How We Understand Others

Spaulding, Shannon

doi:10.4324/9781315396064

Cited by 49 publications

(32 citation statements)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…Mindreading-the ability to predict and interpret the behaviour of others in terms of their underlying mental states-is widely believed to be a central part of human social cognition (Apperly, 2011;Baron-Cohen, 1997;Spaulding, 2018;Tomasello, 2014;Wellman, 2014). However, cognitive scientists are divided about the psychological scope of mindreading and the range of cognitive phenomena that actually involve reasoning about unobservable mental states (Andrews, 2012;Bermudez, 2003;Heyes, 2014;Ruffman, 2014).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Beyond avatars and arrows: Testing the mentalising and submentalising hypotheses with a novel entity paradigm

Westra

Terrizzi

Baal

et al. 2021

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In recent years, there has been a heated debate about how to interpret findings that seem to show that humans rapidly and automatically calculate the visual perspectives of others. In the current study, we investigated the question of whether automatic interference effects found in the dot-perspective task (Samson, Apperly, Braithwaite, Andrews, & Bodley Scott, 2010) are the product of domain-specific perspective-taking processes or of domain-general “submentalizing” processes (Heyes, 2014). Previous attempts to address this question have done so by implementing inanimate controls, such as arrows, as stimuli. The rationale for this is that submentalizing processes that respond to directionality should be engaged by such stimuli, whereas domain-specific perspective-taking mechanisms, if they exist, should not. These previous attempts have been limited, however, by the implied intentionality of the stimuli they have used (e.g. arrows), which may have invited participants to imbue them with perspectival agency. Drawing inspiration from “novel entity” paradigms from infant gaze-following research, we designed a version of the dot-perspective task that allowed us to precisely control whether a central stimulus was viewed as animate or inanimate. Across four experiments, we found no evidence that automatic “perspective-taking” effects in the dot-perspective task are modulated by beliefs about the animacy of the central stimulus. Our results also suggest that these effects may be due to the task-switching elements of the dot-perspective paradigm, rather than automatic directional orienting. Together, these results indicate that neither the perspective-taking nor the standard submentalizing interpretations of the dot-perspective task are fully correct.

show abstract

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Beyond avatars and arrows: Testing the mentalising and submentalising hypotheses with a novel entity paradigm

Westra

Terrizzi

Baal

et al. 2021

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The kind of pluralism we have in mind for the psychology of norms is modeled after pluralistic approaches to folk psychology and social cognition (Andrews 2012;Andrews, Spaulding, and Westra 2020;Fiebich and Coltheart 2015;Spaulding 2018). While early approaches to that field took it for granted that we came to understand the social world by predicting and explaining behavior in terms of propositional attitudes, pluralistic approaches have stressed the importance of alternative strategies for prediction and explanation, including representations of the situation, traits, stereotypes and (notably) social norms; pluralists also emphasized the importance of regulative or "mindshaping" processes that did not involve prediction or explanation at all (McGeer 2007;Zawidzki 2013).…”

Section: Lessons From Empirical Moral Psychologymentioning

confidence: 99%

A pluralistic framework for the psychology of norms

Westra¹,

Andrews²

2021

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Social Norms – rules that dictate which behaviors are appropriate, permissible, or obligatory in different situations for members of a given community – permeate all aspects of human life. Many researchers have sought to explain the ubiquity of social norms in human life in terms of the psychological mechanisms underlying their acquisition, conformity, and enforcement. Existing theories of the psychology of social norms appeal to a variety of constructs, from prediction-error minimization, to reinforcement learning, to shared intentionality, to evolved psychological adaptations. However, most of these accounts share what we call the psychological unity assumption, which holds that there is something psychologically distinctive about social norms, and that social norm adherence is driven by a single system or process. We argue that this assumption is mistaken. In this paper, we propose a methodological and conceptual framework for the cognitive science of social norms that we call normative pluralism. According to this framework, we should treat norms first and foremost as a community-level pattern of social behavior that might be realized by a variety of different cognitive, motivational, and ecological mechanisms. Norm psychologists should not presuppose that social norms are underpinned by a unified set of processes, nor that there is anything particularly distinctive about normative cognition as such. We argue that this pluralistic approach offers a methodologically sound point of departure for a fruitful and rigorous science of norms.

show abstract

“…Other recent accounts of folk psychology have also taken into account the role of character trait attributions in how we understand others (for a review, see Spaulding, 2018b). These accounts are sometimes known, following Andrews's terminology, as pluralistic approaches.…”

Section: Stereotypes and Folk Psychologymentioning

confidence: 99%

You are just being emotional! Testimonial injustice and folk-psychological attributions

Díaz

Almagro

2019

Synthese

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Testimonial injustices occur when individuals from particular social groups are systematically and persistently given less credibility in their claims merely because of their group identity.Recent "pluralistic" approaches to folk psychology, by taking into account the role of stereotypes in how we understand others, have the power to explain how and why cases of testimonial injustice occur. If how we make sense of others' behavior depends on assumptions about how individuals from certain groups think and act, this can explain why speakers are given different degrees of credibility depending on their group identity. For example, if people assume that women are more emotional than men (and they consider that emotionality hinders credibility), they will systematically give less credibility to women's claims. This explanation involves three empirical claims: (1) People assume that women are more emotional than men,(2) people assume that emotionality hinders credibility, and (3) people give less credibility to women's claims. While extant studies provide some support for (1) and ( 2), no study to date has directly tested (3). In two different studies, we tested all these three claims. The results from both studies provide support for (2), as we found significant negative correlations between emotionality and credibility attributions. However, in contrast to what some accounts of folk psychology posit, we did not find any significant difference in people's attributions of emotionality and credibility towards women versus men speakers. We hope that our studies here pave the way for further empirical studies testing the phenomenon of testimonial injustice in a context-sensitive way, in order to have a better understanding of the conditions in which testimonial injustices are likely to happen.Recently, discussions of testimonial injustice have also entered the literature on social cognition and folk psychology (

show abstract

How We Understand Others

Cited by 49 publications

References 0 publications

Beyond avatars and arrows: Testing the mentalising and submentalising hypotheses with a novel entity paradigm

Beyond avatars and arrows: Testing the mentalising and submentalising hypotheses with a novel entity paradigm

A pluralistic framework for the psychology of norms

You are just being emotional! Testimonial injustice and folk-psychological attributions

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About