Cognitive neuroscience: self and social intelligence

Self and Social Intelligence

——A person has many different social levels of self, and others know him through these different selves.

—William James, Principles of Psychology, Volume 1, 1890, p. 294

——People always like to think about problems with analogical thinking, but ignore the underlying principles behind things.

— Elon Musk

——The baseline function of the brain is reference, internal reference and external reference.

——Cognitive neuroscience

——When we marvel at the complexity of the brain, we have to consider the impact of the environment on the brain, because no matter how complex the brain is, it is not as complex as the environment it faces.

——Neuroeconomics

——IQ can be classified into fluid IQ, which is general intelligence that is unrelated to knowledge and experience; crystallized IQ, which is the size of the psychological dictionary; social IQ and emotional IQ.

——Social cognitive neuroscience

Preface:

One of the most puzzling questions is what is the "self"? It was once raised to the height of philosophy: Who am I and where am I going? In our lives, we will meet such people who have high cognitive abilities but seem to be unable to handle interpersonal relationships; the way others know us may be completely different from the way we know ourselves. Social psychologists are very interested in the interaction between the internal self-processing of individuals and the psychological processing of interpersonal relationships, which is actually the goal of social psychology research.

Many people naively take it for granted that personal sovereignty cannot be touched by others and is not influenced by others, just like the absolute freedom claimed by some people. However, social psychology proves that the development and maintenance of the self is shaped by the situation in which it is placed. The importance of environment to individual development was explained in the Three Character Classic thousands of years ago: Choose your neighbors. In other words, people have always been aware of the importance of environment to individual development and maintenance.

If we simply understand that the environment shapes people, and the self can choose the "environment" at a local scale, then the relationship between the self and society should focus more on the group shaping of the overall environment and the importance of individual choices in the local environment. In other words, environmental shaping is crucial for self-growth based on personal choices and overall development based on policies.

In fact, perceiving society and the world is a subjective process shaped by the current individual's motivations, emotions, cognitions, and stable personal traits (such as personality, self-schema, beliefs, and self-beliefs). Even more extreme is the interpretation of social perception by philosopher Nietzsche, who believes that a person's view of society (social perception) is the projection of his traits onto the world: "Those who think they know something about me are merely interpreting certain aspects of me according to their own self-image."

At the beginning of the article, we have identified a question to be discussed, namely, the process of self-cognition and social perception and their relationship. Self-cognition and social perception are inseparable, that is, the environment shapes the self to form self-cognition and social perception. Social psychology has a long history and is deeply influenced by Gestalt psychology, emphasizing the interaction between different social cognitive processes. The multiple attributes of the self will present different aspects of the self according to different social situations. Therefore, the neural mechanism of the self should be as flexible as the self's behavior and cognitive expression when facing social pressure.

In the past, people have been studying happiness. However, people's understanding of whether they are happy in their lives is retrospective. Retrospective situational memory is regulated by emotional salience, that is, emotions are particularly important for situational memory. Therefore, good self-presentation or flexible self-presentation in different social situations will play a vital role in happiness.

1. Self

The ventromedial frontal cortex of the human brain is particularly important for social cognition and self-processing. Self-processing mainly includes three aspects: self-cognition, self-awareness and self-control. Self-cognition includes the ability to know oneself and store information about one's personality, preferences and experiences. Self-awareness refers to the ability to recognize and reflect on one's current experiences and actions. Self-control refers to the ability to adjust oneself strategically to overcome one's impulses and habits.

For example, we know that our personality is thoughtful and we like to be alone, which is self-cognition; we are aware of whether we are happy or sad now, and the impact of our current behavior, which is self-awareness. Our ability to control our emotions and bring about bad results and change bad habits is self-control.

A. Self-awareness

Self-awareness is a person's perception of his or her own personality, hobbies, and personal experiences. Since these are obviously subjective self-characteristics, self-awareness is very complex. The self that others know you and the self that you know yourself may be two completely different people.

