immediate power of these to affect us is
quite clear. Emotion and attitudes are
thought of as not understood until after
the linguistic message has been
determined. The impact of language on
attitudes through persuasion is viewed
by cognitive psychology and linguistics
as occurring after the message has been
understood. However, this does raise the
question about whether a “message” (to
be understood) is simply the linguistic
properties of a sentence or the impact of
the linguistic form on an audience.
A very different view of
language might come from considering
vocal communications that often have a
direct impact on an audience.
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Sometimes just listening to laughter
compels listeners to laugh. Sometimes
hearing a cry of terror directly imputes
an instantaneous feeling of fear.
Hearing someone weep can produce a
feeling of sorrow and perhaps even
cause one to cry. This suggests that
some forms of vocal communication can
elicit direct empathic sharing as Decety
discusses in his chapter.
These forms of vocal
communication can produce direct
results in listeners without following a
route of symbolic reference and
interpretation. 3 Language has typically
been viewed as operating by the more
symbolic route because of the linguistic
claim that symbols are not the things
they stand for and thus must be
understood—words and sentences are
not felt. However, the right insult or
angry words delivered in the right way
or the right praise seems to be felt
directly, perhaps through the same kind
of mechanisms by which empathic
sharing occurs.
But how is this achieved? This
kind of impact of language is not a result
of understanding the content of speech.
It reflects social goals and motives. To
the extent that this kind of social impact
may parallel empathic processes, we
might find that similar mechanisms are
involved. Some kind of resonance must
be established between a speaker and
hearer, and language can serve to
establish this resonance and lead to
subsequent action by the hearer. This
idea of a resonance in an audience does
seem more compatible with the effects
of vocal behavior such as laughter or
crying on a listener than the symbolic
interpretative view. This notion of
resonance may also be useful in
understanding other kinds of language
impact from the fiery sermon of
Edwards to the passionate speeches of
Obama and Kennedy and King.
In listening to speech that has
impact, language has created a state in
the listener that reflects the intention of
the speaker. Whether it is fear or
connection, somehow language can
operate as the medium by which social
and emotional psychological states get
transmitted to an audience. But how
does this impact get created in the social
brain?
Language impact in the social brain
Understanding spoken language
has typically been viewed as an analytic
process in which sound patterns are
translated into linguistic symbols by the
brain. However, an alternative theory is
that we understand spoken language by
using our motor system to simulate what
might have been said. The idea is that
trying to mentally produce the speech
internally (without talking) might help
us understand what is said, when speech
is not clear. However, this theory did
not have much neural plausibility.
People do not generally move their
mouths overtly or even covertly while
listening.
The discovery of mirror neurons,
examined at greater length by Steve
Small in the next chapter, suggested one
kind of mechanism that might instantiate
this kind of process. In certain parts of
the brain, involved in the control of
action, some neurons that respond when
making certain actions also respond
when observing the same actions. This
led to the inference that these neurons
are involved in understanding the
behavior of other people. The reasoning
is simply that neural activity in the
observer’s motor system that results
when seeing a behavior essentially
establishes the brain state that would
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correspond if the observer were doing
the same thing. Another way to say this
is that there is a resonant response in an
observer’s motor system to observing a
behavior and this may potentiate a
degree of social coordination and
connection, as discussed in Semin’s
chapter. This kind of neural resonance
has been shown to play a role in
understanding speech when seeing a
talker’s mouth move, even if the listener
does not actually make any mouth
movements.
Mirror neurons demonstrate that
observed action can produce a resonant
response in an observer’s brain. Seeing
a talker’s mouth move creates a motorresonant
response that aids in
understanding speech sounds. However,
these two observations are very different
from the idea that the meaning of
sentences can create a resonant response
in the listener’s brain. In the case of
speech, mouth movements are the
actions that create speech. This might
seem like a very special case. The
traditional linguistic view of language is
that words and sentences are symbolic:
Language describing action is not action
itself. Language describing emotion is
not the emotion itself. The entire
concept of a symbol is that a symbol
denotes something, stands for
something, but the symbol is not the
thing itself. But it now appears that this
long-held notion may be wrong.
The idea that seeing an object or
event gives rise to brain states that
resonate with previous experiences of
that thing suggests a mechanism for
language understanding to go beyond
symbolic interpretation. Given that there
is a brain mechanism for re-experiencing
actions or sensations, this same
mechanism may operate even when
there is just a symbolic linguistic
description. Understanding language
may take place by invoking such
resonant past experiences in the brain.
For example, when listening to
sentences about hockey action, hockey
players show neural activity in their
motor system which is not seen for
people who are naïve to hockey. 4
Experience playing hockey recruits the
motor system in service of
understanding hockey sentences as if
one were watching or playing hockey
when only listening to speech. This
suggests one way in which language can
have a direct impact on a listener.
Rather than making inferences about
actions based on the meanings of
sentences, understanding a sentence may
be a resonant motor system response in
the listener to a description of an action.
If this idea is extended more broadly,
language impact may come from such
resonant responses. Language
understanding and the impact of
language may result from processes
more similar to the effects of hearing
laughter. Hearing a sentence may create
in a listener a set of resonant responses
very similar to the patterns that
correspond to the actual situations being
described.
Such resonant responses need not
be confined to the motor system and
actions. Emotions such as fear or joy
may be empathically evoked in listeners
by speech just as a scream or laughter
might. Verbal expression of attitudes
may produce similar attitudinal
responses in listeners. Moreover, if a
listener’s resonant response is strong,
there may be increased empathic overlap
with the speaker, which may serve to
increase social connection. To the
extent that people speak together and
share feelings, social connection may
increase as well.
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Evolution of social connection by
communication
The human social brain
constructs connection and understanding
by anthropomorphic projection as
discussed by Nick Epley in his chapter.
When we observe the behavior of
nonhuman entities, anthropomorphic
projection may form a feeling of social
connection. Social connection depends
in part on empathic responses to
observed action. It has been argued that
this same foundation is the basis for the
evolution of language as well--observed
action may be the foundation for
language. 5
A mirror neuron theory of the
evolution of language starts with the
assumption that we understand others by
observing their actions. Communication
depends on the regularization of typical
actions that can be pantomimed. In
principle this could lead to a kind of
manual gestural system of
communication akin to sign language.
Hand and arm movements can depict a
wide range of actions both by firstperson
depiction of an action such as
screwing the top onto a jar and by thirdperson
depictions such as using the
fingers to portray a person walking.
Hand and arm postures can depict
objects such as a cupped hand
representing a bowl. Combining
sequences of such object and action
depictions can communicate relatively
complex messages even without a
formal language. This is a far cry from
sign languages in which the mapping
between hand shapes and movements is
not visually transparent in this way. But
as the pressure to communicate a
broader range of messages increases, a
manual gestural language would have to
be modified to reflect more abstract
symbols ultimately leading in the
direction of a sign language.
However, this kind of manual
language has one major drawback.
Communication depends on visual
contact. In order to understand a
gestural message it is necessary to see
the hand movements. This limits the
distances over which communication can
take place. Moreover, a communication
system that is effective for a group
should not depend on face-to-face
dyadic interaction, but allow for more
broadcast communications. There is a
great survival advantage in being able to
maintain social connection and convey
information over distances that go well
beyond face-to-face communication.
Many species of fish,
amphibians, reptiles, birds, and
mammals commonly exchange
information at a distance through
vocalizations. The learned songs (and
some calls) of songbirds are particularly
rich sources of information conveying,
to the receiver, individual identity and a
host of other characteristics of the
sender. Some mammals exchange
information at great distances through
calling behavior. Humpback whale
vocalizations are perceived over
extremely long distances and may be
used to maintain social groups at
distances as great as 5 km. African
elephants can recognize friends and
relatives from their calls at a distance of
2.5 km. Human sheepherders keep each
other company from the top of one
mountain to another in the Canary
Islands using a whistled language called
Silbo Gomero. Whether for purposes of
mating, threat, warning, or social
organization, conveying information
regarding location, identity and
motivation, and directed at one
individual or towards far-flung groups,
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vocal communication plays an important
role in the social connection and
behavior of a great number of vertebrate
species. Thus while human vocal
communication is enhanced substantially
in face-to-face interaction, the evolution
of speech has resulted in a system that
can function even in the absence of
direct visual observation. The sound of
a threat or warning or distress can have
substantial impact even at a distance
from the speaker.
Social impact and embodied language
Many animals use vocalizations
to maintain social group structure and to
provide information relevant to a group.
Even very young children use the way
people speak as a marker of their social
affiliation. 6 Such vocalizations are
typically not viewed as symbolic forms
that must be decoded and interpreted.
Instead these vocalizations are mapped
onto internal states more directly, much
as human laughter may be. Although
linguists and psychologists have often
tried to differentiate human language
from these kinds of vocalizations,
language can impact us in much the
same way. Perhaps language is less
symbolic and more direct than scientists
have thought.
What does it mean for language
to have impact? If we take laughter as
our model, perhaps it means that
language gives rise to responses that
have a direct effect on our perceptual
and motor systems. Sermons may terrify
because they create worlds inside of the
listener that seem real. We can see and
hear torment and imagine the feelings of
pain and suffering. This is not a
symbolic interpretation but a real
experience created from language.
However, just as we can distinguish the
pain we feel from the pain of others,
even when we have strong empathic
responses, we can distinguish such
created experiences from those that
occur in the real world. The stronger the
language, the richer the imagery, the
more intense the delivery, the more
salient the mentally created experience.
