Abstract cognitive maps of social network structure aid adaptive inference.

Social navigation-such as anticipating where gossip may spread, or identifying which acquaintances can help land a job-relies on knowing how people are connected within their larger social communities. Problematically, for most social networks, the space of possible relationships is too vast to observe and memorize. Indeed, people's knowledge of these social relations is well known to be biased and error-prone. Here, we reveal that these biased representations reflect a fundamental computation that abstracts over individual relationships to enable principled inferences about unseen relationships. We propose a theory of network representation that explains how people learn inferential cognitive maps of social relations from direct observation, what kinds of knowledge structures emerge as a consequence, and why it can be beneficial to encode systematic biases into social cognitive maps. Leveraging simulations, laboratory experiments, and "field data" from a real-world network, we find that people abstract observations of direct relations (e.g., friends) into inferences of multistep relations (e.g., friends-of-friends). This multistep abstraction mechanism enables people to discover and represent complex social network structure, affording adaptive inferences across a variety of contexts, including friendship, trust, and advice-giving. Moreover, this multistep abstraction mechanism unifies a variety of otherwise puzzling empirical observations about social behavior. Our proposal generalizes the theory of cognitive maps to the fundamental computational problem of social inference, presenting a powerful framework for understanding the workings of a predictive mind operating within a complex social world.

Prefrontal cortex state representations shape human credit assignment.

People learn adaptively from feedback, but the rate of such learning differs drastically across individuals and contexts. Here, we examine whether this variability reflects differences in what is learned. Leveraging a neurocomputational approach that merges fMRI and an iterative reward learning task, we link the specificity of credit assignment-how well people are able to appropriately attribute outcomes to their causes-to the precision of neural codes in the prefrontal cortex (PFC). Participants credit task-relevant cues more precisely in social compared vto nonsocial contexts, a process that is mediated by high-fidelity (i.e., distinct and consistent) state representations in the PFC. Specifically, the medial PFC and orbitofrontal cortex work in concert to match the neural codes from feedback to those at choice, and the strength of these common neural codes predicts credit assignment precision. Together this work provides a window into how neural representations drive adaptive learning.

Conceptual representations of uncertainty predict risky decision-making.

Decisions made under uncertainty often are considered according to their perceived subjective value. We move beyond this traditional framework to explore the hypothesis that conceptual representations of uncertainty influence risky choice. Results reveal that uncertainty concepts are represented along a dimension that jointly captures probabilistic and valenced features of the conceptual space. These uncertainty representations predict the degree to which an individual engages in risky decision-making. Moreover, we find that most individuals have two largely distinct representations: one for uncertainty and another for certainty. In contrast, a minority of individuals exhibit substantial overlap between their representations of uncertainty and certainty. Together, these findings reveal the relationship between the conceptualization of uncertainty and risky decisions.

Uncertainty aversion predicts the neural expansion of semantic representations.

Correctly identifying the meaning of a stimulus requires activating the appropriate semantic representation among many alternatives. One way to reduce this uncertainty is to differentiate semantic representations from each other, thereby expanding the semantic space. Here, in four experiments, we test this semantic-expansion hypothesis, finding that uncertainty-averse individuals exhibit increasingly differentiated and separated semantic representations. This effect is mirrored at the neural level, where uncertainty aversion predicts greater distances between activity patterns in the left inferior frontal gyrus when reading words, and enhanced sensitivity to the semantic ambiguity of these words in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Two direct tests of the behavioural consequences of semantic expansion further reveal that uncertainty-averse individuals exhibit reduced semantic interference and poorer generalization. Together, these findings show that the internal structure of our semantic representations acts as an organizing principle to make the world more identifiable.

Shared neural representations and temporal segmentation of political content predict ideological similarity.

Despite receiving the same sensory input, opposing partisans often interpret political content in disparate ways. Jointly analyzing controlled and naturalistic functional magnetic resonance imaging data, we uncover the neurobiological mechanisms explaining how these divergent political viewpoints arise. Individuals who share an ideology have more similar neural representations of political words, experience greater neural synchrony during naturalistic political content, and temporally segment real-world information into the same meaningful units. In the striatum and amygdala, increasing intersubject similarity in neural representations of political concepts during a word reading task predicts enhanced synchronization of blood oxygen level-dependent time courses when viewing real-time, inflammatory political videos, revealing that polarization can arise from differences in the brain's affective valuations of political concepts. Together, this research shows that political ideology is shaped by semantic representations of political concepts processed in an environment free of any polarizing agenda and that these representations bias how real-world political information is construed into a polarized perspective.

