EXPLAINING HUMAN MIND-READING

Humans are stand-out mind readers. Non-human animals may also be able figure out what others can see and feel (at least within limits), but human mind-reading goes beyond this. This is so along two dimensions.

First, it is cognitively very sophisticated. Humans frequently attribute mental states at the third or even fourth level of intentionality: I might attribute to you the hope that I think that you think the treasure is hidden over there (because I think you are trying to deceive me), or I might attribute to you the fear that I think that you think that I am arrogant (due to a Jane Austen-like misunderstanding, say). Furthermore, it can involve highly complex and abstract mental states: ‘he is just hangry’, ‘that’s just wishful thinking on her part’, ‘they are feeling slighted’, or ‘you are full of nostalgia today!’. These are not states that are the outcomes of easily determinable circumstances (like perceptual states), or which are tied to specific behavioural patterns, as is true for the basic emotions.

Second, humans often use mental-state attributions when making adaptively importantly decisions, and these attributions often play a crucial role in determining the outcomes of these decisions. For example, humans rely on their mind-reading skills when their lives or future well-being depends on it: who to trust when conspiring against a dictatorial regime, say, or whether a particular person is a good partner to start a family with. This is not surprising, given that we live in groups consisting of kin as well as non-kin and are utterly dependent on each other for our survival.

That said, human mind-reading is not culturally homogeneous. While mind reading seems to be a part of all human cultures, different cultures differ over how to read other minds, in the emphasis they put on mind reading others, and in the development of mind reading (Shahaeian et al. [2011]; Mayer and Träuble [2013]; Luhrmann et al. [2015]; Henrich [2020]; Tomasello [2021]). For example, in individualist cultures (sometimes referred to as ‘WEIRD’—that is, western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic), children seem to be able to attribute to others beliefs distinct from their own before they can determine what others know; children from more holistic (non-WEIRD) cultures show the opposite pattern. Similarly, in some cultures, it is more common to think of others as acting in line with social role expectations, rather than stable character states; while in other cultures, the opposite is the case.  Moreover, human mind-reading should not be taken to be perfectly reliable, as evidenced by human art and history; much of the latter turns on questions of mind-reading failures.

What needs to be explained, therefore, is how humans came to be mind readers of this distinctive sort, when this is not true for other animals. In the literature to date, there are two main ways of answering this question—however, both face some significant problems.

The first of the existing accounts sees distinctively human mind-reading as the result of the evolution of a dedicated set of neuro-psychological mechanisms that has been selected for enabling humans to deal with the particular social environments in which they live (see, for example, Sperber [1996]; Byrne and Corp [2004]; Sterelny [2012]; Spelke [2022]). The trouble with this purely nativist picture is that it struggles to explain the cultural variability and unreliability of human mind-reading. If human mind-reading abilities are a selected response to the pressures of social living, why is there so much variation in human mind-reading across cultures, and why are mind-reading inferences not more accurate?

The second common way to explain distinctively human mind-reading has the exact opposite problem. According to this account, distinctively human mind-reading is the result of cultural learning and not of biological evolution (Heyes [2018]): mind reading is like book reading. The problem, though, is that this seems to overshoot its target when it comes to explaining the cultural variability in human mind-reading. The contrast to book reading is actually quite telling here: relatively few human cultures are book-reading literate at all, but all cultures are mind-reading literate. Compared to book reading, mind reading appears highly culturally conserved.

My article therefore proposes a new theory that avoids these drawbacks. This theory is based on a reinforcing triad that comprises not just biological adaptation and cultural learning, but also socio-technological development. The first part of this novel answer starts with the same point as the biological account just discussed: it is plausible that we have evolved psychological expectations that make it easier for us to infer others’ mental states from their observable behaviours and other features. However, my account adds to this the further fact that even given these kinds of expectations, mind reading of the kind shown by humans is quite costly, both in terms of the time and the cognitive resources, like attention and concentration, that are required. Human behaviour is too variable to allow that mind reading be so fine-grained that we can narrow the space of theoretical hypotheses to consider when attributing mental states to others to zero, especially in real time.

To solve this problem, it becomes highly adaptively useful for humans to have access to the right kinds of tools. For example, cognitive technology like books, myths, songs, and pictures can help sort out which of the large stock of evolved expectations concerning mental state attribution are especially important to focus on in the situation at hand. So, we may grow up listening to songs that say, ‘I know that five years is a long time, and that times change; but I think that you’ll find: people are basically the same’ (a line from Depeche Mode’s ‘See You’)—thus emphasizing stable character traits—or we may grow up listening to stories like the Mahabharata, where we see that focusing on what Arjuna wants himself is not as helpful as focusing on his duties as a son to predict his actions.

Second, complex and adaptively important mind-reading is supported by the existence of social institutions that restrict the scope of possibilities for what an agent may be motivated by or thinking about in any given situation. For example, if I know that you are the lead hunter, this gives me clues as to what you might be thinking about when there is discussion about hunting parties being put together. In turn, this narrows down the set of mental-state attributions to foreground, and thus makes mental-state attribution much easier.

How do humans get access to these technological and social tools? It is here that cultural learning comes to its own, for it is precisely the acquisition of complex tools and social institutions that is made possible by cultural learning. In this way, the present account takes on key insights from the cultural-learning approach to human mind-reading—but, unlike that approach, it does not see mind reading as directly evolving by cultural learning. Rather, it views cultural learning as the process that builds up the tools and institutions that support mind reading.

This does not exhaust what needs to be said about the place of cultural learning in the evolution of human mind-reading. It is not just the case that cultural learning leads to the existence of the kind of physical and social technology that can support mind reading. It is also the case that mind reading increases the scope for cultural learning; mind reading increases the scope for tool use and social-institutional navigation; and physical and social technology can support cultural learning. The details of these causal relationships are complex, but their upshot is easy to see: an interlocking set of feedback loops.

Acknowledging the existence of this feedback loop matters, as it opens up novel areas of investigation. On the one hand, it raises a whole host of questions concerning how differences in the details of the cultural environment—the tools it makes available—can lead to differences in the nature of the resultant mind reading. Do more improvisational forms of music enhance mind-reading abilities more than structured, individualistic forms of music? Do visual forms of story telling (like comic books) lead to different kinds of mind reading than written forms (like traditional novels)? As yet, we do not know the answers to these questions, but the present account makes clear that they are central to advancing our cross-cultural understanding of human mind-reading. On the other hand, and relatedly, this account may support the development of tools to aid mutual human understanding. By determining which cognitive and social technologies support stronger mind reading in a specific cultural setting, we may be able to improve how we relate to each other.

In this way, the study of the evolution of distinctively human mind-reading is not just of inherent scientific interest; it may improve how we peculiar social beings live our lives.