In Press, Psychological Science Folk Explanations of Behavior: A Specialized Use of a Domain-General Mechanism

We typically explain other people's behaviors by attributing them to the beliefs and motives of an unobservable mind. Although such attributional inferences are critical for understanding the social world, it is unclear whether they rely on processes distinct from those used to understand the nonsocial world. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to identify brain regions associated with making attributions about social and nonsocial situations. Attributions in both domains activated a common set of brain regions, and individual differences in the domain-specific recruitment of one of these regions in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex correlated with attributional accuracy in each respective domain. Overall, however, this brain region showed greater activated for attributions about social situations, and this selective response to the social domain was greatest in those participants reporting the highest levels of social expertise. We conclude that folk explanations of behavior are an expert use of a domain-general cognitive ability.