Sangam: A Confluence of Knowledge Streams

The Neural Bases of Directed and Spontaneous Mental State Attributions to Group Agents

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dc.contributor Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
dc.contributor Saxe, Rebecca R.
dc.creator Jenkins, Adrianna C.
dc.creator Dodell-Feder, David
dc.creator Saxe, Rebecca R.
dc.creator Knobe, Joshua
dc.date 2014-10-15T20:05:09Z
dc.date 2014-10-15T20:05:09Z
dc.date 2014-08
dc.date.accessioned 2023-03-01T18:06:22Z
dc.date.available 2023-03-01T18:06:22Z
dc.identifier 1932-6203
dc.identifier http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/90952
dc.identifier Jenkins, Adrianna C., David Dodell-Feder, Rebecca Saxe, and Joshua Knobe. “The Neural Bases of Directed and Spontaneous Mental State Attributions to Group Agents.” Edited by Allan Siegel. PLoS ONE 9, no. 8 (August 20, 2014): e105341.
dc.identifier https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2377-1791
dc.identifier.uri http://localhost:8080/xmlui/handle/CUHPOERS/278767
dc.description In daily life, perceivers often need to predict and interpret the behavior of group agents, such as corporations and governments. Although research has investigated how perceivers reason about individual members of particular groups, less is known about how perceivers reason about group agents themselves. The present studies investigate how perceivers understand group agents by investigating the extent to which understanding the ‘mind’ of the group as a whole shares important properties and processes with understanding the minds of individuals. Experiment 1 demonstrates that perceivers are sometimes willing to attribute a mental state to a group as a whole even when they are not willing to attribute that mental state to any of the individual members of the group, suggesting that perceivers can reason about the beliefs and desires of group agents over and above those of their individual members. Experiment 2 demonstrates that the degree of activation in brain regions associated with attributing mental states to individuals—i.e., brain regions associated with mentalizing or theory-of-mind, including the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), temporo-parietal junction (TPJ), and precuneus—does not distinguish individual from group targets, either when reading statements about those targets' mental states (directed) or when attributing mental states implicitly in order to predict their behavior (spontaneous). Together, these results help to illuminate the processes that support understanding group agents themselves.
dc.description John Merck Fund (John Merck Scholars Program)
dc.format application/pdf
dc.language en_US
dc.publisher Public Library of Science
dc.relation http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0105341
dc.relation PLoS ONE
dc.rights Creative Commons Attribution
dc.rights http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
dc.source Public Library of Science
dc.title The Neural Bases of Directed and Spontaneous Mental State Attributions to Group Agents
dc.type Article
dc.type http://purl.org/eprint/type/JournalArticle


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