One impact of language may be to create
real feelings and sensations, imagined
movement and behavior. 7 When
language hurts us through criticism,
rejection or insult, it may do so by
activating our experiences of real pain.
When we are soothed by language, it
may produce the same kind of endorphin
effect that placebo treatments can
invoke. When language binds us
together, it may do so by creating the
kind of shared emotional states that
characterize empathy.
In many respects, the linguistic
view of language use does not engage
these ways in which language functions.
Linguistics treats language as consisting
of patterns of symbols divorced from
their origins in a human mouth, almost
like print on a page rather than speech.
But it is spoken language that the social
brain evolved to use—print is a very
modern invention which did not play any
role in our evolution. In contrast, speech
is produced from a coordinate action of
muscles compressing lungs and moving
tongue and jaw under the control of
neurophysiology and hormones. Unlike
the shape of printed letters, the sound of
speech is shaped by attitude and emotion
and intent, and its impact may be to
transfer specific embodied states from
the speaker to the listener.
Conclusion
Although physicists have debated
the possibility of action at a distance for
quite some time, the biological form of
action at a distance is well established,
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achieved through vocal communication
in an extremely broad range of behaviors
and settings. The force of language is
carried by the form, content, and
delivery of a message. And the impact
of this force may be created in the minds
of an audience by the resonant
invocation of past real experiences. Real
pain and sorrow, real comfort and joy,
real love and caring, are all part of our
shared human experience. The impact
of language may come by invoking
resonant past experiences that can create
a platonic mental moment that flickers
with the shadows of those experiences.
In order to understand how this process
works, we need to study how brain
mechanisms operate to translate the
sounds of speech into the impact of
language.
References
1. Giles, H. (1973). Accent
mobility: A model and some data.
Anthropological Linguistics, 15, 87-105.
2. Lakin, J., & Chartrand, T.L.
(2003). Using nonconscious behavioral
mimicry to create affiliation and rapport.
Psychological Science, 14, 334-339.
3. Foroni, F. & Semin, G. R.
(2009). Language that puts you in touch
with your bodily feelings. The
multimodal responsiveness of affective
expressions. Psychological Science, 20,
974-980.
4. Beilock, S. L., Lyons, I. M.,
Mattarella-Micke, A., Nusbaum, H. C.,
& Small, S. L. (2008). Sports experience
changes the neural processing of action
language. Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences, 105, 13269-13272.
5. Rizzolatti, G., & Arbib, M.A.
(1999). Language within our grasp.
Trends in Neurosciences, 21, 188-194.
6. Kinzler, K. D., Shutts, K.,
Dejesus, J., & Spelke, E. S. (2009).
Accent trumps race in guiding children’s
social preferences. Social Cognition, 27,
623-634.
7. Shintel, H., & Nusbaum, H.
C. (2007). The sound of motion in
spoken language: Visual information
conveyed by acoustic properties of
speech. Cognition, 105, 681-690.
Page | 74
Systems and Signals for Social
Coordination
How do we understand each other
as people? Do we take people at their
word, or do actions speak even louder?
When moved to affiliate and to act in
concert with other people as a group, we
need to understand the communications
and actions of others. Language can
move us to action even across great
distances but how does it do so? While
we can observe the behavior of groups
of people as coordinated, the mechanism
of achieving this coordination is unseen.
We may be driven socially to form
groups but how does that drive function
in the individual to cause us to cohere.
In order to go beyond the observation
and experiences we have with groups
and group behavior, we need to
understand what makes the engine of
social connection run. At one level, we
can talk about language as a force itself,
as Howard Nusbaum does. We can talk
about the synchronization of individual
behavior as Gün Semin does. However,
both of these are observations about the
way individuals may become part of a
group. To go beyond this we must look
to our biology to understand how the
machinery underneath our sociality leads
to connected minds.
Semin suggested one way our
brains may seek to connect. Some
neurons in an area of the brain that is
involved in the control and planning of
our actions also respond when we
observe actions we have performed.
Such neurons might be thought to
“resonate” when seeing someone act or
speak with our own experiences.
Neurons that mirror actions and behavior
have been thought to play a role in the
process of understanding that behavior
and the social connection that may form
as a result of the resonance. In the next
essay, Steve Small discusses these neural
mechanisms and how they may be
important in helping us understand
spoken language and possibly in
understanding social behavior.
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Chapter 8 8
8 The lead author is Steven L. Small, M.D.,
Ph.D., a Professor of Neurology and Psychology,
Associate Chair for Research in Neurology,
Member of the Committees on Neurobiology and
Computational Neuroscience, and Senior Fellow,
Computation Institute, at The University of
Chicago. He is currently Director of the Human
Neuroscience Laboratory and was founder of the
Brain Research Imaging Center. He is an elected
member of the American Neurological
Association, a fellow of the American Academy
of Neurology, and Editor-in-Chief of the
international journal Brain and Language.
Small’s research concerns the neural basis of
human language and its breakdown after injury.
He has published more than 120 scientific
articles, primarily about human language, from
the perspectives of artificial intelligence,
cognitive psychology, computational
neuroscience, human systems neuroscience, and
clinical neurology.
Human language represents a unique
product of our social species and the tremendous
evolution of the primate cerebral cortex
simultaneously supported the development of
both. Language is the defining feature of our
species: In his 12 th century volume, Guide to the
Perplexed, Maimonides viewed it as tautological
that man is a speaking animal, i.e., “there is no
third element besides life and speech in the
definition of man”. But how does the brain
implement this unique function in the context of
its common ontogeny with social function? The
current essay discusses the possibility that the
recently discovered “mirror neurons” of the
cerebral cortex of macaque monkeys play a
special role in the ability of humans to
understand each other with language by using a
mechanism of observation and covert emulation.
If the neurobiology of language were partly
grounded on such systems of visual observation
and imitation, this would overlap integrally with
the biology of the social brain.
Hidden Forces in Understanding
Others:
Mirror Neurons and Neurobiological
Underpinnings
It is one thing to perceive objects
in the environment and another to
understand what is perceived. A rodent
that senses an apple definitely has a
notion that this represents something
edible. A monkey might realize that the
apple can be eaten but also can be
thrown. A human might perceive it as a
food, an object to be propelled, a
temptation that should be resisted, or
something that falls out of a tree at a
specific acceleration. For each individual
animal or person, understanding an apple
means to take the sensory perceptions of
the apple and to use previous experience
and knowledge to fit it into an overall
context. In this way, understanding a
particular apple depends on our
previously having seen, touched, and
smelled apples, eaten them, read about
them, and perhaps even been hit by a
falling or thrown apple. All of our
previous experiences come to bear every
time we encounter a new perception that
we must make sense of, and of course,
this represents virtually every moment of
our waking lives.
Our perceptions vary enormously
from seeing simple objects (e.g., apples),
taking in more complex entities (e.g.,
restaurants, neighborhoods), hearing
noises or speech, and seeing actions
(e.g., simple manual actions, sporting
events). A major question for brain
research is how we can possibly
understand all these different kinds of
input, and what brain circuits are used to
do so. We assume that such an
understanding means taking these inputs,
weighing them against our previous
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experiences in some way or other, and
then integrating in some way the new
and old together. This integration
requires constant and dynamic changes
to the brain structures that represent
what we know and how we use it. 1 One
way this could happen is that when we
perceive something new, we actually reenact
in our mind’s eye the previous
related perceptions. For example, if we
encounter an apple – having encountered
many previously -- perhaps we actually
imagine (seeing) one or more previous
apples or episodes involving apples, or
imagine (performing) one or more
instances of biting an apple or throwing
one, and/or imagine tasting and smelling
one. We might also imagine hearing the
word “apple”, producing the sounds of
the word, seeing the written form of the
word, or even hearing, seeing, or
producing synonyms or related words in
our first (e.g., “Granny Smith”) or
second (e.g., “pomme”) languages. We
propose that understanding an apple is
tantamount to executing this entire set of
processes, and thus, that the circuits for
understanding are very complicated and
take up a large portion of the brain.
Of course, not all of what we
understand is directly available to the
senses; we can clearly understand beliefs
and emotions as well as physical objects
and overt actions. Brain researchers
generally take the view that previous
experience guides understanding of
abstract concepts in much the same way
that it guides the understanding of the
more concrete entities. For example, we
can understand the emotional states of
other people by imagining being in those
states ourselves. When I see someone
feeling happy or sad, I can evoke
examples from my own previous
experience of feeling happy or sad
(perhaps even for the same reasons), and
by feeling the emotion, I can understand
it. The closer my previous experience is
to the perceived one, the better the
“understanding”. This principle holds
whether one is trying to understand
objects or people. An important
distinction between people and objects
when trying to understand their actions
is that people, but not objects, have
intentions.
The Social Brain
The critical question for
neurobiologists is how does the brain
understand. In particular, we want to
know whether the same brain circuits
that are used when we experience things
personally are also used when we try to
understand another person having the
same experiences, whether these
experiences are concrete, like grasping a
cup or hitting a baseball, or more
abstract like feeling sad or fearful or in
pain. We also want to know whether
understanding the simple concrete
perceptions and these highly complex
emotional states are mediated similarly
in the brain. Further, we are interested in
the overlap between conscious and
unconscious understanding and shared or
personal understanding. One way to
address these questions is to examine the
brain structures responsible for specific
types of personal sensations, actions, and
cognitive processes, and to see if these
same ones play a role when individuals
attempt to understand these functions in
others. Using modern techniques of
physiology, experiments of this type
have been conducted in both monkeys
and humans, with some surprising
results.
