Perceived warmth and competence predict callback rates in meta-analyzed North American labor market experiments.

Extensive literature probes labor market discrimination through correspondence studies in which researchers send pairs of resumes to employers, which are closely matched except for social signals such as gender or ethnicity. Upon perceiving these signals, individuals quickly activate associated stereotypes. The Stereotype Content Model (SCM; Fiske 2002) categorizes these stereotypes into two dimensions: warmth and competence.

Effects of a Service-Learning Neuroscience Course on Mood and Intergroup Anxiety.

"Everyday Neuroscience" is an academically based community service (ABCS) course in which college students teach basic neuroscience lab activities to high school students in an under-funded school district, working in small groups on hands-on science activities for 10 weekly sessions. The present study examined the possible psychological and social effects of this experience on the college students, in comparison with peers not enrolled in such a course, by observing and surveying the high school and college students across the 10-week course period. First, the teaching-learning sessions in the course successfully promoted science-focused discussion between the high school and college students for 45 to 60 minutes each week.

When uncertainty in social contexts increases exploration and decreases obtained rewards.

Similar decision-making situations often arise repeatedly, presenting tradeoffs between (i) acquiring new information to facilitate future-related decisions (exploration) and (ii) using existing information to secure expected outcomes (exploitation). Exploration choices have been well characterized in nonsocial contexts, however, choices to explore (or not) in social environments are less well understood. Social environments are of particular interest because a key factor that increases exploration in nonsocial contexts is environmental uncertainty, and the social world is generally appreciated to be highly uncertain.

Dissociating neural sensitivity to target identity and mental state content type during inferences about other minds.

Predicting and inferring what other people think and feel (mentalizing) is central to social interaction. Since the discovery of the brain's "mentalizing network," fMRI studies have probed the lines along which the activity of different regions in this network converges and dissociates. Here, we use fMRI meta-analysis to aggregate across stimuli, paradigms, and contrasts from past studies in order to definitively test two sources of possible sensitivity among brain regions of this network with particular theoretical relevance.

Constructing complex social categories under uncertainty.

Conceptual combination is the act of building complex concepts from simpler ones. Although research has examined how inferences about compound objects (e.g.

Neural representations of others' traits predict social decisions.

To guide social interaction, people often rely on expectations about the traits of other people, based on markers of social group membership (i.e., stereotypes).

Anticipating Greater Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Social Life Is Associated With Reduced Adherence to Disease-Mitigating Guidelines.

People regularly make decisions about how often and with whom to interact. During an epidemic of communicable disease, these decisions gain new weight, as individual choices exert more direct influence on collective health and wellbeing. While much attention has been paid to how people's concerns about the health impact of the COVID-19 pandemic affect their engagement in behaviors that could curb (or accelerate) the spread of the disease, less is understood about how people's concerns about the pandemic's impact on their social lives affect these outcomes.

Empathy affects tradeoffs between life's quality and duration.

Sharing others' emotional experience through empathy has been widely linked to prosocial behavior, i.e., behavior that aims to improve others' welfare.

Rethinking Cognitive Load: A Default-Mode Network Perspective.

Typical cognitive load tasks are now known to deactivate the brain's default-mode network (DMN). This raises the possibility that apparent effects of cognitive load could arise from disruptions of DMN processes, including social cognition. Cognitive load studies are reconsidered, with reinterpretations of past research and implications for dual-process theory.

Predicting human behavior toward members of different social groups.

Disparities in outcomes across social groups pervade human societies and are of central interest to the social sciences. How people treat others is known to depend on a multitude of factors (e.g.

Dissociable Contributions of Imagination and Willpower to the Malleability of Human Patience.

The ability to exercise patience is important for human functioning. Although it is known that patience can be promoted by using top-down control, or willpower, to override impatient impulses, patience is also malleable-in particular, susceptible to framing effects-in ways that are difficult to explain using willpower alone. So far, the mechanisms underlying framing effects on patience have been elusive.

Damage to dorsolateral prefrontal cortex affects tradeoffs between honesty and self-interest.

Substantial correlational evidence suggests that prefrontal regions are critical to honest and dishonest behavior, but causal evidence specifying the nature of this involvement remains absent. We found that lesions of the human dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) decreased the effect of honesty concerns on behavior in economic games that pit honesty motives against self-interest, but did not affect decisions when honesty concerns were absent. These results point to a causal role for DLPFC in honest behavior.

The neural bases of directed and spontaneous mental state attributions to group agents.

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.

Distortions of mind perception in psychopathology.

It has long been known that psychopathology can influence social perception, but a 2D framework of mind perception provides the opportunity for an integrative understanding of some disorders. We examined the covariation of mind perception with three subclinical syndromes--autism-spectrum disorder, schizotypy, and psychopathy--and found that each presents a unique mind-perception profile. Autism-spectrum disorder involves reduced perception of agency in adult humans.

Medial prefrontal cortex subserves diverse forms of self-reflection.

The ability to think about oneself--to self--reflect--is one of the defining features of the human mind. Recent research has suggested that this ability may be subserved by a particular brain region: the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC). However, although humans can contemplate a variety of different aspects of themselves, including their stable personality traits, current feelings, and physical attributes, no research has directly examined the extent to which these different forms of self-reflection are subserved by common mechanisms.

Mentalizing under uncertainty: dissociated neural responses to ambiguous and unambiguous mental state inferences.

The ability to read the minds of others (i.e., to mentalize) requires that perceivers understand a wide range of different kinds of mental states, including not only others' beliefs and knowledge but also their feelings, desires, and preferences.

Going beyond the evidence: abstract laws and preschoolers' responses to anomalous data.

Given minimal evidence about novel objects, children might learn only relationships among the specific entities, or they might make a more abstract inference, positing classes of entities and the relations that hold among those classes. Here we show that preschoolers (mean: 57 months) can use sparse data about perceptually unique objects to infer abstract physical causal laws. These newly inferred abstract laws were robust to potentially anomalous evidence; in the face of apparent counter-evidence, children (correctly) posited the existence of an unobserved object rather than revise the abstract laws.

Exploring the neural correlates of social stereotyping.

Judging people on the basis of cultural stereotypes is a ubiquitous facet of daily life, yet little is known about how this fundamental inferential strategy is implemented in the brain. Using fMRI, we measured neural activity while participants made judgments about the likely actor (i.e.

Neural correlates of stereotype application.

Recent research has focused on the disparate mechanisms that support the human ability to "mentalize" about the thoughts and feelings of others. One such process may rely on precompiled, semantic beliefs about the characteristics common to members of a social group, that is, on stereotypes; for example, judging that a woman may be more likely than a man to have certain interests or opinions. In the current study, we identified a pattern of neural activity associated with the use of stereotypes to judge another person's psychological characteristics.

Judicious imitation: children differentially imitate deterministically and probabilistically effective actions.

Three studies look at whether the assumption of causal determinism (the assumption that all else being equal, causes generate effects deterministically) affects children's imitation of modeled actions. These studies show even when the frequency of an effect is matched, both preschoolers (N = 60; M = 56 months) and toddlers (N = 48; M = 18 months) imitate actions more faithfully when modeled actions are deterministically rather than probabilistically effective. A third study suggests that preschoolers' (N = 32; M = 58 months) imitation is affected not just by whether the agent's goal is satisfied but also by whether the action is a reliable means to the goal.

Repetition suppression of ventromedial prefrontal activity during judgments of self and others.

One useful strategy for inferring others' mental states (i.e., mentalizing) may be to use one's own thoughts, feelings, and desires as a proxy for those of other people.