Have you ever wondered what’s going on in your friend’s brain when they think about you? Well, a team of Ohio State University researchers did, and they carried out a study to find the answer. The results provide some insight into what happens in the workings of the mind when someone close to you thinks about you.
What exactly did they discover? If your friend truly knows you, the neural representation (brain activity patterns) in their brain when they think about you will match the neural representation in your brain when you think about yourself. So, when your friend considers a specific personality trait about you, it will likely be incredibly akin to what is found in your brain when you think of that particular personality trait about yourself.
For example, if you think “I am creative” when your friend considers whether you are creative or not and thinks “he/she is creative” – the image of brain activity patterns from your mind and your friends’ mind will look alike.
The study found that brain patterns differed when people thought about different people.
The study co-author and assistant professor of psychology at The Ohio State University, Dylan Wagner, said:
It was somewhat surprising to see the close similarity in brain patterns between individuals and their friends. It didn’t have to be that way. We thought it was equally possible that you would think of me in the same way as I think of myself, but the way your brain encodes that information could be totally different.
The leader of the study was an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Oregon, Robert Chavez, who did the project as a postdoctoral researcher at Ohio State. Together, he and Wagner recruited 11 people who were all good friends in and out of university. The participants were a tight-knit group who spent time together at school and went out together in their free time. They used a research design that had rarely been used in functional neuroimaging experiments before. The study was then published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: Attitudes and Social Cognition.
The Study
- A novel round-robin design was utilized in which everyone evaluated each other – and then themselves in the same way – on a range of personality traits.
- Each person rated themselves and their ten friends in a written questionnaire in the first session. The questions had to do with personality traits – 48 of them, including lonely, cold, sad, lazy, trustworthy, overcritical, enthusiastic, fashionable, clumsy, helpful, smart, punctual, and nice.
- In a second session, they did the same thing, but this time they answered the questions while in an fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) scanner instead of writing them. The fMRI scanner took images of each person’s brain while they rated each friend and themselves on the 48 traits.
The Results
- There was activity in the medial prefrontal cortex. That’s the part of the brain implicated in thinking about close ones and the self.
- The combined brain activity of all ten friends evaluating one was similar to that person’s brain activity evaluating themselves.
Wagner said:
This suggests that order to accurately perceive another person, your neural representation of that person – your patterns of brain activity for their identity – has to essentially match the pattern in that persons’ brain when they are thinking about themselves.
Chavez added:
Each one of your friends gets to see a slightly different side of you. When you put them all together, it is a better approximation of how you have seen yourself than any one person individually.
The next phase of their research will see a larger version of this round-robin design focusing on different groups of people, such as work friends vs. personal friends.
