Project

Sally disagrees with you! A unified theory of human sociality.

Code
01P09721
Duration
01 October 2021 → 30 December 2022
Funding
Regional and community funding: Special Research Fund
Promotor
Research disciplines
  • Social sciences
    • Learning and behaviour
    • Motivation and emotion
  • Medical and health sciences
    • Behavioural neuroscience
    • Cognitive neuroscience
Keywords
theory of mind mentalizing social cognition
 
Project description

As fundamentally social beings, we usually keep company with the people that think like ourselves: Our friends and loved ones. This project aims to deliver a unifying theory of human sociality that can account for why the human brain may want to avoid conflict between own and others' ways of thinking. This will be achieved via online behavioural experiments, a highly innovative functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) design, and philosophical approaches. The project expects to generate knowledge on the social neuroscience of political/religious group behaviour, shedding light on the brain mechanisms that underlie social cognition. It will benefit our approach to societal problems like discrimination, fundamentalism and extremism.