In the past, psychologists believed that people know themselves through their behavior, not through introspection, and that we also know others in this way, that is, we know ourselves and others through explicit behavior, without considering the interaction of our own and others' internal attribute sets. However, modern neuropsychology has proven that not all self-cognition is generated through explicit behavior - many patients have no memory of their own behavior, and their new behavior cannot generate memory, but they can still update their self-cognition.

Social psychology research shows that when a person freely chooses a behavior that is contrary to his beliefs and attitudes, it is enough to change his beliefs and preferences. This process is called "cognitive dissonance reduction." Cognitive dissonance is a state of psychological distress, in which a person is aware of the contradiction between behavior and belief. Belief is also the level of self-commitment. If a person's belief is to succeed, but if the behavior does not match, then cognitive dissonance occurs. But people usually adapt their behavior by changing their beliefs, rather than changing their behavior to adapt to their beliefs. In other words, people are committed to maintaining the consistency of their self-image in their own eyes or in the eyes of those around them through rationalization. This is also the reason why people's beliefs often weaken or change. More importantly, if others think you should be a person with a certain attribute, and your current behavior does not match, then you will change your beliefs, and this belief will switch between your own behavior and the expectations of others.

Research shows that even if people forget what they did immediately, their self-perception will change immediately with this behavior. This shows that self-perception is one of the sources of self-knowledge. People do not need to conduct complex and conscious thinking about their own behavior. Their behavior will automatically reflect their self-perception and self-belief. At least sometimes, it must be a more automatic result of self-observation.

B Neurocognitive Processes

The most common areas activated for self-awareness include the precuneus, medial prefrontal cortex, and lateral temporal cortex. Neuroscience is currently studying the functions of the precuneus, which were little known in the past. The functions performed by their interactions seem to be related to explicit knowledge processing. The medial prefrontal cortex is involved in the process of explicit attribution of other people's mental states, so it can also be involved in self-attribution. The precuneus located in the parietal lobe plays a role in perspective selection and the retrieval of contextual memories that distinguish between oneself and others. The right inferior temporal cortex and temporal pole may play a role in the storage of declarative self-cognition.

The speculation about the most active brain functions during self-perception judgments is consistent with the 17th-century philosopher John Locke's statement about the role of explicit thought and memory processes in maintaining self-perception. Locke proposed that "what we do or think in the past, as far as our consciousness can recall, determines what we are." In other words, if a person cannot recall what he did in the past, how can he answer who he is in general? In this model of self-perception, we judge whether these behaviors are consistent with certain characteristics of ourselves (such as generosity) by explicitly recalling and thinking about typical behaviors in the past. Activation of the precuneus, medial prefrontal cortex, and temporal lobe during self-perception judgments is consistent with this "evidence-based" model of self-perception processing.

Neuroimaging studies are consistent with this research, which is based on two assumptions: (1) people have multiple self-cognition systems; (2) individuals need to obtain evidence-based self-cognition when making self-judgments. When the neural system of evidence-based self-cognition is damaged, they can use other sources of self-cognition.

C Situational Factors

There is clear evidence that the evidence-based self-perception system is not the only self-perception system operating in humans. But the existence of another self-perception system can only be speculated, and its nature is still unknown. It seems that people's experiences are imprinted.

Recent research suggests that another type of self-perception may be based on neural mechanisms of intuition. Specifically, increasing experience in a domain may prompt people to gradually shift from relying on evidence-based self-perception to relying on intuition-based self-perception. When people make self-judgments in domains in which they have little experience, they use evidence-based self-perception; in domains that people are familiar with, they do not use evidence-based self-perception.

