UC Berkeley

To guide social interaction, people often rely on expectations about the traits of other people, based on markers of social group membership (i.e., stereotypes). Although the influence of stereotypes on social behavior is widespread, key questions remain about how traits inferred from social-group membership are instantiated in the brain and incorporated into neural computations that guide social behavior. Here, we show that the human lateral orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) represents the content of stereotypes about members of different social groups in the service of social decision-making. During functional MRI scanning, participants decided how to distribute resources across themselves and members of a variety of social groups in a modified Dictator Game. Behaviorally, we replicated our recent finding that inferences about others' traits, captured by a two-dimensional framework of stereotype content (warmth and competence), had dissociable effects on participants' monetary-allocation choices: recipients' warmth increased participants’ aversion to advantageous inequity (i.e., earning more than recipients), and recipients’ competence increased participants’ aversion to disadvantageous inequity (i.e., earning less than recipients). Neurally, representational similarity analysis revealed that others' traits in the two-dimensional space were represented in the temporoparietal junction and superior temporal sulcus, two regions associated with mentalizing, and in the lateral OFC, known to represent inferred features of a decision context outside the social domain. Critically, only the latter predicted individual choices, suggesting that the effect of stereotypes on behavior is mediated by inference-based decision-making processes in the OFC.