Outcome dependency alters the neural substrates of impression formation
Introduction
The ability to distill the vast amount of interpersonal information that people encounter each day into compact impressions is critical for making sense of the social world. As such, a central goal of cognitive neuroscientists studying social processes has been not only to define the mental operations and neural processes that give rise to social impressions, but also to characterize the nature of these impressions themselves. One consistent observation from behavioral research has been that not all social information counts equally—rather, certain pieces of information come to compose central expectations about people, and these expectations exert a strong pull over how subsequent information is interpreted. Historically, social psychologists have expressed this observation in terms of trait centrality (Asch, 1946), trait primacy (Asch, 1946), implicit personality theory (Rosenberg and Sedlak, 1972), social schemata (Delia and Crockett, 1973), prototypes (Cantor and Mischel, 1979), and various theories of stereotyping (Hamilton and Sherman, 1996).
In parallel, cognitive neuroscience has long viewed this drive toward coherent representations as a general property of cognition and perception (e.g., Sporns et al., 2004, Tononi et al., 1998). Likewise, the importance of perceivers' expectations in guiding these integrative processes has been expressed in numerous theoretical contexts (and numerous brain regions), including visual perception (e.g., feature integration theory; Schoenfeld et al., 2003, Treisman and Gelade, 1980), language acquisition (e.g., native language neural commitment; Kuhl, 2004, Saffran et al., 1996), discourse comprehension (Martín-Loeches et al., 2008) and memory formation (e.g., hippocampal/neocortical interactions theory; Wang and Morris, 2010).
These various perspectives all predict (correctly) that people will tend to form coherent, stable impressions of other people, objects, and scenes. This is adaptive, because representing the world as coherent and stable makes the world more comprehensible and easier to act on. However, the brain's proclivity to extract structure and patterns from noisy inputs leads to more-than-occasional cognitive missteps. People see coherent objects where none exist, confidently invest money to capitalize on illusory stock market patterns, and construct memories that comport well with expected event structures, but poorly with actual events (e.g., Bartlett, 1932, Whitson and Galinsky, 2008).
Given the brain's general (over)zealousness for building coherence, it is unsurprising that (at least according to the dominant models in social psychology) people typically construe other agents as consistent entities whose actions are guided primarily by stable dispositions (Gilbert and Malone, 1995, Jones and Harris, 1967; c.f. Malle, 2006). This personality-driven construal (notably, a primarily Western phenomenon, Choi et al., 1999) is, in many ways, unrealistic. People are, in fact, remarkably variable in their behavior across time and situations (Ross and Nisbett, 1991). Yet “knowing” that people are variable does not necessarily diminish the drive toward stable social impressions—just as “knowing” that the stairs in M.C. Escher's Ascending and Descending (1960) are logically irreconcilable does not diminish the drive to construct a visually coherent staircase. An important question then, is how people maintain consistent impressions of other people when other people are so inconsistent.
The tools of cognitive neuroscience can be usefully applied to this question, having already delineated the biological underpinnings of several “coherence problems” (see Achieving consistency by discounting the inconsistent, Achieving consistency by integrating the inconsistent sections), as well as many of the structures that contribute to social impression formation. By far the most consistent area to emerge in studies of impression formation is a dorsal region of medial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC; for meta-analyses and reviews, see Denny et al., 2012, Mitchell, 2009, Van Overwalle, 2009, Wagner et al., 2012). Several other regions, including the temporo-parietal junction (TPJ), amygdala, posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), and superior temporal sulcus (STS), have also been implicated in impression formation processes (Cloutier et al., 2011, Freeman et al., 2010, Ma et al., 2011, Mende-Siedlecki et al., 2013, Mitchell et al., 2005, Schiller et al., 2009). Yet this research reveals very little about what specific processing strategies might be deployed to resolve what is arguably the fundamental problem of impression formation (Hamilton and Sherman, 1996): creating highly coherent representations from highly divergent information. Moreover, neuroimaging studies that attempt to examine impression formation under relatively naturalistic conditions are all but absent from the literature. This is perhaps puzzling, since the functional value of impression formation (at least as described by some cognitive neuroscientists) lies largely in being able to understand and predict other people. By understanding others and predicting their behavior, one can improve one's social interactions, and better achieve desired outcomes—both social and material. Yet these studies rely on forming impressions of “people” (usually face databases and/or invented names) with whom participants will never interact, who cannot help perceivers to desired outcomes, and who may not even be regarded as “real.” Thus, the question of how dMPFC (or other regions) might respond under more involving conditions remains unanswered.