In other words, if a person needs to find evidence to prove himself in a certain field, then he is actually unfamiliar with this field; and if a person has enough experience and confidence in a certain field, then he is based on intuition. In the field that individuals are familiar with, their intuition and confidence activate the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, the nucleus accumbens of the basal ganglia, the amygdala, and the posterior parietal lobe. However, the study not only proves that self-cognition is based on multiple brain networks with different components, but also proves that these brain networks have essentially different operating characteristics. Future research will consider what kind of brain networks are used in self-cognition in different situations, motivations, cognitive states, goals, and existence.

Self-awareness and self-reflection

If the self is divided into the "objective self" based on the reference, evaluation and summary, and the "subjective self" based on the current feeling and experience, then the subjective self will be divided into two parts: self-awareness and self-control. Self-control occurs when the self realizes that adjustment is needed.

A Neural Association

If people never consider whether they are in pain or others, this is experience-based self-awareness. Moreover, self-awareness also occurs whenever there is a conflict, such as when people are asked to write numbers with their left hand and words with their right hand, which will also trigger self-attention, because we cannot maintain constant perception. Self-awareness is generated in the cingulate gyrus inside the brain. The activation of the anterior cingulate gyrus will trigger self-awareness and initiate cognitive, behavioral and physiological responses to eliminate conflicts as much as possible.

If the anterior cingulate gyrus triggers bottom-up self-awareness, then the posterior parietal lobe will initiate an indirect, top-down self-awareness. Damage to the posterior parietal lobe affects the patient's experience and recognition of self-disorders. If the conflict caused by the external situation can remind the self-awareness of self-attention through the cingulate gyrus, then under non-contextual stimuli, the posterior parietal lobe will remind the self-awareness to pay attention to itself.

B Neurocognitive Processes

Self-awareness in conflict and self-control to overcome the conflict often occur simultaneously and complement each other. Self-control has been found to activate the anterior cingulate gyrus and prefrontal cortex. But when there is a need for self-control, the anterior cingulate gyrus is activated, while the prefrontal cortex is activated to implement self-control. The role of the posterior parietal lobe in self-awareness is gradually being discovered. The posterior parietal lobe has two typical functions, one of which is to maintain working memory in a non-executive manner, and the other is to perform spatial processing.

Many studies have shown that the function of the posterior parietal cortex may be to transform non-symbolic, parallel, discrete representations into symbolic, linear, local representations. In other words, the posterior parietal cortex represents more abstract information, such as people visualize discrete clouds into meaningful graphics. These symbolic representations gradually appear on the invisible, unnoticed background, and are noticed by us, forming a stream of consciousness. For example, some people in a crowd form a graph while walking, and we notice the graph and it becomes conscious.

The key point of this inference is that the posterior parietal cortex receives neural innervation from the ventral temporal lobe and occipital lobe, the functions of the latter two brain regions are exactly visual processing, and the visual information in the occipital lobe can be decoded into objects and categories during unconscious processing. Therefore, when receiving stimuli at the critical point between subconscious and non-subconscious, the posterior parietal lobe will be activated in advance, and the stimulus will be perceived as meaningful. In other words, the parietal lobe has extraordinary meaning associations and insights in visual and graphic processing.

The ability to truly symbolize processing may be critical for perspective taking. Symbols can be used for propositions that explicitly represent asymmetric relations between entities. Perspective taking depends on the representation of asymmetric relations, and the person taking perspectives must distinguish their own perspective from the perspective of the target task. When engaging in episodic recall, people are trying to retrieve their own perspective from a point in the past, a form of self-perspective taking. Interestingly, when people recall their past perspectives, they must turn off processing of their present perspectives.

Just as we must start with perspective taking to rediscover our past selves, we must also consciously understand our current selves to take perspectives. It is difficult for us to directly estimate our own abilities, but people have a magical ability: "I don't know exactly how smart I am, but I can clearly judge how smart others are." Similarly, people may not be able to directly know themselves, but they can make self-judgments through the people around them who have already made judgments about them. But we should be cautious that people know different selves. When we know ourselves through the judgments of others, we should be as cautious as possible to maintain the diversity of ourselves. In other words, we are incomplete in the eyes of others, and we should know ourselves as completely as possible to maintain the integrity of ourselves.

