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Integrations Need Both Breadth and Depth: Commentary on Zaki and Ochsner

July 2011
Psychological Inquiry 22(3):187-192

DOI:10.1080/1047840X.2011.567961

Authors:

Nicholas Epley

University of Chicago

Tal Eyal

Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

Leili and Majnun make joint decisions about where the ball landed. (A) The ball’s trajectory. (B) Leili and Majnun’s individual decisions are based their respective noisy perceptual representation conceptualized here as Gaussian distributions. The figure was inspired by Ernst (2010).

…

. Interactions among Moderators of Accuracy in Personality Judgment. Moderator Judge Trait Target Information

…

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PSYCHOLOGICAL

INQUIRY

An International Journal for the

Advancement of Psychological Theory

Volume 22, Number 3 2011

TARGET ARTICLE

Jamil Zaki

Kevin Ochsner

Reintegrating the Study of Accuracy Into Social Cognition Research 159

COMMENTARIES

Bahador Bahrami

Chris D. Frith

Interacting Minds: A Framework for Combining Process- and

Accuracy-Oriented Social Cognitive Research

183

Nicholas Epley

Tal Ey a l

Integrations Need Both Breadth and Depth: Commentary on Zaki and Ochsner 187

Judith A. Hall

C. Randall Colvin

On Making a Thriving Field Even Better: Acknowledging the Past and

Looking to the Future

193

William Ickes Everyday Mind Reading Is Driven by Motives and Goals 200

David A. Kenny History, Dialectics, and Dynamics 207

Christian Keysers

Lawrie S. McKay

How to Make Social Neuroscience Social 210

Marco Iacoboni Social Cognition, Accuracy, and Physiology 217

Elysia R. Todd

David C. Funder

Organizing Interactions in the Study of Judgmental Accuracy 219

Jamil Zaki

Kerin Ochsner

On the Reintegration of Accuracy in Social Cognition Research: Let Us

Count the Ways

221

Psychological Inquiry, 22: 159–182, 2011

Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

ISSN: 1047-840X print / 1532-7965 online

DOI: 10.1080/1047840X.2011.551743

TARGET ARTICLE

Reintegrating the Study of Accuracy Into Social Cognition Research

Jamil Zaki

Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Kevin Ochsner

Department of Psychology, Columbia University, New York, New York

Understanding the contents of other minds is a vital and ubiquitous task that hu-

mans perform with impressive skill. As such, it is surprising that the majority of

social cognition research—whether behavioral or neuroscientiﬁc—focuses on the

processes people use when attempting to understand each other while ignoring how

well those attempts fare. Here we review historical reasons for the contemporary

dominance of process-oriented research as well as the resurgence in the last decades

of new approaches to studying interpersonal accuracy. Although in principle both

the accuracy-oriented and process-oriented approaches study related aspects of the

same phenomena, in practice they have made strikingly little contact with each other.

We argue that integrating these approaches could expand our understanding of social

cognition, both by suggesting new ways to synthesize extant data and generate novel

predictions and lines of research, and by providing a framework for accomplishing

such an integration. This integration can be especially useful in highlighting the

deeply contextualized nature of the relationships between social cognitive processes,

accuracy, and adaptive social behavior.

Introduction

One of human beings’ most impressive accomplish-

ments is our ability to understand what other peo-

ple are intending, thinking, and feeling. This requires

perceivers (individuals focusing on someone else) to

translate the observable behaviors of social targets (in-

dividuals who are the focus of perceivers’ attention)

into inferences about those targets’ physically invisi-

ble but psychologically real, internal states. Whether

we’re snifﬁng out the intentions of a used car sales-

man or ﬁguring out the right thing to say to an upset

friend, such inferences are critical to acting adaptively

in social situations. Luckily, we are consummate ex-

perts at this task, accurately reading the internal mental

states that guide other’s behavior with an ease and skill

that would be shocking if it wasn’t so universal (Fiske,

1992; Swann, 1984).

For simplicity, we refer to this ability as mind per-

ception, following Epley and Waytz (2009). Unlike

global terms like “social cognition” or “person percep-

tion,” which can refer to the whole host of faculties we

bring to bear in understanding all manner of transient

and enduring characteristics of other people, mind per-

ception zeroes in on the speciﬁc task and accomplish-

ment of understanding others’ internal mental states.

As such, for present purposes, it provides a convenient

shorthand for referring speciﬁcally to this ability.

So how do perceivers draw inferences about tar-

gets’ minds, and why are we so adept at it? Given the

importance of these two questions, it is unsurprising

that they have been a central focus of psychological

research for the greater part of a century, and more

recently have gained a great deal of attention in neu-

roscience. What is surprising, however, is the lopsided

way this attention has been distributed, focusing almost

entirely on answering the ﬁrst—but not the second—

of these questions. The lion’s share of contemporary

research focuses on characterizing the cognitive and

neural processes perceivers engage when encounter-

ing other minds, while typically ignoring whether

the engagement of these processes leads to accurate

159

ZAKI AND OCHSNER

inferences about those minds. In other words, the ma-

jority of relevant research has focused on the question

of how perceivers respond to other minds, but not how

well they understand those minds. Although relatively

neglected, this second question is of clear importance,

as the goal of everyday social cognition is not to sim-

ply draw any type of inference about targets but to use

accurate inferences to guide social behavior.

How did this state of affairs come to pass, what

are its implications for the ﬁeld, and should we do

anything about it? To address these questions, the re-

mainder of this article is divided into four main parts.

In the ﬁrst, we review the central role accuracy once

played in social psychological research and the his-

torical trends responsible for its abandonment in fa-

vor of a near monopoly of process-oriented research.

Here we also brieﬂy review the current understand-

ing of mind perception processes gleaned from behav-

ioral and neuroscientiﬁc research (for more compre-

hensive reviews, see Decety & Jackson, 2004; Fiske

& Taylor, 2007; Gilbert, 1998; Keysers & Gazzola,

2007; Macrae & Bodenhausen, 2000; Mitchell, 2009a;

Saxe, Carey, & Kanwisher, 2004) as well as the com-

paratively smaller number of research programs that

have developed novel approaches to measuring inter-

personal accuracy (again, for more comprehensive re-

views, see Funder, 1995; Ickes, 1997; Jussim, 2005;

Kenny & Albright, 1987; Kruglanski, 1989; Swann,

1984).

The second section builds on this historical foun-

dation by arguing that a critical missing element in

mind perception research is the integration of process-

oriented and accuracy-oriented approaches within

studies and research programs. The essential argument

is that social cognition should reclaim its past tradi-

tion of thinking about accuracy and combine it with

the current focus on processes. Here we motivate and

describe a framework for integrating these usually in-

dependent approaches. This framework draws equally

from neuroscientiﬁc and behavioral research to explain

social cognitive phenomena at multiple levels of analy-

sis, including neural systems, psychological processes,

behavioral accuracy, and other outcomes such as so-

cial well-being and the social deﬁcits that characterize

many psychiatric disorders.

The third section highlights ﬁve kinds of novel

insights and predictions that can emerge from focusing

on the relationships between mind perception pro-

cesses and accuracy—as opposed to either in isolation.

First, an integrated view can help to dispel some

incorrect, but pervasive, assumptions about mind per-

ceivers’ abilities to be accurate, or the sources thereof.

Second, integrating processes and outcomes allows

for an interactionist approach to understanding when a

given social cognitive process contributes to accuracy

about others. Third, an integrated approach enables

researchers to connect social cognitive processes with

their ostensive goals: Skillfully navigating the social

world and maintaining positive interpersonal rela-

tionships. Fourth, this multilevel approach can offer

new insights about parallels between the mechanisms

underlying mind perception and other, seemingly

disparate cognitive domains. Fifth, this approach

offers novel ways to study the social cognitive deﬁcits

that characterize many psychiatric illnesses.

In the fourth and last section, we conclude by

summarizing the central arguments of the article and

touching on the ways an integrative approach can

move beyond the speciﬁc examples of mind perception

considered here and be applied to the study of other

domains of social cognition and person perception,

including prospection and dispositional inference.

Where Are We and How Did We Get Here?

The Rise and Fall of Accuracy Research

In important ways, the dominance of process-

oriented approaches to mind perception research stems

from a revolution older (and slightly less hostile) than

Cuba’s. In the ﬁrst half of the 20th century, a cen-

tral project of social psychology was determining the

sources of accurate interpersonal inferences. Scores

of studies were run with the goal of characterizing so-

called good judges—that is, individuals naturally adept

at understanding other minds—who could be tapped

for jobs requiring interpersonal understanding, such as

being judges or therapists. This work drew on a large,

sometimes poorly organized, slew of criteria, both for

deﬁning and predicting accuracy. Depending on the

study, accuracy was deﬁned as a perceiver’s ability to

recognize emotional facial expressions in photographs,

provide personality ratings of targets that agreed with

expert opinions, group consensus, or targets’ self rat-

ings, or to predict the behavior of target individuals or

groups. Predictors of accuracy varied just as broadly

and included gender, socioeconomic status, training in

psychology, number of siblings, general intelligence,

and aesthetic sensibility. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this

proliferation of independent and dependent variables

led to an explosion of relationships being tested, and

“good judges” often eluded capture behind a tangle

of correlations and effect sizes. Nevertheless, accu-

racy continued to enjoy a privileged status among

research topics; in summarizing more than 50 stud-

ies of “good judges” conducted by the mid-20th cen-

tury, Taft (1955) remained conﬁdent that “the practical

importance of [accuracy research] in psychology is

obvious.”

Writing a quarter century later, Schneider, Hastorf,

and Ellsworth (1979) likely would have surprised Taft

with their conclusion that, amidst the zeitgeist of so-

cial cognition research, “the accuracy issue [had] all but

160

THE REINTEGRATION OF ACCURACY

faded from view” (p. 222). What happened in the inter-

vening years? Although there are many explanations,

among the most salient are the arguments presented

by Lee Cronbach and his colleagues (Cronbach, 1955;

Gage & Cronbach, 1955) that were published only a

few months after Taft’s review. Cronbach presented a

simple methodological criticism of the search for good

judges: Quantifying accuracy as a subtraction between

a perceiver’s judgment and those of a target or group

ignored a host of factors that could affect perceivers’

apparent accuracy. For example, a perceiver with an

accurate base rate for extraversion in the population

could blindly apply that base rate to judge individuals

she had never met and still appear to be a relatively

“good judge.” In other words, Cronbach asserted that

accuracy researchers were not measuring what they

thought they were measuring—accuracy—but instead

were measuring the inﬂuence of other, potentially less

interesting phenomena.

A close read of the publications by Cronbach,

Nathaniel Gage, and others suggests that they did not

intend for their criticism to upend accuracy research

altogether. Instead, they hoped that more sophisticated

methods could help clarify the sources of accuracy by

decomposing them into a number of constituent parts.

In fact, many of the factors they described as relevant to

accuracy (e.g., the use of stereotypes, assumed similar-

ity between perceivers and targets) are quite similar to

mind perception processes studied now (see the Expe-

rience Sharing and Mental State Attribution sections).

