Use Your Words
This is from the beginning of the book Survival of the Friendliest, by Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods. It references a concept known as theory of mind:
Mike [Tomasello] and I worked together for ten years, testing the theory of mind abilities of one of our two closest living relatives, chimpanzees. Before our experiments, there was no experimental evidence that any animal had theory of mind. But our research showed that the answer was more complicated.
Chimpanzees had some ability to map the minds of others. In our experiments, we found that not only did chimpanzees know what someone else saw, they knew what someone else knew, could guess what someone else might remember, and understood the goals and intentions of others. They even knew when someone else had been lied to.
The fact that chimpanzees could do all these things put what they could not do into sharp resolution. Chimpanzees can cooperate. They can communicate. But they struggle to do both at the same time. Mike told me to hide a piece of food under one of two cups so that a chimpanzee would know that I had hidden the food, but not where. Then I would try to tell them which was the correct cup by pointing to it. Almost unbelievably, the chimpanzees, trial after trial, ignored my helpful gesture and could only guess. They became successful only after dozens of trials. And if we changed the gesture even slightly, they fell apart again.
At first, we thought chimpanzees had trouble using our gestures because there was something wrong with our tests. But because chimpanzees seemed to understand our intentions when they were competitive, but not when they were cooperative, we realized their failure might be meaningful.
In human babies, this is the spark that suddenly ignites, always early, always around the same age, and always before we can speak or use simple tools. The simple gesture of extending an arm and index finger that we start to use at nine months old, or our ability to follow along when our mothers point to a lost toy, or a bird flying overhead, is something chimpanzees do not do and do not understand.
This star of cooperative communication, missing from the constellation of abilities that comprise chimpanzee theory of mind, is the first to appear in humans. It shows up before we speak our first words or learn our names; before we understand that others can feel sad even while we are happy, and the other way around; before we can do something bad and lie about it, or understand that we might love someone and they might not love us back.
This ability allows us to communicate with the minds of others. It is the door into a new social and cultural world where we inherit the knowledge of generations. Everything we are as Homo sapiens begins with this star. And like many powerful phenomena, it begins in an ordinary way, with a baby understanding the intentions behind her parents’ gestures.
Theory of mind, in my view, is a product of joint attention, or what I refer to, in a forthcoming paper, as social consciousness. Humans and some other species can run simple mental simulations (Popperian intelligence, in Dennett’s Tower of Generate-and-Test), and when this capacity is operationalized inside of basic joint-attentional social consciousness, it becomes what we talk about as theory of mind. The excerpt above correctly—in my view—indicates that ‘theory of mind’ is not the “star of cooperative communication” that first appeared in humans. We will have to wait and see whether the authors reveal what they think this “star” is. For me, the star is consciousness—comprised of social, joint-attentional consciousness and individual (communicative) consciousness (paper ‘in press,’ as they say).
A very good reason to understand ‘theory of mind’ as a secondary, albeit powerful, force is that we often intuitively overestimate it, believing that we have much more a priori access to others’ minds than we actually do.
“Strangers who are in the midst of their first conversation read each other accurately only about 20 percent of the time and close friends and family members do so only 35 percent of the time . . . [The test rates] research subjects on a scale of “empathic accuracy” from 0 to 100 percent and finds great variation from person to person. Some people get a zero rating. When they are in conversation with someone they’ve just met, they have no clue what the other person is actually thinking. But other people are pretty good at reading others and score around 55 percent. (The problem is that people who are terrible at reading others think they are just as good as those who are pretty accurate.)”
So the self-nominated “whisperers” among us are little better than a coin flip at exercising their special power. We should be more accepting of this situation we find ourselves in—which is one of mostly epistemic solitude. Yes, the underlying machinery of ‘theory of mind’ is there even without specific experiences—because both chimps and humans have social consciousness (in different degrees)—but without relevant knowledge (about people, situations, and norms) our ‘theory of mind’ is weak sauce, and error prone.
Explicit communication is crucial to get beyond our very limited and biased guesses: you cannot read minds—and no one can read yours.
Further Reading
Empathic Accuracy, William Ickes (PDF)