A review of relevant research points toward two (conflicting) approaches that people might use to create and sustain coherent social impressions. The first is to discount or explain away information that does not conform to preconceived expectations. Well-established theories from neuroscience (Kersten et al., 2004), cognitive psychology (Anderson, 1998) and social psychology (Fiske and Linville, 1980, Snyder and Swann, 1978) converge on the notion that selectively discounting expectancy-disconfirming information is an efficient learning strategy, relieving people of the burden of interpreting information that is difficult to process and that, given what is already “known” seems more likely to represent noise than signal (consistent with a Bayesian learning approach; Anderson, 1998).
However, not all expectancies are accurate; therefore, not all expectancy-disconfirming information is noise. Inaccurate impressions arise partially from the fact that people often form these impressions based on minimal evidence. For example, people can provide a judgment of others' trustworthiness after seeing their face for as little as 33 ms (Todorov et al., 2009). The amygdala, orbitofrontal cortex, and anterior insula have been frequently implicated in these rapid, intuitive impressions. These judgments, though not necessarily accurate, nonetheless predict important outcomes, including political elections and criminal sentences (for an overview, see Ames et al., 2011). This and other research (e.g., Ambady and Rosenthal, 1993, Devine, 1989) highlights the fact that social expectancies, while strongly felt and demonstrably influential, are often based on scant evidence. Thus, under-informed expectances routinely become the lenses through which other people are viewed. In principle, information that violates these expectancies provides a means of correcting the prescription of these lenses, delivering valuable cues as to when impressions may be erroneous, while simultaneously provisioning the perceiver with the raw materials for building a more nuanced understanding. Revising impressions takes effort, however, and often the core goal of maintaining cognitive consistency trumps the objective of perceiving the world accurately (Hamilton and Sherman, 1996), people being cognitive misers (Fiske and Taylor, 2013).
Still, people do sometimes attend more to unexpected information than to expected information, with inferior frontal and temporoparietal cortices often playing a key role in reorienting visual attention toward expectancy violations (e.g. Corbetta and Shulman, 2002, Mitchell, 2008, Schank and Abelson, 1977), and posterior STS frequently observed in conjunction with unexpected changes in social gaze or movement (Frith and Frith, 2010, Pelphrey et al., 2003, Saxe et al., 2004). Moreover, these violations, when attended to, can inform social impressions (Srull and Wyer, 1989). Some of these findings appear to conflict with the literature reviewed in the previous section, suggesting that people may sometimes employ a second impression formation strategy, one that maintains coherent impressions, not by explaining away incongruous information, but by adjusting the impression to accommodate that information.
In sum, there are at least two competing approaches by which people might maintain consistent impressions of other people—explaining away inconsistency to preserve the impression, and altering the impression to fit the inconsistency. Given that previous literature provides examples of both approaches to maintaining coherent impressions (both social and nonsocial), it seems likely that the appropriate question is not which approach people use, but rather which one when.
The present study investigates one answer to this question (recognizing that there may be more than one). It begins with the following premise: people pay attention to information that helps them get what they want. This suggests that when people depend on someone else for a desired outcome (when they are outcome-dependent on that person), perceivers may attend to information about the other person that they would ordinarily ignore (including, perhaps, expectancy-disconfirming information). This idea is supported by behavioral research showing that people selectively allocate limited cognitive resources toward people who are most apt to have functional implications (Ackerman et al., 2006, Rodin, 1987, Sporer, 2001). Also consistent with this hypothesis, several behavioral studies from the social attention literature reveal that being outcome-dependent focuses interpersonal attention (as measured in looking time) on inconsistencies (Erber and Fiske, 1984, Neuberg and Fiske, 1987, Ruscher and Fiske, 1990).
But while the thesis that outcome dependency increases attention to otherwise-ignored information is well supported, the hypothesis that outcome dependency alters impression formation processes has (perhaps surprisingly) received little support from this literature (see Discussion section). However, this may be largely explained by methodological limitations. Prior investigations into the effect of outcome dependency on impression formation have lacked a dependent variable that measures, in real time, the extent to which any given piece of information engages the cognitive processes subserving impression-formation. Cognitive neuroscience provides such a measure, as well as a large corpus of data indicating what areas of the brain most reliably index these processes. As noted in Consistent impressions of inconsistent people section, the most consistently observed region in impression formation tasks has been dmPFC. While the responsiveness of this region to social impressions has been long established, new studies have continued to articulate further the region's critical role in processing others' traits and personalities. For example, a recent experiment employing multivoxel pattern analysis (MVPA) required participants to learn the personalities of four individuals. A whole-brain searchlight procedure revealed that the specific identity of the person being thought about could be reliably decoded from dmPFC, but not from any other region (Hassabis et al., in press).