It is now possible to measure
brain activity of humans while having a
wide range of different kinds of
experiences. Such human neuroimaging
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experiments have suggested that
understanding actions and objects invoke
some of the same brain structures used
to perform the actions and to act on the
objects. With respect to actions in
particular, humans sometimes use their
own motor repertoire in interpreting
actions, possibly by imagining or
mentally simulating the perceived
action. When people are asked to
observe the actions of others,
particularly goal-directed actions
involving the hands or mouth, they seem
to activate brain regions for moving the
hands or mouth. Thus, there is a link
between observing actions and executing
actions. This has a relevance to
education as well: “Understanding by
doing” (i.e., by observing and then
executing) has a long and valued
tradition in American education 2 , and
these recent scientific results might help
us understand why this is effective.
When my son was 5 years old, he
was a member of a kids’ soccer team in
Hyde Park, on the campus of the
University of Chicago. His coach was a
professor of history at the university, a
woman who had never played soccer,
but was a voracious reader, and in her
readings on the subject, took careful note
of all the methods needed to play soccer
as well as the rules and regulations. She
methodically took the kids through all
the (theoretically relevant motor) steps
needed to dribble the ball, to pass, and to
shoot – flex your foot this way, bend
your leg that way, keep your arms this
way, etc. The kids tried to follow the
verbal instructions but their motor
performance was less than stellar – they
learned a little bit, but they lost all of
their dozen games, for a depressing 0-12
record. The next season, the same team
was coached by another volunteer
parent, this time an engineer from
Trinidad, who had played soccer his
whole life. The instructions he gave the
kids were quite different: “Follow me
and do what I do”. There were no
suggested foot flexions or extensions,
and no specific leg movements
proposed. The kids learned the skills,
and won all their games. Why? The kids
learned by observing a good model and
then imitating what they observed the
person doing, which appears to be a way
to learn motor skills that is far stronger
than that of explicit motor instruction.
When people have strokes, a part
of their brain dies, and they can lose the
ability to speak or use a hand properly.
We are now using this idea of imitation
in a treatment program to re-educate
people with strokes to use their hands
better and to pronounce words better.
For these imitation-based treatments,
people first observe a particular hand
action or speech sample on a video
monitor, and then they try to produce it.
In fact, they observe it over and over
again for a while before they even try to
do it at all. They are never told how to
move their hands or mouths; they are
just told to copy what they see. Over the
course of six weeks, people with hand
problems progress from imitating a
simple grasp of a cup to picking up a
telephone and dialing a number to
picking up a toothbrush, brushing their
teeth, and returning the brush to the sink.
Those with speech problems progress
from imitating simple words of a single
syllable to longer less common words
and even short phrases. We have already
shown that these therapies have
beneficial effects in a number of people
and are now trying it out more
extensively.
There seems to be an important
link between observing and executing
actions. Similarly, there is a link
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between observing action and
understanding emotion. This link has
been most clearly demonstrated in the
case of facial expressions – if I observe
the muscles of the face in a position to
convey an emotional state, clearly I
perceive the emotion. What has been
shown recently is that observing such
facial expressions leads to two kinds of
brain activations in the observer: The
first set of regions activated are those
that would be used by the observer to
execute the identical face movements,
just as with hand or mouth movements.
However, additional regions are also
active, and these are precisely the ones
that would be involved if the observer
were to feel the observed emotion
personally. Thus the circuitry for action
observation in the human brain is
interdependent with parts of the brain
critical for understanding more complex
nuanced aspects of the world.
Mirror Neurons
It turns out that there may be
cellular building blocks in the brain that
are particularly important for observing
and executing actions, and may
ultimately lead to an explanation of
action understanding and imitationbased
learning. In fact, such structures
would contribute to any form of
understanding that could be partly
explained by imagined re-enactment of
perceived actions (e.g., seeing an
emotional facial expression, hearing a
cry of pain). The cells under discussion
are a type of nerve cell, or neuron,
discovered in the front part of the
monkey brain by Professor Giacomo
Rizzolatti and his colleagues at the
University of Parma. The scientists
trained monkeys to perform specific
actions like grasping an object or licking
their lips, and were performing electrical
recordings in regions in the front of the
brain known to coordinate movements.
These recording machines note brain
activity both visually, as a graph on a
screen, and auditorily, by a loud series of
clicks, indicating the firing of a neuron.
Rizzolatti and his team were focusing on
a particular region in the front of the
brain, and were having the monkey
perform all sorts of hand, mouth, and
eye movements to see how the brain
cells were organized to make these
movements happen. One day (or so the
story goes), one of the researchers
returned from lunch while the electrical
recordings were being made, and was
finishing off a cone of superb Italian
gelato, when all of a sudden the
recording device starting making a loud
series of clicks. The returning scientist
stopped licking his ice cream cone to see
what was going on, and the noise
stopped. When he restarted licking his
gelato, the clicks resumed, and when he
stopped again, they stopped. The
investigators had discovered a type of
neuron that was sensitive to the monkey
observing a particular human action.
It was not surprising that
following training to perform an action,
some neurons in the motor region of the
brain responded while performing that
action, when the same neurons would
not have responded beforehand.
However, it was extremely surprising to
find that some of those neurons also
responded vigorously when the monkey
observed the very same learned actions.
Through a methodical and systematic
approach, this group was able to make a
more elaborate and far-reaching set of
observations. For a small subset of
neurons, if a monkey had learned to
reach for a particular object, seeing
another monkey reach for the same
object would cause the neuron to fire.
For a different subset of neurons, if the
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monkey had learned to pucker up his
lips, the neuron would fire both when the
monkey did this or when the monkey
observed another monkey (or even a
human) doing this. These motor neurons
have been dubbed “mirror neurons”,
since they respond during both execution
of action and during observation of the
same action in a mirror-like fashion. 3
Mirror neurons are not active during
observation of an appropriate action if
there is no goal (i.e., the object is absent)
or when an appropriate object is
presented alone. Mirror neurons have
been discovered both for mouth actions
and hand actions, and for both visual and
auditory perception of actions.
Seeing a previously learned
action performed by someone else seems
to resonate in some neurons in the motor
system almost as if the action were being
performed by the observer. It is as if the
observed action stimulates some motor
neurons to “remember” what it was like
to perform action. Of course, this is not
memory in the overt sense of conscious
recollection, but rather that the
experience of execution changes the
response of the neurons to observation.
Not all the motor neurons respond this
way but a small number have been
shown to respond when performing and
observing an action. Such mirror
neurons could provide a correspondence
between the experience one has of
performing an action and seeing the
same action performed by others.
These mirror neurons might
provide one basis for understanding
action. Relating actions we observe to
actions we have carried out seems like
an important component for
comprehension. After all, we knew what
we were doing when we performed an
action. If that experience is somehow
reinstated during observation we might
attribute our past experience as the
interpretation of the present observation.
Imitation when observing an action
might occur because our motor system is
stimulated by observing an action.
Coordination of action could occur
because in representing others’ actions
as if they were our own, our brains may
be able to compute the time when we
can act without disrupting the other
person. This is just the kind of process
that is described in Gun Semin’s chapter
when he describes how groups of people
can synchronize their actions like
clapping together.
From monkey brains to human
intention
Of course, relating responses in
monkey brains to human brains is
neither direct nor simple. Parts of the
monkey brain and and parts of the
human brain that putatively correspond,
while similar, are not identical in
number or size or location, and probably
do not do exactly the same things, since
monkeys and humans have evolved to
have somewhat different capacities and
behaviors. Furthermore, the study of
mirror neurons in monkeys is based on
recording the responses of individual
neurons, which is not generally possible
in humans except in rare cases of
medical necessity. The measures we can
make on intact human brains come from
the responses of many thousands of
neurons, so it is difficult to make claims
about neurons that respond in producing
an action and perceiving the same
action. This means that any claims about
human mirror neurons depend on a
degree of good faith and inference rather
than specific empirical demonstration
that individual neurons respond both to
observing and executing action.
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Researchers have measured
human brain responses using a variety of
methods such as functional magnetic
resonance imaging (fMRI), which
demonstrate reliable effects of changes
in neural activity by changes in blood
flow. Although slower to respond than
measures of electrical activity, fMRI
provides evidence about where neural
activity in the human brain occurs. This
kind of research does show that
observing action produces activity in
areas of the human brain more typically
associated with executing action. While
there may be some disagreement about
which motor areas of the human brain
are active while observing or imitating
action and how these would correspond
to areas in the monkey brain, there is
good agreement that the human motor
system responds for observation and
imitation of action. 4
There is quite a difference
between recognizing an action and
understanding that action. We can see a
hand move through space with an open
palm oriented with the flat of the palm
moving toward the surface of an object
and predict where the hand will strike
the object and that it will apply force to
the surface of that object. But
understanding the same general action as
pushing a door open with the intent to
enter and slapping a person in the face is
quite different. A ball can be thrown in a
game of catch or as a missile intended to
do harm. The actions may be similar but
the intentions are different. Therefore it
is important that some researchers have
argued that mirror neurons respond to
the intention as well as the action. 5
However, to date there has been no clear
evidence that such neurons respond to
intention -- just that the sight of the
action of reaching without an object to
grasp, the sight of the object alone, and
the sight of the action with the object
present show different patterns of brain
response. The fact that such different
visual experiences lead to different
patterns of brain activity does not
provide clear evidence that intentions or
goals are somehow part of the mirror
neuron response to observed action.
