Studying how we think about people's invisible mental processes
By Maria Karpenko
Monday, July 14, 2011
Can neural activity patterns in the brain predict moral behavior and self-control? How does social isolation affect that neural activity? Adam Waytz, a postdoctoral fellow in Harvard’s Department of Psychology believes that neural activation patterns in certain areas of the brain can predict moral behavior and self-control, and that hypersensitivity to social cues produced by social isolation leads to perceptions of mental states in nonhuman entities.
To test his hypotheses, Waytz, who in 2009 joined Associate Professor Jason Mitchell’s Social Cognitive & Affective Neuroscience Lab, has been examining peoples’ neural activity patterns as they think about their feelings, intentions, and desires, and those of other people.
To study these invisible mental processes, called mentalizing, Waytz has subjects answer questions and perform tasks while the fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) scanner images their brains, mapping metabolic activity in the brain based on blood flow to particular regions. “It’s a very personal thing to be looking at someone’s brain. In a sense, you’re really trying to read their thoughts,” said the 30-year-old postdoc.
In one study, Waytz attempts to determine whether neural activity in the medial prefrontal cortex (MPC) can be used to predict moral behavior. The MPC is one of the brain’s main regions involved in mentalizing and as a result is active when subjects think about their minds and the minds of others. To get subjects to think about their minds and the minds of others and to activate their MPC, he asks them questions while they are inside an fMRI scanner. “How much do you like onions on your pizza?” and “How much would T.J. like to run a 5-km race?” are two examples of the type of questions subjects have to answer.
Subsequently, to determine how activity in the MPC affects generosity, and more broadly moral behavior, he asks the subjects how much money they’re willing to give to others. Although this isn’t a comprehensive or exact measure of moral behavior, it is a canonical measure of generosity in psychology and a good indicator of moral behavior. He also notes that it doesn’t determine whether the subjects are being purely altruistic or not. Waytz found that the extent to which the MPC is active when subjects think about their minds or the minds of others predicted how much money they gave to others, showing that just getting people to think about their mind and the minds of others makes them more generous.
In another study, Waytz tests whether it’s possible to model successful or unsuccessful self-control based on how vividly people mentalize about their future selves. For example, does considering your future self’s desires, such as health and economic stability, correlate with self-control? For this study, he studies groups of people who are believed to mentalize differently—smokers and non-smokers, drinkers and non-drinkers, and adolescents and adults. He uses standardized tests to classify subjects as smokers and drinkers, identifying smokers based on nicotine dependence questionnaires and drinkers based on cutoffs specified by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. It’s know that adolescent brains are structurally and functionally different from adult brains, and for this population category adolescents are aged 15 to 17 and adults are aged 25 to 27.
Waytz poses two questions: are there systematic neural activity pattern differences of smokers and non-smokers, drinkers and non-drinkers, and adolescents and adults as they mentalize about their future self, and can these differences predict self-control? Can conceptualization of self-control explain deficits in self-control beyond typical self-control models in the literature?
For this study, subjects complete a Go/No-Go task that requires them to suppress a dominant response while they’re inside an fMRI scanner. To do the Go/No-Go task, subjects have to press a button when they see a triangle and not to press it when they see a circle. Triangles are presented consecutively to build up the dominant response of pressing the button for each triangle. Occasionally, a circle is presented to measure subjects’ ability to inhibit that dominant response. According to literature, smokers are known to exhibit self-control failure, but Waytz wants to examine their self-control capacity beyond just this level of inhibition. He wants to determine how their capacity to think about their future selves differs from their capacity to think about their present selves.
To do this, he asks subjects questions like how much they’d like to run a race or visit a museum while they’re inside an fMRI scanner and records neural activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPC), a region in the brain known to be involved in metalizing about the present self. Subsequently, he asks subjects the same questions about their desires for their future selves and measures how neural activity in their VMPC differs. He hypothesizes that there will be a greater disconnect of neural activity in the VMPC in smokers considering their present selves compared to their future selves than in non-smokers. Waytz has collected data for smokers and adolescents and will soon begin to collect data for the respective control groups, non-smokers and adults.