A tale of two perspectives: Reply to Schneider (2022).

Although Schneider (2022) suggests integrating our cognitive-mechanistic opinion piece with existentialist-humanistic perspectives, the two approaches answer fundamentally different questions about psychology. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

A probabilistic map of emotional experiences during competitive social interactions.

Theories of emotion and decision-making argue that negative, high arousing emotions-such as anger-motivate competitive social choice (e.g., punishing and defecting). However, given the long-standing challenge of quantifying emotion and the narrow framework in which emotion is traditionally examined, it remains unclear which emotions are actually associated with motivating these types of choices. To address this gap, we combine machine learning algorithms with a measure of affect that is agnostic to any specific emotion label. The result is a probabilistic map of emotion that is used to classify the specific emotions experienced by participants in a variety of social interactions (Ultimatum Game, Prisoner's Dilemma, and Public Goods Game). Our results reveal that punitive and uncooperative choices are linked to a diverse array of negative, neutrally arousing emotions, such as sadness and disappointment, while only weakly linked to anger. These findings stand in contrast to the commonly held assumption that anger drives decisions to punish, defect, and freeride-thus, offering new insight into the role of emotion in motiving social choice.

Latent motives guide structure learning during adaptive social choice.

Predicting the behaviour of others is an essential part of social cognition. Despite its ubiquity, social prediction poses a poorly understood generalization problem: we cannot assume that others will repeat past behaviour in new settings or that their future actions are entirely unrelated to the past. We demonstrate that humans solve this challenge using a structure learning mechanism that uncovers other people's latent, unobservable motives, such as greed and risk aversion. In four studies, participants (N = 501) predicted other players' decisions across four economic games, each with different social tensions (for example, Prisoner's Dilemma and Stag Hunt). Participants achieved accurate social prediction by learning the stable motivational structure underlying a player's changing actions across games. This motive-based abstraction enabled participants to attend to information diagnostic of the player's next move and disregard irrelevant contextual cues. Participants who successfully learned another's motives were more strategic in a subsequent competitive interaction with that player in entirely new contexts, reflecting that social structure learning supports adaptive social behaviour.

The polarized mind in context: Interdisciplinary approaches to the psychology of political polarization.

Existing research into the psychological roots of political polarization centers around two main approaches: one studying cognitive traits that predict susceptibility to holding polarized beliefs and one studying contextual influences that spread and reinforce polarized attitudes. Although both accounts have made valuable progress, political polarization is neither a purely cognitive trait nor a contextual issue. We argue that a new approach aiming to uncover interactions between cognition and context will be fruitful for understanding how polarization arises. Furthermore, recent developments in neuroimaging methods can overcome long-standing issues of measurement and ecological validity to critically help identify in which psychological processing steps-e.g., attention, semantic understanding, emotion-polarization takes hold. This interdisciplinary research agenda can thereby provide new avenues for interventions against the political polarization that plagues democracies around the world. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

A generalizable framework for assessing the role of emotion during choice.

The study of emotion has been plagued by several challenges that have left the field fractionated. To date, there is no dominant method for measuring the nebulous and often ill-defined experience of emotion. Here, we offer a new way forward, one that marries numerically precise measurements of affect with current models of human behavior, to more deeply understand the role of emotion during choice, and in particular, during social decision-making. This tool can be combined with multiple other measures that capture different features and levels of the emotional experience, making it particularly flexible to be used in any number of contexts. By operationalizing the classic circumplex model of affect so that it can deliver fine-grained, continuous measurements as affect evolves overtime, our goal is to provide a generalizable and flexible framework for computing affect to infer emotions so that we can assess their impact on human behavior. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Emotion prediction errors guide socially adaptive behaviour.

People make decisions based on deviations from expected outcomes, known as prediction errors. Past work has focused on reward prediction errors, largely ignoring violations of expected emotional experiences-emotion prediction errors. We leverage a method to measure real-time fluctuations in emotion as people decide to punish or forgive others. Across four studies (N = 1,016), we reveal that emotion and reward prediction errors have distinguishable contributions to choice, such that emotion prediction errors exert the strongest impact during decision-making. We additionally find that a choice to punish or forgive can be decoded in less than a second from an evolving emotional response, suggesting that emotions swiftly influence choice. Finally, individuals reporting significant levels of depression exhibit selective impairments in using emotion-but not reward-prediction errors. Evidence for emotion prediction errors potently guiding social behaviours challenge standard decision-making models that have focused solely on reward.