Understanding spoken language as
action understanding
The potential ambiguity of action
is perhaps clearest if we consider
language. Talking is a form of action and
understanding speech might be a form of
action understanding. In talking, mouth
movements are made in such a way as to
create sounds that will have some affect
on the listener, as discussed in Howard
Nusbaum’s chapter. Listeners must
understand what was meant by making
those sounds. However, if someone says,
“It’s hot in here,” or “You are a great
friend,” there can be ambiguity about the
meaning. Such sentences could be
straightforward observations as they
seem to be or they could be something
very different. We can ask to have a
window opened or we can make a
negative social comment using exactly
the same sentences.
Nonetheless, there is good reason
to believe that the human action system
is involved in understanding speech as
well as producing it. While some
ambiguities in speech or behavior simply
cannot be resolved without broader
contextual knowledge, the motor system
may be important in understanding. If
you try to have a conversation in a noisy
bar, looking at your friend talking makes
it easier to understand what is being said.
We have shown that the motor system
contributes to this process of recognizing
speech. When listeners can see
someone’s face while talking, mouth
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movements increase activity within the
motor system measured using fMRI.
Furthermore, it is possible to show that
the same parts of the motor system can
be active in talking and in understanding
speech. By analyzing which parts of the
brain are active and when they become
active, it is possible to show that when
motor system activity in the frontal lobe
of the brain precedes activity in other
regions (e.g., the temporal lobe),
listeners have a better understanding. 6 It
is as if the motor system “recognizes”
the speech before other parts of the brain
when the talking mouth is visible to the
listener.
This study shows that more
information about the action of
producing speech (visible mouth
movements) can activate the motor areas
of the brain during understanding of
speech. But it is also the case that
understanding speech without seeing the
speaker depends on the motor system.
Hockey players are experts at hitting
slap shots, blocking passes, and
whacking each other in the head with
hockey sticks. They have done these
things in the real world just as monkeys
in Parma have learned to reach for
certain objects. When hockey players
listen to sentences describing hockey
action, even without seeing the speaker
or the action, motor areas are active
during sentence understanding and these
same motor areas are not active in
people without hockey experience. 7
Understanding described actions appears
to be influenced by the motor systems of
people who have experience with those
actions. Understanding action may be
influenced by the experiences of our
motor systems.
Reading minds through action
In understanding other people,
we start with what we understand about
ourselves. As Nick Epley describes in
his chapter, we take this kind of
egocentric perspective in understanding
other people or pets or God or the
behavior of inanimate objects. We know
what we meant when we say something
or do something and we make the same
attribution to others, even nonhuman
others. While this may be a good starting
point for religions to help people feel
connected to God, as discussed by Clark
Gilpin, it may not be uniformly
informative about human behavior.
Behavior is not transparent for the
intention of that behavior. The fact that
any particular action is not necessarily
unique to the intent behind it is the basis
of a great deal of misunderstanding in
daily interactions. As a result, even if
mirror neurons help our brains recognize
actions and sometimes interpret them,
there are real limits to how experienceproducing
actions can correctly inform
social understanding.
In spite of this limitation, we
may often do just this—assume we
understand another’s actions because of
what we would intend were we to do the
same thing in the same circumstance.
Human social understanding does suffer
egocentric limitations often and to the
extent that it does, something like a
mirror neuron system may play a role.
For example, as discussed by Jean
Decety in his chapter, our ability to
understand the pain of others may derive
in part from the neural systems involved
in our experience of pain, but goes
beyond this starting point. The social
brain is on one level perhaps a very
egocentric brain. But the fundamental
motivation to connect with others has
resulted in systems built on top of these
egocentric foundations. If social
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understanding depended entirely on past
experiences of our own intentions and
actions, there might be much more
misunderstanding and cynicism in the
world. However, the capacity to reason,
hypothesize, and model possible futures
may increase social understanding
beyond the anchor of purely egocentric
perspective. We can conceive of
alternatives to our own goals and
motives and relate those alternatives to
the actions we observe. To some extent,
this process might also involve the motor
system by mentally simulating actions
and anticipated responses. By imagining
how we might act in some situation to
achieve a goal or the alternative ways we
may act given some intention, it may be
possible to go beyond the limits of our
own experience. Such constructive
imagery may well depend on the motor
system, along with other neural systems,
but currently there is no scientific
evidence that such a system might be
linked with the operation of mirror
neurons.
Conclusion
We are equipped to understand
the world around us by relating what we
perceive to our own experiences. With
respect to actions in particular, our
brains have specialized circuitry to relate
previously executed actions to newly
perceived ones, possibly by performing
an internal (imagined) simulation of
them. There is evidence too that we
might understand the emotional states of
others by a similar kind of process,
whereby our brains activate circuits for
experiencing the emotion as a way to
understand that emotion in others. These
brain mechanisms might also apply (to a
greater or lesser degree) when we try to
understand actions or feelings by nonhuman
animals or even inanimate
entities. This could be a partial
biological explanation of
anthropomorphism, as discussed by
Epley and Gilpin. Of course as humans
we have the ability to go beyond these
strict egocentric limitations and
recognize and respond to our social
connections more explicitly. This ability
to go beyond the more basic grounding
of the way we understand others may
subserve part of the goal of some
religions, discussed by Kathryn Tanner,
in fostering a more abstract view of our
connection to others. While a mirror
neuron system might help form the basis
for some aspects of social understanding,
there may well be other invisible forces
at work supported by these and other
neural systems in our social brain.
References
1. Hasson, U., Nusbaum, H. C., & Small, S. L.
(2009). Task-dependent organization of
brain regions active during rest. Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences of the
United States of America, 106(26), 10841-
10846.
2. Dewey, J. (1903). Democracy in Education.
The Elementary School Teacher, 4(4), 193-
204.
3. Gallese, V., Fadiga, L., Fogassi, L.,
& Rizzolatti, G. (1996). Action
recognition in the premotor cortex.
Brain, 119 ( Pt 2), 593-609.
4. Iacoboni, M., Woods, R. P., Brass,
M., Bekkering, H., Mazziotta, J. C.,
& Rizzolatti, G. (1999). Cortical
mechanisms of human imitation.
Science, 286(5449), 2526-2528.
5. Iacoboni, M., Molnar-Szakacs, I.,
Gallese, V., Buccino, G., Mazziotta,
J. C., & Rizzolatti, G. (2005).
Grasping the intentions of others
with one's own mirror neuron
system. PLoS Biology, 3, 529-535.
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6. Skipper, J. I., van Wassenhove, V.,
Nusbaum, H. C., & Small, S. L.
(2007). Hearing lips and seeing
voices: how cortical areas supporting
speech production mediate
audiovisual speech perception.
Cerebral Cortex, 17, 2387-2399.
7. Beilock, S. L., Lyons, I. M.,
Mattarella-Micke, A., Nusbaum, H.
C., & Small, S. L. (2008). Sports
experience changes the neural
processing of action language.
Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences, 105, 13269-
13272.
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Connecting and Binding Social Brains
and Minds
We evolved as social organisms
in the context of face-to-face interaction.
Much of our human biology was
established before the technology of
email and cell phones. As a result, our
biological nature is tuned primarily to
social signals and interaction that occurs
in the presence of another. It takes just
a moment of observation for us to know
a lot about another person as a social
being. We can understand other
speakers easily within tens of
milliseconds of experience. Our brains
have developed to make this kind of
social connection quickly and easily,
whether through language or action. In
order to understand someone else, we
need to be able to understand their goals
and intentions. Moreover we need to
relate their behavior to our own
individual and personal experience.
Steve Small discusses some of the brain
machinery that may allow us to translate
our perception of language and
observation of behavior into a form that
can be related to our own use of
language and action. This kind of
resonance with experience, rather than
elaborate inferences, may allow us to
connect quickly with others, satisfying
our drive for sociality.
But understanding behavior and
communication is not all there is to
forming social connections. It is one
thing to read intentions and another to
feel someone’s pain. If we only could
understand action and communication,
an important element of human
connection would be missing. In
forming a collective mind, as Gün Semin
discusses it, we need to have collective
emotional responses. Jean Decety
discusses the foundations of empathy
and the brain machinery that supports
this important capacity by providing a
resonant response to the observation of
another person’s distress. Although
sympathy may motivate helping others,
empathy may be one of the social glues
that binds us together as a collective
social organism.
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Chapter 9 9
Empathy and Interpersonal
Sensitivity
A young girl, after watching a
televised documentary account of child
hunger and suffering in Bangladesh,
pleads with her parents to “do
something” to help them. A new child in
9 The lead author is Jean Decety, Ph.D., the
Irving B. Harris Professor in the Departments of
Psychology and Psychiatry, and co-director of
the Brain Research Imaging Center at the
University of Chicago Medical Center. He is the
editor of the journal Social Neuroscience. His
interests include the investigation of the
neurobiological mechanisms underpinning
interpersonal sensitivity, particularly empathy
and sympathy. His recent work focuses on
developmental neuroscience with both typically
developing children and adolescents as well as in
children with deficits in empathic responding
such as antisocial behavior problems. Decety has
published more than 115 scientific papers, and
recently edited the Social Neuroscience of
Empathy (2009, MIT press), and Interpersonal
Sensitivity: Entering Others’ World (2007,
Psychology Press).
Empathy and sympathy play crucial
roles in much of human social interaction and are
necessary components for healthy co-existence.
Sympathy is thought to have a key role in
motivating prosocial behavior, guides our
preferences and behavioral responses, and
provides the affective and motivational base for
moral development. Although the study of these
abilities has traditionally been examined using
behavioral and clinical methods, recent work in
social neuroscience has begun to provide
compelling and novel insights on the neural
mechanisms involved in interpersonal
sensitivity. These developments are explored in
this essay.
daycare is being ignored by the other
children with the exception of one little
boy who takes her hand and includes her
in all his activities. These modest
beginnings signal the important and
ongoing role of empathy for surviving
and flourishing in our social world.
