Simulation requires activation of self-knowledge to change self-concept.

Simulating other people can shift one's self-concept, an effect known as simulation-induced malleability. How does imagining others shift the self? We propose that the activation of self-knowledge is the key factor by which simulation of others alters one's self-concept. We test this possibility across four studies that each manipulate self-knowledge activation indirectly during simulation and measure the impact on subsequent self-ratings.

A Fluid Self-Concept: How the Brain Maintains Coherence and Positivity across an Interconnected Self-Concept While Incorporating Social Feedback.

People experience instances of social feedback as interdependent with potential implications for their entire self-concept. How do people maintain positivity and coherence across the self-concept while updating self-views from feedback? We present a network model describing how the brain represents the semantic dependency relations among traits and uses this information to avoid an overall loss of positivity and coherence. Both male and female human participants received social feedback during a self-evaluation task while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging.

Stereotypes disrupt probabilistic category learning.

Racial stereotypes exert pernicious effects on decision-making and behavior, yet little is known about how stereotypes disrupt people's ability to learn new associations. The current research interrogates a fundamental question about the boundary conditions of probabilistic learning by examining whether and how learning is influenced by preexisting associations. Across three experiments, participants learned the probabilistic outcomes of different card combinations based on feedback in either a social (e.

Uncertain threat is associated with greater impulsive actions and neural dissimilarity to Black versus White faces.

Race is a social construct that contributes to group membership and heightens emotional arousal in intergroup contexts. Little is known about how emotional arousal, specifically uncertain threat, influences behavior and brain processes in response to race information. We investigated the effects of experimentally manipulated uncertain threat on impulsive actions to Black versus White faces in a community sample (n = 106) of Black and White adults.

Computational underpinnings of partisan information processing biases and associations with depth of cognitive reasoning.

Despite unprecedented access to information, partisans increasingly disagree about basic facts that are backed by data, posing a serious threat to a democracy that relies on finding common ground based on objective truths. We examine the underpinnings of this phenomenon using drift diffusion modeling (DDM). Partisans (N = 148) completed a sequential sampling task where they evaluated the honesty of Democrat or Republican politicians during a debate based on fact-check scores.

Partisan-motivated sampling: Re-examining politically motivated reasoning across the information processing stream.

The United States is increasingly politically polarized, fueling intergroup conflict and intensifying partisan biases in cognition and behavior. To date, research on intergroup bias has separately examined biases in how people search for information and how they interpret information. Here, we integrate these two perspectives to elucidate how partisan biases manifest across the information processing stream, beginning with (a) a biased selection of information, leading to (b) skewed samples of information that interact with (c) motivated interpretations to produce evaluative biases.

Learning About the Self: Motives for Coherence and Positivity Constrain Learning From Self-Relevant Social Feedback.

People learn about themselves from social feedback, but desires for coherence and positivity constrain how feedback is incorporated into the self-concept. We developed a network-based model of the self-concept and embedded it in a reinforcement-learning framework to provide a computational account of how motivations shape self-learning from feedback. Participants ( = 46 adult university students) received feedback while evaluating themselves on traits drawn from a causal network of trait semantics.

Causal Inference Gates Corticostriatal Learning.

Attributing outcomes to your own actions or to external causes is essential for appropriately learning which actions lead to reward and which actions do not. Our previous work showed that this type of credit assignment is best explained by a Bayesian reinforcement learning model which posits that beliefs about the causal structure of the environment modulate reward prediction errors (RPEs) during action value updating. In this study, we investigated the brain networks underlying reinforcement learning that are influenced by causal beliefs using functional magnetic resonance imaging while human participants ( = 31; 13 males, 18 females) completed a behavioral task that manipulated beliefs about causal structure.

Processing of Task-Irrelevant Race Information is Associated with Diminished Cognitive Control in Black and White Individuals.

The race of an individual is a salient physical feature that is rapidly processed by the brain and can bias our perceptions of others. How the race of others explicitly impacts our actions toward them during intergroup contexts is not well understood. In the current study, we examined how task-irrelevant race information influences cognitive control in a go/no-go task in a community sample of Black (n = 54) and White (n = 51) participants.

Self-choice preference: The propensity to under-delegate irrespective of sense of control.

People are more likely to make choices themselves than delegate to an agent, even when it may not be the most optimal decision based on a cost-benefit analysis. Previous studies have demonstrated that retaining authority and controllability might be the primary reason for preferring self-choice. The current study asks whether impairment of controllability associated with self-choice can increase the rate of delegation and whether there are self-other discrepancies in self-choice preference.

Neurocomputational mechanisms underlying motivated seeing.

People tend to believe that their perceptions are veridical representations of the world, but also commonly report perceiving what they want to see or hear. It remains unclear whether this reflects an actual change in what people perceive or merely a bias in their responding. Here we manipulated the percept that participants wanted to see as they performed a visual categorization task.

Neural adaptation to faces reveals racial outgroup homogeneity effects in early perception.