To the extent that this process represents the acquisition of self-knowledge, it suggests that: (1) the generation of self-knowledge is a fundamentally social process, which is different from the naive "introspective acquisition" theory held by most people; and (2) the neural correlates of perspective taking should be central to self-awareness because perspective taking can help us generate or retrieve self-knowledge.

C Situational Factors

The precuneus is the area most often activated during self-judgment. This activation reflects some combination of self-perspective taking to access information about the past self and others’ important evaluations of oneself. To the extent that these perspective-taking processes are integrated, it is almost impossible to separate self-processing from social processing.

self control

Various neuropsychological disorders have shown that self-control, the ability to exert oneself in overcoming one's own impulses, is associated with the lateral prefrontal cortex and the basal ganglia. If the precuneus and cingulate gyrus activate self-awareness, the basal ganglia are involved in more automatic self-control that is built up gradually by habit, while the prefrontal cortex is mainly involved in self-control that requires effort.

A Neurocognitive Process

The lateral prefrontal cortex performs at least three neurocognitive functions when it comes to effortful self-control. The lateral prefrontal cortex is associated with working memory and language processing, two processes that together allow humans to form new propositions from a series of symbolic representations and remember them. This planning ability allows humans to imagine possible future situations and consider the consequences of impulses.

Although we can overcome impulses and adopt other flexible and controlled social behaviors and strategies, it obviously comes at a price. What is exciting is that the abilities of the prefrontal cortex have many similar control characteristics to the peripheral motor system: over time, self-control abilities will be strengthened by constant use, but in the short term, they will become fatigued or even exhausted due to overuse, and the explosive use of self-control in a short period of time will often lead to increasingly worse results.

Activation of the prefrontal cortex triggers self-control through three different computational mechanisms. First, the products of prefrontal activity—in the form of conclusions and behavioral intentions—can directly activate the motor system, controlling the individual's actions away from the control of more automated neural processes. However, the direct guidance of behavior by automated control is extremely flexible and useful in new environments, but when it continues to act on behavior, it requires constant effort and concentration. In addition, conclusions drawn solely from judgments and logic formed by the prefrontal cortex are far from perfect and often make the problem worse.

Research on decision making shows that explicit intent in making decisions often leads to systematic omission of key information, even when the information is at hand.

The second way the prefrontal cortex induces self-control is by promoting the activation of weaker processes and representations so that they can compete with more automatic processes and representations. In other words, the prefrontal cortex directs attention to weaker processes. The prefrontal cortex can also help individuals determine the identity of objects presented from unusual angles.

The final way the prefrontal cortex exerts control is by inhibiting uncertain impulses and representations. The ability to override preexisting associative impulses relies on the lateral orbitofrontal cortex. Attempting to inhibit a dominant behavioral response activates the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex. This finding extends to the realm of emotional self-regulation. When inhibiting strong emotions, the ventrolateral frontal cortex activates, which is critical for stress regulation.

If an event that evokes a strong emotional response requires the subject to reappraise and reframe the meaning of the event, thereby reducing negative emotions, this has been a topic of research in social psychology. There is evidence that when the meaning of an event changes for a person, the corresponding emotions will also change. Fear-related activation of the amygdala is more significant in the "attention" condition, while activation of the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex inhibits the emotional response of the amygdala. This has been confirmed in studies of patients with bipolar disorder, where reduced activation of the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex during decision-making suggests that one of the reasons why these patients become increasingly impulsive during manic states is that the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex is unable to inhibit these impulses.

The placebo effect and self-regulation through self-suggestion are also associated with the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex. Effortful attempts at self-control are associated with activity in the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, but the primary brain region involved in self-control may spontaneously trigger self-regulation. In other words, in previous studies, people consciously engaged in self-control, which seemed to be regulated by the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex. If the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex can inhibit unwanted impulses in the amygdala and other brain regions, then simply activating the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex may be sufficient to inhibit spontaneous emotional impulses, even if the current emotional state is not under self-control.

