Abstract
In this chapter, we review evidence that supports the engagement of mentalizing for optimal and suboptimal decision-making associated with social and/or non-social rewards. Mentalizing can support optimal decisions in the contexts of moral judgment and social interaction. However, mentalizing can also be influenced by apparently irrelevant factors, including agents’ moral history and group status. We suggest that, while these factors can “bias” mentalizing, resulting in suboptimal decisions, some seemingly biased decisions may in fact be procedurally rational. For example, when people discount new negative evidence about someone they have a strong positive impression of, they may nevertheless be engaging in procedurally rational Bayesian updating. We suggest that Bayesian-rational updating involves generating ad hoc auxiliary hypotheses to explain away inconsistent evidence, which may be supported by mentalizing-related neural activity.
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Notes
- 1.
Other work has focused not on the inference of mental states but the inference of moral traits, including generosity. In one study, trait generosity (i.e., proportion of money an agent offered) was encoded separately from total reward provided by the agent, in the rTPJ (Hackel et al., 2015). Partner choice decisions relied primarily on trait generosity.
- 2.
However, another body of research failed to find that repeated interaction with partners necessarily involves mentalizing. These studies focused on the involvement of the reward-processing circuitry, or interpreted activity of regions that constitute both mentalizing and reward valuation networks (e.g., MPFC) in the light of reward computation. See Delgado, Frank, and Phelps (2005), Fareri et al. (2015), Izuma, Saito, and Sadato (2008), King-Casas et al. (2005), and Phan, Sripada, Angstadt, and McCabe (2010), as examples.
- 3.
Here we focus on procedural rationality, which may produce either accurate or inaccurate judgment. By contrast, see Cushman, 2020, for a theoretical account of how people ultimately benefit from rationalization.
- 4.
We also note that procedural rationality is orthogonal to the source of the prior belief: both priors that are evidence-based and priors that are derived largely from socio-affective value (e.g., positive beliefs about the ingroup in minimal group contexts) can undergo Bayesian processing.
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We thank Josh Hirschfeld-Kroen, Emma Alai, and Simon Karg for their thoughtful feedback, and the John Templeton Foundation for support.
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Park, B., Kim, M., Young, L. (2021). An Examination of Accurate Versus “Biased” Mentalizing in Moral and Economic Decision-Making. In: Gilead, M., Ochsner, K.N. (eds) The Neural Basis of Mentalizing. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51890-5_27
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