A hallmark of intergroup biases is the tendency to individuate members of one's own group but process members of other groups categorically. While the consequences of these biases for stereotyping and discrimination are well-documented, their early perceptual underpinnings remain less understood. Here, we investigated the neural mechanisms of this effect by testing whether high-level visual cortex is differentially tuned in its sensitivity to variation in own-race versus other-race faces.

Causal Inference About Good and Bad Outcomes.

People learn differently from good and bad outcomes. We argue that valence-dependent learning asymmetries are partly driven by beliefs about the causal structure of the environment. If hidden causes can intervene to generate bad (or good) outcomes, then a rational observer will assign blame (or credit) to these hidden causes, rather than to the stable outcome distribution.

Social Rewards: From Basic Social Building Blocks to Complex Social Behavior.

Humans are social creatures, engaging almost constantly in social behaviors that serve ultimate social goals, such as forming strong bonds with one another. However, most social behaviors provide only incremental progress toward an ultimate goal. Instead, the drive to engage in any individual social act may derive from its proximal value rather than its ultimate goal.

Perceiving groups: The people perception of diversity and hierarchy.

The visual perception of individuals has received considerable attention (visual person perception), but little social psychological work has examined the processes underlying the visual perception of groups of people (visual people perception). Ensemble-coding is a visual mechanism that automatically extracts summary statistics (e.g.

Motivation alters impression formation and related neural systems.

Observers frequently form impressions of other people based on complex or conflicting information. Rather than being objective, these impressions are often biased by observers' motives. For instance, observers often downplay negative information they learn about ingroup members.

Trusting outgroup, but not ingroup members, requires control: neural and behavioral evidence.

Trust and cooperation often break down across group boundaries, contributing to pernicious consequences, from polarized political structures to intractable conflict. As such, addressing such conflicts require first understanding why trust is reduced in intergroup settings. Here, we clarify the structure of intergroup trust using neuroscientific and behavioral methods.

Power Heightens Sensitivity to Unfairness Against the Self.

Power is accompanied by a sense of entitlement, which shapes reactions to self-relevant injustices. We propose that powerful people more strongly expect to be treated fairly and are faster to perceive unjust treatment that violates these expectations. After preliminary data demonstrated that power leads people to expect fair outcomes for themselves, we conducted four experiments.

The neuroscience of motivated cognition.

Goals and needs shape individuals' thinking, a phenomenon known as motivated cognition. We highlight research from social psychology and cognitive neuroscience that provides insight into the structure of motivated cognition. In addition to demonstrating its ubiquity, we suggest that motivated cognition is often effortless and pervades information processing.

Protecting the self: the effect of social-evaluative threat on neural representations of self.

One of the most robust ways that people protect themselves from social-evaluative threat is by emphasizing the desirability of their personal characteristics, yet the neural underpinnings of this fundamental process are unknown. The current fMRI study addresses this question by examining self-evaluations of desirability (in comparison with other people) as a response to threat. Participants judged how much personality traits described themselves in comparison with their average peer.

Common representation of pain and negative emotion in the midbrain periaqueductal gray.

Human neuroimaging offers a powerful way to connect animal and human research on emotion, with profound implications for psychological science. However, the gulf between animal and human studies remains a formidable obstacle: human studies typically focus on the cortex and a few subcortical regions such as the amygdala, whereas deeper structures such as the brainstem periaqueductal gray (PAG) play a key role in animal models. Here, we directly assessed the role of PAG in human affect by interleaving in a single fMRI session two conditions known to elicit strong emotional responses--physical pain and negative image viewing.

Medial orbitofrontal cortex is associated with shifting decision thresholds in self-serving cognition.

Recent research has begun to identify neural regions associated with self-serving cognition, that is, the tendency to make claims that cast the self in an overly flattering light, yet little is known about the mechanisms supported by neural activation underlying self-serving cognition. One possibility suggested by current research is that MOFC, a region that shows reduced recruitment in relation to self-serving cognition, may support changes in the decision thresholds that influence whether information should be expressed in an evaluation. The current fMRI study addresses this question by combining a signal detection approach and a contextual manipulation that permits the measurement of changes in decision threshold.

Orbitofrontal cortex and anterior cingulate cortex are modulated by motivated social cognition.

Neural research on social cognition has not examined motivations known to influence social cognition. One fundamental motivation in social cognition is positivity motivation, that is, the desire to view close others in an overly positive light. Positivity motivation does not extend to non-close others.

Neural systems of social comparison and the "above-average" effect.

Extant neural models of self-evaluation are dominated by associations with medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) and posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) function and have mostly been developed from studies differentiating self-evaluation from evaluation of other people. Although self-evaluation is robustly characterized by systematic biases, current neural models of self-evaluation cannot speak to their neurobiology because of a lack of research. The few extant studies have made claims about associations between bias and ventral anterior cingulate cortex (vACC) function but have confounded bias with the valence of experimental stimuli.