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2.6
The Myth of Mentalizing and the
Primacy of Folk Sociology
L AW R E N C E A . H I R S C H F E L D

E volution may not select the best of all possible


solutions, but it does select among the best of
those available at any given moment. Over the past
phenomenon: the capacity to attribute mental
states to others and use these attributions as the
basis for interpreting and predicting their actions.
30 years an extensive literature on Theory of Mind Human society, a broad consensus agrees, rests
has emerged, much implicitly or explicitly presum- on a bedrock of mentalizing (Tomasello, 2006),
ing that mentalizing—imagining that others have in significant measure because more highly devel-
thoughts and feelings and other mental states that oped mentalizing skills allow an individual to
motivate them to action—provides a better way of manipulate and deceive cohabiting group mates
predicting and interpreting the behavior of others (Humphrey, 1976). The mentalizing corollary of
than more evolutionarily ancient social strategies. the prevailing assumption that the more accurate a
Here I argue against this position, proposing that creature’s beliefs the more its survival is enhanced
mentalizing is not a particularly useful tool for (McKay & Dennett, 2009) is that the more accu-
predicting and interpreting the behavior of others. rate an individual’s beliefs about what others think
I suggest that this is true for three reasons. First, and feel, the better is that individual’s chances of
mentalizing often, perhaps typically, misattributes survival.
the mental states of others, either by inferring To the contrary, in what follows I suggest that
that an individual holds a particular mental state mentalizing, despite the attention it has received
that he or she does not in fact hold or by ignoring and the importance attributed to it, is ultimately
other aspects of mentalizing, such as the influence of sharply limited utility in interpreting and pre-
that norms and statuses has on the mental states dicting the behavior of others in both the contem-
that an individual is holding. Second, in addition porary world and the sociocultural environments
to mentalizing, humans and other social animals in which mentalizing evolved. I will argue that
possess an early developing, both in ontogenesis humans are in fact quite poor at appraising what
and over evolutionary time, capacity for predict- others and indeed what we ourselves are thinking
ing and interpreting the behavior of others, a fac- and feeling. In contrast, humans excel at interpret-
ulty that we might call a Theory of Society. This ing and predicting behavior in terms of unseen
capacity allows, indeed compels, actors to parse social and cultural (nonmental) qualities (ranging
the environment into groups and calibrate the from “fixed” qualities such as gender or race, to
importance of particular group membership in a “variable” ones such as age, rank, or occupation,
given circumstance. Third, following the lead of and to “episodic” or transient ones such as coali-
the social sciences concerned with aggregations, tion partner or teammate). In negotiating social
I consider the possibility that a folk capacity for interactions, mentalizing is less important than
Theory of Society is generally a more “accurate” attention to the contingencies of context, norma-
strategy for predicting and interpreting the actions tive constraints on action, epistemic affordances of
of others because social position(ing) fundamen- the cultural environment, and the group dynam-
tally shapes social behavior. ics of the social milieu. These capacities allow
Theory of Mind, mentalizing, mind reading, us to identify, interpret, and extrapolate from
Machiavellian intelligence, social intelligence, experience—and ultimately guide our actions.
social brain hypothesis, folk psychology, naïve The mental states of others may be good to think
psychology. All these name a particular cognitive about; still, knowing who actors are and where

