About

Jason P. Mitchell is a principal investigator at Harvard University whose research focuses on social cognition, social influence, and the neural mechanisms underlying social behavior. His work involves understanding how the brain makes mental state judgments and how social and behavioral modifications are influenced by social environments. Mitchell's research also explores the cognitive and neural processes that differentiate humans from non-human primates, aiming to uncover what makes human social cognition unique. Throughout his career, Mitchell has contributed to the understanding of social neuroscience, examining how representations in the brain support social understanding and decision-making. His research integrates behavioral studies with neural investigations to elucidate the mechanisms of social influence, memory, and cognition. As a leader in the field, Mitchell's work advances knowledge of the neural basis of social behavior and the psychological processes that shape social interactions.

Research topics

• Social psychology
• Cognitive psychology
• Psychology
• Neuroscience
• Developmental psychology

Selected publications

• Frontotemporal contributions to social and non‐social semantic judgements

  Journal of Neuropsychology · 2023-05-31 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Semantic judgements involve the use of general knowledge about the world in specific situations. Such judgements are typically associated with activity in a number of brain regions that include the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG). However, previous studies showed activity in brain regions associated with mentalizing, including the right temporoparietal junction (TPJ), in semantic judgements that involved social knowledge. The aim of the present study was to investigate if social and non-social semantic judgements are dissociated using a combination of fMRI and repetitive TMS. To study this, we asked participants to estimate the percentage of exemplars in a given category that shared a specified attribute. Categories could be either social (i.e., stereotypes) or non-social (i.e., object categories). As expected, fMRI results (n = 26) showed enhanced activity in the left IFG that was specific to non-social semantic judgements. However, statistical evidence did not support that repetitive TMS stimulation (n = 19) to this brain region specifically disrupted non-social semantic judgements. Also as expected, the right TPJ showed enhanced activity to social semantic judgements. However, statistical evidence did not support that repetitive TMS stimulation to this brain region specifically disrupted social semantic judgements. It is possible that the causal networks involved in social and non-social semantic judgements may be more complex than expected.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Confirmation of interpersonal expectations is intrinsically rewarding

  Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience · 2021 · 21 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Psychology
  • Social psychology
  • Cognitive psychology

  People want to interact successfully with other individuals, and they invest significant efforts in attempting to do so. Decades of research have demonstrated that to simplify the dauntingly complex task of interpersonal communication, perceivers predict the responses of individuals in their environment using stereotypes and other sources of prior knowledge. Here, we show that these top-down expectations can also shape the subjective value of expectation-consistent and expectation-violating targets. Specifically, in two neuroimaging experiments (n = 58), we observed increased activation in brain regions associated with reward processing-including the nucleus accumbens-when perceivers observed information consistent with their social expectations. In two additional behavioral experiments (n = 704), we observed that perceivers were willing to forgo money to encounter an expectation-consistent target and avoid an expectation-violating target. Together, these findings suggest that perceivers value having their social expectations confirmed, much like food or monetary rewards.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Human Face-Selective Cortex Does Not Distinguish between Members of a Racial Outgroup

  eNeuro · 2020 · 16 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Psychology
  • Cognitive psychology
  • Social psychology

  67) perceivers were slower to discriminate between different outgroup members and remembered them to a lesser extent. Together, these results suggest that the outgroup homogeneity effect arises when early-to-mid-level visual processing results in an erroneous overlap of representations of outgroup members.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Simulation: A strategy for mindreading similar but not dissimilar others?

  Journal of Experimental Social Psychology · 2020 · 13 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Psychology
  • Social psychology
  • Cognitive psychology
  PublisherDOI

• Confirmation of interpersonal expectations is intrinsically rewarding

  bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) · 2020-07-19 · 2 citations

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract People want to interact successfully with other individuals, and they invest significant efforts in attempting to do so. Decades of research have demonstrated that to simplify the dauntingly complex task of interpersonal communication, perceivers use stereotypes and other sources of prior knowledge to predict the responses of individuals in their environment. Here, we show that these top-down expectations can also shape the subjective value of expectation-consistent and expectation-violating targets. Specifically, in two neuroimaging experiments ( n = 58), we observed increased activation in brain regions associated with reward processing—including the nucleus accumbens—when perceivers observed information consistent with their social expectations. In two additional behavioral experiments ( n = 704), we observed that perceivers were willing to forgo money to encounter an expectation-consistent target and avoid an expectation-violating target. Together, these findings suggest that perceivers value having their social expectations confirmed, much like food or monetary rewards.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Wanting without enjoying: The social value of sharing experiences

  PLoS ONE · 2019-04-18 · 53 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Social connection can be a rich source of happiness. Humans routinely go out of their way to seek out social connection and avoid social isolation. What are the proximal forces that motivate people to share experiences with others? Here we used a novel experience-sharing and decision-making paradigm to understand the value of shared experiences. In seven experiments across Studies 1 and 2, participants demonstrated a strong motivation to engage in shared experiences. At the same time, participants did not report a commensurate increase in hedonic value or emotional amplification, suggesting that the motivation to share experiences need not derive from their immediate hedonic value. In Study 3, participants reported their explicit beliefs about the reasons people engage in shared experiences: Participants reported being motivated by the desire to forge a social connection. Together, these findings suggest that the desire to share an experience may be distinct from the subjective experience of achieving that state. People may be so driven to connect with each other that social experiences remain valuable even in the most minimalistic contexts.

