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Consciousness and the social mind Action editor: Leslie Marsh Philip Robbins Department of Philosophy, University of Missouri-Columbia, 426 General Classroom Building, Columbia, MO 65211-4160, USA Received 21 June 2007; accepted 6 July 2007

Abstract Phenomenal consciousness and social cognition are interlocking capacities, but the relations between them have yet to be systematically investigated. In this paper, I begin to develop a theoretical and empirical framework for such an investigation. I begin by describing the phenomenon known as social pain: the affect associated with the perception of actual or potential damage to one’s interpersonal relations. I then adduce a related phenomenon known as affective contagion: the tendency for emotions, moods, and other affective states to spread from person to person in social contexts. Experimental studies of these two phenomena suggest that affective consciousness depends on perception of the social world in much the same way that it depends on perception of the body – in short, that consciousness is ‘socially embodied’. In the second part of the paper I argue that the distinctive sociality of our species, especially its moral dimension, rests heavily on our ability to represent the conscious states of others. In closing, I put these ideas together and show how they point to a circular causal-mechanistic nexus between consciousness and social mindedness. Ó 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Consciousness; Emotion; Social cognition; Social pain; Embodiment; Mindreading; Moral cognition

1. Introduction Emotion is a hot topic, getting hotter all the time. The reasons for this enthusiasm are various, but the growth of neuroscientific interest in the area surely ranks high among them. The same goes for another hot topic: social cognition. Within the last two decades, two subfields of neuroscience have emerged: affective neuroscience, the study of the neural mechanisms underlying emotion and emotional feeling; and social neuroscience, the study of the neural mechanisms underlying social cognition. The parallel development of these new brain sciences is no accident. As Damasio (1994) makes clear, emotional and social functioning are deeply intertwined, since practical rationality is scaffolded by the ability to feel one’s way through the world, the social world included. This is now a familiar theme in cognitive science. Less familiar is the idea that the link between emotional and social functioning identiE-mail address: [email protected]

fied by Damasio forms part of a constellation of connections between consciousness (in the phenomenal, ‘what it’s like’ sense; see Nagel, 1974) and social cognition. In this paper, I try to identify some of these other connections, and to explore their implications for how we think about the conscious mind in general. The plan of the paper goes like this. In the first part, I argue that a wide swath of consciousness is a product of the social mind, as it arises from cognitive operations dedicated to processing information about the domain of persons. I begin by describing two phenomena that have attracted considerable attention in the empirical literature. The first is social pain: the affect associated with the perception of actual or potential damage to one’s interpersonal relations. The second phenomenon of interest is affective contagion: the tendency for emotions, moods, and other affective states to spread from person to person as a consequence of social perception. Neuroscientific investigation of these phenomena suggests that affective consciousness depends on perception of the social world in much the

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same way that it depends on perception of the body. It appears, in short, that consciousness is a ‘socially embodied’ capacity, in two senses of the term (articulated below). In the second part of the paper I look at the flip side of this thematic coin. Here I argue that the distinctive sociality of our species, especially its moral dimension, rests heavily on our ability to represent the conscious states of others. In closing, I try to connect the two main claims of the paper – the claim that consciousness is essentially social, and the claim that thinking about consciousness is socially essential – by showing how they jointly point to a kind of circular causal-mechanistic nexus between consciousness and social mindedness. 2. The social basis of experience In this section, I will argue that consciousness is fundamentally a social phenomenon, in two respects. First, each of us experiences damage or disorder in our social relations in partly the same way, and via partly the same neural mechanism, that we experience damage or disorder in our bodies. In effect, we experience our reflection in the social world as a literal extension of ourselves. Second, each of us ‘‘catches’’ the affective states of those around us. As a result, consciousness is dispersed across the local social environment. This helps to explain why pleasant experiences are more pleasant when shared with another person: the other person’s pleasure is reflected back onto oneself, amplifying the initial hedonic signal (likewise, mutatis mutandis, for unpleasant experiences). Feedback loops of this sort are a direct consequence of the fact that consciousness is essentially a ‘viral’ phenomenon, in the sense I will explain below. 2.1. Social pain Most of us have experienced serious physical pain: a blinding headache, a terrible cramp, an excruciating burn. No one doubts the unpleasantness of these episodes. But some of the most memorably unpleasant experiences in life are associated not with bodily upsets, but rather with upsets of the social kind. Compared with the experience of a bad breakup or a death in the family, the worst of headaches may not seem so bad after all. Then again, it is not clear in what sense the experiences are comparable. Apart from their generally aversive character and negative hedonic tone, it is not clear that headache and heartache have much in common. To decide whether there is a deeper connection here, we need to consult the relevant science. We begin with the official story of pain. According to the International Association for the Study of Pain, pain is ‘‘an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage, or described in terms of such damage’’ (Melzack & Wall, 1996). This gloss captures the dual-aspect nature of pain, namely, the fact that pain has both a sensory and an affective component.