More generally, dmPFC is well-suited to perform the various cognitive functions required by impression formation, having been implicated in the online integration of information across time (Hasson et al., 2007), understanding the motivations behind other agents' actions (Spunt et al., 2011), encoding memories related to people (Mitchell et al., 2004), and goal-directed retrieval of semantic information (Binder et al., 2009). Though it makes good theoretical sense that the computations subserving these diverse processes would factor into impression formation, the fact that dmPFC is a large area of cortex with a large set of functions presents interpretational challenges. For this reason, the present study employs a well-established impression-formation task as a localizer to identify voxels specifically sensitive to impression-formation. Convergent and divergent evidence for this region's functional profile is then sought through independent behavioral measures; analysis of the main task is then restricted to these a priori-defined voxels.
This approach provides an opportunity to test the hypothesis that depending on another person for a desired outcome leads to changes in the neural dynamics of impression formation—with expectancy-confirming or -disconfirming information differentially driving dmPFC depending on whether the perceiver's ability to achieve desired outcomes depends on the target. Specifically, we predict that voxels in dmPFC that subserve impression formation should be more recruited in processing expectancy-confirming over -disconfirming information under outcome-independent conditions, but should show the reverse pattern under outcome-dependent conditions. This is the first study to examine the role of asymmetrical outcome dependency in neural systems of impression formation.
Several methodological features of the present experiment differentiate it from previous studies. The most important of these concerns ecological validity. First, participants formed impressions of real people whom they had met in person several minutes prior to scanning. Second, participants expected to work cooperatively with these individuals immediately following scanning. Third, a desired reward was contingent on this work; thus, the paradigm presented participants with a genuine motivation to form impressions (rather than simply instructions to do so), as their understanding of their partners would likely affect their ability to work with them and to obtain the desired outcome. Fourth, the information that participants saw during the impression formation task was functionally relevant to the participants themselves, since it pertained to the interaction they expected to have a few minutes later. Finally, participants performed no explicit task during scanning, allowing us to study impression formation under somewhat more naturalistic conditions.
Section snippets
Cover story
Participants (N = 19, 6 male; M = 19.1 years, SD = 1.2) were told that the purpose of the study was to investigate “how experts and non-experts work together to solve problems creatively.” Prior to scanning, the experimenter introduced the participant to two confederates, explaining that the confederates were studying education at a neighboring university. It was further explained that they had been hired as “expert consultants” because the present study involved educational themes. To support the
Functional localizer
We began our analysis by identifying regions of cortex subserving impression formation in the functional localizer task using a standard random effects GLM contrast (form impression > sequencing). Consistent with previous studies, the functional localizer identified a region of dorsomedial prefrontal cortex ([− 12, 25, 54], 22 voxels, 3 × 3 × 3 mm, p < .05 cluster-corrected) as preferentially responsive to the form impression condition vs. the sequencing condition. A more ventral region of mPFC and right
The consistency problem
In an influential analysis of the (then) 50-year history of research in social impression formation, Hamilton and Sherman (1996) identified the tendency toward unity and coherence as “the fundamental postulate” of impression formation: “The perceiver assumes unity in the personalities of others, and persons are seen as coherent entities; therefore, one's impression of another person should reflect that unity and coherence” (p. 337; italics in original). This view still describes the dominant
Conclusion
Operating from the premise that thinking is for doing (Fiske, 1992)—this experiment aimed to study how participants thought about other people when they were preparing to do something with those people, and when the doing had meaningful consequences for the participants. For this reason, we examined participants learning about real people whom they met under personally involving circumstances, and with whom they expected to work immediately following scanning.
Further integration of socially
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Mina Cikara, Brooke Macnamara, Andreana Kenrick, Sarah Getz, Jennifer Wu, and Adrianna Jenkins for their valuable assistance with this project. Thanks to Jason Mitchell for generously sharing the functional localizer task, and to four anonymous reviewers and the editor for their helpful comments. Thanks to the Russell Sage Foundation and the Princeton Neuroscience Institute for supporting the research, and to the National Science Foundation for supporting the first author.
Conflict of
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