In the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, barrier gestures such as regular hand-washing, social distancing, and wearing a face mask are highly recommended. Critically, interpersonal distance (IPD) depends on the affective dimension of social interaction, which might be affected by the current Covid-19 context. In the present internet-based experimental study, we analyzed the preferred IPD of 457 French participants when facing human-like characters that were either wearing a face mask or displaying a neutral, happy or angry facial expression. Results showed that IPD was significantly reduced when characters were wearing a face mask, as they were perceived as more trustworthy compared to the other conditions. Importantly, IPD was even more reduced in participants infected with Covid-19 or living in low-risk areas, while it was not affected by the predicted health of the characters. These findings shed further light on the psychological factors that motivate IPD adjustments, in particular when facing a collective threat. They are also of crucial importance for policy makers as they reveal that despite the indisputable value of wearing a face mask in the current pandemic context, their use should be accompanied by an emphasis on social distancing to prevent detrimental health consequences.

In recent decades, the ability to represent others’ mental states (i.e., theory of mind) has gained particular attention in various disciplines ranging from ethology to cognitive neuroscience. Despite the exponentially growing interest, the functional architecture of social cognition is still unclear. In the present review, we argue that not only the vocabulary but also most of the classic measures for theory of mind lack specificity. We examined classic tests used to assess theory of mind and noted that the majority of them do not require the participant to represent another’s mental state or, sometimes, any mental state at all. Our review reveals that numerous classic tests measure lower-level processes that do not directly test for theory of mind. We propose that more attention should be paid to methods used in this field of social cognition to improve the understanding of underlying concepts.