The sensory component includes features such as location (e.g., hand vs. foot), intensity (mild vs. severe), and texture (dull vs. sharp, burning vs. throbbing). The affective component is harder to decompose into features. Ratings along this dimension are primarily intended to measure the raw unpleasantness, aversiveness, and bothersomeness of the sensation. The two components of pain are neurally distinct and functionally independent (Price, 2000). Neurally speaking, the sensory component is subserved by a lateral pathway ending in somatosensory cortex, whereas the affective pathway is more medial and tops out in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). In functional terms, sensory and affective pain processing are doubly dissociable. Patients with intractable pain who have undergone cingulotomy – that is, surgical destruction of the entire cingulate gyrus, including the ACC – report that their pains persist but no longer bother them. Asked how he was feeling, one such patient replied: ‘‘Oh, the pains are the same, but I feel fine now, thank you’’ (Damasio, 1994, p. 266). Roughly the same phenomenon, what Dennett (1978) calls ‘reactive dissociation’, is often seen in patients treated with morphine or other opium derivatives. In general, dissociability of the affective dimension of pain from the sensory dimension has been well established for some time. The reverse dissociation (affect without sensory qualities) is less common, but it too has been documented. Ploner, Freund, and Schnitzler (1999) reported on a stroke patient with a focal lesion in somatosensory cortex who described painful laser stimuli as unpleasant and aversive but could not specify the location, intensity, or texture of the evoked feelings in any detail. Hence, though normal pain has both an affective and a sensory aspect to it, these aspects appear to be both physiologically and functionally separable from each other. These facts provide the entering wedge for theorists of social pain, understood as ‘‘a specific emotional reaction to the perception that one is being excluded from desired relationships or devalued by desired relationship partners or groups’’ (MacDonald & Leary, 2005, p. 202). Part of the motivation for social pain theory is evolutionary (Panksepp, 1998, 2003). Among the distinguishing features of humans as a species is our lack of precocity and the relatively slow pace of our cognitive and motor development. Given the greatly protracted dependence of human young on their caregivers, the capacity to detect damage to one’s social relations is as necessary to survival – hence, as fitness-enhancing – as the capacity to detect damage to one’s body. Research in the area is also animated by the observation that social injury is no less distressing than injury of the physical kind, and that the neural and psychological correlates of such distress are similar. For these reasons, some social pain theorists suggest that the commonsense equation of pain with physical pain is a metaphysical mistake: ‘‘In our analysis, it is most accurate to say that the affective responses to physical trauma usually described as physical pain are themselves a subcategory of emotional pain, albeit a fundamental one’’ (MacDonald & Leary,

