The Theory of Mind or How Not To Be Sexist, Racist or Creepy Geezer
What is a Creepy Geezer?
My ‘European’ Aspie friend asked me the other day, what does ‘geezer’ mean?
He said a woman he was trying to chat up in a pub had called him a ‘creepy geezer’.
I said the word he ought to be concerned about was not ‘geezer’ but ‘creepy’.
I said, what did you say to her?
He said he had asked her if that was her hair?
I said, what?
He said, don’t worry she was black and I thought her hair was lovely.
So what happened next, I asked?
He said for some unexplained reason she got up and walked away and stopped talking to him.
Perplexed he asked me, why did that happen?
So I told him, what he said was not nice.
He said, he was nice and was trying to be nice.
So I told him what mattered was the person he was chatting up had thought that he was not being nice. She thought he was being a creep.
This led to him quizzing me on nice vs creep social etiquette:
What is the difference between:
- Being nice;
- Appearing nice and
- Someone thinking you’re nice?
Are you saying ‘being nice’ is not necessary and ‘someone thinking you’re nice’ is sufficient?
Is ‘appearing nice’the same as ‘someone thinking you’re nice’?
Don’t be a creepy geezer
My friend needs to stop being a creepy geezer and to do that he needs to ‘mind read’ and realise that the object of his affection holds a ‘false belief’ that he is a creep so not nice, and therefore he should modify his behaviour accordingly.
However, as he is on the autistic spectrum he can’t do this unconsciously so he needs to consciously use his words, body language, dress etc to correct her ‘false belief’.
It is the fact that he does not that leads her to walk away.
The fact that he knows that he is nice does not change her ‘false belief’
The fact that he tries to appear nice misses the point.
The goal is to correct her ‘false belief’ by making a good impression then she will think that he is not a creep.
None of this can happen without him realising that other people can hold ‘false beliefs’.
Neurotypicals unconsciously know that others can hold ‘false beliefs’ and this unconsciously affects their behaviour.
My friend needs to learn this and then he would cease to be a ‘creepy geezer’.
Mind Reading and Theory of Mind for Geezers
By the age of five neurotypical children have the ability to read others’ mind; they possess a ‘theory of mind’. They understand that other people have beliefs, thoughts and feelings different to their own. They understand that other people can have ‘false beliefs’. They have a ‘social sense’.
‘Theory of Mind’ (ToM)is the human ability to attribute mental states to oneself and to other people.
By adulthood, even people with mild autism (Aspergers) possess a ‘theory of mind’ but in my opinion, they are less impacted by others’ beliefs, thoughts and feelings. They consciously understand that others’ can have ‘false beliefs’ and they can read intentions but are not unconsciously affected by others’ beliefs, thoughts and feelings.
Having a Theory of Mind, in other words, means having the capacity to go beyond the surface, beyond the behaviour and the actions to the intentions, the desires, the beliefs that motivate the behaviour and actions.
The world is not just made up of bodies, heads and eyes that move in a coordinated fashion; the world is also made up of many of mental states (your own and those of others) that control what those bodies, heads and eyes do.
Aspies can behave as if they have a fully functioning ToM and ‘social sense’, while in fact, all they need is an understanding of the regularity of certain patterned behaviours.
For example, someone on the spectrum can determine that a woman sitting alone in a bar is usually waiting for someone and so does not mind conversing while she is waiting. No ToM or ‘social sense’ needed.
SMURF Studies — Scientific Experiment that illustrates the Strength of Unimpaired Unconscious Social Sense
Human social interactions crucially depend on the ability to represent other people’s beliefs even when these contradict our own beliefs, leading to the potentially complex problem of simultaneously holding two conflicting representations in mind.
This study shows that adults and 7-month-olds automatically encode others’ beliefs, and that, surprisingly, others’ beliefs have similar effects as the participants’ own beliefs.
In a visual object detection task, participants’ beliefs and the beliefs of an animated cartoon figure SMURF(whose beliefs were irrelevant to performing the task) both modulated adults’ reaction times and infants’ looking times. The beliefs of the animated cartoon figure affect the behaviour of viewers so strong is the unconscious ‘social sense’.
Moreover, the animated cartoon figure SMURF’s beliefs influenced participants’ behaviour even after it had left the scene, suggesting that participants computed its beliefs online and sustained them, possibly for future predictions about the animated cartoon figure SMURF’s behaviour.
Hence, the mere presence of even an animated cartoon figure SMURF automatically triggers powerful processes of belief computation that may be part of a “social sense” crucial to human societies.
See Description of SMURF Studies Experiment below. You may need to read experiment details a few times to fully understand it.
Conclusion
To be in tune with others we need to allow ourselves to be influenced by their beliefs both true and false. It is only when we do this can we be truly social and make real intimate connections.