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102 Mentalizing

they find themselves (e.g., the social situations regardless of its moral status. Thus, mentalizing
they are in, their goals, the social positions they is shaped by culturally varying aspects of context
and their interlocutors occupy, etc.) ultimately (to which even infants evince sensitivity; Onishi,
are more important to understanding why they Baillargeon, & Leslie, 2007).
behave as they do. One interpretation of these results is that men-
Assessing these alternative claims—the one talizing encompasses not only beliefs/desire psy-
about mentalizing, the other about folk sociol- chology but also “social influences on action and
ogy or group-based reasoning—involves posing a thought” (Wellman & Miller, 2008). On this view,
series of narrower queries. Regarding mentalizing, mentalizing is the key process for interpreting
we ask two linked questions: (a) How accurately social experience, but it is tweaked or enhanced
do people appraise the states of mind of others? with an understanding of social influences, to
and (b) Does an ability to accurately appraise make it even more informative of the actions of
mental states enhance our understanding of oth- others. Yet little direct evidence speaks to how
ers’ actions? Regarding group-based reasoning, accurately people attribute mental states to others
we ask whether the ability to reliably identify who (beyond measures of false belief) or whether such
someone is (which in part requires reliably iden- attributions enhance survival. This is not sur-
tifying the nature of the relevant context) is more prising if we consider the accuracy of conscious
useful as a strategy. deliberation about our own thought processes. In
We know surprisingly little about either the a classic study, Nisbett and Wilson (1977) found
accuracy with which mental states are attributed that verbal reports “are so removed from the pro-
to others or the degree to which mentalizing cesses that investigators presume to have occurred
enhances an individual’s survival. In one relevant as to give grounds for considerable doubt that
study, although adults were found to be capable of there is direct access to these processes” (p. 238).
distinguishing their own, accurate beliefs from the This is not to say that we do a poor job of inter-
false beliefs of others, routinely they did not do so, preting and predicting the behaviors of others.
even on a task that appeared to require it (Keysar, For many—arguably most—encounters, we seem
Lin, & Barr, 2003). Indeed, enhancing survival to do pretty well. We do not manage this, how-
may turn on inaccurate attributions regarding ever, by mind reading. One class of lay interpre-
one’s own mental states. Trivers (2010) has recently tation and prediction involves inferring another’s
argued that our success at deceiving others (the actions based on what we know about the situa-
supposed evolutionary payoff of a mentalizing tion or social context. The move is a corrective to
capacity) is enhanced when we deceive ourselves a widespread (among lay and professional psy-
(by reducing the social and cognitive costs of chologists alike) overestimation of the influence
deception). In short, deceiving others works bet- of traits and dispositions (i.e., predilections to
ter if we do not know we are doing it. behave in similar ways despite contingencies and
Mentalizing is also surprisingly sensitive to cultural affordances) in shaping our own behav-
context, including culturally specific context. ior, and especially that of others (Ross & Nisbett,
Status differences affect how accurately one pre- 1991). This overestimation of the importance of
dicts another’s mental states (Rutherford, 2004), traits and dispositions can in part be traced to the
the number of siblings a child has affects when parallel confidence that (conscious) mental states
more highly developed mentalizing is achieved are the fundamental determiner of action, as traits
(McAlister & Peterson, 2007), and the moral and dispositions are interpreted as crystallized
valence of an action affects judgments of inten- mental states (Wellman, 1990).
tionality (Knobe, 2003). To illustrate the contex- The situational turn in social psychology has
tual contingencies of mentalizing, consider moral vitally changed the field, but it has ironically also
valence and attribution of intentionality. A mor- encouraged an impoverished notion of situation.
ally bad side effect of an action (say, damage to Often the situation is treated as if it means little
the environment as an unforeseen consequence more than local contingency embedded in a par-
of commercial exploitation)—but not a morally ticular setting—“the environmental attractions,
good one—is judged intentional (Knobe, 2003), a repulsions, and constraints” that shape behavior
pattern of reasoning also found among preschool- (Mason & Morris, 2010). Little effort has been
ers (Leslie, Knobe, & Cohen, 2006). The cultural made to develop models of what a situation actu-
specificity of such judgments is underscored ally is. A hint emerges from another area of social
by Uttich & Lombrozo’s (2010) finding that this psychology, intergroup relations. Much of our
asymmetry turns on whether a norm is violated, attention in interpreting and predicting behavior

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The Myth of Mentalizing and the Primacy of Folk Sociology 103