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2005, p. 203). On the revised view, physical pain is one species of pain, and social pain is another. The main line of argument for this hypothesis rests on evidence that social pain and physical pain rely on substantially overlapping brain mechanisms. Of particular interest here is a dorsal region of anterior cingulate cortex (dACC). As noted above, the ACC seems to be implicated in the affective, as opposed to sensory, side of physical pain processing. The more specific claim is supported by neuroimaging studies showing that increased activity in dACC correlates with the felt unpleasantness of physically painful stimuli (Price, 2000). In a parallel fMRI study of social pain, Eisenberger, Lieberman, and Williams (2003) scanned the brains of subjects playing CyberBall, a computerized ball-tossing game. The task consisted of two phases: an inclusion phase, in which subjects threw the ball back and forth with the other players, followed by an exclusion phase, in which subjects were not thrown the ball and thereby shut out of the game. Increased activity in dACC was detected during the exclusion phase, the level of which correlated with each subject’s level of selfreported distress. The hypothesis that dACC plays a causal role in the production of social pain is also borne out by animal studies. For example, direct electrical stimulation of the dACC in monkeys causes them to emit spontaneous ‘distress cries’ – vocalizations made by young animals when separated from their caregivers – and ablating the dACC eliminates this behavior (Eisenberger & Lieberman, 2004). These findings in animals are especially suggestive of neural overlap between social and physical pain given the efficacy of cingulotomy as a treatment for intractable physical pain in humans. Physical pain and social pain are significantly correlated at the psychological level as well (Eisenberger & Lieberman, 2004; MacDonald & Leary, 2005). Three points here. First, there is pharmacological evidence that sensitivity to physical pain correlates with sensitivity to social pain. Opiate-based drugs such as morphine, though typically prescribed to alleviate physical pain, have a similar effect on social pain. The same point applies, mutatis mutandis, to anti-depressants such as Prozac – so much so that drugs of this class (i.e., selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs) are now prescribed for the treatment of chronic physical pain. Second, there is evidence of correlation from studies of personality that employ the ‘Big Five’ model (openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism). In particular, sensitivity to physical pain is positively correlated with one of these factors (neuroticism) and negatively correlated with a second (extraversion). Sensitivity to social rejection and social anxiety correlates the same way, i.e., positively for neuroticism and negatively for extraversion. Third, increased levels of social support correlate with decreased levels of selfreported social distress, on the one hand, and decreased sensitivity to physical pain, on the other. It is open to dispute whether these considerations show that social pain and physical pain are species of the same

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genus. Questions of metaphysics are tricky, and this one is no exception. Fortunately we do not need to settle it for the purposes at hand. What is at issue in the present context is whether it makes sense to think of consciousness as a product of social perception roughly on a par with the way we think of it as a product of bodily perception. To settle this question in the affirmative, all we need is the claim that social pain, like physical pain, is phenomenologically, psychologically, and neurally real, and the claim that it performs an analogous function, namely, signaling actual or potential damage to the integrity of the interpersonal self, or ‘social body’. Both of these claims are plausible. Taken together, they add substance to the idea of the social mind as a basic source of affective consciousness, comparable in that respect to the somatosensory mind. This formulation of the social embodiment hypothesis, however, raises another delicate metaphysical question, related to the first. It seems natural to understand the suggestion above, that affective consciousness is a product of social perception, as a causal claim. That is, the idea seems to be that certain forms of affective experience causally originate in social perception. But if we take the analogy between social and bodily perception in earnest, it seems more appropriate to say that affective consciousness is a component of social perception, rather than a product of it. That is because, on the assumption that social and physical pain are ontologically kindred capacities, it makes sense to think of social pain as constitutive of social perception, in the same way that the felt unpleasantness of physical pain, its affective character, is constitutive of this mode of bodily perception. Pending a good argument to that effect, however, prudence dictates that we content ourselves with the weaker (i.e., causal, rather than constitutive) claim. 2.2. Affective contagion We are accustomed to thinking of phenomenal consciousness as the most private of possessions. This is one of the features of consciousness that makes it seem such an elusive topic of scientific investigation. There is a sense in which consciousness’ reputation for privacy is deserved: arguably, each of us enjoys considerably greater epistemic authority with respect to at least some of our own conscious states (e.g., pains, itches, visual sensations) than any third-party observer does. But privacy in the epistemic sense does not confer privacy in the metaphysical sense. Conscious mental states are no less metaphysically public – that is, shareable by different individuals – than their non-conscious counterparts. What is more, some conscious states seem especially likely to be shared by different persons in the same social vicinity, in virtue of the operation of fairly low-level mechanisms of social perception. The existence of this ‘viral’ sector of consciousness, which includes emotions, pains, and other affective states, supports the idea that individual consciousness is strongly socially mediated.

