How do you know that? Automatic belief inferences in passing conversation

Abstract

There is an ongoing debate, both in philosophy and psychology, as to whether people are able to automatically infer what others may know, or whether they can only derive belief inferences by deploying cognitive resources. Evidence from laboratory tasks, often involving false beliefs or visual-perspective taking, has suggested that belief inferences are cognitively costly, controlled processes. Here we suggest that in everyday conversation, belief reasoning is pervasive and therefore potentially automatic in some cases. To test this hypothesis, we conducted two pre-registered self-paced reading experiments (N 1 = 91, N 2 = 89). The results of these experiments showed that participants slowed down when a stranger commented 'That greasy food is bad for your ulcer' relative to conditions where a stranger commented on their own ulcer or a friend made either comment-none of which violated participants' commonground expectations. We conclude that Theory of Mind models need to account for belief reasoning in conversation as it is at the center of everyday social interaction. for theoretical models of adult social cognition that fail to account for belief reasoning in conversation (e.g., Apperly & Butterfill, 2009; Heyes, 2014) and as a result leave out of their scope the bulk of the data observed in everyday social interaction. Here we argue that belief reasoning is pervasive in communication and therefore needs to be investigated and characterized in conversational settings, and not only in false-belief tasks. Does communication involve belief reasoning? A popular theoretical view, both in philosophy and psychology, is the hypothesis that attributing mental states to others (not only beliefs, but also intentions and desires) is too cognitively demanding to be the basis for real-time social interaction (e.g.

Mindreading in conversation

“…Instinctive mapping of epistemic territory also explains some recent experimental results advanced in support of the hypothesis that mentalizing is pervasive in ordinary conversation (Rubio-Fernández, Mollica et al, 2019). This work investigated the processing of statements which either did or did not violate expectations about what imagined strangers or friends would know.…”

“…The existence of these harder cases does not speak against the notion that cooperative conversations generally involve participants with more easily recognized forms of knowledge and ignorance, however. Our model predicts that conversation will be easier with cooperative partners whose epistemic state is evident: for example, conversational partners will be swifter to ask questions of or accept information from those who are conspicuously well-positioned to reply, especially when compared to conversational partners for whom the relevant facts appear to lie outside their likely epistemic territory (Rubio-Fernández et al, 2019). One way to explore these predictions might be to exploit the relationship between factive mentalizing and gaze tracking in order to manipulate default attributions of epistemic territoryfor example, by placing participants in tasks where they are reliant upon the advice of two speakers with different levels of visual access, and then measuring how readily they seek out or respond to information from an incongruent epistemic source.…”

“…Anti-mentalistic models of conversation consequently relegate mindreading to a minor, supporting role, for example, as a device for repairing certain kinds of misunderstandings (Apperly, 2018;Pickering & Garrod, 2004;Shintel & Keysar, 2009). These proposals are challenged, however, by a wide array of evidence indicating that speakers are sensitive to information about speakers' mental states from the very earliest stages of language production and comprehension (Brennan & Hanna, 2009;Hanna et al, 2003;Heller et al, 2012;Rubio-Fernández et al, 2019). It is not obvious how to reconcile this latter research with the evidence suggesting that mindreading is slow and cognitively demanding.…”

The Division of Labor in Communication: Speakers Help Listeners Account for Asymmetries in Visual Perspective

“…These inferences do not necessarily come for free, however. Behavioral, developmental, and neural evidence increasingly suggests that at least some aspects of theory of mind use are computationally costly, requiring effortful processing under cognitive control (Bradford, Jentzsch, & Gomez, 2015; Brown‐Schmidt, 2009b; Ferguson, Apperly, Ahmad, Bindemann, & Cane, 2015; Jouravlev et al, 2019; Long, Horton, Rohde, & Sorace, 2018; Low & Perner, 2012; Nilsen & Graham, 2009; Ryskin, Benjamin, Tullis, & Brown‐Schmidt, 2015; Saxe, Schulz, & Jiang, 2006; Symeonidou, Dumontheil, Chow, & Breheny, 2016; but see Rubio‐Fernández, Mollica, Ali, & Gibson, 2019).…”

Pragmatic markers: the missing link between language and Theory of Mind

“…In fact, this work should be relevant to both nativist and developmental accounts of belief since both need to explain how children learn to use Theory of Mind in interaction. By moving away from discussions of belief nativism, I will focus on communication as the natural arena for Theory of Mind development (Rubio-Fernandez 2017, 2019Rubio-Fernandez et al 2019).…”