Title: How Do We Accurately Understand the Minds of Others? Motivators, Strategies, and Choice

 

The proposal seeks to expand the understanding of the properties of mind perception, the inferential processes that enable judging others’ mental states – their beliefs, desires, attitudes, and emotions. We start by exploring the triggers that activate mind perception. In particular, we ask whose minds people wish to understand, what they wish to know, and when. We also test when and why people avoid mind perception efforts. Once mind perception processes are activated, we explore what enables accurate mind perception, and what decreases accuracy. We compare between two strategies for mind perception in terms of accuracy and confidence – perspective taking, a strategy that relies on top-down inferences, and perspective getting, a strategy that relies on bottom-up individuating information about the other. We predict that perspective getting will lead to better accuracy than perspective taking, but that this benefit of perspective getting will not be recognized by participants, leading to high levels of confidence in their predictions, regardless of their actual accuracy. In the final part of the proposal we study whether increasing humility about one’s knowledge enables accuracy by selecting to utilize more effective strategies for understanding others. The predicted results, if obtained, would advance our understanding of the motivators, strategies, and choices that enable effective mind perception and may promote better understanding and less hostility between partners, parents and children, and members of groups in disagreement.