This project is funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council, through a Research Grant awarded to Dr Richard O’Connor and Prof Kevin Riggs. Dr Andrew Lucas has been working with us as a post-doctoral researcher.
- What is “theory of mind”?
- What is “egocentric bias”?
- What are you doing in your research?
- Project Findings (new page)
What is “theory of mind”?
“Theory of mind” is our ability to interpret and predict other people’s behaviour in terms of “mental states”, such as beliefs and desires. For example, if you saw your colleague opening the office fridge, you might interpret this behaviour as the result of your colleague’s desire to get some milk for his coffee and his belief that there is milk in the fridge.
Now imagine that, unbeknownst to your poor colleague, you actually finished off the last bottle of milk just moments before he came into the kitchen. When you see him reaching into the fridge, we would still interpret his behaviour as a result of a desire (to get some milk) and a belief (that there is milk in the fridge). Even though there is in fact no milk in the fridge, your colleague does not know this. He thinks that there is milk in the fridge, and it is this false belief that explains his behaviour.
This simple example highlights a key point: when we want to understand other people’s behaviour, what matters is what other people believe, rather than what is actually the case. People can have beliefs that are different from our own, and that are different from reality. While this may seem obvious to us as adults, young children and many non-human animals (in fact, possibly all non-human animals) do not appear to share this understanding, often acting as though other people share the same beliefs that they do.
As psychologists researching theory of mind, we are interested in the fundamental processes that enable older children and adults to understand this key difference between beliefs and reality.
What is “egocentric bias”?
“Egocentric bias” is the idea that our own mental states – our beliefs, knowledge, desires etc. – interfere with and affect our ability to think about the mental states of other people. Specifically, it has been claimed that in order to think about the false beliefs of others, we have to overcome a bias towards what we know to be the case (our own true belief). If we know that there is no milk in the fridge, then we have to inhibit or suppress this knowledge in order to think about another person who believes there is in fact milk in the fridge. It has been suggested that young children struggle to overcome egocentric bias, and it is improvements in our ability to overcome egocentric bias that allows older children and adults to think about other people’s false beliefs.
What are you doing in your research?
In our research we are trying to measure egocentric bias in adults while they think about other people’s false beliefs. This allows us to test the above claims about egocentric bias: does thinking about false beliefs require overcoming a bias towards our own belief?
Participants in our studies watch videos of short scenarios. Some of these videos involve a person having a false belief about the location of an object: the person in the video thinks the object is in one location, but the participant really knows it is in another place. At the end of each scenario, participants answer questions about what they’ve just seen, using a computer mouse to click on one of two possible answers. Some of these questions will be about where the person in the video thinks the object is hidden.
By measuring not only which answer participants click on, but also how they move the mouse before giving their answer, we can measure the extent to which participants consider the different answers while making their decision. For example, first moving the mouse towards one answer and then switching to click on the other answer indicates that a participant was initially attracted towards giving the first answer, before then changing their mind to give the second answer.
We are interested in whether participants show an initial attraction towards answers that reflect their own belief when they answer questions about the false belief of the person in the video. If we see this behaviour, this would indicate that adults do initially face an egocentric bias towards their own belief when thinking about beliefs of others that are different from their own.
You can find out about our findings here.