Gage and Cronbach presciently suggested that person

perception research would be served best by model-

ing the relationship between these processes (which

they referred to as “intermediary keys”) and the ac-

curacy or inaccuracy of resulting perceptions (Gage,

Leavitt, & Cronbach, 1956). However, in lieu of tak-

ing up this challenge, accuracy researchers reacted by

“crowding the exits” (Gilbert, 1998, p. 91), abandon-

ing their endeavors almost completely for more than 25

years (Funder, 1987, 1995; Gilbert, 1998; Ickes, 1997;

Ickes et al., 2000; Kenny & Albright, 1987).

Why did accuracy researchers so eagerly jump ship?

Retellings of this historical trend converge on two

points. First, the search for good judges suffered from

a dearth of organizing principles and, as such, pro-

duced a jumble of loosely related ﬁndings, in which

some factors predicted some types of accuracy some

of the time (Dymond, 1949; Taft, 1955). Findings of

any one study in this ﬁeld were often idiosyncratic and

irreproducible, and did not sum into programmatic,

generative theoretical models. Second, no matter how

organized accuracy researchers might have made their

search for good judges, those judges—at least in the

way researchers conceived of them—may have been

more myth than reality. Early accuracy research staked

much of its identity on isolating personality traits that

would predict a perceiver’s accurate inferences about

targets’ personality traits. In both cases, traits were

deﬁned as monolithic, stable qualities that should pre-

dict behavior across contexts. A good judge was con-

sidered to be someone who would accurately assess

all social targets in all situations, and targets’ self-

reported personality traits were considered to be sim-

ilarly constant. In the last 40 years, however, the idea

of traits as invariant predictors of behavior has given

way to an interactionist perspective, which describes

behavior as fundamentally dependent on both individ-

uals and the situations they encounter (Bandura, 1978;

Mischel, 1968, 1973; Mischel & Shoda, 1995). This

reconceptualization—and the fact that the majority of

accuracy research preceded it—makes it unsurprising

that the search for good judges was plagued by the

low correlations and inconsistent relationships that also

characterized many trait-based predictions of behavior.

The general challenge to personality research issued

by Mischel and others (Mischel, 1968, 1973; Mischel

& Shoda, 1995) signaled a growing shift in attention to-

ward the processes (or cognitive and affective “units”)

mediating the relationships between individuals and

situations as input and behavior as output. A similar

shift took place in psychology more broadly (Neisser,

1967) and in due time took over the troubled ﬁeld of

interpersonal perception research.

The Reign of Process

Focusing on social cognitive processes, as opposed

to accuracy, has proven extremely generative, as it al-

lowed researchers to “zoom in” on more tractable ele-

ments of mind perception, produced replicable ﬁndings

and generated relatively simple and falsiﬁable theoret-

ical claims (for fantastic reviews of the process ap-

proach and its major ﬁndings, see Chaiken & Trope,

1999; Gilbert, 1998). At its root, process research was

strongly inﬂuenced by Heider (1958), who suggested

parallels between mind perception and object percep-

tion. Gage and Cronbach alluded to these parallels as

well, arguing that mind perception and visual percep-

tion both are “dominated far more by what the Judge

brings to it than what he takes in during it” (Gage &

Cronbach, 1955, p. 420).

Following the leads of Heider, Gage, and Cronbach,

process-oriented researchers set their sights inside per-

ceivers’ heads. Instead of concerning themselves with

the accuracy of perceivers’ inferences about targets’

reported states or observable behaviors—or even with

actual social targets in any way—process models fo-

cused on a set of cognitive “tools” perceivers bring

to bear when drawing inferences about targets in gen-

eral. Although many such tools have been described

(Ames, 2004; Chaiken & Trope, 1999; E. Smith & De-

Coster, 2000), here we focus on two that have gained

a great deal of attention in both psychological and

161

ZAKI AND OCHSNER

neuroscience research: experience sharing and mental

state attribution.

Experience Sharing

President Bill Clinton famously claimed to “feel the

pain” of Americans suffering during tough economic

times. Perceivers of all stripes share the intuition that

they vicariously experience the internal states of oth-

ers. This idea also is found in 18th-century moral phi-

losophy (Smith, 1790/2002), aesthetic theory (Lipps,

1903), and contemporary models of motor cognition

(Dijksterhuis & Bargh, 2001; Prinz, 1997). The com-

mon thread uniting these theories is that when observ-

ing targets experiencing an internal state, perceivers en-

gage many of the cognitive and somatic processes they

would engage while experiencing those states them-

selves (Preston & de Waal, 2002).1A link between the

perception of others’ states and the evocation of simi-

lar states in one’s self is supported by various data, in-

cluding demonstrations that perceivers often adopt the

bodily postures (Chartrand & Bargh, 1999), facial ex-

pressions (Dimberg, Thunberg, & Elmehed, 2000), au-

tonomic arousal (Vaughan & Lanzetta, 1980), and self-

reported emotional states (Neumann & Strack, 2000)

of targets.

In the last 15 years, neuroscience research has

famously supported the idea of perception-action

matching by identifying brain regions that demon-

strate properties consistent with experience sharing.

The common feature of these regions is that they

become engaged both when perceivers experience

an internal state themselves and when they observe

targets experiencing those states. The speciﬁc regions

demonstrating such shared activity for both self and

other experiences depend on the type of internal

state being shared (Decety & Jackson, 2004; Zaki &

Ochsner, 2011b). For example, when both executing

and observing motor acts, perceivers engage the so-

called mirror neuron system, encompassing premotor,

inferior frontal, and inferior parietal cortex (Iacoboni,

2009; Rizzolatti & Craighero, 2004; Rizzolatti &

Sinigaglia, 2010). When experiencing and observing

nonpainful touch, perceivers engage somatosensory

cortex (Keysers, Kaas, & Gazzola, 2010; Keysers

et al., 2004). When experiencing pain and observing

(or knowing that) targets (are) in pain, perceivers also

engage somatosensory cortex (Avenanti, Bueti, Galati,

& Aglioti, 2005) and additionally recruit activity in

regions related to the interoceptive and affective com-

ponents of pain, including anterior insula and anterior

1In many ways, models of perception-action matching borrow

from the more general idea of “embodied cognition,” which posits

that concepts related to physical states (including, presumably, those

of other people) are processed through sensory and motor repre-

sentations (Barsalou, 2008; Decety, 1996; Kosslyn, Thompson, &

Alpert, 1997; Niedenthal, Barsalou, Ric, & Krauth-Gruber, 2005; E.

R. Smith & Collins, 2009).

cingulate cortex (Jackson, Meltzoff, & Decety, 2005;

Morrison, Lloyd, di Pellegrino, & Roberts, 2004;

Ochsner et al., 2008; Singer et al., 2004). The insula

also is engaged both when perceivers feel disgust and

observe it in others (Jabbi, Swart, & Keysers, 2007;

Wicker et al., 2003), consistent with this region’s role

in processing information from the viscera (Craig,

2009; Lamm & Singer, 2010). Recent data suggest

that even the hippocampus and posterior medial

frontal cortex exhibit overlapping engagement during

action observation and imitation (Mukamel, Ekstrom,

Kaplan, Iacoboni, & Fried, 2010). For simplicity,

hereafter we refer to all brain regions demonstrating

this property as experience sharing systems (ESS),

with the understanding that this is a functional deﬁ-

nition and not one based on speciﬁc cytoarchitectonic

properties or patterns of anatomical connectivity.

The general overlap between self and other expe-

rience instantiated in the ESS has generated a great

deal of excitement, for at least two reasons. First, as

noted earlier, the ESS has been put forward as the

likely neural basis of perception-action matching. This

claim is plausible and well supported, especially given

demonstrations that overlapping neural activity in the

ESS often correlates with self-report and online mea-

sures of experience sharing (Pfeifer, Iacoboni, Mazz-

iotta, & Dapretto, 2008; Singer et al., 2004). Second,

evidence about the neural bases of experience shar-

ing has led to several claims that such sharing is the

primary mechanism underlying interpersonal under-

standing (Gallese & Goldman, 1998; Gallese, Keysers,

& Rizzolatti, 2004). This argument aligns much less

well with existing data than the ﬁrst. On one hand,

it is true that shared experience provides a parsimo-

nious, efﬁcient way for perceivers to learn from and

learn about others’ motor intentions, affective states,

and attitudes (Dijksterhuis & Bargh, 2001; Niedenthal,

Barsalou, Winkielman, Krauth-Gruber, & Ric, 2005;

Prinz, 1997; Schippers, Gazzola, Goebel, & Keysers,

2009; Schippers, Roebroeck, Renken, Nanetti, & Key-

sers, 2010). On the other hand, such sharing is a much

less likely mediator of interpersonal understanding in

other situations. This is because targets’ “higher level”

intentions and beliefs often are translated only am-

biguously into motor or somatic states. For example,

the identical motor program of pushing someone could

signify the very different intentions of starting a ﬁght

or saving an inattentive commuter from an oncoming

bus (Jacob & Jeannerod, 2005).

The utility of experience sharing becomes even blur-

rier when one considers that nonverbal expressions of

intentions, beliefs, and emotions often fail to match

the states targets are actually experiencing. In many

cases, targets with no interest in being understood—

because they are lying to, competing with, or at-

tempting to produce a speciﬁc impression in targets—

intentionally dissociate their nonverbal expressions

162

THE REINTEGRATION OF ACCURACY

from their internal states (Ansﬁeld, 2007; Ekman,

Friesen, & O’Sullivan, 1988; Ybarra et al., 2010). The

situation improves only slightly for more forthcoming

targets: Even when earnestly expressing themselves,

these targets often produce ambiguous nonverbal cues.

This is especially prevalent in the domain of emotional

expression. Although Ekman and colleagues famously

demonstrated the ease with which posed facial expres-

sions of canonical emotions are recognized (Ekman,

Sorenson, & Friesen, 1969), such expressions rarely

occur outside artiﬁcial contexts such as emotion studies

and tourist photos: Even while experiencing powerful

emotions, targets in naturalistic settings often produce

subtle cues that leave perceivers puzzling over what

those targets are feeling (Fernandez-Dols, Carrera, &

Russell, 2002; Russell, Bachorowski, & Fernandez-

Dols, 2003; Zaki, Bolger, & Ochsner, 2009). In such

situations (and they are common), it is unclear how per-

ceivers’ use of experience sharing—by itself—could

guide insightful inferences about target states.

Mental State Attribution

What is a perceiver to do, given the limitations of

experience sharing? One alternative is to rely on con-

textually deﬁned semantic information about targets’

likely states, which is based on what perceivers know

of the target and situation they are observing. By way of

illustration, consider encountering a friend you know,

who is grieving the recent death of a family member.

This friend displays a neutral facial expression and oc-

casionally even smiles at you while talking about the

funeral and events since. If you were to make a judg-

ment about his or her feelings based solely on sharing

the internal states implied by these expressions, you

may decide that your friend actually feels ﬁne. How-

ever, it is more likely that your knowledge about your

friend’s situation will inﬂuence your judgments and

lead you to the (probably correct) hypothesis that your

friend’s outward appearance belies a more negative in-

ternal experience.