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The experience of affective contagion is a familiar one to most of us. When observing another person displaying behavior expressive of a feeling state, we often automatically mimic the behavior and share the feeling, if only fleetingly. This phenomenon has been well studied using traditional behavioral methods (Hatfield, Cacioppo, & Rapson, 1993). More recently, it has been validated by non-invasive brain imaging studies of disgust and pain. In the case of disgust, Wicker et al. (2003) scanned the brains of subjects while they inhaled disgusting and nondisgusting odorants, and found a pattern of activation in the anterior insula similar to that observed when the subjects looked at pictures of disgusted and non-disgusted faces. In the case of pain, Singer et al. (2004) scanned the brains of subjects while they were given a painful electric shock and compared the activation pattern to that seen when subjects observed a loved one being shocked. They found overlapping activation in dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC), the part of the brain’s pain circuitry responsible for processing the affective dimension of pain, that is, its felt unpleasantness. It is possible that affective contagion is a special case of a more general phenomenon, namely, mental mirroring (Singer, 2006). Neuroscientific investigation of this phenomenon was pioneered about 20 years ago by Rizzolati and his team at Parma (Rizzolatti, Fadiga, Gallese, & Fogassi, 1996). They found that neurons in the ventral premotor cortex (specifically, area F5) of macaque monkeys discharge both during execution of goal-directed hand actions and when the monkey observes similar actions performed by others. Not long after, a similar system of ‘mirror neurons’ was discovered in humans. For example, neuroimaging studies with PET have shown that observation of grasping activates the anterior part of Broca’s area, a homolog of monkey premotor area F5. And Fadiga, Fogassi, Pavesi, and Rizzolatti (1995) found that during action observation, transcranial magnetic stimulation of motor cortex induces enhanced motor-evoked potentials in action-specific muscles. The work of Wicker, Singer, and others suggests that mirroring applies as much to affect as it does to motor function. The phenomenon appears to be an even more pervasive feature of the mind than that, judging from a recent study of haptic perception, or touch (Keysers et al., 2004). The jury is still out, however, on whether mirror neurons can explain all, or even most, of the contagion effects that have been observed. The fact that mental states are often transmitted from person to person has interesting implications for how we think about consciousness. The fact that individual minds naturally and automatically converge, especially after extended periods of interaction (Anderson & Keltner, 2004), suggests that each person’s consciousness is to some extent a projection, a social-cognitive artifact, of the consciousness of socially salient others. Despite its reputation for privacy, then, consciousness turns out to be a surprisingly public affair, though not in any metaphysically scandalous sense. The publicity of consciousness, understood as

