Show Summary Details
- Title Pages
- Dedication
- Foreword
- Editors’ Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Contributors
- Section I Framing the Issues
- 1.1 Social-Cognitive Development
- 1.2 The Paradox of the Emerging Social Brain
- 1.3 Core Social Cognition
- 1.4 Core Cognition of Social Relations
- 1.5 Infant Cartographers
- 1.6 The Evolution of Concepts About Agents
- 1.7 The Evolution of Human Sociocognitive Development
- 1.8 Teleological Understanding of Actions
- 1.9 How Universals and Individual Differences Can Inform Each Other
- 1.10 The Contribution of Temperament to the Study of Social Cognition
- 1.11 Emotion and Learning
- 1.12 Early Childhood Is Where Many Adult Automatic Processes Are Born
- 1.13 Social Evaluation
- Section II Mentalizing
- 2.1 Universal Social Cognition
- 2.2 Infant Foundations of Intentional Understanding
- 2.3 Why Don’t Apes Understand False Beliefs?
- 2.4 False-Belief Understanding and Why it Matters
- 2.5 Language and Reasoning About Beliefs
- 2.6 The Myth of Mentalizing and the Primacy of Folk Sociology
- 2.7 The New Puzzle of Theory of Mind Development
- 2.8 How Real Is the Imaginary?
- 2.9 Social Engagement Does Not Lead to Social Cognition
- Section III Imitation, Modeling, and Learning From and About Others
- 3.1 Natural Pedagogy
- 3.2 A Comparison of Neonatal Imitation Abilities in Human and Macaque Infants
- 3.3 Origins of Social Cognition
- 3.4 Overimitation and the Development of Causal Understanding
- 3.5 Social Cognition
- 3.6 Early Social Deprivation and the Neurobiology of Interpreting Facial Expressions
- 3.7 The Emergence of Perceptual Preferences for Social Signals of Emotion
- 3.8 Some Thoughts on the Development and Neural Bases of Face Processing
- 3.9 Redescribing Action
- 3.10 Preschoolers Are Selective Word Learners
- 3.11 Culture-Gene Coevolutionary Theory and Children’s Selective Social Learning
- 3.12 How Causal Learning Helps Us Understand Other People and How Other People Help Us Learn About Causes
- 3.13 How Children Learn From and About People
- 3.14 Children Learn From and About Variability Between People
- Section iv Trust and Skepticism
- 4.1 The Gaze of Others
- 4.2 Empathy Deficits in Autism and Psychopaths
- 4.3 Status Seeking
- 4.4 Reputation Is Everything
- 4.5 Understanding Expertise
- 4.6 Respectful Deference
- 4.7 Children’s Understanding of Unreliability
- 4.8 Biased to Believe
- 4.9 Food as a Unique Domain in Social Cognition
- Section V Us and Them
- 5.1 What Is Group Psychology?
- 5.2 The Conceptual Structure of Social Categories
- 5.3 Essentialism
- 5.4 Generic Statements, Causal Attributions, and Children’s Naive Theories
- 5.5 From Categories to Exemplars (and Back Again)
- 5.6 Bridging the Gap Between Preference and Evaluation During the First Few Years of Life
- 5.7 On the Developmental Origins of Differential Responding to Social Category Information
- 5.8 Building a Better Bridge
- 5.9 Is Gender Special?
- 5.10 Does Your Infant Say the Words “Girl” and “Boy”?How Gender Labels Matter in Early Gender Development
- 5.11 Bringing the Cognitive and the Social Together
- 5.12 The Development of Language as a Social Category
- 5.13 The Study of Lay Theories
- 5.14 Social Acumen
- 5.15 Understanding and Reducing Social Stereotyping and Prejudice Among Children
- 5.16 What Are They Thinking?
- 5.17 How Do Children Learn to Actively Control Their Explicit Prejudice?
- Section vi Good and Evil
- 6.1 What Primates Can Tell Us About the Surprising Nature of Human Choice
- 6.2 Horrible Children
- 6.3 Young Children’s Moral and Social-Conventional Understanding
- 6.4 The Origin of Children’s Appreciation of Ownership Rights
- 6.5 Becoming a Moral Relativist
- 6.6 The Origins of the Prosocial Ape
- 6.7 Cooperation, Behavioral Diversity, and Inequity Responses
- 6.8 Morality, Intentionality, and Exclusion
- 6.9 Converging Developments in Prosocial Behavior and Self-Other Understanding in the Second Year of Life
- 6.10 Disposition Attribution in Infancy
- 6.11 What Do Children and Chimpanzees Reveal About Human Altruism?
- Index
The Myth of Mentalizing and the Primacy of Folk Sociology
The Myth of Mentalizing and the Primacy of Folk Sociology
- Chapter:
- (p.101) 2.6 The Myth of Mentalizing and the Primacy of Folk Sociology
- Source:
- Navigating the Social World
- Author(s):
Lawrence A. Hirschfeld
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199890712.003.0019
This chapter argues that mentalizing—imagining that others have thoughts and feelings and other mental states that motivate them to action—is of sharply limited utility in interpreting and predicting the behavior of others. Humans are in fact quite poor at appraising what others and indeed what we ourselves are thinking and feeling. In contrast, humans excel at interpreting and predicting behavior in terms of unseen social and cultural (nonmental) qualities. In negotiating social interactions, mentalizing is less important than attention to the contingencies of context, normative constraints on action, epistemic affordances of the cultural environment, and the group dynamics of the social milieu.
