Cooperation and Deception Recruit Different Subsets of the Theory-of-Mind Network

Silke Lissek,Martin Brüne,Nina Fuchs,Georg Juckel,Henning Witthaus,Volkmar Nicolas,Sören Peters,Martin Tegenthoff,Edwin Robertson

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0002023

Abstract

The term “theory of mind” (ToM) describes an evolved psychological mechanism that is necessary to represent intentions and expectations in social interaction. It is thus involved in determining the proclivity of others to cooperate or defect. While in cooperative settings between two parties the intentions and expectations of the protagonists match, they diverge in deceptive scenarios, in which one protagonist is intentionally manipulated to hold a false belief about the intention of the other. In a functional magnetic resonance imaging paradigm using cartoons showing social interactions (including the outcome of the interaction) between two or three story characters, respectively, we sought to determine those brain areas of the ToM network involved in reasoning about cooperative versus deceptive interactions. Healthy volunteers were asked to reflect upon the protagonists' intentions and expectations in cartoons depicting cooperation, deception or a combination of both, where two characters cooperated to deceive a third. Reasoning about the mental states of the story characters yielded substantial differences in activation patterns: both deception and cooperation activated bilateral temporoparietal junction, parietal and cingulate regions, while deception alone additionally recruited orbitofrontal and medial prefrontal regions. These results indicate an important role for prefrontal cortex in processing a mismatch between a character's intention and another's expectations as required in complex social interactions.

Highlights

The term ‘‘theory of mind’’ (ToM) describes both the ability to understand and predict the behavior of other people by making inferences about their mental states, their intentions, feelings, expectations, beliefs or knowledge, and to cognitively represent one’s own mental states [1]
Brain activation patterns of the stories containing both elements (COOPDEC) tended to show higher BOLD responses in the majority of ToM-activated regions, i.e. in bilateral temporoparietal junction (TPJ), right anterior temporal cortex, left inferior and superior frontal cortex compared to COOP and DEC, respectively
These results suggest that the processing load for the more complex situation depicted in the cooperation and deception (COOPDEC) scenarios might be higher than for the more straightforward one-to one interactions

Summary

Introduction

The term ‘‘theory of mind’’ (ToM) describes both the ability to understand and predict the behavior of other people by making inferences about their mental states, their intentions, feelings, expectations, beliefs or knowledge, and to cognitively represent one’s own mental states [1]. It is widely acknowledged that ToM evolved in hominids in response to the increasing complexity of social interactions, representing a powerful cognitive tool to determine whether or not a conspecific is willing to cooperate and reciprocate [2], or tends to intentionally deceive and defect at the expense of others [3]. In humans, this cognitive mechanism is more or less permanently ‘‘online’’, to the extent that we sometimes ascribe mental states to inanimate objects such as cars, computers etc [4]. The insula has been shown to be activated if unfairness is being recognised [26]

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