impressions.
However, the bigger research question is how people
update person representations in light of new information.
If behavioral research on person perception has been
moving toward assigning a smaller and smaller role to
deliberate, computationally taxing strategies until now, the
future seems to belong to the goal dependence of social cognitive
processes, including relatively automatic processes. Although until
recently these processes were conceived as inflexible, growing
research suggests that different automatic processes can be
recruited as a function of current goals and motives (Ferguson
et al., in press). A few core social motives, noted earlier, will
likely prove central in these contexts.
8. Social cognitive affective neurosciences
as glue
As this article has shown, attributions of intent figure
centrally in social perception because people are agents.
Because of their perceived intent, people as stimuli also
arouse affect in perceivers. Affective reactions stem from the
perceiver's goals colliding with the outside world (e.g.,
Mandler, 1975; Simon, 1975). Major disruptions cause emotional
reactions, which cue coping in the case of negative
disruptions (e.g., Taylor, 1991). Theoretically, an interruption
is mostly negative, but a positive disruption (e.g., unexpected
facilitation) can cause positive emotions. Disruptions arguably
vary in certainty, responsibility, timing, and the like, resulting
in distinct emotional reactions depending on cognitive
appraisals (e.g., Roseman, 1984; Smith and Ellsworth, 1985;
Weiner, 1986). Thus, emotions often result from the interaction
of perceiver mental states (cognition, motivation) and the
situation.
Social relationships particularly provide an opportunity
for the disruption or facilitation of one's goals. Relationships
entail interdependence, that is, depending on others for
reaching one's goals jointly (Kelley and Thibaut, 1978).
These related other people then create strong potentials
for arousing emotion when they facilitate or disrupt goals,
especially in unexpected ways (Berscheid, 1983). Even social
groups can evoke emotions because of such dynamics of
interdependence (Fiske et al., 2002). Thus, the intent of
other social entities is especially important to evoking
emotion.
The consequence for social neuroscience is that it can
never be solely cognitive but will inevitably entail emotion
as well. The neural systems will likely prove interconnected
between affect and cognition, as much of the works
reviewed here already indicate. Thus, the brain is not
divided up in the same way as our departments of
psychology and neurosciences, which intra-disciplinary
forces threaten to pull apart at the seams. Social neuroscience
intrinsically entails cognition, emotion, motivation, and readiness
for behavior. These intertwined systems will require all types
of brain researchers to collaborate, and we would argue to
draw on the rich data of social behavioral research, profiting
from its insights. Ultimately, we are glued together in trying
to understand the social, cognitive, affective, and neural
processes of whole humans, who are profoundly social
beings.
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