Keywords: social interactions, context, normative constraints, action, cultural environment, group dynamics
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- Title Pages
- Dedication
- Foreword
- Editors’ Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Contributors
- Section I Framing the Issues
- 1.1 Social-Cognitive Development
- 1.2 The Paradox of the Emerging Social Brain
- 1.3 Core Social Cognition
- 1.4 Core Cognition of Social Relations
- 1.5 Infant Cartographers
- 1.6 The Evolution of Concepts About Agents
- 1.7 The Evolution of Human Sociocognitive Development
- 1.8 Teleological Understanding of Actions
- 1.9 How Universals and Individual Differences Can Inform Each Other
- 1.10 The Contribution of Temperament to the Study of Social Cognition
- 1.11 Emotion and Learning
- 1.12 Early Childhood Is Where Many Adult Automatic Processes Are Born
- 1.13 Social Evaluation
- Section II Mentalizing
- 2.1 Universal Social Cognition
- 2.2 Infant Foundations of Intentional Understanding
- 2.3 Why Don’t Apes Understand False Beliefs?
- 2.4 False-Belief Understanding and Why it Matters
- 2.5 Language and Reasoning About Beliefs
- 2.6 The Myth of Mentalizing and the Primacy of Folk Sociology
- 2.7 The New Puzzle of Theory of Mind Development
- 2.8 How Real Is the Imaginary?
- 2.9 Social Engagement Does Not Lead to Social Cognition
- Section III Imitation, Modeling, and Learning From and About Others
- 3.1 Natural Pedagogy
- 3.2 A Comparison of Neonatal Imitation Abilities in Human and Macaque Infants
- 3.3 Origins of Social Cognition
- 3.4 Overimitation and the Development of Causal Understanding
- 3.5 Social Cognition
- 3.6 Early Social Deprivation and the Neurobiology of Interpreting Facial Expressions
- 3.7 The Emergence of Perceptual Preferences for Social Signals of Emotion
- 3.8 Some Thoughts on the Development and Neural Bases of Face Processing
- 3.9 Redescribing Action
- 3.10 Preschoolers Are Selective Word Learners
- 3.11 Culture-Gene Coevolutionary Theory and Children’s Selective Social Learning
- 3.12 How Causal Learning Helps Us Understand Other People and How Other People Help Us Learn About Causes
- 3.13 How Children Learn From and About People
- 3.14 Children Learn From and About Variability Between People
- Section iv Trust and Skepticism
- 4.1 The Gaze of Others
- 4.2 Empathy Deficits in Autism and Psychopaths
- 4.3 Status Seeking
- 4.4 Reputation Is Everything
- 4.5 Understanding Expertise
- 4.6 Respectful Deference
- 4.7 Children’s Understanding of Unreliability
- 4.8 Biased to Believe
- 4.9 Food as a Unique Domain in Social Cognition
- Section V Us and Them
- 5.1 What Is Group Psychology?
- 5.2 The Conceptual Structure of Social Categories
- 5.3 Essentialism
- 5.4 Generic Statements, Causal Attributions, and Children’s Naive Theories
- 5.5 From Categories to Exemplars (and Back Again)
- 5.6 Bridging the Gap Between Preference and Evaluation During the First Few Years of Life
- 5.7 On the Developmental Origins of Differential Responding to Social Category Information
- 5.8 Building a Better Bridge
- 5.9 Is Gender Special?
- 5.10 Does Your Infant Say the Words “Girl” and “Boy”?How Gender Labels Matter in Early Gender Development
- 5.11 Bringing the Cognitive and the Social Together
- 5.12 The Development of Language as a Social Category
- 5.13 The Study of Lay Theories
- 5.14 Social Acumen
- 5.15 Understanding and Reducing Social Stereotyping and Prejudice Among Children
- 5.16 What Are They Thinking?
- 5.17 How Do Children Learn to Actively Control Their Explicit Prejudice?
- Section vi Good and Evil
- 6.1 What Primates Can Tell Us About the Surprising Nature of Human Choice
- 6.2 Horrible Children
- 6.3 Young Children’s Moral and Social-Conventional Understanding
- 6.4 The Origin of Children’s Appreciation of Ownership Rights
- 6.5 Becoming a Moral Relativist
- 6.6 The Origins of the Prosocial Ape
- 6.7 Cooperation, Behavioral Diversity, and Inequity Responses
- 6.8 Morality, Intentionality, and Exclusion
- 6.9 Converging Developments in Prosocial Behavior and Self-Other Understanding in the Second Year of Life
- 6.10 Disposition Attribution in Infancy
- 6.11 What Do Children and Chimpanzees Reveal About Human Altruism?
- Index
