The Influence of Mental Representations of Social Agents on Social Decision Preferences

Moreira, Joao F, West Hollywood CA

Investigators

Abstract

This award was provided as part of NSF's Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowships (SPRF) program. The goal of the SPRF program is to prepare promising, early career doctoral-level scientists for scientific careers in academia, industry or private sector, and government. SPRF awards involve two years of training under the sponsorship of established scientists and encourage Postdoctoral Fellows to perform independent research. NSF seeks to promote the participation of scientists from all segments of the scientific community, including those from underrepresented groups, in its research programs and activities; the postdoctoral period is considered to be an important level of professional development in attaining this goal. Each Postdoctoral Fellow must address important scientific questions that advance their respective disciplinary fields. Under the sponsorship of Dr. Carolyn Parkinson at the University of California, Los Angeles, this postdoctoral fellowship award supports an early career scientist investigating how mental representation of social agents affect decision processes involving these others. Defined as decisions that have direct or indirect social consequences, social decision-making has received much scientific attention over the past two decades. However, existing social decision-making research is impoverished insofar that very little is known about how the features of social targets implicated in social decision-making influence decision processes. Humans represent a wealth of information about others that profoundly shapes thought and behavior, yet it is unknown how these representations—dynamic mental models of others—impact decision preferences. Indeed, classic work from social cognitive psychology and neuroscience indicates that representations guide behavior in context, suggesting that mental representations likely play an important role in shaping social decision preferences. The current study aims to use computational methods to analyze functional magnetic resonance images and text data to (i) probe mental representations of common social decision-making targets (parents, friends) and (ii) relate structural features of these representations to social decision behavior. This project stands to make important theoretical contributions towards social decision-making research and contribute to ongoing efforts to build unifying and generalizable models of social decision-making. Notably, because social decision-making behavior has widespread impacts—ranging from individual well-being to aggregate societal phenomena—this project could inform future efforts to promote individually and societally adaptive social decision behavior. This project will employ eminent computational methodologies to test how mental representations of real-life social partners shape social decision preferences as a function of the motivational goals and needs fulfilled by said agents. By combining multivariate pattern analysis of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data with natural language processing (NLP) and computational models of behavior, this project will comprehensively measure mental representations of everyday social partners and identify their relationship to social decision-making preferences. Concretely, this will involving (i) probing the neural representations of different kinds of social agents using fMRI, (ii) determining how neural representational overlap shapes social decision preferences, and (iii) use NLP tools on written content of social agents to help identify the representational content that drives differences in social decision preferences across social partners. This research will hopefully help lay the groundwork for the gradual establishment and refinement of unifying quantitative models of social decision-making, aiding both basic and applied scientific endeavors in the future. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.