a by-product of its viral character, also lends support to the idea of social embodiment mooted earlier, apropos of social pain: the idea that affective consciousness is governed by perception of one’s social milieu just as it is governed by perception of one’s body. But it also supports a second, more literal idea of such embodiment. This further sense of social embodiment can be understood as follows. It is evident that consciousness causally depends, in regular ways and very directly, on changes in the internal physical state of the organism (Damasio, 1999). What the phenomenon of affective contagion suggests is that consciousness also causally depends, in similarly regular ways but less directly, on changes in the internal physical state of organisms in the social vicinity. Thus, consciousness reflects the condition of others’ bodies just as it reflects the condition of one’s own, albeit to a lesser extent. 3. The experiential basis of sociality In this section, I turn to examine the nexus between consciousness and sociality from a different angle. The issue is this: How does the capacity to represent the phenomenally conscious states of others (their pains, pleasures, emotions, and the like) contribute to human social functioning? I will tackle this question in two stages, by looking at the link between phenomenal mindreading and two other capacities: social interaction and moral cognition. Before getting down to the main business, however, a few preliminaries are in order. From infancy onward, we begin to develop a sense of how people tick: to understand what they are thinking and feeling, why they are behaving as they are, why they have behaving as they have in the past, how they are likely to behave in the future, and so on. The preferred term for this capacity is ‘mindreading’ (Baron-Cohen, 1995; Nichols & Stich, 2003). Some of us – poker players and politicians, con artists and car dealers – are better at mindreading than others. But all of us do it, every day. How we do it is a matter of continuing controversy. But this much seems clear: mindreading is not a monolithic capacity. It is a complex of more or less fine-grained subcapacities, each with its own special function and dedicated mechanism. This complexity is captured in Baron-Cohen’s classic (1995) account of mindreading, which posits an eye direction detector, an intentionality detector, a shared-attention mechanism, and a theory of mind mechanism. It is also reflected in the structure of several other accounts, including Tager-Flusberg and Sullivan’s (2000) distinction between ‘social-perceptual’ and ‘social-cognitive’ modes of mindreading, and Goldman’s (2006) distinction between ‘low-level’ and ‘high-level’ mindreading (see also Gray, Gray, & Wegner, 2007; Knobe & Prinz, in press; Robbins, 2004, 2006; Robbins & Jack, 2006; Saxe & Powell, 2006; Singer, 2006). Each of these accounts draws a distinction between the capacity to represent intentional mental states as such (beliefs, desires, intentions, and other states specified partly by propositional content but typically lacking a distinctive

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phenomenal feel, or what-it’s-like-ness) and the capacity to represent phenomenal states as such (like pains, simple emotions, visual sensations, and other states with the opposite profile, that is, phenomenal feel without specified propositional content). The ‘‘as such’’ qualification is intended to highlight the fact that the distinction between intentional states and phenomenal states at issue here is conceptual, not metaphysical. It is a distinction between two ways of thinking about mental states, rather than a distinction between mental-state types per se: a dichotomy in our heads, not in the world. Only recently has this distinction begun to get traction in the literature. As the emphasis on false-belief tasks (e.g., the Sally-Anne task, the Smarties task, and variants thereof) in the experimental literature to date shows, the bulk of research has zeroed in on the intentional side of mindreading – the capacity to attribute beliefs, desires, and intentions, and to predict and explain behavior on that basis – and fairly neglected the phenomenal side. This is unfortunate, since the distinctive profile of human sociality owes much, if not more, to the phenomenal side of the equation. In the rest of this section I will explain why. 3.1. Experience and interaction Intuitively it is hard to resist the idea that fluid social interaction rests on the ability of the participants in the exchange to monitor each other’s conscious states, especially their joys, sorrows, pains, and other affective states. Without this ability, it seems, we could not navigate the quotidian social world with anything like the fluency with which we are normally accustomed. This much seems evident to common sense. It also fits the clinical record, specifically, research on Asperger syndrome and Williams syndrome. Let us start with the case of Asperger syndrome (AS). This is a variant of high-functioning autism, a pervasive neurodevelopmental disorder marked by problems with social interaction and communication, together with restricted, repetitive, and stereotyped patterns of behavior, interests, and activities. As far as language skills go, individuals with AS typically acquire more or less normal syntax, semantics, and phonology on a more or less normal schedule, but they have great difficulty carrying on a normal conversation (Frith & Happe´, 1994). They also have difficulty recognizing the emotions of people around them, negative emotions in particular (Ashwin, Chapman, Colle, & Baron-Cohen, 2006; Dziobek, Fleck, Rogers, Wolf, & Convit, 2006), and they struggle with low-level, perceptually oriented mindreading tasks. These tasks include ‘reading the mind in the eyes’ (Baron-Cohen, Jolliffe, & Wheelwright, 1997) and attributing social properties to ambiguous visual stimuli, such as the Heider–Simmel cartoon (Klin, Schultz, & Cohen, 2000). Their weak performance in this department contrasts with their performance on higher-level, inference-driven tasks, such as understanding false-belief narratives (Bowler, 1992). Despite their greater facility with tasks of this sort, however, individuals