Empathy has been suggested to be
essential to navigating the social world;
it enhances our understanding of others,
improves the effectiveness of our social
communication, and fosters mutually
satisfying social relationships.
Conversely, lack of empathy or its
maladaptive use causes social
relationships to falter and fail.
Empathy refers to our natural
capacity to quickly and automatically
relate to the emotional states of another
person. Rudimentary forms of empathy
appear early in the life course, and with
maturation, empathy can be experienced
by simply reading about or imagining
someone else’s emotion. Empathy
comes so naturally that physicians must
learn to dampen their empathic pain
responses when inserting a needle into a
patient (1). Just because empathy comes
naturally does not mean, however, that it
is instantiated in a discrete brain module
that is automatically activated when one
witnesses another’s distress or suffering.
Rather, the experience of empathy is
underpinned by the combined activity of
several dissociable psychobiological
systems. Further, empathy can be
modulated by various contextual,
dispositional, and interpersonal factors.
The study of empathy, using
sophisticated methods from psychology,
neurology, neuroimaging, and
neuropsychology, provide a unique
opportunity to understand the invisible
power of empathy in shaping our
obligatorily gregarious social nature.
Defining empathy and its functions
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Empathy can be defined as our
natural capacity to share, appreciate, and
respond to the affective states of others.
This capacity is essential for the
regulation of social interactions. For
instance, empathy is believed to
motivate prosocial behavior and inhibit
aggressive behavior (2). In addition, our
ability to share the emotions of those we
observe binds us to each other and
fosters a collective social identity.
Empathy’s invisible power is that it
moves us to cooperate, coordinate our
behaviors, and provide the needed care
for one another. Notably, however,
empathic concern does not necessarily
lead to empathic behavior. First,
empathy poses a paradox, as sharing of
feelings does not necessarily imply that
one will act or even feel impelled to act
in a supportive or sympathetic way.
Second, the complexity of the social and
emotional situations eliciting empathic
concern influences the probability and
nature of the help provided. Whether and
how empathic actions are expressed
depends on the feelings we perceive in
the other, our relationship with that
individual, and the context in which we
share an emotional state.
Empathy is critical for complex
human interactions, but this does not
mean that empathy and prosocial
behavior have suddenly appeared with
Homo sapiens. If empathy is a potent
invisible force generated by the social
brain, some form of emotion-sharing
should also be evident in other social
species such as non-human primates.
Indeed, field observations conducted by
comparative psychologists and
ethologists suggest that behaviors
homologous to empathy can be found in
non-human primates (2). Some have
argued that empathy is not an all-ornothing
phenomenon, and that many
intermediate forms of empathy exist
between the extremes of mere agitation
at the distress of another and full
understanding of their predicaments (3).
Many comparative psychologists view
empathy as a kind of induction process
by which emotions, both positive and
negative, are shared, and which increase
the probability that the protagonists will
subsequently engage in similar behavior.
Though certain non-human
primates may share feelings between
individuals, humans seem to have the
unique ability to intentionally “feel for”
and act on behalf of other individuals
whose experiences may differ greatly
from their own. Such a capacity may
help explain why empathic concern is
often associated with prosocial behaviors
such as helping kin, and why it has been
considered the foundation for altruism,
the expression of empathy and caring for
those who are not kin. Evolutionary
biologists have suggested that empathic
helping behavior evolved because of its
contribution to genetic fitness (kin
selection). In humans and other
mammals, an impulse to care for
offspring is almost certainly genetically
hard-wired. Less clear, however, is
whether an impulse to care for siblings,
more remote kin, and similar non-kin is
genetically hard-wired. The emergence
of altruism is not easily explained within
the framework of neo-Darwinian
theories of natural selection (but see
Cacioppo’s chapter on this point). Social
learning explanations of kinship patterns
in human helping behavior are thus
highly plausible. Indeed, one of the most
striking aspects of human empathy is
that it can be felt for virtually any
“target,” even targets of a different
species (animals included). We can see
a deer hurt by a passing car or the dogs
locked in crates at a shelter and feel
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strongly for their pain or confinement
and future. In part, this kind of empathic
extension may be motivated by the kind
of anthropomorphic attitudes we have
about non-human entities as discussed
by Nick Epley in his chapter. The fact
that we are adept at “feeling for” very
different others whom we can observe
but not truly understand suggests that we
possess a capacity to cognitively rerepresent
others in our mind in a way we
can understand. Indeed, second-order
representation is a key component of
empathy in humans, and may be a useful
adaptation for human survival because it
maximizes the range of individuals with
whom we can form a social bond.
The Components of Empathy
The psychological components
that make up full-blown empathy are
supported by distinct and separable
psychobiological systems. Empathy can
be decomposed into an affective
component that includes the perception
and sharing of an emotional state
observed in another individual, and a
cognitive component that includes the
motivation and intention to respond.
Closely related is a regulatory
component that involves adjustment of
one’s emotional and behavioral
response. The affective, cognitive, and
regulatory aspects of empathy involve
interacting, yet partially non-overlapping
neural circuits. The initial component in
the overall process leading to empathy
draws on somatic mimicry, also known
as “emotion contagion.” This affective
component of empathy develops earlier
than the cognitive component. Affective
responsiveness is present at an early age,
is involuntary, and relies on mimicry and
linking of actions perceived in others
with actions in oneself (i.e., perceptionaction
coupling). For instance,
newborns and infants become vigorously
distressed shortly after another infant
begins to cry. Facial mimicry of basic
emotional expressions also contributes to
affective sharing, and this phenomenon
starts very early in life, by
approximately 10 weeks of age. This
primitive mimicry mechanism, which
may be based on mirror neurons, which
are sensorimotor neurons found in the
premotor, motor, and posterior parietal
cortex of the brain that become active
when observing as well as when
enacting a behavior as discussed in
Steven Small’s chapter. This kind of
mechanism may contribute to the
development of empathy in the early
preverbal period, and continues to
operate past childhood. There is
evidence that when we perceive
emotions and actions of others, we use
the same neural circuits as when we
produce the same emotions and actions
ourselves (e.g., watching another
individual being disgusted and
experiencing disgust in oneself activate
similar neural circuits). For instance,
viewing facial expressions triggers
expressions on one’s own face, even
without explicit identification of what
we’re seeing (4).
The cognitive component of
empathy is closely related to processes
involved in “theory of mind” (i.e., the
ability to attribute mental states to others
and to understand that others’ mental
states can differ from one’s own) and
self-regulation. The capacity for two
people to resonate with each other
emotionally, prior to any cognitive
understanding, is the basis for
developing shared emotional meanings,
but it is not enough for mature empathic
understanding and concern. Such an
understanding requires the observer to
form an explicit representation of the
feelings of another person, a process that
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involves additional mechanisms beyond
the sharing of emotion and includes selfregulatory
mechanisms to modulate the
observer’s experience of negative
arousal. Specifically, in order to
understand the emotions and feelings of
others in relation to oneself, secondorder
representations of the other must
be consciously available and must not
confuse the other with the self. The
medial and ventromedial prefrontal
cortices are known to play crucial roles
in decoupling first-person and thirdperson
information and maintaining
representations of the other as distinct
from the self (5).
The regulatory component of
empathy, especially regulation of
internal emotional states and processes,
is particularly relevant to the modulation
of vicarious emotion and the experience
of empathy as well as sympathy.
Empathy is unlikely to lead to helping
behavior if the observer is incapacitated
by strong empathically evoked emotions,
which is why emotional regulation is an
important component in empathy.
Indeed, children high in effortful control
show greater empathic concern, and the
tendency to experience empathy and
sympathy versus personal distress varies
as a function of their ability to regulate
their emotions more generally.
How We Perceive Other People in
Pain
When witnessing another person
experiencing pain, the scope of an
observer’s reaction can range from
concern for personal safety, including
feelings of alarm, fear, and avoidance, to
concern for the other person, including
compassion, sympathy, and care-giving.
The existence of the perception-action
coupling mechanism apparent in
emotional contagion also seems to
account for our ability to perceive and
understand the pain of others. In the case
of pain, individuals are predisposed to
find distress of others aversive and learn
to avoid actions associated with this
distress. This is even the case in many
mammalian species, including rodents.
For instance, rats that had learned to
press a lever to obtain food would stop
doing so if their response was paired
with the delivery of an electric shock to
a visible neighboring rat (6).
Recently, a handful of functional
neuroimaging studies performed with
healthy human volunteers revealed that
the same neural circuits implicated in
processing the affective and motivational
aspects of pain in oneself account for the
perception of pain in others (7). In one
study, participants in a magnetic
resonance imaging (MRI) scanner either
received a painful stimulus or, in other
trials, observed a signal that their
partner, who was present in the same
room, would receive the same stimulus.
First-hand experience of pain resulted in
activation of the somatosensory cortex,
which encodes the way we feel aspects
of a noxious stimulus such as its bodily
location and intensity. Furthermore, the
anterior medial cingulate cortex (ACC),
and the anterior insula were activated
during both first-hand pain and the
anticipated experience of pain in
someone else. These regions are
responsible for the affective and
motivational processing of noxious
stimuli such as those aspects of pain that
pertain to desires, urges, or impulses to
avoid or terminate a painful experience.