Perceivers commonly create and test such hypothe-

ses about targets’ internal states. Although these hy-

potheses may be generated quickly and easily, they can

typically be represented explicitly and propositionally

within awareness as a perceiver effortfully deliberates

about a target. We refer to this form of mind perception

as mental state attribution2to describe the process by

which perceivers tie together multiple strands of infor-

mation in the service of nuanced, ﬂexible inferences

2This type of inference has also been described in developmental

and clinical research as, “theory of mind” or “mentalizing” (Baron-

Cohen, Leslie, & Frith, 1985; Flavell, 1999; Leslie, Friedman, &

German, 2004; Saxe et al., 2004), whereas inferences about more

stable traits—as opposed to phasic internal states—are often grouped

under the heading “person perception.” We believe these terms re-

fer to a highly overlapping set of computations and hence use one

unifying term to refer to all of them.

about targets’ states and dispositions (Castelli, Happe,

Frith, & Frith, 2000; Kelley, 1973; Saxe et al., 2004).

Like experience sharing, mental state attribution

also has a relatively stable neural signature, involving

multiple brain regions that support inferences about in-

tentional states. Cognitive neuroscience research over

the last 15 years has borrowed a number of paradigms

from developmental and clinical traditions to study

mental state attribution, usually by asking perceivers

to draw inferences about the beliefs, knowledge, in-

tentions, and emotions of others based on written vi-

gnettes, pictures, or cartoons. In a typical study, brain

activity is compared between two conditions in which

perceivers make judgments that differ only in their so-

cial or mental state content: For example, drawing in-

ferences about the traits and states of intentional agents

(e.g., “How dependable is Tracy?” “Is Kenneth’s be-

lief up to date?”), as opposed to inanimate objects

that nonetheless have similar characteristics (“How de-

pendable is Tracy’s computer?” “Is Kenneth’s photo-

graph up to date?”).

Regardless of the type of judgment being made

about others or the medium in which target cues

are presented, such comparisons produce a strikingly

consistent pattern of activation in a network that in-

cludes: Medial prefrontal cortex, temporoparietal junc-

tion, posterior cingulate cortex, and temporal poles. We

refer to this set of regions as the mental state attribu-

tion system (MSAS), again with the understanding that

this categorization is somewhat loose and functional

(for more descriptions of the MSAS and its functions,

see Baron-Cohen et al., 1999; Castelli, Frith, Happe,

& Frith, 2002; Fletcher et al., 1995; Goel, Grafman,

Sadato, & Hallett, 1995; J. P. Mitchell, Heatherton, &

Macrae, 2002; Ochsner et al., 2004; Olsson & Ochsner,

2008; Peelen, Atkinson, & Vuilleumier, 2010; Saxe &

Kanwisher, 2003). Notably, many regions within the

MSAS have been tied to humans’ more general ability

to “project” themselves into distal scenarios or points

of view (including the past, future, and uncertain or

counterfactual concepts, as well as targets’ nonobserv-

able mental states; see Buckner, Andrews-Hanna, &

Schacter, 2008; J. P. Mitchell, 2009b; Schacter, Addis,

& Buckner, 2007; Spreng, Mar, & Kim, 2009). This

putative role for the MSAS—in lifting oneself out of

the cognitive “here and now” and simulating past and

future perspectives and states—is intriguing because it

is complementary to the assumed functional role of the

ESS in providing a basis for vicariously experiencing

the motor, sensory, and visceral states of targets. All

this being said, it is important to note that the speciﬁc

computations carried out by MSAS regions remain to

be precisely speciﬁed, and whatever they turn out to

be, they also play functional roles in behaviors not ob-

viously related to mind perception (Corbetta, Patel, &

Shulman, 2008; Daw, Niv, & Dayan, 2005; for more on

this, see Amodio & Frith, 2006; Cavanna & Trimble,

163

ZAKI AND OCHSNER

2006; J. P. Mitchell, 2008a, 2009a; Olsson & Ochsner,

2008; Saxe, 2006; Saxe et al., 2004; Zaki & Ochsner,

2011b).

A Tale of Two Systems

Experience sharing and mental state attribution are

functional cousins, serving the intimately related goals

of sharing and appraising targets’ internal states. As

such, one might expect them to work together often in

guiding mind perception. This makes the lack of family

resemblance in these processes—between either their

behavioral and neural correlates or the research pro-

grams that have explored them—all the more striking.

Extant data have supported a picture of these mind

perception processes as surprisingly dissociable, in at

least two ways.

First, experience sharing and mental state attribu-

tion differ in the level of effort they seem to require, as

reﬂected both in these processes’ developmental tra-

jectory and in the circumstances during which they

are engaged. Developmentally, mental state attribu-

tion comes online concurrently with executive func-

tions such as response inhibition (Carlson & Moses,

2001), and much later than behavioral signs of experi-

ence sharing (Flavell, 1999; Meltzoff & Decety, 2003;

Meltzoff & Moore, 1977; Wellman, Cross, & Wat-

son, 2001). Mental state attribution is most common

when perceivers are given an incentive to make accu-

rate or defensible judgments (Devine, Plant, Amodio,

Harmon-Jones, & Vance, 2002; Kunda, 1990; Tetlock

& Kim, 1987) and when they have the time and at-

tentional ﬁrepower necessary to perform the necessary

mental state calculus (Gilbert, Pelham, & Krull, 1989;

Kruglanski & Freund, 1983). By contrast, sharing of

targets’ motor and emotional states often occurs out-

side of awareness (Dijksterhuis & Bargh, 2001; Neu-

mann & Strack, 2000), and regions within the ESS—

but not the MSAS—are engaged even when perceivers’

attention to social targets is limited (Chong, Williams,

Cunnington, & Mattingley, 2008; Spunt & Lieberman,

2011).

Second, as readers may have noticed, the brain re-

gions making up the ESS and the MSAS are almost

completely nonoverlapping. This dissociation holds up

under meta-analytic scrutiny: Studies engaging one

system rarely engage the other concurrently (Gob-

bini, Koralek, Bryan, Montgomery, & Haxby, 2007;

van Overwalle & Baetens, 2009). Even more strik-

ingly, the situations and task parameters that engage

the MSAS often dampen activity in the ESS, and vice

versa, leading to suggestions that these neural systems

sometimes “compete” with each other for the guid-

ance of behavior. For example, Brass, Ruby, and Spen-

gler (2009) demonstrated that when participants were

asked to refrain from imitating targets’ movements,

they demonstrated reduced engagement in the ESS and

concurrently engaged areas within the MSAS. In an-

other study, we (Zaki, Hennigan, Weber, & Ochsner,

2010) presented participants with nonverbal emotional

expressions of targets combined with sentences de-

scribing the situational contexts to which targets were

putatively reacting. In some cases, these two types

of information suggested incongruent affective states

(e.g., a happy-looking target paired with a contextual

sentence stating that the target’s dog just died). Per-

ceivers then were asked to judge how they believed

targets felt. As perceivers relied more on target nonver-

bal behavior when making judgments, they increased

engagement of their ESS and dampened engagement of

the MSAS; the opposite pattern emerged as perceivers

relied more on contextual cues.

The impressive dissociations between the cogni-

tive and neural signatures of experience sharing and

mental state attribution have sometimes motivated an

“either/or” approach to mind perception, in which re-

searchers focus on one process while ignoring—or dis-

missing the importance of—the other. As we see next,

this view proves an ill ﬁt for existing and emerging data

(Apperly, 2008; J. P. Mitchell, 2005), and reintegrating

accuracy into the study of mind perception provides

a way to move past such assumptions in favor of po-

tentially richer questions about how mind perception

operates.

Accuracy Returns

As just described, a process-oriented approach to

mind perception has been both generative—in its abil-

ity to produce robust, replicable ﬁndings and relatively

lean theoretical accounts of processes—and potentially

limiting—in its tendency to isolate the study of sin-

gle processes and ignore (or remain agnostic about)

their relationship to behavioral outcomes such as ac-

curacy. If process- and accuracy-related research pro-

grams are to make mutually beneﬁcial contact, how-

ever, the question naturally arises as to what has

become of accuracy research while the process-

oriented approach has dominated research on mind per-

ception, and on social cognition more broadly. After

suffering a 25-year dry spell following the critiques

of Cronbach and others, interpersonal accuracy re-

search has regrouped and grown steadily over recent

decades. Existing reviews provide excellent and de-

tailed descriptions of current approaches to accuracy

research (Funder, 1995; Ickes, 1997; Jussim, 2005;

Kenny & Albright, 1987; Swann, 1984). As such,

we describe only four of these very brieﬂy, with the

goal of laying out the basics of the most common

approaches so that in later sections we can explore

their integration with process-oriented work. The ﬁrst

three of these accuracy types (pragmatic, realistic, and

164

THE REINTEGRATION OF ACCURACY

componential) focus inferences about dispositions,

whereas the fourth (empathic) directly addresses mind

perception.

Pragmatic Accuracy

One approach to accuracy has overcome problems

in measurement and validity by circumventing them

entirely. Instead of attempting to establish a crite-

rion representing the “true” state or trait of targets

and measuring interpersonal accuracy as the ability

of perceivers’ inferences to approach that truth, the

pragmatic approach focuses on the utility of social

inferences for negotiating social relationships (Fiske,

1992, 1993; Jussim, 1991; E. R. Smith & Collins, 2009;

Swann, 1984). Following Mischel’s interactionist ap-

proach to personality, if targets’ behavior varies stably

across situations, then a perceiver’s accuracy for a tar-

get need not (and potentially cannot) encompass all

of that target’s behavior. Rather, perceivers need only

predict behavior relevant to domains in which they in-

teract with a target (e.g., to successfully interact with

John, his students need to accurately assess how hard

a grader he is but not how much he loves banjo mu-

sic). There is evidence that perceivers do achieve such

“circumscribed accuracy” (Swann, 1984) and that they

constrain their predictions about targets to situations

relevant to their basis for judgment (Idson & Mischel,

2001; Noordewier & Stapel, 2009).

Realistic Accuracy

In contrast to pragmatic accuracy, the realistic ac-

curacy approach takes as a starting point the idea that

targets’ dispositions (e.g., a target’s level of extraver-

sion) are real: that is, they exist independently of target

and perceiver opinions. Thus, accuracy can be studied

using methods used for construct validation by ﬁrst

identifying traits that are consensually perceived by

others, predictive of behavior, and stable across time,

and then examining how accurate perceivers are in per-

ceiving such traits (Funder, 1995).

Componential Accuracy

Componential accuracy is embodied by Kenny and

colleagues’ work (Kenny & Albright, 1987; Malloy &

Kenny, 2006), which statistically disentangles multiple

potential sources of interpersonal consensus in a man-

ner similar to that suggested by Cronbach’s original

critiques. Especially interesting for current purposes,

component models provide behavioral cues about the

processes that perceivers employ in drawing inferences

about targets (e.g., projection or stereotyping). Unlike

the realistic approach, however, component models re-

main agnostic about targets’ “real” traits and instead

focus on the mix of sources that inﬂuence interpersonal

judgments.