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with AS flounder in routine social interaction, and they feel generally estranged from other people. They are profoundly egocentric: in extreme cases, they are focused exclusively on themselves and are oblivious to the interests and concerns of anyone else (Baron-Cohen, 2005). This is what we should expect to find if fluency at phenomenal mindreading is what matters most for flourishing in the social world. The fact that individuals with AS have deficits in both intentional and phenomenal mindreading, however, makes it hard to say which capacity is more fundamental to everyday social functioning. It could be that the deeper source of these individuals’ difficulties lies in the intentional domain, rather than the phenomenal one. But there is reason to doubt that hypothesis. Consider the profile of Williams syndrome (WS). Williams syndrome is characterized by a relatively high degree of social functioning juxtaposed with a spectrum of cognitive deficits, including problems with visuospatial cognition, hand–eye coordination, numerical cognition, and commonsense reasoning (Bellugi, Lichtenberg, Jones, Lai, & St. George, 2000; Karmiloff-Smith, Klima, Bellugi, Grant, & Baron-Cohen, 1995). Most people with WS are severely retarded. As far as the non-social world goes, they are operating at a huge disadvantage: they cannot tie their shoelaces, find their way to the grocery store, add two numbers together, retrieve things from a cupboard, tell left from right, judge distances, or even negotiate stairs. Fortunately, their ability to navigate the social world is far better. Individuals with WS are talkative and sociable, and their linguistic competence includes the understanding of jokes, sarcasm, irony, and other forms of non-literal speech (Karmiloff-Smith et al., 1995). What explains this discrepancy? At least part of the answer seems to be that the genetic deletion responsible for WS does not knock out the ability to read another person’s emotional states from their facial expressions, posture, gait, and gestures (Tager-Flusberg & Sullivan, 2000). For example, WS subjects are pretty good at the ‘eyes’ task alluded to earlier (Tager-Flusberg, Boshart, & Baron-Cohen, 1998; but see Tager-Flusberg & Plesa-Skwerer, 2006, for second thoughts). On balance, the evidence suggests that phenomenal mindreading is relatively spared in WS. Intentional mindreading in this disorder, as gauged by performance on false-belief tasks and the like, is a different – and less happy – story. But this deficit does not keep people with Williams syndrome from being energetically engaged in the social world, if only in a limited way (e.g., typically excluding friendships and other long-term relationships, per Davies, Udwin, & Howlin, 1998). The contrast with Asperger syndrome is striking, and instructive. 3.2. Experience and moral cognition Common sense suggests that thinking of something as a locus of experience involves thinking of it as a potential target of moral concern. It seems intuitive that phenome-

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nal states, and phenomenal consciousness in general, have moral value. We care about what others are experiencing, and we care about it for its own sake, not merely as a means to some end of our own. For example, part of what it is to regard something as a locus of experience is to treat it as a ‘moral patient’, that is, as something that one ought to shield from avoidable harm. A creature in distress demands our attention and mandates our best efforts to alleviate that distress. A creature facing the threat of injury (hence, pain) or death (hence, the cessation of experience altogether) engages our attention in much the same way. In short, aversive phenomenal states like pain, sadness, and fear – as well as phenomenal experience more generally – are primitively morally compelling. As Singer (1976) puts it, following the lead of Bentham (1789), it seems to us that ‘‘if a being suffers, there can be no moral justification for refusing to take that suffering into consideration’’. The point can be strengthened. Put crudely: If a being has phenomenal experience of any sort (i.e., if there is something that it is like to be that being), we are morally obliged to take that experience into consideration. In other words, it is not just that we feel morally obliged to consider others’ pains; we also feel morally obliged to consider their pleasures, and perhaps even their hedonically neutral experiences, as factors in deciding how we should act. This is not to say, of course, that those considerations trump all others, or even that they invariably carry a lot of moral weight. It is simply to say that they occupy a place in our moral attention and reasoning. That, at any rate, seems like a fair conjecture as to the folk conception of these matters, in broad strokes (leaving aside various subtleties that need not detain us here). A point worth stressing here is that, according to the folk conception, the connection between phenomenality and moral patiency has little or no echo on the intentional side of the mind. Bentham (1789) made this point explicitly (and poignantly) when he wrote, regarding the moral status of non-human animals: The day may come when the rest of animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny . . . The question is not, Can they reason? Nor, Can they talk? But, Can they suffer? That is, while phenomenality and moral patiency are intimately linked in the folk conception of the mind, intentionality and moral patiency are not, at least not to anything like the same degree (Robbins & Jack, 2006). Recently this twofold hypothesis was experimentally confirmed in a large-scale study using an on-line survey method (Gray et al., 2007). Survey participants were presented with a cast of 13 characters (including a human fetus, a child, an adult, a dog, and a robot) and asked to rate them pairwise, on a five-point scale, on various mental capacities, with each participant making a total of 78 comparisons. A factor analysis of the ratings yielded two

