Scaling Theory of Mind in a Small-Scale Society: A Case Study From Vanuatu

Rethinking Norm Psychology

Norms permeate human life. Most of people's activities can be characterized by rules about what is appropriate, allowed, required, or forbidden-rules that are crucial in making people hyper-cooperative animals. In this article, I examine the current cognitive-evolutionary account of "norm psychology" and propose an alternative that is better supported by evidence and better placed to promote interdisciplinary dialogue. The incumbent theory focuses on rules and claims that humans genetically inherit cognitive and motivational mechanisms specialized for processing these rules. The cultural-evolutionary alternative defines normativity in relation to behavior-compliance, enforcement, and commentary-and suggests that it depends on implicit and explicit processes. The implicit processes are genetically inherited and domain-general; rather than being specialized for normativity, they do many jobs in many species. The explicit processes are culturally inherited and domain-specific; they are constructed from mentalizing and reasoning by social interaction in childhood. The cultural-evolutionary, or "cognitive gadget," perspective suggests that people alive today-parents, educators, elders, politicians, lawyers-have more responsibility for sustaining normativity than the nativist view implies. People's actions not only shape and transmit the rules, but they also create in each new generation mental processes that can grasp the rules and put them into action.

Development of teaching in ni-Vanuatu children

Teaching is an important mechanism of social learning. In industrialized societies, 3-year-olds tend to teach through demonstrations and short commands, while 5-year-olds use more verbal communication and abstract explanations. However, it remains unclear whether this generalizes to other cultures. This study presents results from a peer teaching game with 55 Melanesian children (4.7-11.4 years, 24 female) conducted in Vanuatu in 2019. Up to age 8, most participants taught through a participatory approach, emphasizing learning-by-doing, demonstrations, and short commands (57.1% of children aged 4-6 and 57.9% of children aged 7-8). Contrary to Western findings, abstract verbal communication only became common in children aged 9-11 (63.6%), suggesting that the ontogeny of teaching is shaped by the socio-cultural environment.

Empirical challenges from the comparative and developmental literature to the Shared Intentionality Theory - a review of alternative data on recursive mind reading, prosociality, imitation and cumulative culture

Humans have an irresistible inclination to coordinate actions with others, leading to species-unique forms of cooperation. According to the highly influential Shared Intentionality Theory (SITh), human cooperation is made possible by shared intentionality (SI), typically defined as a suite of socio-cognitive and motivational traits for sharing psychological states with others, thereby enabling individuals to engage in joint action in the mutually aware pursuit of shared goals. SITh theorises that SI evolved as late as 400,000 years ago, when our ancestors (in particular, Homo heidelbergensis) turned to a kind of food procurement that obligatorily required joint coordinated action. SI is, thus, hypothesized to be absent in other extant species, including our closest genetic relatives, the nonhuman great apes ("apes"). According to SITh, ape psychology is exclusively driven by individualistic motivations, as opposed to human psychology which is uniquely driven by altruistic motivations. The evolutionary scenario proposed by SITh builds on a series of findings from socio-cognitive research with apes and human children, and on the assumption that abilities expressed early in human development are human universals, unlikely to have been shaped by socio-cultural influences. Drawing on the primatological and developmental literature, we provide a systematic - albeit selective - review of SITh-inconsistent findings concerning psychological and behavioural traits theorised to be constitutive of SI. The findings we review pertain to all three thematic clusters typically addressed in SITh: (i) recursive mind reading; (ii) prosociality; (iii) imitation and cumulative culture. We conclude that such alternative data undermine two core SITh claims: the late evolutionary emergence of SI and the radical divide between ape and human psychology. We also discuss several conceptual and methodological limitations that currently hamper reliable comparative research on SI, in particular those engendered by Western-centric biases in the social sciences, where an overreliance on Western samples has promoted the formulation of Western-centric conceptualisations, operationalisations and methodologies.

The link between emotion comprehension and cognitive perspective taking in theory of mind (ToM): a study of preschool children

The study examined the relation between perspective taking embedded in theory of mind (ToM) and emotion comprehension (EC) in young children. Our study involved children from Poland aged 3-6 (N = 99; 54% boys) from public and private kindergartens residing mainly in urban areas, whose parents could mostly be classified as middle class. The children were examined with the Test of Emotion Comprehension (TEC) and three tasks targeting three aspects of ToM: a first-order false belief task, an appearance-reality test, and a mental states opacity task. The results showed similarities in performances between these different measures. However, only the opacity task predicted the emotion comprehension test results (η² = 0.13). The results indicate that the key element of ToM that explains individual differences in children's emotion comprehension is the full-blown understanding of perspective taking, namely that having access to an object under one description does not ensure access to that object under all descriptions. In the research, we took also into account the linguistic side of such specific competences as ToM and EC, which allowed us to see the role of language in scaffolding the development of children's ability to handle such socially fundamental tasks as understanding emotions and epistemic states.