A number of other neuroimaging studies
of empathy for pain in adults as well as
in children have demonstrated that the
somatosensory cortex is not activated
only during first-hand pain but is also
activated with the perception of other
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people in pain. Altogether, there is
strong evidence to suggest that
perceiving the pain of others triggers an
automatic somatic sensory-motor
mirroring mechanism between other and
self, which activates almost the entire
neural pain matrix including the
periaqueductal gray, a major site in pain
transmission and for processing of fear
and anxiety, and the supplementary
motor area that programs defensive
movements in response to anticipated
pain. Such a neural resonance
mechanism provides a functional bridge
between first-person and third-person
information. It is grounded in the
equivalence of self and other, which
allows for analogical reasoning, and
offers a possible, yet partial, route to
understanding others.
Of course, human empathic
abilities are more sophisticated than
simply yoking perceptions of the self
and other. In the eighteenth century,
Scottish philosopher and economist
Adam Smith proposed that through
imagination, “we place ourselves in his
situation… enter as it were into his body,
and become in some measure the same
person with” (8). By means of
imagination we come to experience
sensations which are generally similar
to, although typically weaker than, those
of the other person. This capacity to
engage in role-taking has been
theoretically linked to the development
of empathy, moral reasoning, and more
generally, prosocial behavior. Unlike the
motor mimicry and emotional contagion
aspect of empathy, perspective-taking
develops later, possibly because it draws
heavily on the maturation of executive
functions (i.e., processes that serve to
monitor and control thought and actions,
including self-regulation, planning,
cognitive flexibility, response inhibition,
and resistance to interference), functions
that are predominantly centered in the
prefrontal cortex which continues to
mature from birth to adolescence.
Theoretically, imagining the other is
distinct from imagining the self: the
former may evoke empathic concern
(defined as an other-oriented response
congruent with the perceived distress of
the person in need) while the latter
induces both empathic concern and
personal distress (i.e., a self-oriented
aversive emotional response such as
anxiety or discomfort). This distinction
has been supported empirically. When
individuals are asked to imagine how
they would feel in reaction to emotionladen
familiar situations and to imagine
how a known person would feel if she
was experiencing the same situations,
common neural circuits are activated
both for the self and the other. However,
relative to imagining the self, imagining
the other results in specific activation of
parts of the frontal cortex that are
implicated in executive control—the use
of attention and working memory and
decisions—and an area of the brain at
the interface of the temporal and parietal
lobes of the brain that is a key
component of a larger network of neural
circuits involved in attention (sometimes
called the temporoparietal junction).
Some researchers have
hypothesized that the role of the frontal
lobes and the temporoparietal junction is
to hold separate perspectives or to resist
interference against attention to one’s
own perspective. In a recent functional
brain imaging study (9), participants
were shown pictures of people with their
hands or feet in painful or non-painful
situations with the instruction to imagine
themselves or to imagine another
individual experiencing these situations.
During perception of painful situations,
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both the self-perspective and the otherperspective
were associated with
activation in the neural network involved
in pain processing. These results reveal
the similarities in neural networks
representing first- and third-person
information. In addition, however, the
self-perspective yielded higher pain
ratings and involved more extensive
activation of some circuits in the pain
matrix than did the other-perspective,
thus highlighting important differences
between self- and other-perspectives.
Neuroanatomical regions and
circuits form the foundation for the
experience of pain in others, but they are
not sufficient to explain variability in
interpersonal sensitivity. Although
empathetic brain circuits are activated by
the mere perception of pain in others,
activity in these circuits can be
modulated by social, motivational, and
cognitive factors. For example,
observing pain in likable others (i.e.,
those who played a game fairly) resulted
in an enhancement of empathic brain
responses, whereas pain in dislikable
others who played unfairly did not.
Another functional MRI study (10)
found that participants showed
significantly greater responses in neural
regions that are involved in pain
perception when observing the pain of
people who were not responsible for
their stigmatized condition (i.e.,
individuals who contracted AIDS as the
result of a blood transfusion) than either
controls (healthy individuals) or people
who were held responsible for their
condition (i.e., those who contracted
AIDS through illegal drug use). In
addition, participants expressed more
empathy and personal distress in
response to the pain of people who were
not responsible for their stigmatized
condition as compared to controls. The
level of empathic response, therefore,
seems to be influenced by motivational
factors as well as the interpersonal
relationship between the target and the
observer.
Altogether, these findings
demonstrate that the similarities between
affective representations of the self and
the other stem from shared neural
circuits that can be emulated either
automatically or intentionally by the act
of perspective-taking. Importantly, these
findings also point to some distinctions
between these two representations,
distinctions that contribute to our
capacity to detach ourselves from others
sufficiently to make considered
responses to their pain.
Conclusion
Empathy, the natural capacity to
share, appreciate, and respond to the
affective states of others, plays a crucial
role in much of human social interaction
from birth to the end of life. As would be
expected if empathy functions to
enhance social cohesion, social nonhuman
primate species also exhibit
rudimentary versions of empathy. What
humans have in abundance are higherlevel
cognitive and social abilities
(language, theory of mind, executive
functions) that can be deployed to
modulate empathic responses, and that
are amenable to modulation by lowerlevel
processes such as emotional
contagion and mimicry. These levels of
processing enable empathy to have an
impact on a wide variety of human
behaviors. From motivating prosocial
behavior to providing the affective and
motivational bases for moral
development, empathy is an invisible
force to reckon with when considering
how humans behave toward each other.
References
Page | 91
1. Cheng, Y., Lin, C., Liu, H.L.,
Hsu, Y., Lim, K., Hung, D., &
Decety, J. (2007). Expertise
modulates the perception of pain
in others. Current Biology, 17,
1708-1713.
2. De Waal, F. (2009). The Age of
Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a
Kinder Society. New York:
Harmony Books.
3. De Waal, F. B. M. (2009).
Darwin’s last laugh. Nature, 460,
175.
4. Meltzoff, A.N., & Decety, J.
(2003). What imitation tells us
about social cognition: A
rapprochement between
developmental psychology and
cognitive neuroscience. The
Philosophical Transactions of the
Royal Society, London, 358,
491-500.
5. Decety, J., & Sommerville, J.A.
(2003). Shared representations
between self and others: A social
cognitive neuroscience view.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7,
527-533.
6. Church, R. M. (1959). Emotional
reactions of rats to the pain of
others. Journal of Comparative
and Physiological Psychology,
52, 132-134.
7. Decety, J., & Lamm, C. (2009).
Empathy and intersubjectivity.
In G. G. Berntson & J. T.
Cacioppo (Eds.), Handbook of
neuroscience for the behavioral
sciences (Vol. 2, pp. 940-957).
Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
8. Smith, Adam. The Theory of
Moral Semtiments. Edited by
Sálvio M. Soares. MetaLibri,
2005, v1.0p.
9. Jackson, P.L., Brunet, E.,
Meltzoff, A.N., & Decety, J.
(2006). Empathy examined
through the neural mechanisms
involved in imagining how I feel
versus how you feel pain: An
event-related fMRI study.
Neuropsychologia, 44, 752-61.
10. Decety, J., Echols, S.C., &
Correll, J. (2009). The blame
game: the effect of responsibility
and social stigma on empathy for
pain. Journal of Cognitive
Neuroscience, Epub ahead of
print.
Page | 92
Seeing into My Mind and Other
Minds
Empathy is defined by Jean
Decety as “the natural capacity to share,
appreciate, and respond to the affective
states of others.” Empathy rests on our
ability to see into the mind of another
while distinguishing it from one’s own
to be in a position to cooperate,
coordinate, and provide the needed care
for others. The possession of empathic
capacity is not sufficient to determine
the precise nature of the response toward
others, however. As Decety points out,
whether an individual attends to and
responds empathically upon observing
emotion in another individual depends
on, among other things, dispositional
tendencies, the relationship between the
individuals, and contextual constraints.
Motivation to help another is also
influenced by the amount of cognitive
effort we are willing and able to exert to
take the perspective of the other.
Perspective-taking is essentially
an attempt to see into the invisible mind
of another. What we can’t see, we model
based on our own mind and like-minded
individuals. Nick Epley shows that
seeing into and connecting with other
minds is such a frequent operation of the
social brain that the absence of others
inclines people to see human minds in
nonhuman entities. Whether it’s a tree, a
pet, or God, ascribing mind to others
endows them with the capacity to
experience the same affective states we
experience. This shared capacity evokes
in us a tendency to feel and express
empathic concern for their well-being.
Unfortunately, humans do not grant all
individuals, much less non-human
entities, an equivalent degree of mind.
Epley articulates how differences in the
capacity to see mind in others have
consequences for the way we feel and
think about and behave toward others.
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Chapter 10 10
Seeing Invisible Minds
Shortly after taking off from
LaGuardia airport in the dead of winter,
the engines of US Airways flight 1549
failed after inhaling several large geese.
The pilots glided their plane onto the
Hudson River, where all of the
10 The lead author is Nicholas Epley, Ph.D., a
Professor of Behavioral Science at the University
of Chicago Booth School of Business. His
research investigates people’s ability to reason
about others’ minds, from knowing how one is
being judged by others to predicting others'
attitudes, beliefs, and underlying motivations,
and the implications of systematic mistakes in
mind reading for everyday social interactions.
His research has appeared in more than two
dozen journals, has been featured by the Wall
Street Journal, CNN, Wired, and National Public
Radio, among many others, and has been funded
by the National Science Foundation and the
Templeton Foundation. Epley has written for the
New York Times, produced lectures for the
Financial Times, been elected as a Fellow of the
Association for Psychological Science, and is the
winner of the 2008 Theoretical Innovation Prize
from the Society for Personality and Social
Psychology.
