Emma Otterski
Category: Philosophy
Keywords: mindreading, theory of mind, social cognition, empathic accuracy, emotions, social status, power
Date: Wednesday 3rd of September
Time: 16:00
Location: Room 154 (154)
View the full session: Mind Reading
This paper considers the impact of social status on mindreading. Focussing on emotion attribution, I argue that one’s status in society results in differences in how and when we mindread and that salient, transitory status in an interaction can have similar effects. Attention to social dynamics, then, on both a societal and interpersonal level, offers as-yet unacknowledged insights into the mechanisms underlying mindreading.
In a 2020 interview, director Spike Lee was praised for creating “balanced, compelling and humane white characters”. Asked why he thinks white filmmakers tend not to be able to do the same for Black characters, Lee responded, “…the minorities know more about the majority and it’s not vice-versa because we’re swamped by the majority culture” (Shoard, 2020). This sentiment is familiar to anyone interested in social epistemology but perhaps less so to social cognition researchers; there has been scant uptake of such insights despite ostensibly being highly relevant, given a shared interest in our understanding of others. In philosophy, social cognition has focused on giving an account of the cognitive mechanisms underlying our ability to mindread, with scant attention to how socio-cultural phenomena – at least in adulthood – may affect this. Until recently, if philosophical accounts of mindreading considered cultural factors, it was to highlight cross-cultural differences in platitudinous or external theories of folk psychology while maintaining no difference at the level of mindreading. While not unwarranted given robust findings showing broad convergence in the development of false-belief understanding, it is odd that this would be the end of the story. False-belief tests are methodological tools designed to measure a specific ability. For one, they do not tell us when we engage in mindreading, which is a broader set of competencies than false-belief understanding.
Socio-economic status (SES) has been shown as a variable affecting the developmental trajectory of mental-state understanding. In western society, data indicate that children with low SES pass the elicited false-belief test later than those with high SES (e.g. Holmes, Black and Miller, 1996; Shatz et al., 2003), though the general trajectory of mindreading development remains the same. However, the later onset of false-belief understanding between those with low and high SES is not reflected in poorer performance in mindreading tasks in adulthood. In fact, studies indicate adults from lower SES backgrounds are better at recognising others’ emotions (Kraus, Piff and Keltner, 2009; Kraus, Côté and Keltner, 2010; Kraus et al., 2012), with the social and material environments that people inhabit fostering and reinforcing different socio-cognitive attentional patterns.
It has been suggested that individuals with low SES develop ‘contextualist’ tendencies, which can be seen in folk explanations of social events and self-concepts. Regarding explanations of events, people with low SES are more likely to describe events in terms of contextual factors than people with high SES, who are more likely to offer dispositional explanations. The focus on context by people with low SES is not confined to verbal explanations of events but is mirrored in perceptual attention to context when judging others’ emotional states. For instance, Kraus and colleagues (2009) found that lower SES individuals were more influenced by background information, in this case, the emotional states of other people in the background, when rating the emotional state of someone in the foreground. Using Spaulding’s (2018) distinction between the methods and goals of mindreading, I argue this indicates that there are intra-cultural mindreading differences due to socio-economic status (SES) even when the goal is the same.
However, some of the results appealed to above are reproduced even when SES is manipulated, i.e., when someone perceives themselves to have low SES in a certain situation, or when one is manipulated to feel lower SES, suggesting that differences in stable socio-cognitive patterns are not the only status-related effects on mindreading. To explore this, I turn to work on social power (e.g., Guinote, 2013; Galinsky et al., 2003) and developmental studies of the effect of salient status (Rizzo and Killen, 2018) to suggest the beginnings of an explanation for why salient or transitory status can have similar results to the outputs of the socio-cognitive patterns formed by long-term position within a society.
The upshot is that interaction dynamics and one’s position within a culture can each affect one’s ability and motivation to mindread, something not captured in received theories of mindreading. While interactive vs. observational effects on social cognition and their implications for theories of mindreading have been extensively discussed, this has largely proceeded independently of discussions of socio-cultural differences, which have, in contrast, received relatively limited attention. This paper shows the benefits of attending to both together.