In another study, Waytz wants to examine how social isolation, which unlike social exclusion is complete social deprivation, affects subjects’ responses to inanimate stimuli. Extant research suggests that social isolation can produce hypersensitivity to social cues, such as the mental states of others, vocal tones, and emotional expressions. Tasks that involve detecting social cues and “perceiving minds” have consistently implicated a small set of brain regions that include the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex (dMPFC), posterior cingulate (PC) and posterior regions of the superior temporal sulcus at the temporo-parietal junction (TPJ). But does hyperactivity in these regions produced by social isolation diminish the ability to discriminate social from nonsocial stimuli? Waytz hypothesizes that it does.
For this study, Waytz will keep one group of subjects in social isolation for ten hours while allowing another group engage socially via the Internet and perhaps even bring in a friend, for the same duration and in the same room. Echoing the “hunger metaphor,” he expects that just like being without food makes people desire food, being without social interactions should make people extremely sensitive to social cues and opportunities. He will compare the brain activation patterns of socially isolated subjects and non-socially isolated subjects as they respond to tasks that involve social stimuli. For example, the subjects will see shapes that move in an animate fashion versus a mechanical fashion, and pictures of body parts in pain (being stuck by a needle). How will the subjects response to the shapes? Will the pictures induce an empathy response? Waytz will soon take this study to the fMRI scanner to test his hypothesis.
While work in the lab consumes much of Waytz’s life, it hardly consumes it all. Born and raised in Minneapolis, he has been rapping since he was fifteen. Before the Minneapolis rap scene got big, he was the lead rapper in a band with a national following. The freedom to do any style of rap, and its members’ diverse musical interests, inspired his band’s first name, Oddjobs. Oddjobs performed in North America, playing at venues such as the Knitting Factory and the Irving Plaza in New York City, and The Fillmore in San Francisco.
But with time, Oddjobs found its unique identity and a new name: Kill The Vultures. Conceding that the name may seem pretentious, Waytz explained its metaphoric meaning: “You want to preempt the things that eat at you when you’re dead by killing them.” Kill The Vultures’ sound can be described as “noisy violent jazz.”
When Waytz moved to New York City to study psychology at Columbia University, his band mates dropped out of college and also moved to New York City in order to keep the band intact. They devoted their lives to Kill The Vultures and made a living by touring, only occasionally working day jobs. Waytz continued on to the University of Chicago for his master’s and Ph.D. degrees in psychology.
Fifteen years later, split over three States, having toured North America and Europe, Kill The Vultures is still together and recording multiple albums for release later this year. “We’re like brothers. We grew up together, so we have similar sensibilities. Once we’re in a room together, we pick up where we left off,” Waytz said.
While in college, he wrote about music for The Fader, a music, culture and fashion magazine. In 2004, he founded Freedarko, a basketball blog, with a group of friends. They contributed to magazines and Web sites, some sports focused and others more literary like McSweeneys.net. The Freedarko writers had higher aspirations from the early days of the blog, Waytz said, and as the readership mounted, they wrote a book proposal and got a book deal with Bloomsbury, the publisher of the Harry Potter series. “Freedarko Presents… The Macrophenomenal Pro Basketball Almanac: Styles, Stats, and Stars in Today’s Game” was published in 2008 and was recently followed up with another book, “The Undisputed Guide To Pro Basketball History.”
Four writers and an illustrator worked on the first book, collaborating long distance. The second book was a bigger undertaking, employing twelve people—some volunteered their time as research assistants and others interned for college credit. The Freedarko writers had never been in one place until they gathered for one of the writer’s wedding in 2009.
Now, spurred by what he describes as wanting to be an ambassador for modern, data-driven psychology, Waytz writes for Psychology Today and Scientific American.
Though his research is highly specialized, Waytz says he has “always tried to exist in many different worlds.” Despite his demanding schedule, he keeps up this way of life, noting that it’s “a bit exhausting.” In high school, he led a normal social life and, although his parents didn’t push him, scored top grades. “The importance of intrinsic motivation is one of the biggest findings in social psychology. Giving people external rewards and punishments makes them more likely to work only for the reward or the punishment,” he said.
Preventing regrets from ever forming, Waytz is living the metaphor of Kill The Vultures. “It just seems to me that whatever Adam does he does it well and he does it big. Whether it is writing about basketball, rapping, or conducting research, Adam is a pro at it,” said Juan Manuel Contreras, who is a Ph.D. candidate in the same department as Waytz and shares office space with him.
