Padium wrote:
Anyone find that they have difficulties with some theory of the mind stuff? For example, I often like to think that just because I close the door to my room that my roomies in the next room over can't hear my music, even though I know that is not true. But I will not bother with my music when my door is open just because I don't want to be judged based on what I listen to. Anyone else have experiences like this?
This doesn't sound to me like Theory of Mind... My interpretation of ToM is that it's about being able to rationalize what another person might be thinking on the basis of their perspective (what information they have or are likely to have).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mindQuote:
The canonical test of ToM ability is the false-belief task. One of the most important milestones in theory of mind development is gaining the ability to attribute false belief: that is, to recognize that others can have beliefs about the world that are wrong. To do this, it is suggested, one must understand how knowledge is formed, that people’s beliefs are based on their knowledge, that mental states can differ from reality, and that people’s behavior can be predicted by their mental states. Numerous versions of the false-belief task have been developed, based on the initial task done by Wimmer and Perner (1983).[19]
In the most common version of the false-belief task (often called the ‘Sally-Anne’ task), children are told or shown a story involving two characters. For example, in one version, the child is shown two dolls, Sally and Anne, playing with a marble. The dolls put away the marble in a box, and then Sally leaves. Anne takes the marble out and plays with it again, and after she is done, puts it away in a different box. Sally returns and the child is then asked where Sally will look for the marble. The child passes the task if she answers that Sally will look in the first box where she put the marble; the child fails the task if she answers that Sally will look in the second box, where the child knows the marble is hidden, even though Sally cannot know, since she did not see it hidden there. In order to pass the task, the child must be able to understand that another’s mental representation of the situation is different from their own, and the child must be able to predict behavior based on that understanding.
The criticisms of the test have to do largely with the fact that the test is pass/fail and that it makes a lot of assumptions about the test-taker's thinking. For example, the test taker may assume that Sally and Anne had a lengthy discussion of all the possible places where the marble might be prior to Sally's leaving the room and therefore Sally might simply not expect the marble to be in the place she left it after she returns. I personally have a difficult time following that line of reasoning, since it seems like that would lead them to saying "she'll ask Anne" rather than pointing to the box, in which case you would know that the test didn't work the way it's expected to work. I have a hard time imagining a scenario in which the test taker uses inductive reasoning to conclude via ToM that Sally comes back into the room and goes straight to the box first before anything else. I suppose that could just be my interpretation.
The thing with music and the door sounds more like a quirk... although at one job I worked for a while, I had a closed office and I turned my radio down (I thought "way down") and had assumed because I myself, sitting not more than 2' from the speaker could barely hear it, that obviously no one else could hear it beyond my closed office door. Apparently I was horribly mistaken as my boss later told me that he was rather annoyed by my continual music but hadn't said anything about it prior.
Though it doesn't seem to me that being able to know what people might like as gifts would fall into the ToM category either -- that sounds more like simply not having observed the other person's preferences.
I don't think not knowing which abbreviations or acronyms need to be spelled out in a report falls into the category of ToM either. I know that other people aren't always aware of the abbreviations that are used in my job, but that doesn't mean they'll necessarily be unfamiliar with a given abbreviation. If I say XML for example, many people don't know what that is, but they've heard the term and are apt to just ignore it in a report, essentially substituting the term "XML" with "black magic". As in, "We plan to use black magic to solve problems x, y, z." The person reading the report is often less interested in how the problem is resolved than they are in the fact that there is a plan to resolve it, so they're happy to know that "black magic" will be a solution. But none of these things give you any kind of specific input that would allow you to rationalize what the other person is thinking (as in the Sally Anne test you know the specific inputs of the marble's placement and Sally's leaving the room).
However even if it never occurred to you that others might not be familiar with an abbreviation, that may not indicate a lack of ToM either, because that kind of assumption that others think similarly is common amongst NTs as well. There are a few cognitive biases related to this, such as déformation professionnelle as well as false concensus and the availability heuristic. So even to the NT it often doesn't occur to them that others don't know what XML means because they're familiar with it as part of their job.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%A9for ... ssionnelle
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_consensus_effect
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic
Last edited by ike on 13 Jan 2009, 11:41 am, edited 1 time in total.
12 Jan 2009, 5:40 pm
