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Social interactions unfold within networks of relationships. How do beliefs about others’ social ties shape—and how are they shaped by—expectations about how others will behave? Here, participants joined a fictive online game-playing community and interacted with its purported members, who varied in terms of their trustworthiness and apparent relationships with one another. Participants were less trusting of partners with untrustworthy friends, even after they consistently showed themselves to be trustworthy, and were less willing to engage with them in the future. To test whether people not only expect friends to behave similarly but also expect those who behave similarly to be friends, an incidental memory test was given. Participants were exceptionally likely to falsely remember similarly behaving partners as friends. Thus, people expect friendship to predict similar behavior and vice versa. These results suggest that knowledge of social networks and others’ behavioral tendencies reciprocally interact to shape social thought and behavior.

How does the human brain support reasoning about social relations (e.g., social status, friendships)? Converging theories suggest that navigating knowledge of social relations may coopt neural circuitry with evolutionarily older functions (e.g., shifting attention in space). Here, we analyzed multivoxel response patterns of fMRI data to examine the neural mechanisms for shifting attention in knowledge of a social hierarchy. The "directions" in which participants mentally navigated social knowledge were encoded in multivoxel patterns in superior parietal cortex, which also encoded the direction of attentional shifts in space. Exploratory analyses implicated additional regions of posterior parietal and occipital cortex in encoding analogous mental operations in space and social knowledge. However, cross-domain analyses suggested that attentional shifts in space and social knowledge are encoded in functionally independent response patterns. These results elucidate the neural basis for navigating abstract knowledge of social relations, and its connection to more basic mental operations. Author ContributionsConceptualization, C.P.; Methodology, C.P. and M.D.; Software, M.D.; Formal Analysis, M.D.; Investigation, M.D. and R.B.; Resources, C.P.; Data curation, M.D.; Writing -Original Draft, C.P. and M.D.; Writing -Review & Editing, C.P., M.D., and R.B., Visualization, M.D.; Supervision, C.P.; Project Administration, C.P.; Funding Acquisition, C.P. Declaration of InterestsThe authors declare no competing interests.

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