Waytz sees himself co-authoring a book about psychology or writing with his brother, a lawyer, in the future. He fills in every hour with work, yet says that he would be bored if he only thought about research all the time. “When you study psychology it’s hard not to see your research in every aspect of your life because you’re basically studying people. But I need something else to escape from that academic mindset,” he said.
Adam Waytz will continue to work on these three studies throughout this year, but will be joining the faculty of Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management in July 2011.
To study these invisible mental processes, called mentalizing, Waytz has subjects answer questions and perform tasks while the fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) scanner images their brains, mapping metabolic activity in the brain based on blood flow to particular regions. “It’s a very personal thing to be looking at someone’s brain. In a sense, you’re really trying to read their thoughts,” said the 30-year-old postdoc.
In one study, Waytz attempts to determine whether neural activity in the medial prefrontal cortex (MPC) can be used to predict moral behavior. The MPC is one of the brain’s main regions involved in mentalizing and as a result is active when subjects think about their minds and the minds of others. To get subjects to think about their minds and the minds of others and to activate their MPC, he asks them questions while they are inside an fMRI scanner. “How much do you like onions on your pizza?” and “How much would T.J. like to run a 5-km race?” are two examples of the type of questions subjects have to answer.
Subsequently, to determine how activity in the MPC affects generosity, and more broadly moral behavior, he asks the subjects how much money they’re willing to give to others. Although this isn’t a comprehensive or exact measure of moral behavior, it is a canonical measure of generosity in psychology and a good indicator of moral behavior. He also notes that it doesn’t determine whether the subjects are being purely altruistic or not. Waytz found that the extent to which the MPC is active when subjects think about their minds or the minds of others predicted how much money they gave to others, showing that just getting people to think about their mind and the minds of others makes them more generous.
In another study, Waytz tests whether it’s possible to model successful or unsuccessful self-control based on how vividly people mentalize about their future selves. For example, does considering your future self’s desires, such as health and economic stability, correlate with self-control? For this study, he studies groups of people who are believed to mentalize differently—smokers and non-smokers, drinkers and non-drinkers, and adolescents and adults. He uses standardized tests to classify subjects as smokers and drinkers, identifying smokers based on nicotine dependence questionnaires and drinkers based on cutoffs specified by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. It’s know that adolescent brains are structurally and functionally different from adult brains, and for this population category adolescents are aged 15 to 17 and adults are aged 25 to 27.
Waytz poses two questions: are there systematic neural activity pattern differences of smokers and non-smokers, drinkers and non-drinkers, and adolescents and adults as they mentalize about their future self, and can these differences predict self-control? Can conceptualization of self-control explain deficits in self-control beyond typical self-control models in the literature?
For this study, subjects complete a Go/No-Go task that requires them to suppress a dominant response while they’re inside an fMRI scanner. To do the Go/No-Go task, subjects have to press a button when they see a triangle and not to press it when they see a circle. Triangles are presented consecutively to build up the dominant response of pressing the button for each triangle. Occasionally, a circle is presented to measure subjects’ ability to inhibit that dominant response. According to literature, smokers are known to exhibit self-control failure, but Waytz wants to examine their self-control capacity beyond just this level of inhibition. He wants to determine how their capacity to think about their future selves differs from their capacity to think about their present selves.
To do this, he asks subjects questions like how much they’d like to run a race or visit a museum while they’re inside an fMRI scanner and records neural activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPC), a region in the brain known to be involved in metalizing about the present self. Subsequently, he asks subjects the same questions about their desires for their future selves and measures how neural activity in their VMPC differs. He hypothesizes that there will be a greater disconnect of neural activity in the VMPC in smokers considering their present selves compared to their future selves than in non-smokers. Waytz has collected data for smokers and adolescents and will soon begin to collect data for the respective control groups, non-smokers and adults.
In another study, Waytz wants to examine how social isolation, which unlike social exclusion is complete social deprivation, affects subjects’ responses to inanimate stimuli. Extant research suggests that social isolation can produce hypersensitivity to social cues, such as the mental states of others, vocal tones, and emotional expressions. Tasks that involve detecting social cues and “perceiving minds” have consistently implicated a small set of brain regions that include the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex (dMPFC), posterior cingulate (PC) and posterior regions of the superior temporal sulcus at the temporo-parietal junction (TPJ). But does hyperactivity in these regions produced by social isolation diminish the ability to discriminate social from nonsocial stimuli? Waytz hypothesizes that it does.
