Author ORCID Identifier

https://orcid.org/0009-0000-4548-5978

Date of Award

Spring 2026

Document Type

Thesis (Ph.D.)

Department or Program

Cognitive Neuroscience

First Advisor

Jonathan Phillips

Second Advisor

Steven Frankland

Third Advisor

Mark Thornton

Abstract

Human lives are increasingly shaped by collective entities (e.g., corporations, governments, nonprofits) that make consequential decisions and evoke trust, blame, and praise. Yet how people perceive and relate to these non-individual agents remains underexplored. This dissertation investigates collective mind perception, moral repair, and forgiveness across three chapters using experimental, neuroimaging, and corpus-based methods.

Chapter 1 examines how collective entities repair their moral standing after wrongdoing. Across four studies, agentic cues such as responsibility-taking and corrective plans consistently outperform experiential expressions such as remorse in eliciting forgiveness toward organizational transgressors. Agentic apologies also reshape memory: participants recall the apology content more accurately while remembering fewer details of the harm. A corpus analysis of real-world apologies corroborates this pattern, showing that collectives naturally gravitate toward agentic language and that this linguistic profile predicts more favorable evaluations. Chapter 2 investigates the neural mechanisms of interpersonal forgiveness. Using a two-day fMRI paradigm, we show that effective forgiveness updates memory representations of negative experiences: information considered during forgiving becomes incorporated into the memory trace, with updating localized to the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex and posterior hippocampus. These findings support a “forgive and update” account of the way forgiveness reshapes memory of transgressions. Chapter 3 maps the representational landscape of collective entities across five studies. A bottom-up approach reveals a two-dimensional Dominance–Sociality structure, in which Dominance predicts attribution of cognitive capacity but dampens perceived experiential capacity, whereas Sociality predicts both. Contextualized vignettes further show that people spontaneously assign mental states to collectives, with organizational features shaping these attributions.

Together, this work offers a multi-level account of how people perceive, evaluate, and forgive collective agents, integrating social cognition, moral psychology, and cognitive neuroscience.

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