Empathic Accuracy

Pragmatic, realistic, and componential approaches

to accuracy all share a focus on perceivers’ ability

to gauge targets’ stable dispositions, but often, per-

ceivers are more concerned with a target’s transient

states (How does Frank feel right now? Is Jenna

ﬂirting with me?). Work on empathic accuracy ex-

amines interpersonal consensus about such states us-

ing paradigms in which perceivers’ rating of targets’

thoughts and feelings are compared with targets’ re-

ports on their own states (Ickes, 1997; Ickes, Stin-

son, Bissonnette, & Garcia, 1990; Levenson & Ruef,

1992). Such paradigms have been used to examine the

situational and individual-difference predictors of ac-

curacy for emotions (Klein & Hodges, 2001; Pickett,

Gardner, & Knowles, 2004; Simpson, Ickes, & Black-

stone, 1995; Simpson, Orina, & Ickes, 2003; Stinson &

Ickes, 1992). Similar approaches in nonverbal behavior

also have examined the types of emotional cues (e.g.,

visual, prosodic) that predict accuracy, and in which

circumstances they do so (Costanzo & Archer, 1989;

Hall & Schmid Mast, 2007; Nowicki & Duke, 1994;

Rosenthal, Hall, DiMatteo, Rogers, & Archer, 1979;

Russell et al., 2003).

Where Do We Go From Here? Integrating

Process and Accuracy

The process- and accuracy-oriented approaches de-

scribed here ostensibly study two sides of the same

social cognitive coin: How people go about attempting

to understand each other and how well their attempts

fare. As such, the relative lack of crosstalk between

these approaches is at least somewhat surprising. In

some cases, this disconnect may stem from percep-

tions that processes and accuracy are orthogonal and

do not impact each other in lawful ways. If this were

true, it would be unclear how single studies or research

programs could meaningfully tie these phenomena to-

gether. In other cases, researchers may believe that

processes and accuracy are related but that the struc-

ture of these relationships is obvious (e.g., the more

a perceiver applies a given process, the more accu-

rate their inferences will be), and therefore the explicit

study of their connection offers little new insight about

mind perception. If this were true, it would be un-

clear why examining process–accuracy relationships is

a meaningful endeavor. In this section we address the

ﬁrst of these issues (how processes and outcomes can

be brought together). In the third section we address

the second (why bringing these phenomena together is

important to the future of mind perception research).

165

ZAKI AND OCHSNER

A Framework for Integration

A Social Cognitive Neuroscience Approach

In building a framework for integrating research on

process and accuracy, it should be highlighted that we

adopt a social cognitive neuroscience (SCN) approach

(Lieberman, 2007; J. P. Mitchell, 2006; Ochsner, 2007;

Ochsner & Lieberman, 2001) that combines the theory

and methods of cognitive neuroscience and social psy-

chology. Two key ideas are embodied by this approach.

The ﬁrst idea is that behavior can be explained usefully

at multiple levels of analysis, including (a) the social

level describing behaviors and experience in their in-

terpersonal context, (b) the cognitive level specifying

underlying information processing mechanisms, and

implement these processes. Whereas social psychol-

ogy traditionally has been concerned primarily with

the ﬁrst two of these levels, and cognitive neuroscience

primarily concerned with the latter two, SCN (or social

neuroscience more broadly; see Cacioppo & Bernston,

1992) seeks to connect all three.

The second idea concerns the way in which we draw

inferences about the relationships between these lev-

els. In any given experiment we can manipulate and/or

measure variables at the social (e.g., accurate vs. inac-

curate inference) and neural (e.g., activity in speciﬁc

brain systems) levels. By contrast, cognitive processes

such as experience sharing and mental state attribution

cannot be directly measured; their operation must be

inferred from patterns we observe in social- and neural-

level variables. For this reason, the SCN approach em-

phasizes the use of converging evidence from the so-

cial and neural levels to triangulate on psychological

processes. This can provide greater leverage for testing

psychological theories than approaches that emphasize

only the social and cognitive, or cognitive and neural

levels, respectively.

Applying SCN to Process-Accuracy Relationships

The SCN approach can be used to build a frame-

work that uses behavioral (including self-report) and

neuroscientiﬁc measures to draw inferences about how

interpersonal accuracy is related to the underlying pro-

cesses of experience sharing and mental state attribu-

tion. Although no one technique taken alone is sufﬁ-

cient to document the presence of a given cognitive

process—or its effect on accuracy—the hope is that

combining data from varying levels of analysis will

afford us more traction in examining mind perception

in a way that speaks to multiple domains of research.

Figure 1 illustrates this framework, using experi-

ence sharing as an example process. Cognitive/process-

level phenomena—for example, a perceiver’s de-

ployment of experience sharing—are impossible to

observe directly. Even deﬁning them requires wading

into murky phenomenological terrain (e.g., “How can

we really know what emotion a target is experienc-

ing?”). However, each of these phenomena involves

multiple measurable variables at the social/behavioral

and neural levels. By way of comparison, consider that

the study of affective experience (the leftmost phe-

nomenon in Figure 1) has been well served by seek-

ing out converging evidence from self-report, neural

activity, and other domains (Barrett, 2009; Barrett,

Mesquita, Ochsner, & Gross, 2007; Kober et al., 2008;

Lindquist & Barrett, 2008). Similarly, we believe that

the operation of mind perception processes and their

effect on accuracy can be inferred best from the many

measurable signs that these cognitive-level phenomena

leave in their wake. These include activity in relevant

neural systems, convergence between targets’ and per-

ceivers’ reports of their own affect (a social/behavioral

level sign of experience sharing), convergence between

targets’ and perceivers’ reports on targets’ affect (a so-

cial/behavioral level sign of interpersonal accuracy),

and correlations between target and perceiver neural or

physiological activity over time (Marci & Orr, 2006;

Schippers et al., 2009; Stephens, Silbert, & Hasson,

2010; Vaughan & Lanzetta, 1980). It is important to

note that connections between phenomena can also be

effectively interrogated by sampling evidence at multi-

ple levels of observation. For example, a strong case for

Figure 1. A framework for combining neural and behavioral observations to gain traction on how and when mind

perception processes produce accurate inferences. Note. ESS =experience sharing systems.

166

THE REINTEGRATION OF ACCURACY

the idea that experience sharing contributes to interper-

sonal accuracy can be made by marshalling evidence

that these phenomena are related at behavioral, experi-

ential, and neural levels (Cacioppo & Bernston, 1992;

Ochsner & Lieberman, 2001).

Modeling Context Dependency

As Lieberman (2005) pointed out, if a social psy-

chologist was stranded on a desert island and given the

choice of one idea to bring with her, a likely candi-

date would be “the power of the situation.” The SCN

approach expands this “situationalist” focus to neuro-

science research as well. Does Jack’s high score on a

conscientiousness scale mean he won’t be found play-

ing air guitar while standing precariously on a barstool

this weekend? Will viewing a surprised face engage

participants’ amygdala or not? The likely answer to

these (and myriad other questions) is, It depends on

the contexts in which behaviors and brain activity are

embedded. Our own work and our examination of oth-

ers’ work suggest that process-outcome relationships

in mind perception are no exception to this trend. That

is, asking whether experience sharing or mental state

attribution (or any other mind perception process) pro-

duces accuracy is a conceptual nonstarter. Instead, re-

searchers should focus on when these processes pro-

duce accuracy. This requires “zooming out” from a

focus on processes or accuracy in isolation, to achieve

a broader focus on contextual factors that determine

their connection to each other.

Figure 2 displays such a broad view of accuracy,

with an emphasis on the many moving parts that deter-

mine the course of a mind perception episode. In this

model, both the cues produced by a target and those

received by a perceiver constrain (a) the likelihood that

a perceiver will engage a given mind perception pro-

cess, and (b) the effect that process can be expected

to have on accuracy. Zooming out also makes clear

that neither cognitive processes nor accuracy are mind

perception’s endgame. Both of these phenomena serve

the more “downstream” goal of supporting adaptive

social behavior and fostering positive social ties. Re-

searchers often labor under the assumption that mind

perception processes and interpersonal accuracy allow

perceivers to “navigate,” “maneuver,” or otherwise lo-

comote adeptly through their social world. However,

there are likely cases in which a given process, or even

accuracy, are not social interaction’s power steering.

Processes and accuracy sometimes have no effect on

social well-being, and can even reduce perceivers’ abil-

ity to connect fruitfully with others. Our approach em-

phasizes the need to model situational factors that de-

termine when a process (or accuracy) helps—and when

it harms—perceivers’ social interactions.

Thus, central to this model is a focus on two ways

in which the relationship between cognitive processes

and later outcomes are mediated by other factors. First,

there is an emphasis on understanding the situational

factors that determine whether a given process will pro-

duce accurate inferences. Second, there is an emphasis

on understanding how accuracy itself can serve as a

mediator between the use of a mind perception process

and adaptive social outcomes.

It is worth noting that connections between mind

perception phenomena are bidirectional and that the

left–right direction in Figure 2 is not a timeline de-

marcating sequentially completed steps. Perceivers do

not encounter targets, deploy a mind perception pro-

cess, draw an (in)accurate inference, produce a so-

cially (mal)adaptive behavior, and call it a day. In-

stead, social interactions are dynamic and dense with

feedback loops (Freeman & Ambady, 2011; Kunda

& Thagard, 1996). For example, learning that she is

Figure 2. An illustration of some of the many contextual factors constraining the relationship between mind perception phenomena.

167

ZAKI AND OCHSNER

mistaken or has behaved inappropriately, a perceiver

may alter the way she engages during subsequent

interactions with a target. Perceivers can shift their

mind perception in multiple ways, including chang-

ing the content that they focus on when employing

mental state attribution (such as the level at which

they construe a target’s behavior; see Spunt, Satpute,

& Lieberman, 2010; Vallacher & Wegner, 1987), or

altogether changing the process they employ in per-

ceiving that target (e.g., “turning up” one’s shared ex-

perience through perspective taking; see Batson, 1991;

Lamm, Batson, & Decety, 2007). These adaptations

can, in turn, serve perceivers’ goals of better under-

standing targets (Eyal & Epley, 2010). Such feedback

processes are not limited to perceivers’ information

processing; targets also may change the social cues

they produce to clarify their internal states after learn-

ing that a perceiver has misjudged them (Swann & Ely,

1984; Swann, Hixon, Stein-Seroussi, & Gilbert, 1990),

or (even more interesting) may change their self-view

to match a perceiver’s initially erroneous judgment of

them (Turner, 1991). The role of such feedback loops

in mind perception is an emerging topic of enormous

interest. However, because relatively little is known

about how such feedback works—and to constrain

the scope of this article—we focus predominantly on

“left to right” relationships between the phenomena in

Figure 2.

What Does This Buy Us? The (Basic and

Applied) Fruits of Integration

Thus far, we have outlined a framework for inte-

grating processes and accuracy in the study of mind

perception. We now broaden our focus to suggest ways

in which this integrative approach can foster novel in-

sights and inﬂuence the way observations are made

in behavioral, neuroscientiﬁc, and clinical mind per-

ception research. We describe separately the potential

advances that could be made for our understanding

of mind perception in each of these domains, but we

emphasize at the outset that a major advantage of in-

tegrating the study of processes and accuracy emerges

speciﬁcally from bridging data gleaned from different

approaches (e.g., neural and clinical) that too often are

isolated from each other.

