When we think about mindreading, we often picture impressive psychic abilities - the type we see in movies and magic shows. This does not stop us from trying to mindread ourselves, of course. In psychology, mindreading is called ‘social mentalizing,’ which means predictions based on our understanding of other people. Whenever we try to figure out what someone else is thinking, we are doing something called first-order mentalizing. Second-order mentalizing is similar, but involves inferring how close others are to thinking about our own minds. Different social cues, like past experiences and tone of voice, affect how we do this in our minds.
If we study how these cues work, we might be able to learn how we mentalize. A 2023 paper hoped to study just that. Participants were put into pairs with other participants. Each person was then given a desk with a computer. They completed a ‘spot the difference’ task with two pictures on their screens for ten seconds. Next, participants were asked to predict how many differences they would find after another ten seconds. This task and question were used to measure second-order mentalizing. After another ten seconds, participants viewed the first ten seconds of their partner’s task. They were asked to guess how many differences the partner would find after 20 seconds. This task and question were used to measure first-order mentalizations.
The authors suggested that during both types of mentalizations, how well one and how well the other were doing on the task are both used as cues. These cues help us make predictions when we are trying to mindread. They also suggested that future research should explore how other forms of cues, like body language, can affect how we ‘mindread.’
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