Pattern of acquisition of theory of mind in pre-schoolers: A cross-sectional study from South India

BACKGROUND

Theory of Mind (ToM) is an important part of children's social cognitive development. The pattern of ToM acquisition depends on many factors including culture, the number of family members, and siblings. This study aimed to examine the pattern of ToM acquisition in Indian culture.

METHODS

We conducted a cross-sectional study among preschool children (three to six years) (N = 118) from rural and urban backgrounds. ToM development was assessed using the Wellman and Liu Theory of Mind Scale and the Children's Social Understanding Scale (parent report).

RESULTS

The order of acquisition of ToM in Indian children was as follows: diverse desire> diverse belief> knowledge access> explicit false belief> content false belief> hidden emotion. The number of siblings positively correlated with the total ToM task score, and the number of adults in the family did not show any positive correlation.

CONCLUSIONS

Although India is a collectivistic country, the acquisition pattern of ToM in our population was like that of individualistic countries such as the United States.

Could, would, should: Theory of mind and deontic reasoning in Tongan children

This study examined the developmental profiles of children's social reasoning about individual agentive and deontic concerns. Tongan children (N = 140, 47.9% male), aged 4–8 years, were given a set of mentalistic (standard theory‐of‐mind) and deontic reasoning tasks. On average, children found diverse desires, knowledge access, hidden emotion, and belief emotion easier than the false‐belief and diverse belief tasks. Tongan children were sensitive to social norms governing behavior, and this information was recruited for predicting behavior in a false‐belief task when embedded in a socially normative context. We discuss the potential for cultural mandates to shape children's social understanding and the impact of culture on our theoretical framing of children's development.

Evidence for similar conceptual progress across diverse cultures in children’s understanding of emotion

Research with adults has increasingly moved beyond the focus on a small set of allegedly basic emotions, each associated with a signature facial expression. That expansion has been accompanied by a greater emphasis on the potential variability of emotion concepts across different cultural settings. In this conceptual review of children’s understanding of emotion, we argue that it is also important in developmental research to look beyond the small set of emotions associated with distinctive facial expressions. At the same time, we caution against any premature rejection of a universalist approach to children’s understanding of emotion. We review three different lines of evidence in support of this stance: (1) children’s ability to appropriately cite situational elicitors for emotions beyond the basic set; (2) their developing understanding of the relations between emotions and other mental processes; and (3) their realization that a person’s facially expressed emotion may not indicate their felt emotion. In each of these three domains, we target studies that have included children from a variety of cultures to assess how far they respond similarly or differently. We conclude that there is robust evidence for similar conceptual progress in children’s understanding of emotion across a range of cultural settings.

Relations between theory of mind and family environment among Brazilian preschool children

Given the importance of the environment for the development of the theory of mind (ToM) in childhood, as well as the scarcity of studies in low-income Latin American countries, we aimed to investigate the relation between family environment characteristics and performance in ToM tasks in a group of Brazilian children. A total of 49 children participated, whose ages ranged between 3 and 5 years (M = 4.43; SD = 0.71), all of whom attended a public kindergarten school located in the metropolitan region of São Paulo, Brazil, and took the Theory of mind test for children (TMTC). The observation of the characteristics of the family environment was conducted by using the Home Observation for Measurement of the Environment (HOME) instrument in the very home setting of each participating child. By controlling the effects of children's age, intelligence, vocabulary, and mother's and father's educational level, a consistent positive, significant, and low-magnitude correlation was found between HOME's Responsiveness subscale with the total score in TMTC. A robust regression analysis also showed that individual and contextual variables (above cited, plus sex) and Responsiveness accounted for 28.4% of ToM variance. This study corroborates previous findings on the relation between family aspects and ToM, specifically highlighting parents' responsiveness.

Teaching Through Collaboration: Flexibility and Diversity in Caregiver-Child Interaction Across Cultures

Teaching supports the high-fidelity transmission of knowledge and skills. This study examined similarities and differences in caregiver teaching practices in the United States and Vanuatu (N = 125 caregiver and 3- to 8-year-old child pairs) during a collaborative problem-solving task. Caregivers used diverse verbal and nonverbal teaching practices and adjusted their behaviors in response to task difficulty and child age in both populations. U.S. caregivers used practices consistent with a direct active teaching style typical of formal education, including guiding children's participation, frequent praise, and facilitation. In contrast, Ni-Vanuatu caregivers used practices associated with informal education and divided tasks with children based on difficulty. The implications of these findings for claims about the universality and diversity of caregiver teaching are discussed.

