An fMRI study of violations of social expectations: When people are not who we expect them to be

By Jasmin Cloutier, John D. E. Gabrieli, Daniel R. O'Young, N. Ambady. 2011

103 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The current study examines the effect of violations of social expectancies on the neural substrates of person perception. In an event-related fMRI experiment, participants were presented with the photographs of either Republican or Democrat politicians paired with either typical Republican or Democrat political views (e.g., "wants a smaller government" or "wants liberal supreme court judges"). Subjects were asked to form an impression of the targets using information about both their political affiliation and their political views. Of interest was the contrast between stereotypically congruent trials and stereotypically incongruent trials. The results reveal that brain regions previously involved in mentalizing (i.e., temporoparietal junction and medial prefrontal cortex) are preferentially recruited when viewing incongruent social targets.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Cognitive Neuroscience

In Social Psychology

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

Theory of Mind: A Neural Prediction Problem (2013, neutral): “Brain regions on the medial surface of cortex, in both medial prefrontal (MPFC) and medial parietal (PC) cortex, show robust responses while thinking about people’s stable personalities and preferences (Mitchell et al., 2006; Schiller et al., 2009; Cloutier et al., 2011).”
Contributions of episodic retrieval and mentalizing to autobiographical thought: evidence from functional neuroimaging, resting-state connectivity, and fMRI meta-analyses (2014, unknown): “…et al., 2003; Saxe and Powell, 2006; Döhnel et al., 2012), especially when these processes require a participant to integrate present information with prior knowledge about that person to build a coherent model of another’s mind (Saxe and Wexler 2005; Young et al., 2010; Cloutier et al. 2011).”
Political Neuroscience: The Beginning of a Beautiful Friendship (2014, background): “…" perspective-taking Viewing politicians who violate stereotypical (partisan) expectations Politicians who violate expectations may require individuation, " mentalizing " Cloutier et al., 2011 Rating agreement/disagreement with political statements Increased activation for societal (vs. individual)”
The neural dynamics of updating person impressions. (2013, background): “The primary region associated with such tasks is the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC; Mitchell et al., 2004, 2005, 2006; Schiller et al., 2009; Baron et al., 2011; Cloutier et al., 2011a).”