LAUSR

Social life requires us to treat each person according to their unique disposition. To tailor our behavior to specific individuals, we must represent their idiosyncrasies. Here, we advance the hypothesis that our representations of other people reflect the mental states we perceive those people to habitually experience. We tested this hypothesis by measuring whether neural representations of people could be accurately reconstructed by summing state representations. Separate participants underwent functional MRI while considering famous individuals and individual mental states. Online participants rated how often each famous person experiences each state. Results supported the summed state hypothesis: frequency-weighted sums of state-specific brain activity patterns accurately reconstructed person-specific patterns. Moreover, the summed state account outperformed the established alternative—that people represent others using trait dimensions—in explaining interpersonal similarity. These findings demonstrate that the brain represents people as the sums of the mental states they experience.Social life requires us to store information about each person’s unique disposition. Here, the authors show that the brain represents people as the sums of the mental states that those people are believed to experience.