Getting Inside Your Head: What Cognitive Science Can Tell Us about Popular Culture

ONE: Culture of Greedy Mind Readers

Culture of Greedy Mind Readers 1 Iam writing this in a quiet library hall lined with long desks. In front of me I see a young woman turning around and glancing at the three whispering and occasionally laughing students to her left. I think the noise bothers her, and she wants to show it. But I could be wrong. Perhaps, bored after hours of sitting still, she appreciates this momentary diversion and wants to see its source. Or perhaps she wonders if she knows any of them. Or perhaps she is a sociologist and something about their group dynamics has caught her attention. I don’t know her, so I am not likely ever to find out what she is actually thinking as she turns around. Still, I automatically interpret her body language in terms of her unobservable thoughts and feelings: she feels this; she wants that; she wants them to think that she thinks this or that; she wants other people to know that she is responding to that group’s behavior. And you are not in the least surprised by my reasoning. You, too, take it for granted that there must be some thought, desire, or intention behind her body language. Our everyday social interactions are unimaginable without this kind of intuitive reasoning: to make sense of any human action, we must see it in terms of a mental state that prompted it. 2 GETTING INSIDE YOUR HEAD We’ve been doing this day and night for hundreds of thousands of years. (At night we attribute intentions to creatures populating our dreams.) Psychologists have a special term for the evolved cognitive adaptation that makes us see behavior as caused by underlying mental states. They call it theory of mind, also known as folk psychology and mind reading. The latter term is particularly inapt. Given how many of our attributions and interpretations of thoughts and feelings are wrong or only approximately correct, they might as well call it mind misreading. But since evolution doesn’t deal in perfection, we have to fumble through by “reading minds” as best we can. In the last five years theory of mind has become a major research topic among cognitive, developmental, comparative, and social psychologists , as well as cognitive neuroscientists. Though everything they learn opens up more questions and will remain the subject of debates for years to come, theory of mind is increasingly thought of as a crucial cognitive endowment of our species—a cornerstone of imagination, pretense, morality , and language, indeed of every aspect of human sociality. As a cognitive adaptation, mind-reading ability may have developed during the Pleistocene period, from 1.8 million to 10 thousand years ago. According to evolutionary psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen, the emergence of theory of mind was evolution’s answer to the “staggeringly complex ” challenge faced by our ancestors, who needed to make sense of the behavior of other people in their group, which could include up to two hundred individuals. As Baron-Cohen points out, “Attributing mental states to a complex system (such as a human being) is by far the easiest way of understanding it,” that is, of “coming up with an explanation of the complex system’s behavior and predicting what it will do next.”1 Studies in theory of mind suggest a new way of understanding what constitutes our human environment. Usually, the word environment brings to mind trees, air, water, roads, houses, and such. If we remember, however, that the human species is foremost a social species—that is, our need and ability to communicate with others underlies every aspect of our existence—we realize that our environment can also be defined as other minds.2 We spend our lives breathing in oxygen, whether we are aware of this or not. But—no less important—we also spend our lives interpreting and imagining minds, whether we are aware of this or not. CULTURE OF GREEDY MIND READERS 3 When We Read Minds, Do We Know It? (The First Misconception) When people first hear about theory of mind, they often come away with two misconceptions. One results from imperfect terminology.3 The word theory in “theory of mind” and the word reading in “mind reading” are potentially misleading. They seem to imply that we attribute states of mind intentionally and consciously: that is, when we read minds, we know that we are reading them. Think again of my...