Speciﬁcally, we discuss ﬁve advantages an integra-

tion of process and accuracy have over the study of ei-

ther in isolation: (a) overturning incorrect but pervasive

assumptions about mind perception, (b) delineating the

situation-speciﬁc relationships between processes and

accuracy, (c) tying data about information processing

more directly to evidence about social well-being, (d)

drawing parallels between mind perception and other

domains of cognition, and (e) mapping the domains

in which social cognitive abnormalities in psychiatric

disorders lead to functional impairments.

As previously mentioned, the majority of exam-

ples we discuss focus on mind perception accuracy for

transient affective states (i.e., empathic accuracy) and

not on inferences about other aspects of individuals,

such as their stable dispositions. Beyond the pragmatic

limitations of space, this narrowing of scope is mo-

tivated by two principled factors. First, empathic ac-

curacy paradigms enjoy some psychometric strengths

that obviate some of the early concerns leveled against

accuracy research more generally. Historically, accu-

racy has been calculated as the simple difference be-

tween a perceiver’s rating of a target state or trait

relative to some criterion measure (e.g., the target’s

self-report). This approach is intended to index ac-

curacy about the overall level of some attribute, has

been common to many forms of accuracy research,

and has been roundly criticized as statistically prob-

lematic (see earlier and see Cronbach, 1955; Kenny,

1991). By contrast, contemporary empathic accuracy

paradigms record perceivers’ inferences, as well as tar-

gets’ self-report, at multiple timepoints. This allows

researchers to compute a measure of accuracy for the

time-varying dynamics of a target’s state, not just the

overall average level of that state. For example, one

can calculate the correlation between a perceiver’s in-

ferences about a target’s affect and a target’s self-rating

as they both vary across time. The resulting correla-

tions reﬂect target–perceiver agreement about when a

target felt relatively negative. It is important to note that

such correlations are independent of the overall level

of some state that perceivers infer that targets are expe-

riencing and that targets assign to themselves. As such,

dynamic measures are robust to many of the biases—

including stereotype application, assumed similarity,

or scale usage tendencies—that can inﬂate empathic

accuracy measures deﬁned as the difference between

two global assessments.

Second, for reasons explained above (see Where

Do We Go From Here?), we are especially interested

in connecting measures of cognitive processes such as

shared experience and mental state attribution to mea-

sures/correlates of interpersonal accuracy at the behav-

ioral and neuroscientiﬁc levels. Because almost all neu-

roscience research on process use concerns the sharing

and inferring of transient states (beliefs, emotions, in-

tentions), and not static traits, empathic accuracy is a

natural candidate for exploring process-accuracy rela-

tionships across multiple levels of analysis. This does

not mean that this measure of accuracy is the only one

that can be used to examine the connections we de-

scribe next. In fact, it is our hope that future researchers

will be motivated to explore similar connections—

at both the neural and behavioral levels—between

mind perception processes and other forms of

accuracy.

168

THE REINTEGRATION OF ACCURACY

Contributions to Behavioral Approaches

Perceivers’ Mind Perception Abilities: Half Full or

Half Empty?

Imagine an extraterrestrial preparing to make ﬁrst

contact with Earth. In advance of meeting humans,

she decides to do research on our behavior, taps into

PsycINFO, and reads all the work she can ﬁnd on

mind perception. She is disappointed to learn that peo-

ple are, by and large, inept at understanding each other:

They ascribe traits to each other based on demonstra-

bly nondiagnostic behaviors (Gilbert & Malone, 1995;

Jones & Harris, 1967); erroneously impute their knowl-

edge, beliefs, and preferences onto others (Epley et al.,

2004; Gilovich, Medvec, & Savitsky, 2000; Gilovich,

Savitsky, & Medvec, 1998; Ross, Greene, & House,

1977); and carelessly apply stereotypes (Fiske, 1998).

They can correct these mistakes, but only through

slow, labor-intensive application of rules, and in the

absence of such efforts, they “default” to error and

bias (Devine, 1989; Devine et al., 2002; Gilbert, Pinel,

Wilson, Blumberg, & Wheatley, 1989).

Why has existing research equipped our interplan-

etary traveler with such underwhelming expectations?

Because accuracy is hard to deﬁne, and the faults

and foibles of mind perception have proved compara-

tively easier to uncover and eye-catching to boot, the

process-oriented approach tends toward a potentially

disheartening view of mind perceivers as “faulty com-

puters,” running mind perception software that is of-

ten situation inappropriate (Higgins & Bargh, 1987;

Krueger & Funder, 2004). This outlook gains further

momentum from its contact with a historically popular

view of decision making, which suggests that people—

instead of optimizing their decisions based on all the

information available to them—rely on simple judg-

mental heuristics that lead them toward a host of in-

correct decisions about the outside world (Kahneman

& Tversky, 1996; Tversky & Kahneman, 1974), the

sources of their own behaviors and abilities (Nisbett

& Wilson, 1977), and even the nature of those behav-

iors and abilities (Kruger, 1999; Kruger & Dunning,

1999).3

Is such a pessimistic attitude about mind percep-

tion warranted? Granted, perceivers can be induced

into committing lawful, compelling errors when judg-

ing targets’ states and traits. However, studies of these

effects often use statistically perfect judgments as a

criterion against which to deﬁne social cognitive error

(e.g., completely discounting nondiagnostic informa-

tion when making preference judgments, see Jones &

Harris, 1967). Further, studies of social cognitive er-

ror typically use highly superﬁcial and nonnaturalistic

tasks that—in a manner analogous to visual illusions—

3Nonetheless, heuristics offer efﬁcient decisions that are often as

accurate—and sometimes more accurate—than exhaustive problem-

solving strategies (Gigerenzer, 1999; Rieskamp & Otto, 2006).

are designed to create the errors they document

(Funder, 1987) and may overlook the ways these errors

actually reﬂect generally adaptive processing. These

factors result in a “half-empty glass” view of perceivers

who are seen in light of their errors and not their ac-

complishments (Krueger & Funder, 2004).

Traditionally, accuracy research has taken a much

different tack: Comparing judgments made in more

naturalistic settings (i.e., judgments made about ac-

tual social targets on the basis of complex behavior)

to targets’ own self-perceptions. Further, accuracy in

these studies is typically measured against a baseline

of chance, as opposed to an assumption of perfect (and

often perfectly rational) performance. This approach

produces a more optimistic view of mind perceivers,

who are shown to excel in a number of ways. First,

perceivers largely agree with each other and establish

impressive consensus about the states and traits of so-

cial targets, even when they have access only to “thin

slices” of target behavior (Ambady & Rosenthal, 1992,

1993; but see also Ames, Kammrath, Suppes, & Bolger,

2010), or impoverished target cues (North, Todorov, &

Osherson, 2010; Zaki, Bolger, et al., 2009). Second,

perceivers’ inferences are impressive predictors of tar-

get behavior (Funder, 1991; Moskowitz & Schwarz,

1982), even decades after perceivers’ from their ini-

tial impressions (Nave, Sherman, Funder, Hampson,

& Goldberg, 2010). Third, perceivers achieve consen-

sus with targets themselves (Ickes, 1997; Kenny &

Albright, 1987; Levenson & Ruef, 1992; Zaki, Bolger,

& Ochsner, 2008). Finally, emerging evidence suggests

that, at least in certain situations, perceivers have a

well-calibrated understanding of when they are likely

to be accurate, versus inaccurate, about target states

(Kelly & Metcalfe, in press).

An integration of processes and accuracy can com-

bine the strengths of each of these approaches in bal-

ancing views about perceivers’ skills in understanding

targets. Speciﬁcally, not only can we document that

perceivers fare pretty well in their endeavors (the con-

clusion of extant accuracy research) or that a given

process sometimes fails them (the conclusion of extant

process research), but we can more speciﬁcally chart

the landscape of process-accuracy relationships to de-

scribe when a given process supports accuracy. We turn

to this issue now.

Processes’ Situation-Speciﬁc Utility

When humans are equipped with more than one tool

for completing a single task, a few questions naturally

arise. One could ask which tool is better for completing

that task (e.g., “Should I use the hammer or screwdriver

for hanging this painting?”). However, a deeper ques-

tion may be, Why would nature equip us with more

than one tool for a single task? The answer is often

that what appears to be a single task (e.g., hanging a

painting), upon closer inspection, ends up splintering

169

ZAKI AND OCHSNER

into multiple, independent tasks each suited to differ-

ent tools (e.g., hanging frames held up by screws vs.

nails).

Perceivers’ repertoire of mind perception processes

suggests just such a state of affairs: Shared experience,

mental state attribution, and other processes likely ex-

ist in tandem because they each support accurate inter-

personal understanding under differing circumstances.

This perspective can clear up confusion in the extant

literature on the process-accuracy relationship.

Consider the age-old search for the “good per-

ceiver.” Popular intuition has long held that some

individuals—speciﬁcally, those who tend to share oth-

ers’ experiences— also should be adept at understand-

ing those experiences (Allport & Allport, 1921). How-

ever, attempts to relate accuracy and experience sharing

have fared surprisingly poorly (Hall, 1979; Ickes et al.,

1990; Levenson & Ruef, 1992), leading modern accu-

racy research to largely abandon the search for “good

perceivers” (Ickes et al., 2000). The model described

in the Modeling Context Dependency section suggests

a way out of this counterintuitive null ﬁnding: Lawful

features of social situations may determine when expe-

rience sharing will come in handy to mind perceivers.

Following this logic, we recently tested the idea

that a critical feature of a perceiver’s situation is the

type of target they encounter. Our premise was that

mind perception, as a fundamentally interpersonal pro-

cess, should depend both on a perceiver’s tendencies

to deploy speciﬁc kinds of processes—such as expe-

rience sharing—and features of targets that inﬂuence

how easily they can be perceived—such as their trait

levels of emotional expressivity (Gross & John, 1997;

Zaki, Bolger, et al., 2009). Speciﬁcally, we predicted

that perceivers high on the tendency to use experience

sharing would be more accurate in judging the emo-

tions of a target to the extent that the target sends strong

expressive signals to their internal emotional state that

the perceivers could share. In line with this prediction,

we found that perceivers’ trait-level experience sharing

predicted accuracy as a function of a target’s tendency

to be emotionally expressive (Zaki et al., 2008). Find-

ings like this both ﬂesh out situation-speciﬁc utility

of mind perception processes and highlight the impor-

tance of moving beyond the “perceiver-centric” view

that has dominated process-oriented research for half

a century.

Linking Processes to Social Well-Being and

Dysfunction

Whereas the proximal goal of mind perception pro-

cesses is forming an accurate impression of targets,

the ultimate goal of such processes is to allow per-

ceivers to function adaptively in the social world, by

forming and maintaining social bonds with others.

Positive social relationships are a central human need

(Baumeister & Leary, 1995) that provides both psycho-

logical and physical protection against environmental

stressors (Bolger & Eckenrode, 1991; Cohen, Doyle,

Skoner, Rabin, & Gwaltney, 1997; Hawkley, Burleson,

Berntson, & Cacioppo, 2003). Indeed, discussions of

mind perception often begin with the idea that pro-

cesses such as experience sharing and mental state at-

tribution are important because those processes support

adaptive social behavior.

