Abstract
In daily life, perceivers often need to predict and interpret the behavior of group agents, such as corporations and governments. Although research has investigated how perceivers reason about individual members of particular groups, less is known about how perceivers reason about group agents themselves. The present studies investigate how perceivers understand group agents by investigating the extent to which understanding the ‘mind’ of the group as a whole shares important properties and processes with understanding the minds of individuals. Experiment 1 demonstrates that perceivers are sometimes willing to attribute a mental state to a group as a whole even when they are not willing to attribute that mental state to any of the individual members of the group, suggesting that perceivers can reason about the beliefs and desires of group agents over and above those of their individual members. Experiment 2 demonstrates that the degree of activation in brain regions associated with attributing mental states to individuals—i.e., brain regions associated with mentalizing or theory-of-mind, including the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), temporo-parietal junction (TPJ), and precuneus—does not distinguish individual from group targets, either when reading statements about those targets' mental states (directed) or when attributing mental states implicitly in order to predict their behavior (spontaneous). Together, these results help to illuminate the processes that support understanding group agents themselves.
Highlights
In domains ranging from the economy to national security, large-scale decisions often involve judgments about the machinations of a group agent, such as a terrorist organization, government, or corporation
To the extent that participants attributed purported mental states to group agents themselves, we should observe both cases in which participants attribute a state to all of the members of the group without attributing that state to the group itself and, most critically, cases in which participants attribute a state to the group itself without attributing that state to any of the individual members
To the extent that perceivers rely on different processes to understand group agents, we should observe reduced activation in brain regions associated with theory-of-mind—Right TPJ (RTPJ), medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), and precuneus—during consideration of groups versus individuals
Summary
In domains ranging from the economy to national security, large-scale decisions often involve judgments about the machinations of a group agent, such as a terrorist organization, government, or corporation. When people use sentences that appear to ascribe mental states to a group agent, are they ascribing something to the group agent, or are they merely attributing something to the group’s members? To the extent that people are willing to ascribe a property to a group agent over and above its members, participants should say that the organization knows how to build a space shuttle, but the individual members do not. In another vignette, a Community Association needs to choose music for an upcoming event. Each question was answered on a scale from 1 (‘No’) to 7 (‘Yes’)
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