For this study, Waytz will keep one group of subjects in social isolation for ten hours while allowing another group engage socially via the Internet and perhaps even bring in a friend, for the same duration and in the same room. Echoing the “hunger metaphor,” he expects that just like being without food makes people desire food, being without social interactions should make people extremely sensitive to social cues and opportunities. He will compare the brain activation patterns of socially isolated subjects and non-socially isolated subjects as they respond to tasks that involve social stimuli. For example, the subjects will see shapes that move in an animate fashion versus a mechanical fashion, and pictures of body parts in pain (being stuck by a needle). How will the subjects response to the shapes? Will the pictures induce an empathy response? Waytz will soon take this study to the fMRI scanner to test his hypothesis.
While work in the lab consumes much of Waytz’s life, it hardly consumes it all. Born and raised in Minneapolis, he has been rapping since he was fifteen. Before the Minneapolis rap scene got big, he was the lead rapper in a band with a national following. The freedom to do any style of rap, and its members’ diverse musical interests, inspired his band’s first name, Oddjobs. Oddjobs performed in North America, playing at venues such as the Knitting Factory and the Irving Plaza in New York City, and The Fillmore in San Francisco.
But with time, Oddjobs found its unique identity and a new name: Kill The Vultures. Conceding that the name may seem pretentious, Waytz explained its metaphoric meaning: “You want to preempt the things that eat at you when you’re dead by killing them.” Kill The Vultures’ sound can be described as “noisy violent jazz.”
When Waytz moved to New York City to study psychology at Columbia University, his band mates dropped out of college and also moved to New York City in order to keep the band intact. They devoted their lives to Kill The Vultures and made a living by touring, only occasionally working day jobs. Waytz continued on to the University of Chicago for his master’s and Ph.D. degrees in psychology.
Fifteen years later, split over three States, having toured North America and Europe, Kill The Vultures is still together and recording multiple albums for release later this year. “We’re like brothers. We grew up together, so we have similar sensibilities. Once we’re in a room together, we pick up where we left off,” Waytz said.
While in college, he wrote about music for The Fader, a music, culture and fashion magazine. In 2004, he founded Freedarko, a basketball blog, with a group of friends. They contributed to magazines and Web sites, some sports focused and others more literary like McSweeneys.net. The Freedarko writers had higher aspirations from the early days of the blog, Waytz said, and as the readership mounted, they wrote a book proposal and got a book deal with Bloomsbury, the publisher of the Harry Potter series. “Freedarko Presents… The Macrophenomenal Pro Basketball Almanac: Styles, Stats, and Stars in Today’s Game” was published in 2008 and was recently followed up with another book, “The Undisputed Guide To Pro Basketball History.”
Four writers and an illustrator worked on the first book, collaborating long distance. The second book was a bigger undertaking, employing twelve people—some volunteered their time as research assistants and others interned for college credit. The Freedarko writers had never been in one place until they gathered for one of the writer’s wedding in 2009.
Now, spurred by what he describes as wanting to be an ambassador for modern, data-driven psychology, Waytz writes for Psychology Today and Scientific American.
Though his research is highly specialized, Waytz says he has “always tried to exist in many different worlds.” Despite his demanding schedule, he keeps up this way of life, noting that it’s “a bit exhausting.” In high school, he led a normal social life and, although his parents didn’t push him, scored top grades. “The importance of intrinsic motivation is one of the biggest findings in social psychology. Giving people external rewards and punishments makes them more likely to work only for the reward or the punishment,” he said.
Preventing regrets from ever forming, Waytz is living the metaphor of Kill The Vultures. “It just seems to me that whatever Adam does he does it well and he does it big. Whether it is writing about basketball, rapping, or conducting research, Adam is a pro at it,” said Juan Manuel Contreras, who is a Ph.D. candidate in the same department as Waytz and shares office space with him.
Waytz sees himself co-authoring a book about psychology or writing with his brother, a lawyer, in the future. He fills in every hour with work, yet says that he would be bored if he only thought about research all the time. “When you study psychology it’s hard not to see your research in every aspect of your life because you’re basically studying people. But I need something else to escape from that academic mindset,” he said.
Adam Waytz will continue to work on these three studies throughout this year, but will be joining the faculty of Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management in July 2011.