Social Perception

Sometimes, social cognition and social perception are almost synonymous. Understanding the personalities, intentions, beliefs, and identities of others is perhaps the most important form of perception for humans participating in social activities. Much of the research on social cognition in recent decades has most often emphasized the common errors that arise from these processes. The processes of attribution and stereotyping both involve individuals making judgments about the personalities, attitudes, intentions, and morals of others, with attribution focusing on behaviors and stereotyping focusing on groups. Identifying others is related to attribution or stereotyping, and decoding the emotional expressions of others is another important area of ​​social perception.

Attribution

Attribution is a unique human ability to understand the intentions, beliefs, desires, and stable psychological traits of others. It is easy for us to infer that the most motivated students are studious, and it is easy for us to infer that a sad person has encountered difficulties. Social psychology theory describes the rules for inferring other people's moods and traits from observed behavior. For example, a person who spits has certain traits and stable personality. But to a certain extent, human behavior is triggered by environmental norms, so it is impossible to separate norms from internal potential personality. It is difficult for us to attribute the quietness of students in the library to environmental norms or their personality. But if the behavior violates the norm, it is easy for us to make attributions.

Healthy adults frequently misattribute other people's behavior to their personality, while autism is a developmental disorder in which the ability to infer other people's moods continues to decline. A high-functioning autistic patient has an IQ and cognitive ability that is even higher than that of healthy adults, but they have difficulty inferring other people's moods, so we can think that social intelligence and other intelligence show a double dissociation.

In other words, compared to the individual acting in a certain way because he is in a certain situation, we are more inclined to believe that he will act in a certain way because he has a certain stable personality quality - for drug abusers, people are always used to attributing this to the person's quality problems. Even if we tell people that this is a good person, people still think that drug use is because the person's willpower is not strong. However, as mentioned earlier, norms and personality cannot be separated. Logically, it is not because not taking drugs has good personality qualities, and it cannot be assumed that taking drugs means there is a problem with personality qualities.

We need to pay attention to what was mentioned at the beginning, that the development and maintenance of an individual is the result of environmental shaping. In fact, an individual's behavior is more likely to be the result of environmental shaping rather than the influence of his or her personality traits.

We are always willing to believe that the author's content represents his thoughts. Even if someone tells us that the author was forced to write the opinion, we will still believe that it is his thoughts. We are more willing to believe that the poverty of the poor is the result of their lack of effort, rather than believing that the environment they experience causes their poverty. This attribution ability even extends to ourselves - we ignore the shaping power of the environment on ourselves, and always blame ourselves for not working hard enough.

This phenomenon is called correspondence bias or fundamental attribution bias. It refers to the tendency of people to attribute the behavior of others to their personality tendencies when attributing the behavior of others, and underestimate the role of known situational factors in the behavior. If autistic people have an underdeveloped ability to infer the mental state of others, then healthy adults have an overdeveloped ability to infer the mental state of others, and the bias of healthy adults is not so easy to reduce. Social psychologists believe that correspondence bias causes us to always attribute the responsibility of things to individuals, even if they may just be victims of the environment. For example, the legalization of marijuana in the United States, people always tend to attribute it to the "despicable decisions" of certain policymakers.

A Neurocognitive Process

People can divide the attribution process into three stages in chronological order: behavior classification, personality representation, and correction. For example, if a student sleeps in class, people will first classify the behavior of sleeping in class as inappropriate, then attribute it to personality representation, saying that the student does not pay attention to classroom discipline and does not like to study, and finally make corrections, whether it is because he reviewed too late last night, was under too much pressure and did not sleep well, which led to his inability to persist in class.

