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How do people consider other minds during cooperation versus competition? Some accounts predict that theory of mind (ToM) is recruited more for cooperation versus competition or competition versus cooperation, whereas other accounts predict similar recruitment across these two contexts. The present fMRI study examined activity in brain regions for ToM (bilateral temporoparietal junction, precuneus, dorsomedial prefrontal cortex) across cooperative and competitive interactions with the same individual within the same paradigm. Although univariate analyses revealed that ToM regions overall were recruited similarly across interaction contexts, multivariate pattern analyses revealed that these regions nevertheless encoded information separating cooperation from competition. Specifically, ToM regions encoded differences between cooperation and competition when people believed the outcome was determined by their and their partner's choices but not when the computer determined the outcome. We propose that, when people are motivated to consider others' mental states, ToM regions encode different aspects of mental states during cooperation versus competition. Given the role of these regions for ToM, these findings reveal distinct patterns of social cognition for distinct motivational contexts. •Cooperative and competitive interactions involve theory of mind (ToM).•BOLD response magnitudes in ToM regions are similar for the two contexts.•Spatial patterns of activity in ToM regions differ for cooperation and competition.•Trials with person- but not computer-dependent outcomes show this difference.

During conversation, people often endeavor to convey information in an understandable way (finding common ground) while also sharing novel or surprising information (exploring new ground). Here, we test how friends and strangers balance these two strategies to connect with each other. Using fMRI hyperscanning, we measure a preference for common ground as convergence over time and exploring new ground as divergence over time by tracking dyads’ neural and linguistic trajectories over the course of semi-structured intimacy-building conversations. In our study, 60 dyads (30 friend dyads) engaged in a real-time conversation with discrete prompts and demarcated turns. Our analyses reveal that friends diverge neurally and linguistically: their neural patterns become more dissimilar over time and they explore more diverse topics. In contrast, strangers converge: neural patterns and language become more similar over time. The more a conversation between strangers resembles the exploratory conversations of friends, the more they enjoy it. Our results highlight exploring new ground as a strategy for a successful conversation. People employ different conversational strategies to establish social connection. Here, the authors use fMRI hyperscanning to track neural and linguistic trajectories during naturalistic conversation to show that friends diverge, exploring new ground, while strangers converge, seeking common ground.

Across a variety of contexts, adults tend to cooperate more with ingroup members than outgroup members. However, humans belong to multiple social groups simultaneously and we know little about how this cross-categorization affects cooperative decision-making. Nationality and gender are two social categories that are ripe for exploration in this regard: They regularly intersect in the real world and we know that each affects cooperation in isolation. Here we explore two hypotheses concerning the effects of cross-categorization on cooperative decision-making. First, the additivity hypothesis (H1), which proposes that the effects of social categories are additive, suggesting that people will be most likely to cooperate with partners who are nationality and gender ingroup members. Second, the category dominance hypothesis (H2), which proposes that one category will outcompete the other in driving decision-making, suggesting that either nationality or gender information will be privileged in cooperative contexts. Secondarily, we test whether identification with—and implicit bias toward—nationality and gender categories predict decision-making. Indian and US Americans ( N = 479), made decisions in two cooperative contexts—the Dictator and Prisoner’s Dilemma Games—when paired with partners of all four social categories: Indian women and men, and US American women and men. Nationality exerted a stronger influence than gender: people shared and cooperated more with own-nationality partners and believed that own-nationality partners would be more cooperative. Both identification with—and implicit preferences for—own-nationality, led to more sharing in the Dictator Game. Our findings are most consistent with H2, suggesting that when presented simultaneously, nationality, but not gender, exerts an important influence on cooperative decision-making. Our study highlights the importance of testing cooperation in more realistic intergroup contexts, ones in which multiple social categories are in play.

Abstract While we may think about harm as primarily being about physical injury, harm can also take the form of negative psychological impact. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we examined the extent to which moral judgments of physical and psychological harms are processed similarly, focusing on brain regions implicated in mental state reasoning or theory of mind, a key cognitive process for moral judgment. First, univariate analyses reveal item-specific features that lead to greater recruitment of theory of mind regions for psychological harm versus physical harm. Second, multivariate pattern analyses reveal sensitivity to the psychological/physical distinction in two regions implicated in theory of mind: the right temporoparietal junction and the precuneus. Third, we find no reliable differences between neurotypical adults and adults with autism spectrum disorder with regard to neural activity related to theory of mind during moral evaluations of psychological and physical harm. Altogether, these results reveal neural sensitivity to the distinction between psychological harm and physical harm.

