Developing accurate inferences about others’ expectations and possible actions is essential for successful social interactions.

The brain’s process to predict others’ thoughts and behaviors was investigated by University College London’s Demis Hassabis, with R. Nathan Spreng of Cornell University, Vrije Universiteit’s Andrei A. Rusu, Harvard’s Clifford A. Robbins and Daniel Schacter, and Raymond A. Mar of York University.

Volunteers read four accounts of fictional individuals’ personality traits, then imagined each character’s behaviours in different situations.
Afterward, participants underwent fMRI brain scans.

Accurate inferences about characters’ personality traits and behaviours were associated with activity in the medial prefrontal cortex of the brain, demonstrating that “brain activity can reveal what and whom someone is thinking about.”

Other cortical areas were associated with Judgments of people’s degree of agreeableness (Lateral temporal cingulate) and extraversion (posterior cingulate).  

These brain regions “code” inferred personality traits in others and synthesise these characteristics into “personality models” that represent individuals and their likely behaviours in new situations.

People can also infer others’emotional intentions through unseen touch, reported Matthew Hertenstein with DePauw University colleagues Brittany Bulleit and Ariane Jaskolka, UC Berkeley’s Dacher Keltner and Betsy App of University of Denver.

Two hundred volunteers in the United States and Spain accurately perceived anger, fear, disgust, love, gratitude, and sympathy through a stranger’s unseen touch on the participants’ arms.

Observers also accurately identified emotions conveyed by touchers’ “tactile displays” toward paired volunteers.

Gian Gonzaga of UCLA collaborated with Keltner and University of Wisconsin’s Daniel Ward to investigate differences in ability to infer emotion among male-female communication pairs.

The researchers attributed high power to one volunteer in a communication pair, then compared interactions when male-female pairs were in an equal-power condition.

Participants who were ascribed high power made less accurate judgments of the communication partner’s emotion.
Individuals who were assigned the low power role reported greater self-consciousness and anxiety.

Men engaged in power behaviours even when female participants were attributed equal power, but displayed fewer power behaviours when both participants were men.
These studies confirm power differentials between women and men.

In addition, male-female pairs misinterpreted the partner’s attempts to convey emotions (“emotion blindness” ).
Male pairs accurately detected anger, but men did not correctly report women’s anger in male-female pairs.
Likewise, women did not accurately detect men’s attempts to convey compassion.

This demonstrates gender-related limitations to accurate empathy and emotionally attuned interpersonal inferences.

-*How do you develop accurate inferences about others’ opinions and behaviours?

-*How do you revise your hypotheses about others’ personalities?

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©Kathryn Welds