But do they? Perhaps only sometimes. On one hand,

individual differences in experience sharing sometimes

are associated with adaptive social behaviors, such

as cooperation, altruism (Eisenberg & Miller, 1987;

Johnson, 1975), or some measures of social skills (Bai-

ley, Henry, & Von Hippel, 2008; Pfeifer et al., 2008;

Riggio, Tucker, & Coffaro, 1989), and individual dif-

ferences in the tendency to employ mental state attri-

bution may track with accommodating behavior dur-

ing conﬂict in close relationships (Arriaga & Rusbult,

1998; Long & Andrews, 1990). On the other hand,

some studies have found no relationship between these

processes and social skills, adjustment, or integration

(Cliffordson, 2002; McWirther, Besett-Alesch, Horib-

ata, & Gat, 2002).

The integrative approach we advocate suggests a

novel prediction: Accuracy may serve as a “middle-

man” mediating the relationship between deployment

of a process and its ultimate adaptive goal of promoting

social well-being. Support for this comes from the ﬁnd-

ing that interpersonal accuracy (especially concerning

transient states such as thoughts and emotions) pre-

dicts adaptive relationship behavior, such as skillful

social support (Verhofstadt, Buysse, Ickes, Davis, &

Devoldre, 2008); lower relationship abuse (Clements,

Holtzworth-Munroe, Schweinle, & Ickes, 2007); and

social adjustment in adolescents (Edwards, Manstead,

& MacDonald, 1984; Gleason, Jensen-Campbell, &

Ickes, 2009; Spence, 1987), college students (Carton,

Kessler, & Pape, 1999; Zaki & Ochsner, 2011a), and

adults (Bartz et al., 2010).

Of course, the idea that accuracy supports adaptive

social function is nothing new (for a review of nearly

100 studies on this topic, see Hall, Andrzejewski, &

Yopchick, 2009) and was, in fact, part of the impe-

tus for the original accuracy movement described ear-

lier. Today, well-known theories incorporate decoding

of others’ states into larger constructs, such as emo-

tional intelligence (Lopes, Grewal, Kadis, Gall, & Sa-

lovey, 2006; Mayer, DiPaolo, & Salovey, 1990; Mayer,

Salovey, & Caruso, 2008; Mayer, Salovey, Caruso,

& Sitarenios, 2001) or affective social competence

(Halberstadt, Denham, & Dunsmore, 2001). However,

these frameworks often view accuracy as a precur-

sor, or “lower level, fundamental skill” (Mayer et al.,

2008, p. 506) that combines with other skills such as

affect management and communication ability to pro-

duce a higher level set of abilities that support social

function.

170

THE REINTEGRATION OF ACCURACY

In contrast, mind perception researchers view accu-

racy itself as a complex outcome dependent on a suite

of ﬂexibly deployed cognitive processes. As such, re-

search tying health and well-being to accuracy often

makes little contact with work on the cognitive pro-

cesses that produce accuracy. This is unfortunate, given

that social cognitive work has begun to suggest that

empathic accuracy does not always promote adaptive

behavior. In fact, in some cases accuracy can be mal-

adaptive, as when perceivers correctly intuit a target’s

negative or relationship-damaging thoughts and feel-

ings (Simpson et al., 1995; Simpson et al., 2003) or

when accuracy prevents the application of (presum-

ably adaptive) positive biases in self-perception that

are characteristic of most individuals (Taylor & Brown,

1988).

Integrating processes and outcomes suggests ways

to address these seemingly conﬂicting relationships be-

tween mind perception processes, accuracy, and adap-

tive social behavior by reframing the questions we ask.

Instead of asking whether a given mind perception pro-

cess promotes adaptive behavior, we might ask when

its use is adaptive by virtue of producing accurate in-

ferences, and when does that process motivate adaptive

behaviors irrespective of (or even by reducing) accu-

racy?

Following a social cognitive neuroscience ap-

proach, both behavioral and neural correlates of mind

perception processes and accuracy can be brought to

bear in answering such questions, and testing models

in which accuracy mediates the relationship between

mind perception processes and social function. The use

of brain activity to predict outcomes in the ﬁeld is only

now taking hold (cf. the “brain as predictor” model em-

ployed by Berkman, Falk, & Lieberman, 2011; Falk,

Berkman, Mann, Harrison, & Lieberman, 2010) and

stands to make headway in linking information pro-

cessing to adaptive behavior in the social domain.

Contributions to Neuroscientiﬁc Approaches

Fleshing Out Single-Process Models

Dissociations between the neural systems support-

ing experience sharing and mental state attribution

have prompted a curious debate among neuroscien-

tists about which system is primarily responsible for

mind perceivers’ abilities (Apperly, 2008). Some, fol-

lowing so-called simulation theory (Heal, 1996), have

cited the role of the ESS as evidence that shared expe-

rience is the royal road to interpersonal understanding

(e.g., Gallese & Goldman, 1998; Gallese et al., 2004).

Others, following the tongue-twistingly named “theory

theory” (Gopnik & Wellman, 1992), argue that mental

state attribution, supported by the MSAS, is central to

understanding targets (e.g., Saxe, 2005).

We believed such theories lack two features critical

to forming a more complete theory of mind percep-

tion’s neural bases. First, in focusing on single neural

systems, it is easy to forget that processing the complex

social cues perceivers most often encounter in daily life

typically draws on both the MSAS and ESS (among

other regions). Second, MSAS and ESS-based theories

of interpersonal understanding have proceeded largely

in the absence of direct evidence about whether either

neural system supports accuracy about actual social

targets. This is because tasks engaging the ESS rarely

require perceivers to infer targets’ internal states, and

tasks tapping the MSAS typically employ extremely

easy, simpliﬁed social tasks that produce ceiling ef-

fects. In each case, the ability to directly measure the

neural systems supporting accurate, as opposed to in-

accurate, social inferences is limited at best (Zaki &

Ochsner, 2009). We now discuss each of these weak-

nesses in the literature—and how we believe they can

be overcome—in turn.

Moving from single to multiple-process models.

In our view, nominating single processes or neural sys-

tems as supporting interpersonal understanding likely

reﬂects a lack of contact between cognitive neurosci-

entiﬁc and behavioral approaches to mind perception.

A major aim of cognitive neuroscience is using brain

activity as a guide for interpreting multiple cognitive

processes as either distinct (based on separable neural

circuitry) or functionally related (based on overlapping

neural circuitry; see Henson, 2005). This approach has

helped to resolve a number debates about cognition, for

example, providing evidence that visual imagery and

visual perception are highly similar (Kosslyn et al.,

1997), or that declarative and procedural memory are

not (Buckner et al., 1995; Schacter, 1997).

However, such an approach also encourages re-

searchers to emphasize single patches of neural real

estate and to focus on tasks that excite their particular

neural neighborhood. For example, a researcher exam-

ining the role of the ESS may be more interested in

tasks tapping the ESS, such as perceivers’ sharing of

targets motor intentions, disgust, or pain, and may pay

less attention to false belief tasks that do not engage the

ESS. Similarly, such a researcher may pay more atten-

tion to data demonstrating that damage to the ESS im-

pairs emotion perception (Adolphs, Damasio, Tranel,

Cooper, & Damasio, 2000; Shamay-Tsoory, Tomer,

Berger, Goldsher, & Aharon-Peretz, 2005) than to sim-

ilar lesion data suggesting that the MSAS is necessary

for making judgments about many forms of beliefs and

intentions (Shamay-Tsoory, Aharon-Peretz, & Perry,

2009).

Nonetheless, the fact that neural systems can be

dissociated does not imply that they are necessarily

or even usually dissociated during social inferences,

especially those based on the kinds of complex social

information that we encounter in everyday situations

(Keysers & Gazzola, 2007; Shamay-Tsoory, 2010;

171

ZAKI AND OCHSNER

Singer, 2006; Uddin, Iacoboni, Lange, & Keenan,

2007; Zaki & Ochsner, 2009). Consistent with this,

both the ESS and MSAS are concurrently engaged by

“naturalistic” mind perception tasks, such as viewing

videos of complex social cues (Brass, Schmitt, Spen-

gler, & Gergely, 2007; de Lange, Spronk, Willems,

Toni, & Bekkering, 2008; Spunt et al., 2010; Wolf,

Dziobek, & Heekeren, 2010).

The second weakness in the cognitive neuroscience

literature on mind perception is the absence of direct

data on the neural sources of accuracy, which renders

any claim about the neural bases of interpersonal un-

derstanding more speculative than is typically recog-

nized. In some ways, this is similar to the state of mem-

ory research in the mid-1990s. At that time, a few key

brain regions had been linked to memory performance

through lesion studies, and in the ﬁrst wave of neu-

roimaging studies of memory these same regions were

engaged during encoding tasks. The extent to which

any given region was critical for successful encoding

was not yet known, however, because the issue had yet

to be assessed directly. This changed with the advent

of the subsequent memory paradigm, in which brain

activity during a given encoding trial was related to

veridical recollection of a memorandum on a later test.

This approach conﬁrmed that activity in the medial

temporal lobe and inferior frontal gyrus was related

to later performance, cemented their functional impor-

tance to memory formation, and provided a critical

methodological tool for probing the neural correlates

of memory more generally (Brewer, Zhao, Desmond,

Glover, & Gabrieli, 1998; Wagner et al., 1998).

We believe that integrating a focus on accuracy into

neuroimaging studies of mind perception can play a

similar role, by providing novel, direct evidence about

the role of the ESS and MSAS in producing interper-

sonal accuracy. To take a step in that direction, we

identiﬁed brain regions the activity of which increased

as perceivers became more accurate about the emotions

expressed by targets shown on videotapes talking about

autobiographical emotional experiences. This analysis

revealed that activity in several regions within both the

MSAS and ESS (especially the putative mirror neuron

system engaged by observing and performing actions;

see Zaki, Weber, Bolger, & Ochsner, 2009) predicted

accuracy. Dovetailing with this initial ﬁnding, a sub-

sequent study demonstrated that functional coupling

between target brain activity and perceiver brain activ-

ity in both ESS and MSAS predicts perceivers’ com-

prehension of stories told by targets (Stephens et al.,

2010).

This type of data is critical in that it can help move

past the prevalent yet ultimately unproductive debate

as to whether interpersonal understanding is supported

by the MSAS or ESS, by demonstrating that both

systems—and, it stands to reason, their related cog-

nitive processes—support accuracy.

The suggestion here is that future work could move

toward asking more nuanced questions about when a

given system is most important to fostering accuracy.

Again, consider memory research, where the neural

bases of successful encoding have been shown to differ

critically depending on the type of information being

encoded (e.g., social vs. nonsocial; see Macrae, Moran,

Heatherton, Banﬁeld, & Kelley, 2004; J. P. Mitchell,

Macrae, & Banaji, 2004). In like fashion, the MSAS

and ESS may turn out to be variably useful in produc-

ing accurate inferences, depending on types of social

cues perceivers encounter and the inferences they are

asked to make. Speciﬁcally—although direct evidence

is still lacking—extant data suggest that the MSAS

may support accurate inferences about complex, con-

textualized internal states (i.e., those that require un-

derstanding the source of a belief or emotion), whereas

the ESS may support accuracy about states with more

prominent bodily components, such as disgust or pain

(Keysers & Gazzola, 2009; Lamm & Singer, 2010;

Saarela et al., 2007; Zaki, Davis, & Ochsner, 2011;

Zaki et al., 2010). Future work should investigate such

possibilities.

