Representations of social and political attitudes, opinions, and facts in the mind and brain

Abstract

Information abounds in our social world. But when we learn about the world through interactions with others, we rarely receive information without commentary: propositions about the world are so often presented alongside others’ attitudes about those propositions. As we navigate a complex information landscape riddled with social group prejudices, political agendas, and misinformation minefields, how do we extract the information from the commentary? In my dissertation, I investigate social information processing by characterizing the representations of attitudes, opinions, and facts about the world in our minds and brains. I take an interdisciplinary approach that integrates across social psychology, cognitive neuroscience, multivariate statistics, and epistemology to characterize the ways in which our beliefs and judgments about the world inform our behaviors toward others. In Chapter 1, I show that the subjective importance of our stated attitudes toward others predicts our engagement in costly intergroup behaviors. In Chapter 2, I show that psychological features such as perceived social consensus influence us to evaluate propositional political attitudes as factual statements. And in Chapter 3, I show that our brains encode epistemic representations of political propositions in medial and ventral temporal cortex, and that these neural representations also predict factual judgments of political statements. My results lay the groundwork for the development of new interventions to address prejudices and information hazards in the social and political world.