is focused on groups, particularly the sorts of peo- Yahr, Kuhn, Slater, & Pascalis, 2002), language
ple their members are rather than what they might spoken (Mehler et al., 1988), and even race (Kelly
think. Groups are cultural entities, defined and et al., 2005).
justified by norms and systems of moral belief, A recent study demonstrates the indepen-
sustained by commitment to the web of common dence of group-based reasoning and mentalizing
sense, and implicated in the organization and dis- (Hirschfeld et al., 2007), two of whose findings
tribution of power and authority. are particularly relevant to this discussion: first,
Recent work suggests that group-based social adult-like competence in group-based reasoning
reasoning (what I have called elsewhere “folk emerges earlier than the corresponding adult-like
sociology”) is governed by a distinct, arguably competence in mentalizing; second, culturally
core, cognitive knowledge structure (Hirschfeld, specific, adult-like competence in group-based
1996; Spelke & Kinzler, 2007) that is orthogonal reasoning develops intact, even when there is
to mentalizing (Clément, Bernard, & Kaufmann, significant impairment in social communication
2011). Relative to group-based reasoning, mental- generally, and mental state reasoning in particular.
izing may in fact be a later emerging, and more Specifically, the study demonstrated that highly
limited, tool in our arsenal for social thinking impaired 6-year-old autistic children (who failed
(Hirschfeld, Bartmess, White, & Frith, 2007). a false-belief task) recruited culturally transmitted
More speculatively, rather than being the foun- racial and gender stereotypes as readily as unim-
dation of human sociality, mentalizing may be a paired controls when interpreting novel situations
by-product of a by-product, a way to think about (e.g., when asked to select the helpful person, they
the causal potential of conscious mental states chose a drawing of a White woman over a Black
enabled by the emergence of self-awareness rela- woman more than two thirds of the time). As the
tively recently in human evolutionary history. performance of unimpaired 3-year-olds (whose
Indeed, its importance in the literature may be use of gender and racial stereotypes did not differ
overestimated because of its importance to the from those of older, autistic children and unim-
particular cultural environment from which that paired controls) in the same study demonstrated,
literature emerges. As a set of papers in a recent adult-like competence in group-based reason-
issue of Anthropology Quarterly illustrate, in many ing emerges before similarly advanced mental-
cultural environments the predominant expecta- izing skills (i.e., the ability to grasp false beliefs).
tion is that it is difficult if not impossible to know Indeed, in some respects group-based reasoning
what others think and feel; indeed, the emphasis trumps the nascent mentalizing skills mastered by
on interpreting others in terms of (crystallized) younger preschoolers and impaired autistic chil-
mental states (rather than the social categories dren (viz., the ability to recognize that individu-
they occupy) is characteristic of a rather limited als have desires and habitual preferences, such
range of cultures in North America and Northern as the recognition that a particular girl prefers to
Europe, and for the most part the White males liv- play with trucks rather than dolls). Both unim-
ing in them (Robbins & Rumsey, 2008). paired 3-year-olds and highly impaired autistic
If knowing who and what people are is a fun- 6-year-olds were more likely than unimpaired
damental strategy for interpreting and predicting controls and less impaired autistic 6-year-olds to
their actions, then discovering who and what peo- predict that the person would act in accord with
ple are—in short, discovering the sorts of groups a cultural stereotype than a personal desire/habit-
there are in society and who their members are—is ual preference, when the two conflicted (e.g., that
a fundamental task for the child. Not surprisingly, despite knowing that a particular girl prefers to
as noted earlier, there is growing evidence of a play with trucks over dolls, these subjects, when
special-purpose cognitive device, a component of asked whether she would play with a truck or a
core knowledge, dedicated to guiding the child’s doll, predicted that she would play with a doll).
acquisition of this specific sort of knowledge. Like What accounts for the priority of group-based
other special-purpose devices, this one is robust, reasoning? The divergent natural histories of the
requiring modest levels of environmental input, two competencies seems a reasonable explana-
early emerging, and operates outside conscious tion. Highly developed mentalizing skills appear
awareness. Precursor saliencies are evident in to be unique to humans (Povinelli & Vonk, 2003);
infants’ sensitivity to those social dimensions that in contrast, humans are among many creatures
ultimately become culturally articulated and play that live in groups. Moreover, the complex social
predominant roles in all known societies, includ- (group) lives of some primate species are strikingly
ing age (Brooks & Lewis, 1976), gender (Quinn, evocative of extant human societies (i.e., presence

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104 Mentalizing

of multiple and often strategic affiliations, oppor- social openness may be supported by an evolved
tunistic as well as enduring group commitments, mechanism (Hirschfeld, 2008).
transitive and inheritable statuses, and so on; One way to imagine much group-based rea-
Cheney & Seyfarth, 2007). Such cross-species par- soning is as cultural affordances, predilections to
allels, although informative, may obscure crucial act that are shaped not by interiorized and personal
features of human group living. Although small- motivations but by commitment to cultural expec-
scale human societies with relatively low levels of tations. These affordances support the emergence
socioeconomic integration are often (accurately) of “communities of sentiment,” which Appadurai
described as based on relations of kinship, the (1990) illustrates with one strategy South Asian
parallel with kin-based nonhuman primate group beggars use to extract gifts. Beggars, he argues, lit-
structures risks being overdrawn. First, human erally entrap their “audience” into a fleeting sense
groups are seldom kin based in a strict biological of debt by evoking the sentiments associated with
sense, even when the language (both indigenous the web of obligation and counterobligation that
and scholarly) for describing them seems to be. ordinarily links kinds of people rather than indi-
Human systems of kin reckoning never accu- viduals per se. Neither the beggar nor the donor
rately reflect degrees of biological relatedness; in believes that the evoked web of obligation in fact
fact, they almost always distort it (as biological actually reigns; only that the participants are com-
relatedness is understood by the indigenous pop- pelled to act in the short run as if it does in virtue
ulations themselves). For example, in one well- of expectations of mutual knowledge and commit-
studied class of kinship systems, individuals who ments to a mutually acknowledged set of cultural
are related biologically to the same degree are entanglements.
the most sought-after marriage partners if the This kind of engagement—and the powerful
relationship is reckoned through the mother’s ways it shapes behaviors independent of variation
line, whereas if it is reckoned through the father’s in individual psychological motivation—is not lim-
line, they are incestuously close relatives (Lévi- ited to “tradition-bound” cultural environments
Strauss, 1969). rich in interpersonal obligations and counterobli-
A more crucial difference between human and gations, and the political, economic, and religious
other primate societies is the nature of and extent structures supporting them. We can see this in
to which human groups are linked in enduring the pull of patriotism and nationalist sentiments.
confederations (using the term broadly), some Personally I believe that nationalist chauvinism is
of which define people of a single “kind,” some of pernicious, yet every 2 years I find myself root-
which define people of essentially other “kinds.” ing for American athletes at the Olympics. How
Studies of neocortex across species have revealed do I reconcile this discrepancy? On one interpre-
a close association between relative neocortex size tation—a version of a dual processing model—I
and number of individuals typically in a single consciously hold a set of beliefs consistent with a
group (Dunbar, 1992). The association seems to broader political position that favors, say, an inter-
break down with humans; our neocortex seem- nationalist perspective. “Hidden” behind these
ingly supports groups much larger than the typical beliefs are a set of nonconscious or implicit beliefs
residential bands found among hunter-gathering and attitudes that, although inconsistent with this
populations. The reason is that unlike other pri- conscious perspective, are widely held among
mates, human groups have invariably embraced those with whom I live (Banaji & Greenwald,
multiple residential bands, even when face-to- 1994). The force of the latter ultimately trumps the
face contact between members was infrequent. former, so that my conscious, internationalist per-
Moreover, ethnographic and archaeological evi- spective is less a competing ethos than a cognitive
dence shows that these bands are systematically veneer over “truer” biases. An alternative expla-
linked in enduring exchange relationships. Not nation is that my beliefs are shaped by a range of
only did modern humans engage in continuing cultural affordances, situations, and relations that
long-distance trade in goods (Tattersal & Schwartz, render certain engagements more readily effected
2000) but also in the exchange of women between (as action) than readily accepted (as belief).
groups (Chapais, 2008; Lévi-Strauss, 1969). First Claude Steele (1995) and his associates have
contact reports suggest that people moved easily documented a similarly involuntary and less
and regularly between cultural groups and across trivial instance of this process. When minority
cultural “boundaries” (Fried, 1975). The human (or in another way stigmatized), but otherwise
capacity to learn multiple languages as readily confident and competent, test takers were even
as acquiring a single language suggests that this briefly primed for representations disparaging

