Our Social Minds

It has been said that if you find one human, chances are good that you can find another one within 10 feet. (The most completely alone man in history was probably astronaut Michael Collins, orbiting the moon by himself in the Apollo 11 command module while his colleagues Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were down on the surface; at his furthest rotation from the landing site he would have been about 2,200 miles away, and that lasted only a second or two before he started to approach them again). I have argued that the Narrative mind is particularly good at telling stories about social situations -- our interactions with others -- because we are fundamentally social animals.

But why are we so interested in other humans? The mental projections we make about social interactions seem to be produced by the Narrative mind, but our basic orientation toward others comes from a more Intuitive process. In the book Who's In Charge? Free Will and the Science of the Brain, neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga points out the importance of mimicry in human interactions. Think about the last time you interacted with a baby, and how naturally the baby imitated whatever you did. Babies have a natural recognition of people and understand intuitively that people are different from objects. Yet they also can be led to attribute personality characteristics and intentions to inanimate shapes, as in a classic study by David and Ann Premack where a triangle going up a hill was either helped by a circle or impeded by a square that pushed against it. When given the choice to play with a circle or a square afterwards, 6- to 10-month old infants overwhelmingly chose the "helper" circle over the "mean" square. By age 12-14 months, human infants will spontaneously point to an object that someone else is looking for, or pick up an object that someone has dropped and hand it back to them. This type of social behavior occurs without any prompting or reward, and is unique to humans and our close cousins the chimpanzees. 

Gazzaniga also describes the physiological basis for mimicry. Studies of monkeys' brains during dyadic interactions show that when one monkey vocalizes, the listener monkey's brain reproduces a pattern of activation similar to that seen in the vocalizing monkey. In other words, we don't just hear what our conversation partner is saying, we literally reproduce their brain state in order to see the world as they do. The neurons that match in both brains are called "mirror neurons," and they exist in a part of the brain called the insular cortex. Even though these are cortical neurons, they are deep in the brain and perhaps more connected to the limbic system than to the outer cortex where language and reason reside. The neurological mirroring process might be the foundation of our capacity for empathy, because this system allows us to reproduce another person's mental state inside our own head. As a result we can relatively accurately reproduce another person's desires, thoughts, or intentions simply by observing their outward behavior. Without even thinking about it we extend this tendency to attribute thoughts to our pets, or to nonliving robots that behave like living things. Recent studies using fMRI brain scans have shown that the degree of activation in mirror neurons allows us to rate not only the emotional tone of another person's experience but also its intensity -- for instance, how much pain they are feeling when they stub their toe. The degree of activation in brain regions connected to pain matches the intensity of pain that we believe another person is experiencing. 

Humans unconsciously mimic others' facial expressions, postures, vocal tones, accents, and even speech patterns or word choices. We do this all the time, even when information about another person is presented so fast that our conscious minds do not register it (e.g., an image shown on a screen for just 30 milliseconds). And when someone mimics our own mannerisms, we rate our conversational partner as more likeable and tend to have better social interactions with them. The same process operates in a negative way when unpleasant emotions expressed by others lead to "emotional contagion" in which we pick up on those feelings without being aware of it. One of my psychotherapy supervisors noted this tendency in a group where several of us had been treating depressed clients, which led to a very depressed group of psychology trainees. He pointed out that our hopeless thinking wasn't inevitable or required by our clients' circumstances; we had simply been sucked in to a depressed world-view by our Intuitive minds' tendency to mirror the way that our clients were thinking.

Mimicry is particularly likely to occur within a social group such as a family or tribe, but is tamped down when interacting with members of an out-group with whom we are in competition. Mimicry is more common in non-human animals than theory of mind, occurring among great apes, some birds, and maybe also in dolphins. Some professional coaches advise their clients to deliberately mimic the mannerisms and cadences of people they interact with, in order to be more successful at business or life. And in motivational interviewing, we regularly advise trainees to use more reflective listening in which they simply repeat back what their clients say. Imitation is not only the sincerest form of praise, it is also a crucial way in which people form and maintain good relationships with others.

Gazzaniga suggests a second level of social awareness that is more cognitive, takes longer to develop, and perhaps relies on the Narrative rather than the Intuitive system. David Premack called this ability "theory of mind," our tendency to explain the thoughts of others and to understand that these might be different from our own thought. Theory of mind begins to develop in humans by 18 months, and is fully developed by age 4 or 5 years. In an experiment by neuroscientist Rebecca Saxe, children younger than 4 were shown a scenario where Sally hides a ball in a blue box and Anne watches, then Anne leaves, then Sally moves the ball to a red box, and then Anne returns. These children thought that Anne would know (as the child did) that the ball was in the red box. But children older than 4 or 5 predicted that Anne will still think the ball is in the blue box -- in other words, they were able to understand that another person can have a false belief. This is a relatively advanced theory of mind, because it requires projecting onto another person a belief that is different from one's own. 

Again, chimpanzees have this ability to a limited degree, but they are the only other animals that have demonstrated it. So, writes Gazzaniga, "even though you have a theory about your dog, what he is thinking about, what he believes, and so forth, he does not have a theory about you, and he gets along quite well by tracking observables -- your movements, facial expressions, habits of behavior, and tone of voice, and making predictions from them." (p. 160). Our social minds allow us to go far beyond this type of prediction, however. By forming expectations about other people's states of mind, and ultimately crafting narratives that allow us to explore a range of possible future states without actually experiencing them, we navigate our way through an otherwise baffling array of status hierarchies, relational webs, and interpersonal challenges in the course of everyday life. 

The Intuitive mind pays attention to social cues, but the Narrative mind uses them like a painter’s palate to depict our social world. As usual the Intuitive process keeps us grounded in reality while the Narrative process helps us prepare for alternate future scenarios. Both of these abilities help us to successfully interact with others, and to participate in the social systems that are such a crucial part of being human.