Recent technological and cultural change has introduced new and fast-evolving challenges to social perception and evaluation. Deepfakes, misinformation, artificial agents, and other technologically mediated phenomena pose novel inputs to these systems, and the psychological mechanisms through which perceivers interpret, believe, and evaluate them remain incompletely understood. 
This symposium examines these issues through the lens of the beholder’s share: the extent to which what we “see” in others—including artificial agents—is shaped by predictions grounded in prior knowledge, beliefs, and emotional context. The psychology of the perceiver matters ever more as technologies produce increasingly convincing social signals, such that beliefs and contextual cues—like knowing an image is fake—become distinctive factors in determining their impact.
Emotion plays a central role across the five presentations, each addressing how affective meaning interacts with belief and authenticity in social cognition. Julia Baum’s talk examines EEG correlates of social evaluation under potential misinformation, identifying neural markers of susceptibility and effective intervention. Alexander Leonhardt investigates how intentionality evoked by affective knowledge and robot appearance jointly shape mind attribution and moral-emotional evaluation of humanoid robots. Martin Maier’s presentation explores how emotionally relevant deepfake faces and scenes influence neural responses and evaluations, revealing asymmetries in how positive versus negative content is discounted when believed to be artificial. Annika Ziereis will show behavioral and EEG data examining the processing of naturally photographed or AI-generated facial expressions, evaluating how the actual and perceived authenticity of the emotional cues influences neural and behavioral responses. Finally, Jana Vanek turns to the mechanisms of social-perceptual change itself, showing through EEG studies of meme-like humor how new contextual information can trigger sudden perspective shifts and reorganize social meaning in real time.
Together, these investigations illuminate how emotions, beliefs, and expectations guide perception in increasingly uncertain and often artificially social environments. By focusing on the interplay between psychological processes and cultural-technological transformations, the symposium aims to advance understanding of how humans navigate authenticity, agency, and moral evaluation in a rapidly changing social world.