Correction is the key to this model. It mobilizes more cognitive resources and energy than the first two stages. Correction will fail if cognitive channels are blocked, knowledge is insufficient, emotional, tired, busy, mental inertia, cognitive fixation, or other reasons. In other words, individuals need mental effort and a desire for accuracy to take situational factors into account. Because these resources are always missing in daily life, people often show correspondence bias. Under cognitive load, the classification and attribution of the first two stages are not affected, but correction difficulties will occur. Therefore, to fully consider the impact of situational factors on human behavior, we need to reduce cognitive load, good emotional control, more knowledge and experience, and more flexible cognitive methods.

In the social cognition neuroscience model, the correction stage depends on the activation of the lateral prefrontal cortex, because the lateral frontal cortex is related to mental effort and the use of propositional logic. People will give a character to an inanimate cartoon animal and infer its character and intention. People are using generalized representations to make non-propositional inferences and blur the distinction between the actor's current behavior and the behavioral tendencies of his or her personality. In other words, when the connection between a person's behavior and the actor is vague, people will make forced attributions, and forced attributions will produce correspondence bias.

B. Situational Factors

Situational factors can change the attribution process. People are more likely to attribute their own negative behavior to the situation than to the negative behavior of others. Self-serving bias refers to the tendency of individuals to attribute their own problems to environmental factors and others' problems to personality. Self-serving bias can produce positive illusions, that is, I am always better than others.

The basal ganglia are involved in automatic positive emotion processing and automatic self-perception processing. Studies have found that the negative behavior of members of other groups is more likely to be attributed to their inherent character than that of members of the same group. The self-serving bias can extend beyond the physical self to members of the same group as the self or others with whom the individual empathizes. In other words, we will think that the negative behavior of people of the same group or those with whom we empathize is caused by the environment, while the negative behavior of people of other groups or strangers is a problem with their own character or their own responsibility.

Empathy is a key situational factor in social intelligence that can regulate the attribution process. The premise of empathy is to be able to recognize the other person's emotions and feel the same way. Cognitive neuroscience has just started to study empathy, but it has been proven that the emotional system has a neural mechanism similar to the mirror neurons in the motor system - we can simulate the emotions of others. Philosophy and social psychology have a long history of research on empathy, and it is a key factor in generating prosocial behavior and cognition.

Recent studies have found that tasks that require empathy and judgments about forgiveness can induce activation of the precuneus, while other social judgments cannot. The precuneus and the entire parietal lobe are activated at the critical point of the subconscious and conscious generation of meaning, which makes sense logically, as the foundation of human social behavior is based on empathy and the meaning generated after empathy.

In addition, self-perception is based on the evaluation of other people's positions, so our understanding of ourselves depends on how others treat our self and whether we are able to understand their perspective. The precuneus is activated in most studies on self-perception, and it is involved in the perspective-taking process, which is a prerequisite for empathy. Through self-empathy for others, we can have a more positive and tolerant attribution of the intentions behind his behavior.

Although self-perception and social perception are different processes, they are deeply intertwined. Without one, the other cannot be well understood. In the field of skills, only success can be considered as ability, because ability is seen as a necessary condition for success, while failure may be caused by many situational factors. Moral attribution is different from other types of intentional attribution. People think that it is excusable for a person to violate morality because of certain things, but unprovoked violation of morality will be attributed to personal quality problems. Therefore, moral attribution will be regulated by other brain areas, such as the orbitofrontal cortex.

Stereotype

In all aspects of life, people often use membership classification to guide their next behavior. To describe it in Chinese cultural terms, people are accustomed to classifying other people into different levels, which is the neuropsychological basis of stereotypes. People do not have stereotypes about paper clips and light bulbs because they do not have emotional activation for objects, but they will have emotions about the identity processing of light bulbs produced in Europe and Africa after the attributes. However, the greatest potential harm of stereotypes is to oneself, because people who have stereotypes about other groups are also likely to form stereotypes about themselves. What we should pay more attention to is that those groups that are blamed will form stereotypes about themselves.

