Human Neuroscience Talk

The social mind is tailored to the problem of predicting other people. Imagine trying to navigate the social world without understanding that tired people tend to become frustrated, or that mean people tend to lash out. Our social interactions depend on the ability to anticipate others’ actions, and we rely on knowledge about their state (i.e., tired) and traits (i.e., mean) to do so. I will present a multi-layered framework of social cognition that helps to explain how people map the richness and complexity of others’ minds, how they use this map to predict others’ social future, and the social consequences of making accurate predictions. Using neuroimaging, behavioral, and linguistic methods, I demonstrate how the social mind leverages the structure and dynamics of mental state representations to make predictions about the social world.