Theory of mind
In psychology and philosophy, theory of mind is the capacity to understand other individuals by ascribing mental states to them. A theory of mind includes the understanding that others' beliefs, desires, intentions, emotions, and thoughts may be different from one's own. Possessing a functional theory of mind is crucial for success in everyday human social interactions. People utilize a theory of mind when analyzing, judging, and inferring other people's behaviors.
Theory of mind was first conceptualized by researchers evaluating the presence of theory of mind in animals. Today, theory of mind research also investigates factors affecting theory of mind in humans, such as whether drug and alcohol consumption, language development, cognitive delays, age, and culture can affect a person's capacity to display theory of mind.
It has been proposed that deficits in theory of mind may occur in people with autism, anorexia nervosa, schizophrenia, dysphoria, addiction, and brain damage caused by alcohol's neurotoxicity. Neuroimaging shows that the medial prefrontal cortex, the posterior superior temporal sulcus, the precuneus, and the amygdala are associated with theory of mind tasks. Patients with frontal lobe or temporoparietal junction lesions find some theory of mind tasks difficult. One's theory of mind develops in childhood as the prefrontal cortex develops.
Definition
The "theory of mind" is described as a theory because the behavior of the other person, such as their statements and expressions, is the only thing being directly observed; no one has direct access to the mind of another, and the existence and nature of the mind must be inferred. It is typically assumed others have minds analogous to one's own; this assumption is based on three reciprocal social interactions, as observed in joint attention, the functional use of language, and the understanding of others' emotions and actions. Theory of mind allows one to attribute thoughts, desires, and intentions to others, to predict or explain their actions, and to posit their intentions. It enables one to understand that mental states can be the cause of—and can be used to explain and predict—the behavior of others. Being able to attribute mental states to others and understanding them as causes of behavior implies, in part, one must be able to conceive of the mind as a "generator of representations". If a person does not have a mature theory of mind, it may be a sign of cognitive or developmental impairment.Theory of mind appears to be an innate potential ability in humans that requires social and other experience over many years for its full development. Different people may develop more or less effective theories of mind. Neo-Piagetian theories of cognitive development maintain that theory of mind is a byproduct of a broader hypercognitive ability of the human mind to register, monitor, and represent its own functioning.
Empathy—the recognition and understanding of the states of mind of others, including their beliefs, desires, and particularly emotions—is a related concept. Empathy is often characterized as the ability to "put oneself into another's shoes". Recent neuro-ethological studies of animal behavior suggest that rodents may exhibit empathetic abilities. While empathy is known as emotional perspective-taking, theory of mind is defined as cognitive perspective-taking.
Research on theory of mind, in humans and animals, adults and children, normally and atypically developing, has grown rapidly in the years since Premack and Guy Woodruff's 1978 paper, "Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind?". The field of social neuroscience has also begun to address this debate by imaging the brains of humans while they perform tasks that require the understanding of an intention, belief, or other mental state in others.
An alternative account of theory of mind is given in operant psychology and provides empirical evidence for a functional account of both perspective-taking and empathy. The most developed operant approach is founded on research on derived relational responding and is subsumed within relational frame theory. Derived relational responding relies on the ability to identify derived relations, or relationships between stimuli that are not directly learned or reinforced; for example, if "snake" is related to "danger" and "danger" is related to "fear", people may know to fear snakes even without learning an explicit connection between snakes and fear. According to this view, empathy and perspective-taking comprise a complex set of derived relational abilities based on learning to discriminate and respond verbally to ever more complex relations between self, others, place, and time, and through established relations.
Philosophical and psychological roots
Discussions of theory of mind have their roots in philosophical debate from the time of René Descartes' Second Meditation, which set the foundations for considering the science of the mind.Two differing approaches in philosophy for explaining theory of mind are theory-theory and simulation theory. Theory-theory claims that individuals use "theories" grounded in folk psychology to reason about others' minds. According to theory-theory, these folk psychology theories are developed automatically and innately by concepts and rules we have for ourselves, and then instantiated through social interactions. In contrast, simulation-theory argues that individuals simulate the internal states of others to build mental models for their cognitive processes. A basic example of this is someone imagining themselves in the position of another person to infer the other person's thoughts and feelings. Theory of mind is also closely related to person perception and attribution theory from social psychology.