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The Myth of Mentalizing and the Primacy of Folk Sociology 105

their “kind,” performance declined relative to Dunbar, R. (1992). Neocortex size as a constraint
performance in unprimed conditions. Like the on group size in primates. Journal of Human
South Asian beggar’s audience, test takers need Evolution, 22(6), 469–493.
not endorse these representations for the manipu- Fried, M. (1975). The notion of the tribe. Menlo Park,
lation to have effect; indeed, they may well actively CA: Cummings.
reject them. Perhaps as distressing—and the rea- Hirschfeld, L. A. (1996). Race in the making: Cognition,
son that I prefer to conceptualize stereotypes as culture, and the child’s construction of human kinds.
cultural affordances—nonminority test takers’ Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
performance is also sensitive to cultural represen- Hirschfeld, L. A. (2008). The bi-lingual brain revisited.
tations disparaging some groups over others. But Evolutionary Psychology, 6(1), 182–185.
in this case the effect is inverse: When primed with Hirschfeld, L. A., Bartmess, E., White, S., & Frith, U.
the same cultural representations that negatively (2007). Can autistic children predict behavior
affect performance among members of stigma- by social stereotypes? Current Biology, 17(12),
tized groups, White test takers experience a boost R451–R452.
Humphrey, N. K. (1976). The social function of intel-
in performance compared to scores in unprimed AQ: Please
lect. In P. P. Bates & R. A. Hinde (Eds.), Growing provide
conditions (Walton, 2003)
points in ethology (pp. xx–xx ). Oxford, England: chapter
In brief, behavior is often best understood in page range.
Oxford University Press.
terms of how the dynamics of social positionings
Kelly, D. J., Quinn, P. C., Slater, A. M., Lee, K., Gibson, A.,
play out as they are mediated by group affiliation,
Smith, M., . . . Pascalis, O. (2005). Three-month-olds,
independent of an individual’s desires. Interpreting but not newborns, prefer own-race faces. Develo-
and predicting others’ behaviors is less a function pmental Science, 8(6), F31–F36.
of identifying whether dyadic relations are marked Keysar, B., Lin, S., & Barr, D. J. (2003). Limits on theory
by sincerity or deception than by situating actors of mind use in adults. Cognition, 89(1), 25–41.
in cultural environments—and the roles the envi- Knobe, J. (2003). Intentional action in folk psychol-
ronments afford—that define and preserve the ogy: An experimental investigation. Philosophical
possibilities for action. Mentalizing is of limited Psychology, 16(2), 309–324.
utility not because we lack interior landscapes that Leslie, A. M., Knobe, J., & Cohen, A. (2006). Acting
are singular or opaque but because how we act is intentionally and the side-effect effect: Theory of
so often despite rather than in virtue of them. mind and moral judgment. Psychological Science,
17(5), 421–427.
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