As we get older our ‘social sense’ diminishes and we become ‘grumpy old men’ or ‘cat women’. People on the autistic spectrum also struggle with ‘social sense’.
One solution is to be both mindful to fully appreciate your own state of mind and to be open and objective, dispensing with both your conscious and unconscious biases.
If you assume others don’t hold ‘false beliefs’ about you and you don’t care about the beliefs of others false or otherwise then others may misjudge you. Others may assume that you are a creep, sexist or racist.
So although developing and improving your ‘social sense’ is not easy it is worthwhile.
Description of SMURF Studies Experiments
See ‘The Social Sense: Susceptibility to Others’ Beliefs in Human Infants and Adults’. YouTube video.
Here is a description of the experiment that illustrates unconscious ‘Social Sense’, see Dinner Thought Theory of Mind. It was part of a series of studies, designed at the Department of Cognitive Science at the Central European University in Budapest, which have come to be known as the SMURF studies (Kovács et al. 2010)
The experiment asks participants, recruited in Trieste, Italy, to watch one of four different versions of a movie which involves a ball that first rolls behind a screen and then either stays there or rolls away out of sight. Participants are told that at the end of the movie, the screen will be removed and that if they see the ball after this happens, they have to press a button as fast as they can.
This sounds like a daft reaction task, were it not for the surreptitious role played by a Smurf, in all its blue glory! The Smurf is just a bystander who comes on the scene at the start of each movie. From where it stands, on the side of the screen, the Smurf has the same visual access to the ball as the participants who are watching and reacting to the film. Except that, in all four versions of the movie, but at different moments in the sequence of events, the Smurf leaves and then re-enters the scene.
Now, the point of the experiment is to manipulate the expectation that you — the participant — have formed about the location of the ball and the expectation of the Smurf who, because of its exits from the scene, does not always share the same expectation as you.
Thus, when the screen is removed and, in half of the trials, the ball is there to be detected — only these are test trials, since reaction times can only be measured when the ball is behind the screen — you and the Smurf can both be “right” in your expectation that the ball is behind the screen, or you can both be “wrong” (neither of you expecting the ball to be there), or one of you can be “right” and the other one “wrong” (where “right” and “wrong” are measured against the test trials’ actual outcome).
So, this is how it works:
FILM 1
The Smurf enters
The ball rolls behind the screen
The Smurf leaves — nothing happens
The Smurf returns
In this case, both you and the Smurf rightly expect that the ball is behind the screen;
FILM 2
The Smurf enters
The ball rolls behind the screen
The ball rolls away
The Smurf leaves — nothing happens
The Smurf returns
In this case, both you and the Smurf wrongly expect that the ball is not behind the screen;
FILM 3
The Smurf enters
The ball rolls behind the screen
The Smurf leaves — balls rolls away
The Smurf returns
In this case, the Smurf rightly expects that the ball is behind the screen, while you wrongly expect that it is not;
FILM 4
The Smurf enters
The ball rolls behind the screen
The ball rolls away
The Smurf leaves — balls returns
The Smurf returns
In this case, you rightly expect that the ball is behind the screen, while the Smurf wrongly expects that it is not.
Because of these manipulations, the question that this cleverly designed study allows us to ask is whether the expectation of the Smurf makes any difference to the reaction time of the participants.
Note that the participants were never told anything about the Smurf, they were not instructed to pay attention to its presence, its movements or its expectations about the presence of the ball, and indeed the Smurf’s expectations are totally irrelevant to the participants’ perceptual task of detecting the presence of the tennis ball.
And yet, what the reaction times show is that, irrelevant as it may be, participants automatically and unconsciously represented to themselves and were affected by where the Smurf expected the ball to be.
Compared to the baseline reaction time — when both the participants and the Smurf had the same incorrect expectation that the ball was not behind the screen and were thus at their slowest in detecting the ball — the results indicate that:
- Unsurprisingly, participants were faster than in the baseline when both they and the Smurf correctly expected the ball to be behind the screen;
- That, reassuringly, participants were faster than in the baseline when they correctly expected the ball to be behind the screen and the Smurf didn’t — the Smurf’s incorrect expectation did not affect them;
- And that, somewhat astonishingly, participants were faster when they did not expect the ball to be behind the screen but the Smurf did!
In other words, participants computed the Smurf’s expectation — that the ball is behind the screen — and this influenced their behaviour even though it was inconsistent with their own expectation that the ball was not there. Indeed, their reaction times were not significantly different in the two conditions when the expectation that the ball was behind the screen was their own or that of the Smurf.[http://aotcpress.com/articles/dinner-thoughts-theory-mind/]
To me, this study provides a perfect illustration of the kind of automatic, unconscious, low-level processes that make up our mind-reading abilities. Here we have participants whose very simple task is to press a button when they detect a ball, and what we find is that even when performing such a simple task, they cannot help entering somebody else’s mind and becoming entangled in what somebody else knows and expects about the world.
