People commonly anthropomorphize nonhuman agents, imbuing everything from computers to pets to gods with humanlike capacities and mental experiences. Although widely observed, the determinants of anthropomorphism are poorly understood and rarely investigated. We propose that people anthropomorphize, in part, to satisfy effectance motivation-the basic and chronic motivation to attain mastery of one's environment. Five studies demonstrated that increasing effectance motivation by manipulating the perceived unpredictability of a nonhuman agent or by increasing the incentives for mastery increases anthropomorphism. Neuroimaging data demonstrated that the neural correlates of this process are similar to those engaged when mentalizing other humans. A final study demonstrated that anthropomorphizing a stimulus makes it appear more predictable and understandable, suggesting that anthropomorphism satisfies effectance motivation. Anthropomorphizing nonhuman agents seems to satisfy the basic motivation to make sense of an otherwise uncertain environment.

Prior research has shown that perceived social isolation (loneliness) motivates people to attend to and connect with others but to do so in a self-protective and paradoxically self-defeating fashion. Although recent research has shed light on the neural correlates of social perception, cooperation, empathy, rejection and love, little is known about how individual differences in loneliness relate to neural responses to social and emotional stimuli. Using functional MRI we show that there are at least two neural mechanisms differentiating social perception in lonely and nonlonely young adults. For pleasant depictions, lonely individuals appear to be less rewarded by social stimuli, as evidenced by weaker activation of the ventral striatum to pictures of people than of objects, whereas nonlonely individuals showed stronger activation of the ventral striatum to pictures of people than of objects. For unpleasant depictions, lonely individuals were characterized by greater activation of the visual cortex to pictures of people than of objects, suggesting their attention is drawn more to the distress of others; whereas nonlonely individuals showed greater activation of the right and left temporoparietal junction to pictures of people than of objects, consistent with the notion that they are more likely to reflect spontaneously on the perspective of distressed others.As a social species, humans create emergent organizations beyond the individual-structures that range from dyads, families, and groups to cities, civilizations, and cultures. These emergent structures evolved hand in hand with neural and hormonal mechanisms to support them because the consequent social behaviors helped these organisms survive, reproduce, and care for offspring sufficiently long that they too reproduced (Cacioppo & Patrick, in press;Dunbar & Shultz, 2007). The multimodal neurophysiological processes involved in the execution of an action, for instance, give rise to parallel neurophysiological sensorimotor processes in the observer of these actions (Rizzolatti & Craighero, 2004). This mirror neuron system appears to play a role in a variety of social processes including mimicry, synchrony, contagion, coordination, and co-regulation (e.g., Rizzolatti & Fabbri-Destro, in press; Semin & Cacioppo, in press).Empathy for another person's pain is also associated with many of the same neural mechanisms associated with one's personal experience, including activation of the dorsal anterior cingulate (dACC), thalamus, and anterior insula (Decety & Lamm, in press-a;Jackson, Rainville, & Decety, 2006). In an illustrative study, Jackson, Meltzoff, and Decety (2005) found that the level of activity in the dACC was strongly correlated with ratings of the intensity of pain experienced by the observed person, a result reminiscent of Eisenberger, Lieberman, and Williams ' (2003) exclusion was strongly correlated with activity in the dACC. In the case of empathy and of social pain, evolutionarily older neural mechanisms appear to have been co-opted to ...

Interpersonal synchrony is characterized by a temporary alignment of periodic behaviors with another person. This process requires that at least one of the two individuals monitors and adjusts his/her movements to maintain alignment with the other individual (the referent). Interestingly, recent research on interpersonal synchrony has found that people who are motivated to befriend an unfamiliar social referent tend to automatically synchronize with their social referents, raising the possibility that synchrony may be employed as an affiliation tool. It is unknown, however, whether the opposite is true; that is, whether the person serving as the referent of interpersonal synchrony perceives synchrony with his/her partner or experiences affiliative feelings toward the partner. To address this question, we performed a series of studies on interpersonal synchrony with a total of 100 participants. In all studies, participants served as the referent with no requirement to monitor or align their behavior with their partners. Unbeknown to the participants, the timings of their "partner's" movements were actually determined by a computer program based on the participant's (i.e., referent's) behavior. Overall, our behavioral results showed that the referent of a synchrony task expressed greater perceived synchrony and greater social affiliation toward a synchronous partner (i.e., one displaying low mean asynchrony and/or a narrow asynchrony range) than with an asynchronous partner (i.e., one displaying high mean asynchrony and/or high asynchrony range). Our neuroimaging study extended these results by demonstrating involvement of brain areas implicated in social cognition, embodied cognition, self-other expansion, and action observation as correlates of interpersonal synchrony (vs. asynchrony). These findings have practical implications for social interaction and theoretical implications for understanding interpersonal synchrony and social coordination.

People often reason egocentrically about others' beliefs, using their own beliefs as an inductive guide. Correlational, experimental, and neuroimaging evidence suggests that people may be even more egocentric when reasoning about a religious agent's beliefs (e.g., God). In both nationally representative and more local samples, people's own beliefs on important social and ethical issues were consistently correlated more strongly with estimates of God's beliefs than with estimates of other people's beliefs (Studies 1-4