Seeing the world through others’ minds: Inferring social context from behaviour

Abstract

Past research tells us that individuals can infer information about a target's emotional state and intentions from their facial expressions (Frith & Frith, 2012), a process known as mentalising.This extends to inferring the events that caused the facial reaction (e.g. Pillai, Sheppard, & Mitchell, 2012;Pillai et al., 2014), an ability known as retrodictive mindreading. Here, we enter new territory by investigating whether or not people (perceivers) can guess a target's social context by observing their response to stimuli. In Experiment 1, perceivers viewed targets' responses and were able to determine whether these targets were alone or observed by another person. In Experiment 2, another group of perceivers, without any knowledge of the social context or what the targets were watching, judged whether targets were hiding or exaggerating their facial expressions; and their judgments discriminated between conditions in which targets were observed and alone. Experiment 3 established that another group of perceivers' judgments of social context were associated with estimations of target expressivity to some degree. In Experiments 1 and 2, the eye movements of perceivers also varied between conditions in which targets were observed and alone. Perceivers were thus able to infer a target's social context from their visible response. The results demonstrate an ability to use other minds as a window onto a social context that could not be seen directly.

Interpreting signals in other people's behavior to sense things about them and to infer things about their world

“…Children aged 3 and 4 years were expected to explain the protagonist's behavior by referring to a proximal cause (the protagonist's false belief, Bartsch & Wellman, ) or by referring to a more distal cause (the event that gave rise to false belief, Robinson & Mitchell, ). Defined this way, retrodiction refers to the process of identifying the cause of extant behavior, where, according to Teoh et al (), the cause can either be understood at a proximal level (an inner state, such as a state of false belief) or at a distal level (a worldly event that gave rise to the inner state, such as the coveted object moving from one place to the other in the protagonist's absence).…”

“…In real life, people usually have a wide range of information to draw upon in making a retrodictive inference, including the natural and spontaneous facial expression of the target along with other aspects of observable behavior coupled with contextual information. An expressive face can signal an emotional state (Zaki, Bolger, & Ochsner, , ), a state that will likely be caused by events in the world (Cassidy, Ropar, Mitchell, & Chapman, , ; Kang, Anthoney, & Mitchell, ; Pillai, Sheppard, & Mitchell, ; Pillai et al, ; Sheppard et al, ; Teoh et al, ; Valanides, Sheppard, & Mitchell, ; Wu & Mitchell, ). Hence, retrodiction as an account of mindreading assumes that a person's inner states are to some degree signaled in their behavior (e.g., see Gallagher, , for a perspective on how behavior signals inner states), implying that a person (a perceiver) who is accurate in mindreading is one who is capable of interpreting such signals.…”

“…Hence, retrodiction as an account of mindreading assumes that a person's inner states are to some degree signaled in their behavior (e.g., see Gallagher, , for a perspective on how behavior signals inner states), implying that a person (a perceiver) who is accurate in mindreading is one who is capable of interpreting such signals. Retrodictive inferences not only involve labelling the expression or indeed identifying the target's inner state but also inferring the event (the distal cause) that caused the target's inner state (the proximal cause) that in turn caused the behavior in the target that we currently observe (Teoh et al, ). Retrodiction, we argue, is a form of (situational) attribution process, but it is a special kind of attribution that it involves inferring the cause of the event based on perceiving an observable behavioral reaction and via sensing the target's inner state (rather than reasoning from other known facts).…”

Seven- to 11-Year-Olds’ Developing Ability to Recognize Natural Facial Expressions of Basic Emotions

“…Retrodiction, a concept articulated by Gallese and Goldman (1998), is the opposite of prediction and, according to Teoh et al (2017), refers to instances where we see a sample of behaviour and then work backwards to infer the mental state that underlies that behaviour (the proximal cause) and in turn the event (something that might have happened in the world) that triggered the mental state (the distal cause). In the current study, while we cannot be certain about the status of the proximal cause of the target's behaviour, we can at least be absolutely certain about the distal cause: We can be certain, for example, that the target was viewing a disgusted expression, and if the participant selected an emoticon for 'disgust', then it would appear that they had made a retrodictive inference.…”

“…If an observer could nevertheless accurately interpret the target's expression, then not only would they know something of the target's inner state, they would also effectively have access to a broader social world through the lens of the target's mind (Teoh et al, 2017). If so, the observer is parasitic on another mind (the mind of the target) to know something more broadly about the social world (that the person the target is speaking with is happy, angry, disgusted, etc); something they would not have known had they not been able to interpret the target's expression (Pillai et al, 2014).…”