Cultural variation in young children's social motivation for peer collaboration and its relation to the ontogeny of Theory of Mind

Children seek and like to engage in collaborative activities with their peers. This social motivation is hypothesized to facilitate their emerging social-cognitive skills and vice versa. Current evidence on the ontogeny of social motivation and its’ links to social cognition, however, is subject to a sampling bias toward participants from urban Western populations. Here, we show both cross-cultural variation and homogeneity in three- to eight-year-old children’s expressed positive emotions during and explicit preferences for peer collaboration across three diverse populations (urban German, rural Hai||om/Namibia, rural Ovambo/Namibia; n = 240). Children expressed more positive emotions during collaboration as compared to individual activity, but the extent varied across populations. Children’s preferences for collaboration differed markedly between populations and across ages: While German children across all ages sought collaboration, Hai||om children preferred to act individually throughout childhood. Ovambo children preferred individual play increasingly with age. Across populations, positive emotions expressed selectively during collaboration, predicted children’s social-cognitive skills. These findings provide evidence that culture shapes young children’s social motivation for dyadic peer collaboration. At the same time, the positive relation of social motivation and social cognition in early ontogeny appears cross-culturally constant.

Expert or Esoteric? Philosophers Attribute Knowledge Differently Than All Other Academics

Academics across widely ranging disciplines all pursue knowledge, but they do so using vastly different methods. Do these academics therefore also have different ideas about when someone possesses knowledge? Recent experimental findings suggest that intuitions about when individuals have knowledge may vary across groups; in particular, the concept of knowledge espoused by the discipline of philosophy may not align with the concept held by laypeople. Across two studies, we investigate the concept of knowledge held by academics across seven disciplines (N = 1,581) and compare these judgments to those of philosophers (N = 204) and laypeople (N = 336). We find that academics and laypeople share a similar concept of knowledge, while philosophers have a substantially different concept. These experiments show that (a) in contrast to philosophers, other academics and laypeople attribute knowledge to others in some "Gettier" situations; (b) academics and laypeople are much less likely to attribute knowledge when reminded of the possibility of error, but philosophers are not affected by this reminder; and (c) non-philosophy academics are overall more skeptical about knowledge than laypeople or philosophers. These findings suggest that academics across a wide range of disciplines share a similar concept of knowledge, and that this concept aligns closely with the intuitions held by laypeople, and differs considerably from the concept of knowledge described in the philosophical literature, as well as the epistemic intuitions of philosophers themselves.

The Minds of God(s) and Humans: Differences in Mind Perception in Fiji and North America

Previous research suggests that how people conceive of minds depends on the culture in which they live, both in determining how they interact with other human minds and how they infer the unseen minds of gods. We use exploratory factor analysis to compare how people from different societies with distinct models of human minds and different religious traditions perceive the minds of humans and gods. In two North American samples (American adults, N = 186; Canadian students, N = 202), we replicated a previously found two-factor agency/experience structure for both human and divine minds, but in Fijian samples (Indigenous iTaukei Fijians, N = 77; Fijians of Indian descent, N = 214; total N = 679) we found a three-factor structure, with the additional containing items related to social relationships. Further, Fijians' responses revealed a different three-factor structure for human minds and gods' minds. We used these factors as dimensions in the conception of minds to predict (a) expectations about human and divine tendencies towards punishment and reward; and (b) conception of gods as more embodied (an extension of experience) or more able to know people's thoughts (an extension of agency). We found variation in how these factors predict conceptions of agents across groups, indicating further theory is needed to explain how culturally generated concepts of mind lead to other sorts of social inferences. We conclude that mind perception is shaped by culturally defined social expectations and recommend further work in different cultural contexts to examine the interplay between culture and social cognition.

Cognitive gadgets: A provocative but flawed manifesto

The argument against innatism at the heart of Cognitive Gadgets is provocative but premature, and is vitiated by dichotomous thinking, interpretive double standards, and evidence cherry-picking. I illustrate my criticism by addressing the heritability of imitation and mindreading, the relevance of twin studies, and the meaning of cross-cultural differences in theory of mind development. Reaching an integrative understanding of genetic inheritance, plasticity, and learning is a formidable task that demands a more nuanced evolutionary approach.