Mind Attribution is for Morality

Mental state reasoning is crucial for moral evaluation and social interaction. In the first half of the paper, we discuss recent and ongoing work on mental state reasoning for moral evaluation – judging agents from a position “on high” as an observer or a judge. In the second half of the paper, we turn to moral cognition “on the ground” – mental state reasoning for social interaction. We discuss evidence indicating distinct behavioral and neural signatures of mental state reasoning for distinct motivational contexts – for interacting with ingroups versus outgroups, for cooperation versus competition, and for affiliation versus action prediction.