RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Neural representations of others’ traits predict social decisions
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 2021.08.01.454671
DO 10.1101/2021.08.01.454671
A1 Kenji Kobayashi
A1 Joseph W. Kable
A1 Ming Hsu
A1 Adrianna C. Jenkins
YR 2021
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/09/26/2021.08.01.454671.abstract
AB To guide social interaction, people often rely on expectations about the traits of other people based on markers of social group membership, i.e., stereotypes. Although the influence of stereotypes on social behavior is widespread, key questions remain about how traits inferred from social group membership are instantiated in the brain and incorporated into neural computations that guide social behavior. Here, we show that the human lateral orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) represents the content of stereotypes about members of different social groups in the service of social decision-making. During fMRI scanning, participants decided how to distribute resources across themselves and members of a variety of social groups in a modified Dictator Game. Behaviorally, we replicated our recent finding that perceptions of others’ traits, captured by a two-dimensional framework of stereotype content (warmth and competence), biased participants’ monetary allocation choices in a context-dependent manner: recipients’ warmth increased advantageous inequity aversion and their competence increased disadvantageous inequity aversion. Neurally, representational similarity analysis (RSA) revealed that perceptions of others’ traits in the two-dimensional space were represented in the temporoparietal junction and superior temporal sulcus, two regions associated with mentalizing, and in the lateral OFC, known to represent latent environmental features during goal-directed outcome inference outside the social domain. Critically, only the latter predicted individual choices, suggesting that the effect of stereotypes on behavior is mediated by inference-based, domain-general decision-making processes in the OFC.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.