Drawing Parallels With Other Phenomena

As previously described, a major aim of cognitive

neuroscience is to “carve nature at its joints” by using

imaging data to inform questions about the distinct

or overlapping processing systems underlying various

behaviors. In this regard, imaging data have proven to

be particular useful in addressing particular kinds of

questions about processing mechanisms. One question

ideally suited for imaging data is whether two different

behavioral phenomena depend on common or distinct

processing systems. By determining whether the two

behaviors recruit similar or different neural systems

one gains purchase on this question.

In the last decade, this approach has been applied

to the study of social cognition to demonstrate that

encountering, drawing inferences about, and respond-

ing to social information recruits brain regions largely

distinct from those supporting processing of nonsocial

information. Consider the example of cognitive con-

trol. Tasks requiring the engagement of control pro-

cesses such as response inhibition or working mem-

ory engage lateral prefrontal and cingulate regions

but seldom if ever activate regions within the MSAS

(Botvinick, Braver, Barch, Carter, & Cohen, 2001;

Wager, Jonides, & Reading, 2004). In fact, cogni-

tively demanding tasks deactivate several MSAS re-

gions, and activity in regions associated with social

and nonsocial task types demonstrates negative, re-

ciprocal relationships (Drevets & Raichle, 1998; Fox

et al., 2005). At ﬁrst these ﬁndings were taken to mean

that thinking about animate agents requires a discrete

form of information processing unique to the social

domain (J. P. Mitchell, 2008b) and that cognition and

172

THE REINTEGRATION OF ACCURACY

socioemotional processes might be antagonistic to one

another (Drevets & Raichle, 1998). More recent mod-

els have focused on the speciﬁc computations that may

differentiate the demands of social versus nonsocial

inference (Buckner & Carroll, 2007; J. P. Mitchell,

2009b).

Although useful for clarifying the boundaries be-

tween social and nonsocial cognition, a strong focus on

dissociating their underlying processing systems may

miss ways in which the two kinds of systems collabo-

rate in everyday social interactions that demand more

than one kind of process come into play. This bears on

the previous discussion of cognitive control. Behav-

ioral work suggests that mind perception—and specif-

ically mental state attribution—is highly demanding,

and succeeding in it depends on the availability of ex-

ecutive control resources (Apperly & Butterﬁll, 2009;

Carlson & Moses, 2001). At ﬁrst blush, this ﬁnding

seems to clash with evidence that executive control

and social cognition rely on different neural systems.

This confusion is partially cleared up, however, when

we consider that neuroimaging studies of mind per-

ception often employ social tasks with limited or no

executive demands (e.g., passive viewing of social tar-

gets), and when they do employ more difﬁcult social

tasks (e.g., some studies of mental state attribution),

cognitive control demands are typically equated across

the critical mind perception and baseline control con-

ditions so as to isolate the neural correlates of mental

state attribution.

As such, distinctions between neural systems in-

volved in social and nonsocial information processing

may not reﬂect “deep” dissociations between the com-

putations underlying these phenomena. Instead, they

may reﬂect the simple fact that, to date, extant work has

largely focused on a particular question: Is mind per-

ception different from other cognitive abilities? This

question is addressed by attempting to isolate neural

systems preferentially engaged by the presentation of,

and judgments about, social cues. Typically, this is ac-

complished by stripping away the complexities of ev-

eryday social interaction to devise tasks simple enough

that they depend most critically on only the speciﬁc

mind perception process(es) of interest in a given study.

Asking a different question—for example, What

do social and nonsocial information processing have

in common?— suggests focusing on tasks that more

closely match the complex processing demands of “ev-

eryday” social cognition where cognitive control pro-

cesses might be important. For example, targets often

produce unclear or contradictory feedback about their

internal states, which perceivers must sort through or

choose between in order to be accurate. In such cases,

drawing accurate interpersonal inferences requires ad-

judication between multiple sources of social informa-

tion (e.g., a target who looks sad but sounds happy). It

is likely that these requirements functionally resemble

other forms of response conﬂict that engage executive

control centers in the brain. Studies of the neural cor-

relates of perceiving conﬂicting social cues bear out

this parallel by showing engagement of domain gen-

eral control systems (Decety & Chaminade, 2003; R.

L. Mitchell, 2006; Wittfoth et al., 2009) that interact

with regions in the ESS and MSAS to guide attention to

the cues that perceivers ﬁnd most relevant to deciding

how targets feel (Zaki et al., 2010).

Thus, although the neural systems involved in mind

perception and nonsocial cognition can be dissociated,

exploring their common reliance on domain-general

control systems can illuminate some of their similari-

ties as well. Future work employing naturalistic social

tasks in combination with measures of accuracy may

serve to further characterize the links between mind

perception processes and other cognitive abilities.

Contributions to Clinical Approaches

Finally, an integration of processes and accuracy

has the potential to reframe thinking about clinical dis-

orders characterized by social cognitive deﬁcits. As

with the study of healthy perceivers, this approach al-

lows for a shift away from viewing these disorders as

representing disruptions of single processes that invari-

ably cause social symptoms and toward a focus on (a)

seeing disorders as arising from abnormal proﬁles of

function in multiple processes and their interrelation-

ships and (b) examining the situation-speciﬁc effects

of these processing abnormalities on social symptoms.

Here we consider autism spectrum disorders (ASD) as

an example case.

Processes and Accuracy in Autism

Individuals with ASD famously fail to engage in

typical forms of interpersonal interactions (Lord et al.,

1997; Lord, Rutter, & Le Couteur, 1994; Wing &

Gould, 1979) and to normatively deploy mental state

attribution and experience sharing or engage the neu-

ral systems underlying these processes (Baron-Cohen

et al., 1985; Dapretto et al., 2006; Kennedy, Red-

cay, & Courchesne, 2006; Oberman, Ramachandran,

& Pineda, 2008; Rogers, Hepburn, Stackhouse, &

Wehner, 2003). The observed covariance between a

speciﬁc kind of processing dysfunction (e.g., experi-

ence sharing) and abnormal social function in ASD

is sometimes used as evidence that abnormalities

in single mind perception processes underlie social

deﬁcits in autism (Baron-Cohen, 1994; Oberman &

Ramachandran, 2007). On this view, abnormalities in

either mental state attribution or experience sharing

lead, more or less directly, to the complex social symp-

toms evinced by ASD.

Although processes such as those supporting expe-

rience sharing no doubt play some role in ASD, single

173

ZAKI AND OCHSNER

process models fail to square with several lines of evi-

dence (Happe, Ronald, & Plomin, 2006). For example,

not all studies of ASD document problems in mind per-

ception tasks or their neural bases (Bird et al., 2010;

Bowler, 1992; Castelli, 2005; Fan, Decety, Yang, Liu,

& Cheng, 2010). Further, the few studies attempting

to directly link deﬁcits in mind perception processes

with social symptom severity have yielded inconsis-

tent results (Dapretto et al., 2006; Fombonne, Siddons,

Achard, Frith, & Happe, 1994; Lombardo, Barnes,

Wheelwright, & Baron-Cohen, 2007; Rogers et al.,

2003; Tager-Flusberg, 2007). What’s more, interven-

tions aimed at encouraging the use of mind perception

processes (e.g., training in recognizing photographed

emotional faces) often produce improvements on these

tasks without causing any parallel improvements in

clinically assessed social deﬁcits (Gevers, Clifford,

Mager, & Boer, 2006; Golan & Baron-Cohen, 2006;

Hadwin, Baron-Cohen, Howlin, & Hill, 1996, 1997;

Ozonoff & Miller, 1995). These disparities underscore

the gap between successfully deploying a particular

cognitive process and successfully interacting with oth-

ers.

The model we are advocating here suggests that two

conceptual shifts could better link information process-

ing to social function in ASD. First is the proposition

that adaptive social functioning depends on the simul-

taneous and concerted use of multiple processes to

support accurate understanding of the complex social

cues perceivers typically encounter. Extant tasks used

to assess impairments in ASD (such as motor imitation

or emotion identiﬁcation using pictures) are ill suited

to capturing such deﬁcits, because they are aimed at

assessing the deployment of single processes using

highly simpliﬁed stimuli. Second, abnormalities in the

operation of mind perception processes likely interact

with features of a situation (e.g., the target to which a

perceiver is paying attention), affecting social function

more in some situations and less so or not at all in

others. As such, moving beyond a “perceiver-centric”

take on mind perception could allow for mapping the

speciﬁc contextual domains in which the processing

deﬁcits characterizing ASD are most damaging to pa-

tients.

Although there are only three extant studies of em-

pathic accuracy in ASD, they provide promising initial

support for the more nuanced view we are advocat-

ing here. For example, individuals with ASD demon-

strate more consistent impairments in empathic accu-

racy than in simpler, more canonical theory of mind

tasks (Demurie, De Corel, & Roeyers, 2011; Roeyers,

Buysse, Ponnet, & Pichal, 2001). Second, the one study

examining contextual effects on accuracy deﬁcits sug-

gests that ASD individuals’ social cognitive problems

are indeed selective and related to the types of cues they

encounter. Speciﬁcally, ASD status predicted reduced

accuracy when perceivers observed unstructured inter-

actions between targets but not when they observed

targets interviewing each other in a structured format

(asking each other questions, such as “What do you

like to do in your spare time?”; see Ponnet, Buysse,

Roeyers, & De Clercq, 2008). These data suggest that

examining context-dependent deﬁcits in accuracy can

help researchers map the domains in which individu-

als with ASD are likely to be more or less impaired

and how these impairments evolve out of mind per-

ception processes that support greater or lesser accu-

racy. Such an approach also suggests potential novel

interventions based not on erasing cognitive deﬁcits

but rather on placing individuals in contexts/situations

where those cognitive deﬁcits are less likely to

matter.

Consider anecdotal reports (Grandin & Barron,

2004) and empirical studies (Baron-Cohen, 2009;

Baron-Cohen, Richler, Bisarya, Gurunathan, & Wheel-

wright, 2003) suggesting that individuals with ASD of-

ten compensate for mind perception deﬁcits by using

systemized rules to elaboratively “work out” the likely

experiences of social targets. Such a compensatory

strategy could be most useful when targets are produc-

ing clear and structured cues about their internal states

(as in the interview condition previously described)

of the type produced by emotionally expressive tar-

gets (Zaki et al., 2008; Zaki, Bolger, et al., 2009).

This suggests a form of intervention in which care-

givers and family members of individuals with ASD

could restructure their behavior to provide clear, read-

able cues about their internal states, thereby rendering

the information-processing issues inherent to ASD less

debilitating.

Although speculative, ideas like this one highlight

a broader point: Integrating measures of mind percep-

tion processes, accuracy, and adaptive functioning can

produce novel predictions about the domains in which

information-processing deﬁcits lead to clinical dys-

function, and suggest situation-speciﬁc interventions

to alleviate such dysfunction.