It is common and intuitive to assume that others have minds. People anthropomorphize non-human animals, inanimate objects, and even natural phenomena. Daniel Dennett referred to this tendency as taking an "intentional stance" toward things: we assume they have intentions, to help predict their future behavior. However, there is an important distinction between taking an "intentional stance" toward something and entering a "shared world" with it. The intentional stance is a functional relationship, describing the use of a theory due to its practical utility, rather than the accuracy of its representation of the world. As such, it is something people resort to during interpersonal interactions. A shared world is directly perceived and its existence structures reality itself for the perceiver. It is not just a lens, through which the perceiver views the world; it in many ways constitutes the cognition, as both its object and the blueprint used to structure perception into understanding. In recent studies on human interaction with generative artificial intelligence systems, the term noosemia has been proposed to describe the tendency of users to attribute mental states and intentionality to such systems.
The philosophical roots of another perspective, the relational frame theory account of theory of mind, arise from contextual psychology, which refers to the study of organisms interacting in and with a historical and current situational context. It is an approach based on contextualism, a philosophy in which any event is interpreted as an ongoing act inseparable from its current and historical context and in which a radically functional approach to truth and meaning is adopted. As a variant of contextualism, RFT focuses on the construction of practical, scientific knowledge. This scientific form of contextual psychology is virtually synonymous with the philosophy of operant psychology.
Development
The study of which animals are capable of attributing knowledge and mental states to others, as well as the development of this ability in human ontogeny and phylogeny, identifies several behavioral precursors to theory of mind. Understanding attention, understanding of others' intentions, and imitative experience with others are hallmarks of a theory of mind that may be observed early in the development of what later becomes a full-fledged theory.Simon Baron-Cohen proposed that infants' understanding of attention in others acts as a critical precursor to the development of theory of mind. Understanding attention involves understanding that seeing can be directed selectively as attention, that the looker assesses the seen object as "of interest", and that seeing can induce beliefs. A possible illustration of theory of mind in infants is joint attention. Joint attention refers to when two people look at and attend to the same thing. Parents often use the act of pointing to prompt infants to engage in joint attention; understanding this prompt requires that infants take into account another person's mental state and understand that the person notices an object or finds it of interest. Baron-Cohen speculates that the inclination to spontaneously reference an object in the world as of interest, via pointing, and to likewise appreciate the directed attention of another, may be the underlying motive behind all human communication.
Understanding others' intentions is another critical precursor to understanding other minds because intentionality is a fundamental feature of mental states and events. The "intentional stance" was defined by Daniel Dennett as an understanding that others' actions are goal-directed and arise from particular beliefs or desires. Both two and three-year-old children could discriminate when an experimenter intentionally or accidentally marked a box with stickers. Even earlier in development, Andrew N. Meltzoff found that 18-month-old infants could perform target tasks involving the manipulation of objects that adult experimenters attempted and failed, suggesting the infants could represent the object-manipulating behavior of adults as involving goals and intentions. While attribution of intention and knowledge is investigated in young humans and nonhuman animals to detect precursors to a theory of mind, Gagliardi et al. have pointed out that even adult humans do not always act in a way consistent with an attributional perspective. In their experiment, adult human subjects attempted to choose the container baited with a small object from a selection of four containers when guided by confederates who could not see which container was baited.
Research in developmental psychology suggests that an infant's ability to imitate others lies at the origins of both theory of mind and other social-cognitive achievements like perspective-taking and empathy. According to Meltzoff, the infant's innate understanding that others are "like me" allows them to recognize the equivalence between the physical and mental states apparent in others and those felt by the self. For example, the infant uses their own experiences, orienting their head and eyes toward an object of interest to understand the movements of others who turn toward an object; that is, they will generally attend to objects of interest or significance. Some researchers in comparative disciplines have hesitated to put too much weight on imitation as a critical precursor to advanced human social-cognitive skills like mentalizing and empathizing, especially if true imitation is no longer employed by adults. A test of imitation by Alexandra Horowitz found that adult subjects imitated an experimenter demonstrating a novel task far less closely than children did. Horowitz points out that the precise psychological state underlying imitation is unclear and cannot, by itself, be used to draw conclusions about the mental states of humans.
While much research has been done on infants, theory of mind develops continuously throughout childhood and into late adolescence as the synapses in the prefrontal cortex develop. The prefrontal cortex is thought to be involved in planning and decision-making. Children seem to develop theory of mind skills sequentially. The first skill to develop is the ability to recognize that others have diverse desires. Children are able to recognize that others have diverse beliefs soon after. The next skill to develop is recognizing that others have access to different knowledge bases. Finally, children are able to understand that others may have false beliefs and that others are capable of hiding emotions. While this sequence represents the general trend in skill acquisition, it seems that more emphasis is placed on some skills in certain cultures, leading to more valued skills to develop before those that are considered not as important. For example, in individualistic cultures such as the United States, a greater emphasis is placed on the ability to recognize that others have different opinions and beliefs. In a collectivistic culture, such as China, this skill may not be as important and therefore may not develop until later.