Other minds are inherently invisible.
You cannot see an attitude, smell a belief, or
touch an intention, and yet you can nevertheless
“see” these mental states in other people with
great ease. You can even see them in agents
ranging from pets to gadgets to gods. How you
are able to see other minds, and how they
become visible, matters because it marks the
difference between treating others as human
beings worthy of moral care and concern versus
treating others as objects or animals.
passengers were rescued, cold, wet, and
almost completely unharmed. Explained
one passenger, “God was certainly
looking out for us.” New Orleans Mayor
Ray Nagin offered a very different
assessment of God’s mind following the
devastating impact of Hurricane Katrina
when he explained that, “Surely God is
mad at America. Surely he’s not
approving of us being in Iraq under false
pretense. But surely he’s upset at Black
America, too.”
Depending on your own beliefs,
such statements will seem somewhere
between insane and insightful. To
psychologists, they seem impressive.
They seem impressive not because they
reveal a keen sense of causal inference,
but rather because they reveal what may
be the most impressive capacities of the
social brain—the ability to reason about,
or “to see,” what other minds see.
Introspection enables you to know your
own intentions, report on your own
thoughts, feel your own pain, and
recognize when you are feeling shame
rather than guilt. Other minds, however,
are inherently invisible. You cannot
know what it is like to be another person
on the inside because your skull gets in
the way.
The inherent invisibility of other
minds poses a major problem for hardnosed
philosophers, who skeptically note
that people cannot infer that other minds
exist at all. Although it is surprisingly
difficult for philosophers to reject the
skeptical conclusion from the “other
minds problem,” almost everyone else
casts it aside altogether some time
around the age of five. At this point
people have developed such a strong
capacity to think about other minds that
they not only see minds in other people,
but they seem to see other minds almost
everywhere 1 . Gods can be caring or
Page | 94
callous. Pets can be thoughtful or
devious. And every now and then,
computers can have a mind of their own.
Having the capacity to reason
about other minds enables people to
form deep social connections with
others, to empathize with others’ pain
and share in their joy, and to anticipate
others’ actions. But having a capacity
and actually using it are two different
things. People are not naturally inclined
to see invisible things in the
environment. People do not
automatically see into other minds,
either, but instead do so only under
certain circumstances and with some
psychological effort. This chapter will
describe how people come to see other
minds, how other minds can become
more or less visible, and why the
visibility of other minds matters for
everyday life.
Kinds of Minds
Studying how people understand
other minds first requires understanding
how people intuitively define another
mind. Research suggests that people
think of minds as having two distinct
dimensions, the ability to act (agency)
and the ability to feel (experience) 2 .
Mindful agency involves the cognitive
activities that enable action, such as the
capacity to plan, to have intentions, to
engage in deliberate self-control, and to
pursue one’s own goals. Conscious
preferences, attitudes, and beliefs follow
from these capacities. Mindful
experience, in contrast, involves the
cognitive activities involved in reacting
to the external world, such as the
capacity for self-awareness, and the
experience of basic psychological states
(like hunger, thirst, or pain), and otheroriented
emotions (such as empathy or
sympathy). Mindful experience also
involves the capacity for
metacognition—the capacity to think
about one’s own thoughts or emotions—
exemplified in experiences such as
confidence and doubt, or in secondary
emotions such as shame, guilt, joy, or
hope. People seem to represent these
two capacities in others quite
independently. A sociopath, for
instance, can appear to act with a high
degree of mindful agency but no mindful
experience, whereas a baby might appear
full of mindful experience with
relatively little mindful agency. Seeing
other agents as mindful essentially
means seeing them as able to
consciously think and/or to feel.
Because you are aware of both your own
thoughts and feelings, you likely
consider yourself—like most people
do—to be very mindful.
Making Other Minds Visible
Introspection provides a kind of
flashlight that seems to provide direct
access to one’s own agency as well as
experience. Although research
demonstrates that introspection is
actually a process of indirect inference,
it appears to us that introspection
provides direct access to the workings of
our own brain. It seems that we can look
on the inside and feel when we are
suffering, know when we are
experiencing regret, or be aware of our
intentions to lose weight. We can use
our introspective abilities to make
inferences about what others are likely
thinking or feeling (and we very often
do), but such inferences are likely to
seem inherently less direct, less
immediate, and less illuminating. We
cannot see into other minds as clearly as
we seem able to see our own.
When something is difficult to
see, people may doubt whether it
Page | 95
actually exists, or may not see it at all.
This is true of the relative difficulty that
people have seeing other minds
compared to one’s own, in ways that are
sometimes very subtle and surprising.
For instance, we tend to evaluate
ourselves by consulting our mindful
intentions, but we evaluate others (and
their intentions) by observing their
actions. We may consider ourselves to
be conscientious if we planned to buy
our spouse a birthday gift, but need to
see an actual gift to infer that our spouse
is equally conscientious. 3 We tend to
believe that we are more likely to
experience complicated mental emotions
like shame, guilt, or embarrassment than
are others. 4,5 We tend to believe that our
own behavior will therefore be guided
by moral sentiments like empathy, guilt,
or compassion whereas others’ behavior
is more likely driven by the relatively
mindless motives of self-interest. 6 Other
minds are more opaque than our own,
and some learning, attending, seeking,
and projecting is required for our brains
to become fully social and see into them.
Here’s how 7 .
Learning. Children do not enter
the world able to think about other
minds, but they learn to do so fairly
quickly. At around three months of age,
children start preferentially attending to
animate objects compared to inanimate
objects, and at around six months of age
start to distinguish between intentional
(goal-directed) and unintentional
(accidental) action. At this age, for
instance, children will look reliably
longer at a person who is reaching for a
cup than to a person who is making the
same reaching motion in the absence of
a cup. Over the next 18 months,
children become more likely to mimic
intentional than unintentional actions 8 , to
follow the gaze of another person and
therefore share his or her attentional
focus, and recognize that other people
may have preferences that differ from
one’s own. By age two, children’s
social ability to read other minds seems
to have already surpassed that of our
nearest primate relatives, and over the
next two years they pick up what appear
to be uniquely human mind-reading
capacities. By age five, children
demonstrate the most sophisticated of
mind-reading abilities—the capacity to
recognize that others’ beliefs may differ
from one’s own and to use those
differing (sometimes mistaken) beliefs to
predict the other agent’s behavior.
Variability from age five onward comes
from learning more specific details about
how other minds actually work, largely
gathered from personal experience,
religious practice, or broader cultural
norms.
Many psychologists and
neuroscientists speculate that learning to
read other minds comes from the deeply
social tendency, present at birth, to
mimic others’ actions. For example,
Steve Small examines a neurological
underpinning for mimicry, and Jean
Decety argues in his essay that an inborn
capacity for mimicry underlies the
human capacity for empathy. Looking
where others look and copying their
actions is a reasonable way to copy their
likely mental states as well. This
egocentric method of using one’s own
mental experience as a guide to other
minds continues to be employed
throughout adulthood, and can give
insight into others’ mental states but can
also lead people to overestimate the
extent to which others’ minds are similar
to one’s own. These biases tend to be
called egocentric when reasoning about
other people, and they tend to be called
anthropomorphic when reasoning about
Page | 96
nonpeople such as a god or a gadget or a
pet.
Attending. People rarely notice
things in their environment unless they
are specifically attending to them. Other
minds likewise tend to be relatively
invisible unless attention is specifically
drawn to them. For instance, take a
moment to think about how happy you
are compared to the average American…
No really, please take a moment…If you
just spent some time thinking about how
happy you are and no time thinking
about how happy the average American
is, then you are no different from the
majority of people in psychology
experiments who do likewise 8 . People
can consider others’ thoughts, feelings,
beliefs, or emotions, but doing so
requires mental effort that is in short and
limited supply. Consider, for instance, a
simple experiment in which you are
playing a game with another person 9 .
Both you and the other player in this
game must first choose privately to
cooperate or compete with each other. If
you both choose to cooperate, you both
earn $5. But if the other player chooses
to cooperate and you choose to compete,
then you win $10 and your partner gets
nothing. If you, however, choose to
cooperate and the other player chooses
to compete, you win nothing and your
partner wins $10. If you both choose to
compete, you both win a measly $2. It
seems obvious in this situation that you
should consider both what you would
like to do, but also consider what the
other player is likely to be thinking.
Experimental evidence suggests that
people do indeed think about the former
but spend little time thinking of the
latter. In a basic version of this
experiment, 60% of people chose to
cooperate. However, when people were
simply asked to think about their
partner’s thoughts before making their
choice, only 27% chose to cooperate. If
people had already been thinking about
others’ thoughts, as it seems like they
would naturally be doing in this
situation, then a simple instruction to
consider others’ thoughts would have no
effect on people’s own behavior. That is
not the case. This simple experiment
shows that people may not naturally
consider other minds even when it
appears that they should. Thinking
about other minds requires attentional
effort. It does not necessarily come
automatically. Indeed, as Tanya
Luhrmann describes in her chapter,
people may have to work very hard to
discern other minds, such as the mind of
God, even when they are actively
looking for them.