Conclusions

Mind perception research has a long and some-

times rocky past. The early years were deﬁned by

the hunt for accuracy. This hunt never captured its

quarry, which led researchers to focus almost exclu-

sively on the information-processing steps underpin-

ning social cognition—independent of accuracy. This

shift has been enormously successful in characterizing

the separable mechanisms through which perceivers

try to understand targets, and recent work identifying

neural signatures of these processes has made the en-

deavor even more compelling.

We have argued that mind perception research—

in focusing almost exclusively on process—has

174

THE REINTEGRATION OF ACCURACY

often chosen to ignore its past, and as a consequence

has been limited in some important ways. The major-

ity of current mind perception research is concerned

with determining whether and when a given cognitive

processes is in play—and neural correlates of these

processes are—in many cases without reference to

whether or to what extent one’s resulting understanding

of another person is accurate. Or put another way, we

know a lot about what processes people engage when

they try to make sense of others minds but less about

what determines whether they are accurate. This mat-

ters because in actual social encounters, a perceiver’s

goal is not simply to draw any old inference about

their social partners but (usually) to draw an accurate

one.

There seem to be two main reasons that the pro-

cess approach has failed to make contact with the ac-

curacy approach. First, researchers may believe that

accuracy is too difﬁcult to quantify. Luckily, this con-

cern is outdated. Following a 25-year hibernation,

accuracy research has surged, producing a novel and

varied approaches to quantifying accuracy and identi-

fying its predictors. Second, even if process-oriented

researchers believe that accuracy can be quantiﬁed,

they may not believe doing so is relevant to their work.

Here, we hope to have shown that this view may be

shortsighted insofar as integration can provide several

novel insights, predictions, and lines of research. Fol-

lowing the framework previously outlined, the strength

of this approach comes from directly linking (either

behavioral or neural) signs that a process has been

deployed with signs that a perceiver has accurately de-

coded a target’s internal states, and in turn relating both

of these constructs to adaptive outcomes in the social

world. Critical to all of these connections is identifying

ﬁrst the contextual boundaries that determine when a

process supports accuracy and, second, when accuracy

predicts social well-being.

In elaborating this approach, we have purposefully

constrained our focus to two processes—mental state

attribution and experience sharing—and on one form

of accuracy—the ability to correctly judge a target’s

dynamic emotional experience—because we consid-

ered a limited focus to be necessary for fully ﬂeshing

out and illustrating the value of a process-accuracy

integration in a single article. However, we hope that

future work will port this approach to the study of other

processes, such as stereotyping and projection (Hoch,

1987; Judd & Park, 1993; Jussim, 1991; Neyer, Banse,

& Asendorpf, 1999); other forms of accuracy, such as

predictions of one’s own future experiences (Gilbert

et al., 1998; Kermer, Driver-Linn, Wilson, & Gilbert,

2006; Wilson, Wheatley, Meyers, Gilbert, & Axsom,

2000); and other forms of adaptive behavior, such as

successful negotiation, cooperation, and accurate pre-

diction about others’ actions (Coricelli & Nagel, 2009;

Galinsky, Maddux, Gilin, & White, 2008; Hampton,

Bossaerts, & O’Doherty, 2008; Valdesolo, Ouyang, &

DeSteno, 2010).

Overall, we believe that this approach can reframe

current data concerning mind perception processes,

prompt richer questions about how people understand

each other, and suggest new ways of testing these ques-

tions. The sorts of changes motivated by this approach

will vary depending on the phenomenon being stud-

ied and level of analysis being employed. In some

cases, questions will be reﬁned from the categorical

(“Which process leads to accuracy?”) to the condi-

tional (“When will this process produce accuracy?). In

other cases, neuroscientists could shift away from char-

acterizing single systems (“What processing steps are

instantiated in the MSAS or ESS?”) and toward more

holistically viewing these systems’ role in naturalistic

situations (“How do the MSAS and ESS interact with

each other and with other systems—like those involve

in domain general cognitive control—to produce ac-

curate inferences?”). Finally, in clinical settings, this

could mean moving beyond characterizing psychiatric

disorders as arising from deﬁcits in single processes

(“Do individuals with ASD fail to normatively em-

ploy mental state inference?”) to examining proﬁles of

information-processing abnormalities across multiple

processes in a broader social-cognitive context (“Un-

der which situations will failing to employ mental state

attribution most affect an ASD individual’s abilities to

interact with others, and is there a way to attenuate this

effect?”).

Let us end by saying that in no way do we wish

to suggest that the current, process-focused approach

dominating social cognition should be replaced by the

one described here. That would be as counterproduc-

tive as the screeching halt of accuracy research half a

century ago. Instead, we are making the simple point

that—as so often is the case when two approaches pro-

vide different angles on the same, complex question—

joining forces can be beneﬁcial to everyone.

Note

Address correspondence to Jamil Zaki, Department

of Psychology, Harvard University, Northwest Science

Building, 52 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA 02138.

E-mail: zaki@wjh.harvard.edu

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Psychological Inquiry, 22: 183–186, 2011

Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

ISSN: 1047-840X print / 1532-7965 online

DOI: 10.1080/1047840X.2011.573767

COMMENTARIES

Interacting Minds: A Framework for Combining Process- and

Accuracy-Oriented Social Cognitive Research

Bahador Bahrami

UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, London, England; Institute of Anthropology,

Archaeology, Linguistics, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark; and Centre of Functionally Integrative

Neuroscience, Aarhus University Hospital, Aarhus, Denmark

Chris D. Frith

Institute of Anthropology, Archaeology, Linguistics, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark; Centre of Functionally

Integrative Neuroscience, Aarhus University Hospital, Aarhus, Denmark; and Wellcome Trust Centre for

Neuroimaging, University College London, London, England

Zaki and Ochsner underscore the importance of

combining two different viewpoints in social cogni-

tion: a currently popular, process-oriented approach

that is concerned with how we come to understand

others’ mental states. The main insights from this mind

perception research come from the ideas of theory of

mind and understanding by simulation. Another, rather

older approach focused on what enables human agents

to understand others’ mental states better. The latter ap-

proach is motivated by the assumption that there must

be some survival value in higher accuracy and reliabil-

ity of our internal mental models of others’ intentions

and beliefs. Accuracy research has been thwarted, Zaki

and Ochsner argue, by a lack of principled theoreti-

cal approach leading to research programs plagued by

a plethora of scattered and often difﬁcult-to-replicate

cross-correlations between multiple arbitrary depen-

dent variables.

Both approaches are admittedly concerned with so-

cial interaction. However, both also address social in-

teraction as yet another cognitive faculty serving the

isolated agent. For example, in a game of poker, the

accuracy approach may seek to understand who is bet-

ter at calling bluffs. The process approach, on the other

hand, may ask what happens in the poker player’s brain

that enables him to call the bluff and raise the stakes as

opposed to fold. But whether these ﬁndings will be es-

sentially different from the work of a psychophysicist

who investigates the object recognition that happens

when the player reads his cards is far from decided

(Frith & Frith, 2010).

Social interaction also allows agents to share infor-

mation and make decisions together. This function is

directly relevant to the accuracy and the process of so-

cial perception but is qualitatively different from what

helps our poker player win the game. Every social agent

is continuously sampling information and making

judgments and inferences about her or his surrounding

environment. These inferences are always corrupted

by (extrinsic environmental as well as intrinsic neural)

noise and therefore have limited reliability (Green &

Swets, 1966). By interacting with other social agents

who have obtained their own samples of information,

individuals can beneﬁt from the increased reliability

of joint decisions (Nitzan & Paroush, 1985). Informa-

tion sharing through interaction can lead to emergent

forms of collective wisdom that could serve all mem-

bers of a group. Indeed, such collective wisdom that

arises from efﬁcient near-optimal democratic decision-

making strategies are amply observed in social animals

such as bees and deer (Conradt & Roper, 2005, 2007;

Seeley & Visscher, 2004a, 2004b) and has been the

topic of much interest in humans (Surowiecki, 2004).

The research on collective wisdom asks what consti-

tutes efﬁcient social interaction. We are often told that

“two heads are better than one.” But what are the min-

imum necessary or sufﬁcient conditions for two heads

together to excel better than one in isolation? Are there

any limiting conditions to group beneﬁt accrued by in-

teraction? Are there any conditions where interaction is

counterproductive and not advisable? These questions

rephrase the Zaki and Ochsner’s idea of “accuracy of

social perception” in the context of collective decision

making.

The brain is a highly efﬁcient information integra-

tion device that adeptly integrates information from

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COMMENTARIES

Figure 1. Leili and Majnun make joint decisions about where the ball landed.

(A) The ball’s trajectory. (B) Leili and Majnun’s individual decisions are based

their respective noisy perceptual representation conceptualized here as Gaussian

distributions. The ﬁgure was inspired by Ernst (2010).

multiple sensory channels. A prominent example of

such highly efﬁcient integration is speech perception:

Noisy visual and auditory information are efﬁciently

and quickly combined almost as perfectly as math-

ematically possible (given their own inherent noise

level) to maximize understanding (Ernst & Bulthoff,

2004). One brain can combine information optimally

from multiple modalities. But can two different brains

integrate information about the same modality? If

yes, how does the integration happen? The answer to

this question entails rephrasing Zaki and Ochsner’s

process-oriented mind perception in terms of collective

decision making: What is the nature of the shared

information that contributes to making joint decisions?

It is interesting to note that these questions—which

relate critically to the accuracy limit and the process of

collective decisions—date back to (at least) the French

revolution (Condorcet, 1785). However, it is only re-

cently that they have been formally and rigorously ad-

dressed in humans (Bahrami et al., 2010; Sorkin, Hays,

& West, 2001). The conceptual basis of this new ap-

proach to collective decision making is described next

in the context of a game of tennis (see Figure 1).

Leili and Majnun—our two protagonists from here

on—are watching a game of tennis (Figure 1). The ball

has just landed very close to the line (Figure 1A, white

arrow), and they disagree about whether it landed in

or outside the court (Figure 1B). They will consult

each other and arrive at a joint decision about the ball,

and the game will then carry on. But let’s stop here

and consider the situation. Each observer’s visual per-

ception of what happened can be conceptualized as a

normal distribution1withamean(dLfor Leili and dM

for Majnun) and a standard deviation (σLand σM). The

mean identiﬁes the observer’s decision about whether

the ball fell above (e.g., Leili) or below (e.g., Majnun)

the thick black line that marks the border of the ten-

nis court. The standard deviation of each distribution

quantiﬁes the amount of noise in the observer’s sensory

representation and is inversely related to the observer’s

perceptual sensitivity. A reliable percept would there-

fore be characterized by a mean with large magnitude

(greater distance from the boundary, e.g., Majnun) and

a small standard deviation (sharper, less noisy distri-

bution, e.g., Leili).

This formulation is useful in many respects. First,

a large body of literature in sensory psychophysics

gives us reliable tools to empirically identify these pa-

rameters underlying the decisions made by Leili and

1This normal distribution could represent, for example, the ac-

tivity pattern of neurons in the observer’s primary visual cortex.

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COMMENTARIES

Majnun in isolation and for the group (Green & Swets,