Clarifying the link between music and social bonding by measuring prosociality in context.

To corroborate the music and social bonding hypothesis, we propose that future investigations isolate specific components of social bonding and consider the influence of context. We deconstruct and operationalize social bonding through the lens of social psychology and provide examples of specific measures that can be used to assess how the link between music and sociality varies by context.

The computational challenge of social learning.

The complex reward structure of the social world and the uncertainty endemic to social contexts poses a challenge for modeling. For example, during social interactions, the actions of one person influence the internal states of another. These social dependencies make it difficult to formalize social learning problems in a mathematically tractable way. While it is tempting to dispense with these complexities, they are a defining feature of social life. Because the structure of social interactions challenges the simplifying assumptions often made in models, they make an ideal testbed for computational models of cognition. By adopting a framework that embeds existing social knowledge into the model, we can go beyond explaining behaviors in laboratory tasks to explaining those observed in the wild.

Cognitive maps of social features enable flexible inference in social networks.

In order to navigate a complex web of relationships, an individual must learn and represent the connections between people in a social network. However, the sheer size and complexity of the social world makes it impossible to acquire firsthand knowledge of all relations within a network, suggesting that people must make inferences about unobserved relationships to fill in the gaps. Across three studies (n = 328), we show that people can encode information about social features (e.g., hobbies, clubs) and subsequently deploy this knowledge to infer the existence of unobserved friendships in the network. Using computational models, we test various feature-based mechanisms that could support such inferences. We find that people's ability to successfully generalize depends on two representational strategies: a simple but inflexible similarity heuristic that leverages homophily, and a complex but flexible cognitive map that encodes the statistical relationships between social features and friendships. Together, our studies reveal that people can build cognitive maps encoding arbitrary patterns of latent relations in many abstract feature spaces, allowing social networks to be represented in a flexible format. Moreover, these findings shed light on open questions across disciplines about how people learn and represent social networks and may have implications for generating more human-like link prediction in machine learning algorithms.

Intolerance of uncertainty modulates brain-to-brain synchrony during politically polarized perception.

Political partisans see the world through an ideologically biased lens. What drives political polarization? Although it has been posited that polarization arises because of an inability to tolerate uncertainty and a need to hold predictable beliefs about the world, evidence for this hypothesis remains elusive. We examined the relationship between uncertainty tolerance and political polarization using a combination of brain-to-brain synchrony and intersubject representational similarity analysis, which measured committed liberals' and conservatives' (n = 44) subjective interpretation of naturalistic political video material. Shared ideology between participants increased neural synchrony throughout the brain during a polarizing political debate filled with provocative language but not during a neutrally worded news clip on polarized topics or a nonpolitical documentary. During the political debate, neural synchrony in mentalizing and valuation networks was modulated by one's aversion to uncertainty: Uncertainty-intolerant individuals experienced greater brain-to-brain synchrony with politically like-minded peers and lower synchrony with political opponents-an effect observed for liberals and conservatives alike. Moreover, the greater the neural synchrony between committed partisans, the more likely that two individuals formed similar, polarized attitudes about the debate. These results suggest that uncertainty attitudes gate the shared neural processing of political narratives, thereby fueling polarized attitude formation about hot-button issues.

Hippocampus Guides Adaptive Learning during Dynamic Social Interactions.

How do we evaluate whether someone will make a good friend or collaborative peer? A hallmark of human cognition is the ability to make adaptive decisions based on information garnered from limited prior experiences. Using an interactive social task measuring adaptive choice (deciding who to reengage or avoid) in male and female participants, we find the hippocampus supports value-based social choices following single-shot learning. These adaptive choices elicited a suppression signal in the hippocampus, revealing sensitivity for the subjective perception of a person and how well they treat you during choice. The extent to which the hippocampus was suppressed was associated with flexibly interacting with prior generous individuals and avoiding selfish individuals. Further, we found that hippocampal signals during decision-making were related to subsequent memory for a person and the offer they made before. Consistent with the hippocampus leveraging previously executed choices to solidify a reliable neural signature for future adaptive behavior, we also observed a later hippocampal enhancement. These findings highlight the hippocampus playing a multifaceted role in socially adaptive learning.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Adaptively navigating social interactions requires an integration of prior experiences with information gleaned from the current environment. While most research has focused on striatal-based feedback learning, open questions remain regarding the role of hippocampal-based episodic memory systems. Here, we show that during social decisions based on prior experience, hippocampal suppression signals were sensitive to adaptive choice, while hippocampal enhancements was related to subsequent memory for the original social interaction. These findings highlight the hippocampus playing a multifaceted role in socially adaptive learning.