Seeking. If seeing other minds
requires attention, then other minds are
especially likely to become visible when
people are motivated to think about
them. There are many reasons why
people might try to get into the mind of
another agent, from a spouse to a pet to a
god, but two are reasonably wellsupported
by existing research. First,
people tend to think about other minds
when they are trying to form a social
connection with others. 10 Making
people feel lonely or isolated, for
instance, increases the tendency to
describe one’s pet as thoughtful,
considerate, or sympathetic (all mindful
traits). And those who are made to feel
lonely are also likely to report believing
in mindful supernatural agents, such as
God. Second, people tend to think about
other minds when they are trying to
achieve some understanding and control
over their environment or over another
agent’s behavior. 1 Concepts of mind,
including attitudes, beliefs, goals, or
desires, can provide compelling cause-
Page | 97
and-effect explanations of behavior that
give a sense of predictability and
control. A meteorologist may know that
a hurricane may strike here or there
depending on environmental conditions.
Lacking such knowledge, a hurricane
that strikes here rather than there may
lead people to invoke a mindful agent—
such as a God—to explain that action.
Projecting. If introspection
makes your own mind visible, then you
might assume that those who look
similar to you on the outside might look
similar to you on the inside as well.
Indeed, animals that move at a
humanlike speed (such as a horse) seem
more mindful to people than do animals
that move either much slower (such as a
sloth) or much faster (such as a
hummingbird). 11 And an agent that look
humanlike, such as a computerized
avatar with human face, seems more
mindful than avatars that do not look
humanlike. Any parent knows how well
toy makers love to capitalize on this
tendency. But it is the converse of this
effect that is even more interesting—
other minds become less visible as the
agent becomes less similar to the self.
Others that differ from you in their
interests, nationality, or social status are
likely to be seen as less mindful—less
thoughtful, less likely to experience
complicated emotions, less able to
experience pain or suffering—than those
that are similar to you. It is little
wonder, then, that the history of human
conflict is filled with instances of people
dehumanizing radically different others,
treating them like mindless animals or
objects. 12
Why Minds Matter
It may not be obvious to you why
it matters that your neighbor, every now
and then, thinks that her computer has a
mind of it’s own, that a mayor believes
that God punished his city by sending a
hurricane, or that you truly believe that
your pet poodle is thoughtful and
considerate. Some of these attributions
of mind seem purely metaphorical and
therefore unimportant, as ways of
speaking rather than ways of believing,
whereas others seem to represent
genuine beliefs about the real presence
or absence of another social mind. But
metaphors have a way of influencing
behavior in ways that are consistent with
believing the metaphor to be literally
true. People metaphorically refer to
feeling dirty after behaving unethically,
and yet washing one’s hands actually
reduces the guilt that people report
feeling from engaging in unethical
actions. 13 People are surely just
speaking metaphorically when they refer
to rejection as being given the cold
shoulder, and yet research demonstrates
that people do indeed report feeling that
a room is colder after someone has just
rejected them than after someone has
just accepted them. 14 And surely people
are only speaking metaphorically when
they refer to the stock market as anxious
or jittery, and yet describing the market
as mindful leads stock traders to believe
that trends are likely to continue whereas
describing the market as mindless leads
traders to predict more random
variability. 15 Whether metaphorical or
literal, seeing other agents as mindful
matters because people tend to treat the
agent as if it has a mind. That matters
for at least three major reasons.
First, mindful agents have both
intentions and the capacity for selfcontrol.
Mindful agents can therefore be
held responsible for their actions.
Possessing a guilty mind (mens rea) is
necessary for being held criminally
responsible for a crime in the US, a
Page | 98
precedent found in courts around the
world dating back to the Middle Ages.
In times past and cultures in which
people did not so naturally restrict
intentional capacities to other humans,
animals (such as rats) and objects (such
as “possessed” statues) were common
targets of criminal prosecution 16,17 .
Increasing the extent to which other
agents seem mindful also increases the
praise or blame that they receive for
their actions. And even diminishing the
extent to which people feel in mindful
control of their own behavior (e.g., by
undermining people’s belief in free will),
leads people to behave in ways that are
consistent with diminished self-control
(such as by cheating on an exam when
tempted to do so). 18
Second, other minds are capable
of thinking, and may therefore be
thinking about you. Being under
scrutiny by mindful agents has two basic
effects on human behavior. One is that
mindful agents become sources of social
influence, increasing the extent to which
people behave in socially desirable
ways 20 . Imagine, for instance, how you
might behave if you found a magic ring
that made you invisible… and you’ll get
the point. This ability for mindful
surveillance to control behavior has been
proposed as one of the reasons, if not the
primary reason, why religious systems
that posit an omnipresent deity are able
to maintain such large-scale cooperative
societies. The other effect of mindful
surveillance is that it is mentally taxing
to monitor others’ thoughts. This
effortful monitoring can diminish a
person’s performance on other
cognitively demanding tasks 21 . And
while waiting for a stressful event, such
as giving a speech, people show less
stress-related responses when in the
presence of their relatively mindless pet
than when in the presence of their
relatively more mindful spouse 22 .
Finally, other minds matter
because mindful agents become moral
agents worthy of care and compassion 7 .
The principle of autonomy captures this
most basic of human rights—that
because all people have the same
minimal capacity to suffer, deliberate,
and choose, no person can compromise
the body, life, or freedom of another
person. Agents with mindful
experience, the capacity to suffer,
deliberate, and choose, become those
that evoke empathy and concern for well
being, whereas agents without mindful
experience can be treated simply as
mindless objects. From debates about
abortion to animal rights to euthanasia,
the mindful experience of the agents in
question is often either the explicit or
implicit focus of debate. Making
invisible minds visible, and hence more
like one’s own, enables people to more
readily follow the most famous of all
ethical dictates—to treat others as you
would have others treat you.
Conclusion
It is impossible for scientists to
examine whether God was looking out
for the passengers of flight 1549 or
punishing the residents of New Orleans
with Hurricane Katrina, but it is very
possible to examine why people might
make such inferences. These
examinations have revealed a
remarkable capacity to look beyond the
visible behavior that the environment
provides to reason about a completely
invisible world of intentions and goals,
of motives and beliefs, of attitudes and
preferences—an invisible world of other
minds. Understanding when people are
likely to recognize other minds (and see
into them) and when they are not is the
Page | 99
key to understanding when people may
be likely to invoke natural versus
supernatural explanations, when gadgets
can seem to have minds of their own,
and when people are likely to treat their
pets as people and their enemies as
animals. A mind like our own, with the
capacity to see into other minds, is
essential for an agent to be, as we are,
fundamentally social.
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Inferring Minds Where None
Can Be Seen
The social brain seeks
connections with others. But what is the
foundation that we use to build such
connections? We experience empathy as
a form of emotional resonance and
understanding of other people. This
connection allows us to comfort and
support and celebrate with others. Being
in tune with emotional states of others
allows us to respond in ways that
strengthen a group. But how do we
understand the thoughts and goals of
others? How do we predict choices and
decisions to facilitate cooperation in
groups? Anthropomorphism is the basis
for predicting behavior and thoughts and
goals. Nick Epley discusses how
anthropomorphism is rooted in an
egocentric view of others. Moreover our
view of others is not confined to the
others that are people. It is perhaps
reflective of the deep and fundamental
nature of anthropomorphism in the
social brain that its anthropomorphic
inferences about agents can be derived
from observed behavior, allowing us to
understand “minds” where none may
exist, as in mechanical toys or alarm
clocks. Of course we tend to understand
those minds by thinking they are just
like us.
Even when there is no agent to
be seen, events in the world may be
understood by attributing them to unseen
agents. During World War II, the
bombing of London was demonstrably
random, but citizens of London could
not help but discern intentional patterns
in the attacks. As Epley points out,
hurricanes and floods are even today
attributed to the hand of God, perhaps an
angry God. Clark Gilpin discusses how
religions may use this aspect of the
social brain to achieve an understanding
of God and what God wants. This kind
of anthropomorphism can be taken to
different metaphoric extremes in
personifying God as father or friend.
But an overly concrete personification
may have costs perhaps diminishing the
universality and pervasiveness of God in
other religions. Thus religions may
differ in theological perspective on the
value of the anthropomorphic impulse
inherent in the social brain.
Page | 102
Chapter 11 11
Anthropomorphism: Human
Connection to a Universal Society
When Jonathan Edwards, an
angular New England minister in his late
11 The lead author, Clark Gilpin, Ph.D., is the
Margaret E. Burton Professor of the History of
Christianity at the University of Chicago
Divinity School. Clark studies the cultural
history of theology in England and America
from the seventeenth century to the present.
From 1990 to 2000, he served as dean of the
Divinity School, and from 2000 to 2004 he
directed the Martin Marty Center, the Divinity
School’s institute for advanced research in all
fields of the academic study of religion. His
current research projects include a book with the
working title Alone with the Alone: Solitude in
American Religious and Literary History, which
explores ways in which the spiritual discipline of
solitary writing—autobiographic narratives,
journals, and letters—shaped the careers of
major New England intellectuals of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Anthropomorphic representations of
God make many modern people very nervous,
including many religious people. Attributing
human-like ideas and emotions to the
comprehending powers of the universe not only
seems out of step with modern science but also a
presumptuous confinement of the world within
merely human needs and capacities. Yet, the
impulse to speak anthropomorphically about our
“ultimate environment” has vigorously persisted
into the modern age. Rather than dismissing
anthropomorphism as an outmoded way of
thinking, this essay adopts a historical approach
to rethink why anthropomorphism exhibits this
perennial capacity to focus the human ethical
imagination on our relations with and obligations
to the universe within which we live.
thirties, mounted the narrow steps into
the pulpit on July 8, 1741, the sermon he
was about to preach would become one
of the most famously electrifying
orations in American history, “Sinners in
the Hands of an Angry God.” Edwards
preached this sermon during the massive
transatlantic religious revival that gave
rise to Methodism in England and came
to be known in the American colonies as
“the Great Awakening.” This was not