People are often quite attuned to the minds around them, but it’s unclear whether the tendency to consider the minds of others differs depending on the context. Research on intergroup processes and interpersonal relations reveal that the tendency to consider the minds of others depend on factors like group membership; however, interactions with ingroup members and outgroup members tend to conflate with cooperative interactions and competitive interactions, respectively. Cooperation and competition are two categories of interactions that encompass most of collective human behavior and thus provide natural categories for grouping social behaviors. We test the idea that people’s tendencies to consider the minds of others depend on the type of social interaction by primarily focusing on cooperation and competition. Papers 1 and 2 directly compare theory of mind across cooperative and competitive contexts, whereas Paper 3 aims to understand the role of theory of mind in supporting one important aspect of cooperation—a sense of fairness—by studying responses to different forms of unfairness across a spectrum of ages in children. Altogether, these results show an influence of theory of mind on social evaluations and social behaviors and support the idea that sensitivity to context may emerge early in life but becomes more difficult to detect over time.

The present study presents the results of a collaborative registered replication of Griskevicius et al. (2010, Experiment 1). As part of the Collaborative Replication and Education Project, 24 student groups from six countries (N = 3,774) investigated whether pro-environmental behavior can be promoted by priming status motives (desires for social status and prestige). This large, multi-site replication showed no evidence to support the hypothesis that hypothetical pro-environmental behavior can be stimulated by having participants read a story designed to prime status motives. We performed several exploratory analyses to investigate whether extension variables (i.e., equating “green” choices with prosocial behavior, political beliefs, sampling methods, location, duration of data collection, and gender) moderated the hypothesized effect of status motives on pro-environmental choices, but these analyses produced null results. One limitation of the study is that most data collection sites did not include a manipulation check, and the one site that did found a much weaker effect (d = 0.32) than the extremely large effect originally reported (d = 3.69). As a result, it remains unclear whether the null result reflects a failure of this specific priming method or a challenge to the underlying theory.

The core use of human language is communicating complex ideas from one mind to another in everyday conversations. In conversations, comprehension and production processes are intertwined, as speakers soon become listeners, and listeners become speakers. Nonetheless, the neural systems underlying these faculties are typically studied in isolation, using paradigms that cannot fully engage our capacity for interactive communication, and with indirect measures of similarity. Here, we used an fMRI hyperscanning paradigm to measure neural activity simultaneously in pairs of subjects engaged in real-time, interactive conversations. We used contextual word embeddings from a large language model to quantify the linguistic coupling between production and comprehension systems within and across individual brains. We found a highly overlapping network of regions involved in both production and comprehension spanning much of the cortical language network. Our findings reveal that shared representations for both processes extend beyond the language network into areas associated with social cognition. Together, these results suggest that the specialized neural systems for speech perception and production align on a common set of linguistic features encoded in a broad cortical network for language and communication.

Understanding people's minds is essential for effectively navigating our social world. This chapter focuses on the capacity to attribute and reason about one's own mind and the minds of others (referred to as theory of mind , or ToM ) and its role in moral cognition. The section on moral judgment focuses on the circumstances in which people rely on mental states for moral judgments and how ToM may differ depending on the moral domain. We provide a functional explanation for these patterns of mental‐state reasoning that contrasts the need to regulate interpersonal relations with the need to protect the self. The section on moral behavior focuses on interactions with moral agents (e.g., friends, foes, ingroups, outgroups). We examine how ToM is deployed in two fundamental social contexts (i.e., cooperation and competition) and elaborate on the circumstances in which people fail to consider the minds of others. We end by providing some evidence that ToM can improve interpersonal and intergroup relations.

Many prize synchrony as the ingredient that turns a conversation from a debate into a delightful duet. Yet, learning from other people’s diverging opinions can also foster understanding and agreement, satisfy curiosity, and spur imagination. Using fMRI hyperscanning and natural language processing we tested how two debaters navigate conflictual conversations to find agreement. Dyads (N=60) discussed pressing societal problems while being instructed to either persuade their partner or compromise with each other. Our analysis uncovered three key insights: First, individuals instructed to compromise rather than persuade tended to agree more at the end of the session. Second, hyperscanning and linguistic analyses revealed that encouraging compromise resulted in increased exploration during conversations; dyads given compromise instructions traversed more diverse mental states and topics. Third, heightened exploration was linked to greater eventual agreement. Notably, the effect of the compromise instruction on agreement was entirely mediated by the degree of exploration. Together, these results suggest that trying to find agreement may be spurred by exploration, something that happens when people are motivated to compromise but not persuade.