Ian Apperly, Rory Devine and Stephen Butterfill
Affiliation: University of Birmingham & University of Warwick
Category: Psychology
Keywords: mindreading, theory of mind, individual differences
Date: Wednesday 3rd of September
Time: 15:30
Location: Room 154 (154)
View the full session: Mind Reading
Research on mindreading has been dominated by questions about the presence, absence or nature of mindreading concepts or structures, and by paradigms designed to create the most favourable circumstances for demonstrating such abilities. This focus on competence has led to a neglect of questions about performance. Yet without a theory of performance, mindreading concepts and structures are incapable of explaining how we ascribe particular thoughts and feelings to other people, and it is impossible to explain core empirical findings about individual differences in mindreading. In the past ten years there has been a great expansion in the evidence base on individual differences in mindreading. These demonstrate variation in mindreading abilities long after children first pass tests of their understanding of knowledge, beliefs, desires, and intentions. These individual differences are stable over time and appear to persist into adulthood. They are specific to mindreading, and not only due to individual differences in motivation or processing capacity. They are consequential for real-world social abilities. I will argue that these findings cannot be explained by existing accounts that focus on the development of the concepts and structures necessary for mindreading. I will draw upon recent work on modal reasoning to propose an account on which competent mindreading requires generating and selecting mental states. But whereas modal reasoning generates plausible and appropriate ideas based upon the value of those ideas to the individual themselves, I will suggest that mindreading requires generation and selection of ideas that can be recognised as plausible and appropriate by other people. This requirement means that mindreading is essentially a joint social activity. It is an asynchronous joint activity because, once learned, it can be performed alone. Viewed this way, it is possible to see how mindreading performance can continue to vary between people who share the same basic mindreading competence, and how this variation can be specific, stable, and persistent. It explains how mindreading serves as a mediator in human social lives, is shaped by social experience, varies according to that experience, and enables social abilities that would not be the same without its mediating role.