Theory of Mind Following the Violation of Strong and Weak Prior Beliefs

Abstract

Recent work in psychology and neuroscience has revealed differences in impression updating across social distance and group membership. Observers tend to maintain prior impressions of close (vs. distant) and ingroup (vs. outgroup) others in light of new information, and this belief maintenance is at times accompanied by increased activity in Theory of Mind regions. It remains an open question whether differences in the strength of prior beliefs, in a context absent social motivation, contribute to neural differences during belief updating. We devised a functional magnetic resonance imaging study to isolate the impact of experimentally induced prior beliefs on mentalizing activity. Participants learned about targets who performed 2 or 4 same-valenced behaviors (leading to the formation of weak or strong priors), before performing 2 counter-valenced behaviors. We found a greater change in activity in dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (DMPFC) and right temporo-parietal junction following the violation of strong versus weak priors, and a greater change in activity in DMPFC and left temporo-parietal junction following the violation of positive versus negative priors. These results indicate that differences in neural responses to unexpected behaviors from close versus distant others, and ingroup versus outgroup members, may be driven in part by differences in the strength of prior beliefs.

Human reasoning on social interactions in naturalistic context: insights from the theory of mind brain circuits.

“…Also, evidence highlighted an enhanced activity the bilateral TPJ when mental states information is relevant for the moral judgment (Young & Waytz, 2013). Especially, enhanced activations in the TPJ are observed when an immoral behavior is shown (Kim et al, 2021) compared to a moral social comportment. A suggested explanation is the perception of immoral behavior as containing more intents than moral ones (Brambilla et al, 2019), plausibly recruiting a broader neural circuit.…”

Focusing on the positive or the negative: Self‐construal moderates negativity bias in impression updating

“…It is interesting to discover a reduced negative tendency or even positivity bias among interdependent individuals, in the context that negativity bias is widely found in the research on moral impression updating (Kim et al, 2021; Mende‐Siedlecki et al, 2013; Mende‐Siedlecki & Todorov, 2016; Siegel et al, 2018). We argue that the goals of maintaining a social network and close connections with others drives interdependent individuals to keep their good opinions of others.…”

“…Study 2 aimed to confirm the results of study 1 with a narrative description paradigm. This is the most commonly used paradigm in impression updating (e.g., Kim et al, 2021; Mende‐Siedlecki et al, 2013) and manipulates impression updating by presenting inconsistent behavioral descriptions. Given that this topic has not been directly studied in previous research, the results of study 1 might be insufficient to support our hypothesis.…”

Neural implementation of computational mechanisms underlying the continuous trade-off between cooperation and competition

“…Classical accounts have posited that this region had a role in distinguishing one's own mental states from others, as revealed by the BOLD response changing when another's beliefs are revealed to be erroneous and different from one's own 40 . More recent theoretical work has argued for a social predictive coding framework for theory of mind postulating errors signals in TPJ 66 and previous studies have reported evidence of rTPJ encoding of both unsigned [67][68][69][70] and signed prediction errors 71 in a range of social contexts and behaviours. rTPJ has also been implicated in tracking the expectation of cooperation of others in public good games 72,73 .…”