Capgras Delusion and The Neuroscience of Social Media Imposters
On an ordinary summer morning in 1994, David woke up with a stranger in the house.
When he went into the kitchen for breakfast, there she was, making coffee. She looks up at him calmly as he enters the room, as if nothing is out of the ordinary. "Hello, David," the portly woman in a sunflower dress says calmly. "How does she know my name?" David thinks.
When he studies her face, he's struck by an uncanny observation: she looks exactly like his Mom. She looks like her, talks like her, and acts like her. He doesn't know who this woman is, but one thing is certain - she's not his Mom. She's a realistic look-alike who's impersonating his mother; she's an imposter.
The woman here is, in fact, David's mother. David, or patient D.S., as he was known, suffers from a rare disorder called Capgras Delusion. It's a neurological condition typified by a deeply held, uncanny conviction: the people close to them are not who they say they are. They are imposters. She looks like your mother, but something's missing; she's an imposter pretending to be your mother.
What accounts for this seemingly strange belief? The experiences of people with Capgras Delusion appear bizarre. However, when we examine its underlying neuroscience, we see that these beliefs aren't so irrational; they're the only rational response the brain can draw when presented with a strange set of social circumstances. And when we zoom out and look at our own circumstances, it provides us with a key framework to understand our own psychology in the digital world. More specifically, the neuroscience of social media imposters.
To experience Capgras Delusion is to experience a person - or a collection of people, devoid of their deeper humanity. In many ways, this is the social media we’ve inherited: a world full of people who look real, but who feel like imposters. At its core, this is the social experience of TikTok.
Before we can understand this connection with TikTok, we first need to take a step back and understand the neuroscience of Capgras Delusion. Why do otherwise lucid people become convinced that their close friends are imposters?
Why do People feel like Imposters? The Social Neuroscience of Capgras Delusion
Capgras Delusion is a mysterious condition. The leading explanation is that it arises with brain damage or neurodegeneration in the brain's temporal lobe, which separates two streams of social representation. Ordinarily, we represent the people we know in two ways. One is what we know about them. It's their basic biography and superficial, external features: we know what they look like, what they do as a career, etc.
At the same time, we also have a representation of the person's internal model: their personality, beliefs, and their humanity. Not just what they do, but who they are and how they make us feel. This is a much more emotional representation than a semantic one - you don't know someone is an honest, trustworthy person; you feel it.
These two types of representation - knowing the features, and feeling the humanity, are governed by distinct regions of the brain's temporal lobe.
Ordinarily, these two types of representation are so closely linked and interconnected that their contributions are seamless. It’s human nature that we experience them as one. When you look at your Mom - you instantly recognize and retrieve what you know we know about her, and simultaneously, you feel their deeper humanity. You automatically sense the "warm glow" of their essence.
In the case of Capgras Delusion, this connection is severed. The second, more emotional representation is damaged or inaccessible. The warm, emotional feel is gone. All that remains is the cold hard facts. So now, when you look at your mother, all you get are the basic features. The warm glow you'd ordinarily expect from this person is absent.
The only conclusion our brain can draw, given this strange set of affairs, is that the person you're looking at is an imposter. They look like my Mom, but they don't feel like my Mom. Therefore, they're a "fake" Mom! An imposter
As the Philosopher of Mind, William Hirstein writes, "Capgras syndrome occurs when the internal portion of the representation is damaged. This produces the impression of someone who looks right on the outside, but seems different on the inside, i.e., an impostor."
In other words, the Capgras experience is all what and no who; all facts and no warmth; all of a person's external features, and and none of the internal landscape.
In Capgras Delusion, real people don't feel like real people. And in the digital world, this strange way of seeing other people is slowly becoming the norm.
How Social Media Became Asocial
We see this kind of social experience most profoundly in TikTok. But as we'll soon see, social media has slowly evolved towards being less and less social.
How did social media come to be so asocial?
The biggest difference between online and real-world social experiences is that online, people are commodified. Their personhood must be distilled down to fit within the confines of a specific digital platform. If it's Facebook, for example, you get a circular headshot, a few lines of description, a photo album, etc. And when you appear in the newsfeed, you appear in the same format as everyone else.
To be exported into a digital environment, a person's humanity must be boiled down into a collection of manageable pixels. So when you interact with someone on social media, or see their content, it's necessarily an abstraction of who they are.
This abstraction process, however, is just the beginning.
As the first major social media platform, Facebook built its empire of users by leveraging their existing social ties. In the beginning, it was just a series of individual profile pages. If you wanted to see what your friend Lindsay did over the weekend, you had to look up her page and see what she had posted. You deliberately engaged with someone you likely knew well in real life.
Overall, your experience was tethered entirely to your existing social network as a user. Sure, everyone is a digital abstraction, but these are people you actually know. The pictures and videos they post are symbols of their real-life existence. And the enjoyment we derive comes from sharing in a life that we already about.
It's not real life, but it's a close digital approximation. And it checks the same social boxes. When you look at a photo - you retrieve their features, and you feel the humanity. The social experience of early Facebook was the same way.
At least in the very beginning.
As the platform evolved, the social experience became less and less connected with your real-life social network. First, the newsfeed came, and this began to show not just your friends' activity, but their friends' activity. And then came content that the algorithm gleaned would be interesting to you, just given your interests and your history of likes. Then came Instagram, influencer culture, parasocial relationships, and a steady flow of people you neither know, nor could ever come to know, in real life.
Slowly, newsfeeds began to fill up with strangers. And social media became asocial.
From Social Media to TikTok Media
As a general category, social media has become less connected with your existing social connections. Engaging with social media became less about engaging with friends in a digital format, and more akin to stepping into a completely distinct social environment.
And then came TikTok. And it threw the social baby out of the social media bathwater. While other platforms had tiptoed outside the bounds of a user's social network, TikTok never ventured there in the first place.
And as TikTok has grown in size and popularity, it has brought us face-to-face with a new kind of social experience: the Capgras Delusion of social media.
Photo by Bruce Christianson on Unsplash
This is the first of a two-part series on social psychology and the digital world. How does Capgras play out on TikTok? Find out in the final piece in this series, the social neuroscience of TikTok.
About the author
Matt Johnson, PhD is a researcher, writer, and consumer neuroscientist focusing on the application of psychology to branding. He is the author of the best-selling consumer psychology book Blindsight, and Branding That Means Business (Economist Books, Fall 2022). Contact Matt for speaking engagements, opportunities to collaborate, or just to say hello
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