Stereotypes often involve negative generalizations about the intelligence, abilities, and moral qualities of group members. That is, stereotypes of race, gender, age, and sexual orientation often involve emotional components that are not present in impressions of objects. And unlike objects, humans can fight back against stereotypes imposed on themselves. Groups that are branded with certain labels often publicly oppose the stereotypes imposed on them. Unfortunately, however, after being accused or "defined", members of these stigmatized groups (such as drug abusers, African Americans, Asian Americans, and Arab Americans) will develop self-doubt and then develop stereotypes about themselves. This self-consciousness can actually lead to self-fulfilling prophecies and ultimately prove those stereotypes that are not true in the first place.

For example, a drug addict who is criticized is likely to have self-doubt and then give up on himself to face the difficult life that he should have to deal with. At this time, emotions will lead to irrational behavior, and this behavior will further "verify" the expectations and predictions of others. In other words, the two basic ways of thinking of human beings are: declarative thinking and rule-based thinking. That is, if someone states that drug addicts have the problem of stealing, then people will automatically find out whether this description is correct. However, this description is biased, but the verification result is consistent with the description. Some drug addicts do have the problem of stealing, but certainly not all. Once people verify the fact that "drug addicts steal", they will have a second way of thinking, that is, rule-based thinking. This rule is "drug addicts will definitely steal" because they use one point to summarize a group, and this way of thinking is more labor-saving. But once rule-based thinking is produced, the consequence is: if you want to prove that drug addicts are good people, unless the entire group of drug addicts does not steal. Otherwise, people think that the proposition is not established. Even more unfortunately, drug addicts will often deny themselves until they make themselves perfect. Since becoming perfect is impossible, they often fall into constant self-denial, which forms a vicious circle caused by their way of thinking. Even after quitting drugs, drug addicts still cannot escape the stereotypes of others and themselves - just like those "smart people" described, unless they die, they will be drug addicts all their lives.

In a free society, people gradually realize that these negative socialized generalizations are unpleasant, so they will not admit to their biases in public, just as no one would say that they are biased against drug users. However, there is ample evidence that people still have negative stereotypes in their cognition and behavior. Therefore, it takes a lot of effort to self-regulate biased behavior. In short, stereotypes are so common that people who hold egalitarian views may express implicit stereotypes even if they do not consciously hold them. Implicit stereotypes are more harmful in some ways because they can go unchecked. In other words, the reason why the dark heart is dark is that it can grow wildly in the heart without being inhibited by the feedback from the world.

The study showed that both blacks and whites experienced greater activation in the amygdala when viewing photos of blacks, and that amygdala activation was associated with behavioral data on implicit stereotyping. Crucially, implicit stereotyping may be the result of repeated negative representations of stigmatized groups in school, the media, and elsewhere, which in other words do not elicit in-depth scrutiny from others, but rather lead to attribution and stereotyping.

What is even more interesting is that when people realize that emotions interfere with the normal processing of information, when people find themselves biased against themselves, and when people are depressed, they will use the frontal cortex to suppress emotional reactions and biased views. This call of the frontal cortex will occupy the normal working process of the frontal cortex, making the information channel of the frontal cortex crowded. This occupation of the process will affect the loss of subsequent processing. Therefore, prejudice and emotions will affect the normal thinking of the brain. It is worth noting that self-schema can be described as implicit self-stereotypes.

summary

Without social perception, there can be no self-processing. Social perception and the ability to gain the views of others are not only the beginning of self-formation, but also the key to constructing and maintaining the self in different periods of time. The self is a stable object. This trend is not only believed by scientists, but also by any human being with self-perception and independent consciousness. However, over time, the self changes to adapt to situations and interpersonal relationships, and at least part of it is being rebuilt.

Social perception also varies depending on the individual's perspective, and unlike some types of perception, social perception is highly motivated. Social stimuli are often ambiguous, and our interpretation of them is often affected by self-serving biases.