Theory of mind

I mentioned the Theory of mind in the last post. This blog aims to make vulgarization and to make accessible some concepts used in comparative psychology and cognitive science, in relation with apes. I think it is then necessary for me to explain a bit about this theory of mind and the folk psychology.

Folk psychology (introduced by Fodor) is the way we use mental states to understand others and therefore, that's what shape how we are behaving in our social life and our interactions with others (I won't enter the controversy about it's existence, that's not the place for it). It supposes that we act by making a bunch of hypotheses, the most important of which is that others think and act with beliefs. "I intend that you will do such a thing". "I think that he will turn right on the next cross so that I should go on the left line". "Alice intends that Bob thinks that he upsets her". Und so weiter. We keep using those beliefs to predict and understand how the other behave, and therefore, we adapt our own behavior. Theory of mind is basically relying on those mental states. Having a theory of mind is attributing to others beliefs and accepting the fact that those beliefs will help the others to behave, in the same way that it helps us to do. Theory of mind is therefore a concept that is totally turned to the other. It is different from metacognition, where we can evaluate ourselves directly (another really interesting program of research btw). The ability to attribute beliefs to others is not easy to acquire. It requires to understand that others can have beliefs independently of us. The well known "false-belief task" has been defined as a test of theory of mind and children usually succeed only at 4 of age. Its adaptation to primate, apes in particular, has always failed.

However, some new experiments, notably by Brian Hare, have shown that in a competitive situation, chimps know what the others see. It's a first clue of up to which point their cognition is developed. They also know what they don't see and then can turn it to their own advantage.
It is important to see that the purpose of such study is not to seek a black and white answer as "yes they have a ToM" or "no, they don't". They have a different cognition and it is interesting to know how it works. Firstly, because it would be great to know how this cognition works without a language. Secondly, from a comparative point of view, it can tell us what our last ancestor had already develop and what is specific to human as well as to chimps. I have mentioned language above. That may be one of the key for the development of ToM. As in my examples, I wrote "A thinks that B thinks that C....", a property of language that is called recursion. That's a really important property of language and some researchers even believe that it is one of the most unique property to language, therefore, something really specific to humans. The question now is: is this recursion necessary to develop a ToM? Other related questions are then: is language necessary to develop a ToM? (probably not, in regard with the last experiments); if a species does not have a language, how can it develop and up to which point a ToM? Probably, we have achieved the most complete ToM of the animal kingdom. However, it is very unlikely that it developed only after the split of our lineage. Therefore, we have to find what already existed in our last common ancestor, and see what is really specific to the human lineage. Surely, language will have a strong part to play in it, taken that this adaptation has been so successful that we can not even think without it. However, the important question is to know if it developed over an existing substrat or if it IS the main substrat on which such advanced skills as ToM have developed.

I hope I haven't been through too complicated explanations and that this will also represent a concreat example of what comparative psychology tries to understand.


TG