When is mindreading accurate? A commentary on Shannon Spaulding’s How We Understand Others: Philosophy and Social Cognition

ABSTRACT

In How We Understand Others: Philosophy and Social Cognition, Shannon Spaulding develops a novel account of mindreading with pessimistic implications for mindreading accuracy: according to Spaulding, mistakes in mentalizing are much more common than traditional theories of mindreading commonly assume. In this commentary, I push against Spaulding’s pessimism from two directions. First, I argue that a number of the heuristic mindreading strategies that Spaulding views as especially prone to error might actually be quite reliable in practice. Second, I argue that current methods for measuring mindreading performance are not well-suited for the task of determining whether our mental-state attributions are generally accurate. I conclude that any claims about the accuracy or inaccuracy of mindreading are currently unjustified.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Spaulding is sensitive to this point. In particular, she is careful to distinguish between stereotypes that encode false statistical generalizations and stereotypes that encode generics (Leslie, 2014). For example, “most mosquitos carry West Nile” expresses a false statistical generalization, but the generic “mosquitos carry West Nile” expresses a true proposition. Spaulding allows that the stereotypes that influence mindreading may be either statistical or generic in their form, and that generic stereotypes sometimes encode true propositions.

2. Spaulding (2018) also argues that sometimes our goals in mindreading are not to attribute accurate mental states at all but, rather, to shape or regulate the mental states of our mindreading targets (McGeer, 2007; Zawidzki, 2013). For example, one might try to encourage a person to sample a new kind of cuisine by convincing them that they like to try new things. Ostensibly, this mental-state attribution need not be true in order for it to achieve its goal. However, this goal is entirely consistent with – and indeed might actually depend upon – accurate mindreading. In order for subtle acts of regulative mental-state attribution like this to be effective, however, they will most likely require other accurate mental-state attributions. For example, in order for the aforementioned strategy to work, I must first be able to predict that the false mental-state attribution would have a particular effect on the target’s actual mental states (say, by activating the person’s desire to like up other people’s expectations of her). If this part of my prediction is wrong, then the whole regulative strategy would fail. Thus, the fact that we sometimes mindread for regulative purposes does not undercut the basic claim that mindreading typically aims at accuracy.

3. Indeed, a common critique of these kinds of tasks is that they involve extraneous performance demands that obscure conceptual competence (Helming et al., 2016; Leslie et al., 2005; Westra & Carruthers, 2017).

4. It is also worth noting that performance on the reading-the-mind-in-the-eyes task is strongly affected by participant race, ethnicity, and education (Dodell-Feder et al., 2020), which raises further questions about its reliability as a tool to measure mindreading competence.

5. Using this method, Lewis and colleagues have found that having stronger stereotypes can, at least in certain circumstances, lead to more accurate mindreading (Lewis et al., 2012) – a point that is consistent with the argument about stereotyping from the previous section. However, as I go on to argue, we should be very cautious about how much authority we give to this finding.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [PDF 756-2018-0012].