  PublisherDOI

• FaceRS1 - neural expressions of outgroup homogeneity

  OSF Preprints (OSF Preprints) · 2019-01-22

  articleOpen access

  People often fail to individuate members of social outgroups, a phenomenon known as the outgroup homogeneity effect. Here we used fMRI repetition suppression to demonstrate that perceivers’ neural activity distinguishes different faces only when targets belong to the perceivers’ racial ingroup. In contrast, face-selective cortex did not discriminate between other-race individuals. These results suggest that the outgroup homogeneity effect arises from an erroneous overlap of representations in early-to-mid-level visual processing.

  Publisher

• E-book Is Not a Four Letter Word

  2018-11-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  As the landscape of e-book publishers, platforms, and acquisition models continues to shift and expand, librarians and staff working in collection development and acquisitions do their best to stay on top of ever-changing decision-points and workflows.At the William H. Hannon Library at Loyola Marymount University, twenty librarian-liaisons are also expected to stay informed of new or changing options when it comes time to select a format for monographs in their subject areas. But selection is a secondary responsibility for most of our liaisons, and information about changes in our e-book collection development shared via email or even through semi-regular face to face liaison meetings often fails to “stick.” As a result, many liaisons continue making selection decisions about e-books based on outdated or incomplete information, or in some cases become overwhelmed and omit e-books from their decision-making process altogether.As if frustration during the selection process weren’t enough, public services librarians also reported challenges with helping our users understand the increasing complexities of selecting and using e-books for their research.In order to prevent “e-book” from becoming a profane phrase, staff in Acquisitions & Collection Development decided to see what we could do to increase communication and reduce e-book anxiety for our liaisons both as selectors and in their roles working with end-users. In this presentation, attendees learned about the development and implementation of a two-hour interactive E-book Boot Camp designed to increase LMU librarians’ knowledge and confidence in making informed decisions about e-book selection in GOBI and in providing support to our students and faculty.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Consistent Neural Activity Patterns Represent Personally Familiar People

  Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience · 2017-05-30 · 42 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  How does the brain encode and organize our understanding of the people we know? In this study, participants imagined personally familiar others in a variety of contexts while undergoing fMRI. Using multivoxel pattern analysis, we demonstrated that thinking about familiar others elicits consistent fine-grained patterns of neural activity. Person-specific patterns were distributed across many regions previously associated with social cognition, including medial prefrontal, medial parietal, and lateral temporoparietal cortices, as well as other regions including the anterior and mid-cingulate, insula, and precentral gyrus. Analogous context-specific patterns were observed in medial parietal and superior occipital regions. These results suggest that medial parietal cortex may play a particularly central role in simulating familiar others, as this is the only region to simultaneously represent both person and context information. Moreover, within portions of medial parietal cortex, the degree to which person-specific patterns were typically instated on a given trial predicted subsequent judgments of accuracy and vividness in the mental simulation. This suggests that people may access neural representations in this region to form metacognitive judgments of confidence in their mental simulations. In addition to fine-grained patterns within brain regions, we also observed encoding of both familiar people and contexts in coarse-grained patterns spread across the independently defined social brain network. Finally, we found tentative evidence that several established theories of person perception might explain the relative similarity between person-specific patterns within the social brain network.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Theories of Person Perception Predict Patterns of Neural Activity During Mentalizing

  Cerebral Cortex · 2017-08-01 · 105 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Social life requires making inferences about other people. What information do perceivers spontaneously draw upon to make such inferences? Here, we test 4 major theories of person perception, and 1 synthetic theory that combines their features, to determine whether the dimensions of such theories can serve as bases for describing patterns of neural activity during mentalizing. While undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging, participants made social judgments about well-known public figures. Patterns of brain activity were then predicted using feature encoding models that represented target people's positions on theoretical dimensions such as warmth and competence. All 5 theories of person perception proved highly accurate at reconstructing activity patterns, indicating that each could describe the informational basis of mentalizing. Cross-validation indicated that the theories robustly generalized across both targets and participants. The synthetic theory consistently attained the best performance-approximately two-thirds of noise ceiling accuracy--indicating that, in combination, the theories considered here can account for much of the neural representation of other people. Moreover, encoding models trained on the present data could reconstruct patterns of activity associated with mental state representations in independent data, suggesting the use of a common neural code to represent others' traits and states.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• NIH Grant R01AG032780

  NIH · $1.1M · 2014

• The Neural Basis of Stereotypic Thinking

  NSF · $610k · 2007–2011

• CRCNS Data Sharing: An open data repository for cognitive neuroscience: The Open fMRI Project

  NSF · $102k · 2011–2014

Frequent coauthors

• C. Neil Macrae

  University of Aberdeen

  66 shared

• Mahzarin R. Banaji

  Harvard University

  39 shared

• Louise F. Pendry

  University of Exeter

  16 shared

• Jamil Zaki

  Stanford University

  12 shared

• Anthony D. Wagner

  Stanford University

  10 shared

• Jasmin Cloutier

  University of Delaware

  10 shared

• Daniel L. Schacter

  10 shared

• Diana Tamir

  Princeton University

  9 shared

Labs

• Jason P. Mitchell LabPI

Education

• Ph.D., Psychology

  Harvard University

  2005

• B.A., Psychology

  University of California, Berkeley

  1999