‘‘dimensions of mind’’: experiential capacities, such as pain and joy, which belong mostly to the domain of feeling; and agentic capacities, such as self-control and planning, which belong mostly to the domain of thought. Gray and her colleagues also found that different aspects of moral valuation correlated with these different dimensions. In particular, moral patiency (judged by the question, ‘‘If you were forced to harm one of these characters, which one would it be more painful for you to harm?’’) correlated strongly with experience (r = 0.85), but only weakly with agency (r = 0.26). A similar result – call it the ‘Bentham effect’ – was found in a smaller-scale study of folk intuitions about mind and morals using a narrative-based method (Jack & Robbins, 2006). In this study, participants read a fictional story about lobsters slowly starving to death in traps, and then rated their baseline moral concern for the victims. They were then asked to recalculate their moral concern for the lobsters in two alternative science-fictional scenarios. In one scenario, scientists discovered that lobsters were highly intelligent but wholly insentient; in the other, the opposite discovery was made. Average ratings of moral patiency by the participants significantly decreased relative to baseline in the first scenario (intelligence without sentience) and increased in the second (sentience without intelligence). This finding further substantiates the claim that according to folk intuitions about the mind and morality, Bentham was right: what matters most to moral patiency is not whether a creature is clever, but whether it is conscious. If the folk conception of the mind is correct, then we should expect that the capacity to attribute moral patiency will be linked to the capacity to understand the phenomenal (as opposed to the intentional) mind. And there is some clinical evidence to that effect, from studies of psychopathy. Psychopathy is a personality disorder marked by an array of cognitive and affective deficits, including lack of concern for others’ distress, lack of remorse, shallow affect, impulsivity, pathological lying, and poor behavioral controls (Hare, 1991). Perhaps the most striking symptom of the disorder is what used to be called ‘moral insanity’: psychopaths appear to be incapable of regarding others as worthy of moral consideration. They also suffer from selective deficits in face-based emotion recognition, notably negative emotions like fear (Blair et al., 2004). They also lack affective empathy, judging from their lack of emotional responsivity to distress cues in others (Blair et al., 1996). What they do not suffer from, however, is any comparable difficulty understanding the beliefs, desires, and intentions of others. On the contrary, psychopaths perform well on tests of intentional mindreading, such as advanced (i.e., second-order) false-belief tasks, and they are often good at Machiavellian reasoning. This is just the pattern we should expect to find if phenomenal, as opposed to intentional, mindreading – the ability to understand others’ pains, pleasures, emotions, and other conscious states – is what lies at the heart of our capacity to care about others for their own sake.

