Minimize to attributions to the group’s members.PLOS A single plosone.
Lower to attributions to the group’s members.PLOS A single plosone.orgTheoryOfMind and Group AgentsFigure . Imply agreement with mental state ascriptions by condition for the MembersOnly and GroupOnly vignettes. Error bars show SE imply. Dotted PubMed ID:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24367588 black line indicates neutral midpoint; points above indicate agreement and points beneath indicate disagreement. doi:0.37journal.pone.00534.gCritically, for the GroupOnly vignettes, a oneway ANOVA once again revealed a substantial effect of query condition on participants’ responses, F(2, four) 9.6, p , .00, g2 .62 (Fig. ), such that participants have been willing to attribute states for the group itself that they did not attribute to any with the members of your group. Tukey’s posthoc tests showed that participants agreed additional with ascriptions in the `group’ query condition than in either the `any member’ query condition, p , .00, or the `each member’ question condition, p , .00. Furthermore, participants’ responses inside the group question condition were considerably above the neutral midpoint with the scale, p , .00, indicating that participants have been genuinely endorsing sentences ascribing mental states to group agents. These outcomes suggest that attributions for the group agent were produced more than and above the attributions produced to individual members. This study explored the connection involving ascribing states to group agents and their members. We observed situations in which participants Linolenic acid methyl ester attributed a state to all the members but didn’t attribute that state for the group itself as well as instances in which participants attributed a state for the group itself but didn’t attribute the state to any of the members. Collectively, these benefits demonstrate that mental state ascriptions to a group agent can diverge from these made for the group’s individual members, suggesting that perceivers can attribute a home of some sort to the group agent itself.Experiment two: Neural processes supporting mental state ascriptions to group agentsExperiment suggests that that when individuals use expressions of the kind `United Food Corp. wants.’, they seem to become ascribing anything for the group itself, instead of towards the members on the group. Nevertheless, a additional question issues the processes supporting these ascriptions. That may be, even though such statements clearly involve the exact same linguistic expressions that individuals use when applying theoryofmind to person human beings, to what extent do they also involve the same cognitive processes To investigate the processes supporting attributions of purported mental states to group agents, we scanned participants employing fMRI as they regarded as the mental states of people andPLOS A single plosone.orggroups. In 1 activity, participants read sentences that referred explicitly to the mental states of groups and people (in addition to matched, nonmental handle sentences). In a second process, participants carried out a procedure that relied on mental state ascription incidentally, with no the use of mental state words: creating predictions about what a person or group would do within a 
range of circumstances. To the extent that perceivers rely on processes associated with understanding people when they have an understanding of and predict the behavior of groups, brain regions associated with theoryofmind must be active both when pondering about individuals and when thinking about group agents, and they ought to be active to a similar degree. However, to the extent that perceivers depend on distinct processes to unde.
