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I've heard that theory of mind issue described as "cannot reliably make predictions based on what other people might think or do.", which is more nuanced than t

I've heard that theory of mind issue described as "cannot reliably make predictions based on what other people might think or do.", which is more nuanced than the other definition of "doesn't understand that other people have minds of their own." Using the first definition, about prediction, makes a lot of sense and is a useful psychological concept. The first definition would predict theory of mind issues in unrelated disorders, which I think you do see: - Autism: the mind's ability to process social cues is not there or severely diminished. You'd expect these individuals to be bad predictors of others because they don't get or can't use sensory information that others do. - Schizotypal personality disorder: they experience intrusive thoughts. They might be bad predictors of others because they assume that everyone else gets intrusive, paranoid thoughts on a regular basis.

jimberlage 3y ago
It's also worth noting - the concept is bottom-up, practitioner-driven, while the experiments that get at theory of mind are top-down, academic-driven. Theory of mind would exist even if it stopped showing up in academic papers, only because it makes sense to have a shorthand for "my patient keeps complaining about uncomfortable social situations, and after I dig in, it turns out they were missing important social cues". That was known by therapists long before we started trying to operationalize theory-of-mind issues for experiments. It's really, really tough to design an experiment for this, because it's not super easy to design a multiple-choice questionnaire that will predict if you'll have difficulty understanding subtle social cues. It's a thing that a face-to-face interview would uncover, but not necessarily someone's written output. You can also run experiments where an investigator interviews the person and records when they miss a social cue, but even then lots of high-functioning autistic people would be able to pass that even if they genuinely have trouble interpreting social cues on a regular basis.

jimberlage 3y ago

It's also worth noting - the concept is bottom-up, practitioner-driven, while the experiments that get at theory of mind are top-down, academic-driven. Theory of mind would exist even if it stopped showing up in academic papers, only because it makes sense to have a shorthand for "my patient keeps complaining about uncomfortable social situations, and after I dig in, it turns out they were missing important social cues". That was known by therapists long before we started trying to operationalize theory-of-mind issues for experiments. It's really, really tough to design an experiment for this, because it's not super easy to design a multiple-choice questionnaire that will predict if you'll have difficulty understanding subtle social cues. It's a thing that a face-to-face interview would uncover, but not necessarily someone's written output. You can also run experiments where an investigator interviews the person and records when they miss a social cue, but even then lots of high-functioning autistic people would be able to pass that even if they genuinely have trouble interpreting social cues on a regular basis.