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But this dependency claim raises a question: Why are not individuals with Asperger syndrome also morally incompetent, just like psychopaths? One possibility, of course, is that they are incompetent in this domain, but for one reason or another do not express this incompetence in the dramatic fashion characteristic of psychopaths. This seems unlikely, however, for a couple of reasons. First, there is the fact of autistics’ performance on standard tests of moral understanding, such as the ability to distinguish moral from conventional transgressions (Turiel, 1983). Moral transgressions, such as punching someone or picking their pocket, violate rules protecting the rights and welfare of others. Conventional transgressions, such as cross-dressing or nose-picking, violate rules protecting more or less arbitrary features of the social order. Psychopaths fail to distinguish reliably between moral and conventional transgressions, and they fail to justify prohibitions against examples of each category in normatively appropriate ways (Blair, 1995). Individuals with autistic spectrum disorders, such as AS, do not have this problem (Blair, 1996). Second, some individuals with autism exhibit a keen moral sense: Autistic individuals can be profoundly upset by the idea of suffering, and they can show righteous indignation... One young man with Asperger syndrome, seeing a girl roughly treated, attacked her escort, with painful consequences for himself. (Frith, 2003, p. 112) Further evidence of preserved moral understanding in AS can be found in the writings of Temple Grandin, which reveal her passionate concern for the welfare of animals (Grandin, 1995). On balance, then, the suggestion that individuals with AS are morally incompetent has little merit (Kennett, 2002). A more plausible story about moral cognition in AS is that the deficits in emotion recognition observed in this disorder have a different source than they do in psychopathy. Individuals with autistic spectrum disorders such as AS, like normal controls, show obvious signs of autonomic arousal, such as increased skin conductance, in response to viewing photographs of infants and adults in distress (Blair, 1999), whereas psychopaths are not much bothered by such images (Blair et al., 1996). This suggests that, in contrast with the case of psychopathy, affective empathy is intact in autism (Frith, 2003). On the assumption that (a) emotion recognition involves the application of emotion concepts and (b) the possession of emotion concepts requires affective empathy, it may be that autistics have difficulty recognizing others’ negative emotions because they have difficulty applying the relevant concepts (e.g., due to problems with processing information from faces), whereas psychopaths have difficulty recognizing others’ negative emotions because they lack those concepts altogether (e.g., due to lack of affective empathy). Thus, the reason autistics are not morally insane is that they can, and sometimes do, process the emotional expressions of other people in the empathic mode that moral sanity requires. It is just

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that they cannot reliably access the information needed to initiate this processing in everyday social encounters. 4. Social mind, viral mind Let us take stock, then press on a bit further. I have argued that consciousness and social cognition are connected in two ways. First, social cognition is responsible for an important slice of our conscious experience. Second, the ability to represent the conscious experience of other people, a particular facet of social cognition, is responsible for some of the most important features of our social functioning. So far I have said nothing about how these two connections relate to each other. It is time to fill in that gap. In describing the social character of consciousness, we noted that consciousness is to some extent a viral phenomenon. Though each individual has her own distinctive point of view on the world, a good deal of the content of individual experience is picked up from contact with others. This tendency of consciousness to spread from person to person appears to play a causal role in phenomenal mindreading, the process by which we understand the conscious states of others. Probably the best evidence to this effect comes from the clinical literature on face-based emotion recognition. There is a whole crop of neuropsychological studies of individuals who have lost the ability to recognize a specific emotion (e.g., fear or disgust) as well as the capacity to experience that emotion, but who can recognize and experience other emotions normally (Goldman, 2006). A natural way to explain these cases of selective paired deficits in emotion recognition and experience is according to the ‘mental resonance’ model of phenomenal (low-level) mindreading: we recognize others’ emotions by mirroring their state, then introspectively classifying the result of that mirroring, and finally attributing the introspected state to the target. On this model, mechanisms of affective contagion are part of the machinery of mindreading. This model is consistent with clinical studies of autism showing deficits in both emotion recognition and emotional mimicry (McIntosh, ReichmannDecker, Winkielman, & Wilbarger, 2006), and studies of Williams syndrome showing that both of these capacities are intact (Fidler, Hepburn, Most, Philofsky, & Rogers, 2007). In terms of thinking about the relation between consciousness and the social mind, this brings us literally full circle. We saw earlier that consciousness is shaped by the social mind, in virtue of phenomena like social pain and affective contagion. We also saw that the ability to represent the conscious states of others contributes something vital to social competence. Finally, we have just seen that this representational ability may turn on the ability to mirror the conscious states of others in oneself. Hence, just as consciousness depends on the whirrings of the social mind, social mindedness may depend on the whirrings of consciousness.

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