Making predictions in the social world:
The social mind is tailored to the problem of predicting other people. Imagine trying to navigate the social world without understanding that tired people tend to become frustrated, or that mean people tend to lash out. Our social interactions depend on the ability to anticipate others’ actions, and we rely on knowledge about their state (i.e., tired) and traits (i.e., mean) to do so. I will present a multi-layered framework of social cognition that helps to explain how people represent the richness and complexity of others’ minds, and how they use this representation to predict others’ actions. Using both neuroimaging and Markov modeling, I demonstrate how the social mind might leverage both the structure and dynamics of mental state representations to make predictions about the social world.