Emotional responses to prosocial messages increase willingness to self-isolate during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic may be one of the greatest modern societal challenges that requires widespread collective action and cooperation. While a handful of actions can help reduce pathogen transmission, one critical behavior is to self-isolate. Public health messages often use persuasive language to change attitudes and behaviors, which can evoke a wide range of negative and positive emotional responses. In a U.S. representative sample (N = 955), we presented two messages that leveraged either threatening or prosocial persuasive language, and measured self-reported emotional reactions and willingness to self-isolate. Although emotional responses to the interventions were highly heterogeneous, personality traits known to be linked with distinct emotional experiences (extraversion and neuroticism) explained significant variance in the arousal response. While results show that both types of appeals increased willingness to self-isolate (Cohen's d = 0.41), compared to the threat message, the efficacy of the prosocial message was more dependent on the magnitude of the evoked emotional response on both arousal and valence dimensions. Together, these results imply that prosocial appeals have the potential to be associated with greater compliance if they evoke highly positive emotional responses.

Punishing the privileged: Selfish offers from high-status allocators elicit greater punishment from third-party arbitrators.

Individuals high in socioeconomic status (SES) are often viewed as valuable members of society. However, the appeal of high-SES people exists in tension with our aversion to inequity. Little experimental work has directly examined how people rectify inequitable distributions between two individuals varying in SES. The objective of the present study was to examine how disinterested third parties adjudicate inequity in the context of concrete financial allocations between a selfish allocator and a recipient who was the victim of the allocator's selfish offer. Specifically, this study focused on whether knowing the SES of the victim or the allocator affected the participant's decisions to punish the selfish allocator. In two experiments (N = 999), participants completed a modified third-party Ultimatum Game in which they arbitrated inequitable exchanges between an allocator and a recipient. Although participants generally preferred to redistribute inequitable exchanges without punishing players who made unfair allocations, we observed an increased preference for punitive solutions as offers became increasingly selfish. This tendency was especially pronounced when the victim was low in SES or when the perpetrator was high in SES, suggesting a tendency to favor the disadvantaged even among participants reporting high subjective SES. Finally, punitive responses were especially likely when the context emphasized the allocator's privileged status rather than the recipient's underprivileged status. These findings inform our understanding of how SES biases retributive justice even in non-judicial contexts that minimize the salience of punishment.

Anxiety Impedes Adaptive Social Learning Under Uncertainty.

Very little is known about how individuals learn under uncertainty when other people are involved. We propose that humans are particularly tuned to social uncertainty, which is especially noisy and ambiguous. Individuals exhibiting less tolerance for uncertainty, such as those with anxiety, may have greater difficulty learning in uncertain social contexts and therefore provide an ideal test population to probe learning dynamics under uncertainty. Using a dynamic trust game and a matched nonsocial task, we found that healthy subjects (n = 257) were particularly good at learning under negative social uncertainty, swiftly figuring out when to stop investing in an exploitative social partner. In contrast, subjects with anxiety (n = 97) overinvested in exploitative partners. Computational modeling attributed this pattern to a selective reduction in learning from negative social events and a failure to enhance learning as uncertainty rises-two mechanisms that likely facilitate adaptive social choice.

Why we don't always punish: Preferences for non-punitive responses to moral violations.

While decades of research demonstrate that people punish unfair treatment, recent work illustrates that alternative, non-punitive responses may also be preferred. Across five studies (N = 1,010) we examine non-punitive methods for restoring justice. We find that in the wake of a fairness violation, compensation is preferred to punishment, and once maximal compensation is available, punishment is no longer the favored response. Furthermore, compensating the victim-as a method for restoring justice-also generalizes to judgments of more severe crimes: participants allocate more compensation to the victim as perceived severity of the crime increases. Why might someone refrain from punishing a perpetrator? We investigate one possible explanation, finding that punishment acts as a conduit for different moral signals depending on the social context in which it arises. When choosing partners for social exchange, there are stronger preferences for those who previously punished as third-party observers but not those who punished as victims. This is in part because third-parties are perceived as relatively more moral when they punish, while victims are not. Together, these findings demonstrate that non-punitive alternatives can act as effective avenues for restoring justice, while also highlighting that moral reputation hinges on whether punishment is enacted by victims or third-parties.