A single strategy is not sufficient to navigate the complex social interactions of everyday life, argues study

To successfully cooperate or compete with other people in everyday life, it is important to know what the other person thinks, feels, or wants. Dr. Julia Wolf, Dr. Sabrina Coninx and Professor Albert Newen from Institute of Philosophy II at Ruhr-Universität Bochum have explored which strategies people use to understand other people.

For a long time, it was assumed that people relied exclusively on a single strategy: Mind reading. This means that people infer the mental states of others solely based on their behavior. In more recent accounts, however, this ability has been relegated to the background. The Bochum-based team now argues that although people use a number of different strategies, mind reading also plays an important role. They present their findings in the journal Erkenntnis, published online on 10 November 2021.

Strategies for understanding others

In recent years, researchers have criticized mind reading for being too complicated and demanding to be a common strategy for understanding other people. Julia Wolf provides an example of mind reading: “When I see someone running towards a bus, I infer that this person has the desire to catch the bus,” she says. “In doing so, I can either picture myself in their situation, or draw on my knowledge of general principles regarding the behavior of others.”

However, in order to recognize the feelings, desires, and needs of others, people may take a different approach. They can directly perceive that a person is stressed based on physical features and other contextual cues. But they can also predict what a person will do next based on learned behavioral rules, without having to infer and attribute a mental state. “When someone gets on the bus, I can predict that they will show their ticket at the entrance without thinking about what is making them do so,” says Sabrina Coninx.

People combine different strategies

Today, researchers assume that people combine several strategies to understand others. “We argue that mind reading is more than an unreliable and rarely used backup strategy in this context—it plays a major role in social cognition,” Albert Newen sums up the findings. The authors identify three criteria that could be used to test the importance of mind reading: how frequently it is used, how central it is, and how reliable it is.

While more empirical research is needed to answer the frequency question, the Bochum-based team thinks that there are good reasons to think that mind reading is central to social understanding. “It enables us to develop an individual understanding of others that goes beyond the here and now,” explains Julia Wolf. “This plays a crucial role in building and maintaining long-term relationships.”

Source: Read Full Article