The Social Sense: Susceptibility to Others' Beliefs in Human Infants and Adults

Human social interactions crucially depend on the ability to represent other agents' beliefs even when these contradict our own beliefs, leading to the potentially complex problem of simultaneously holding two conflicting representations in mind. Here, we show that adults and 7-month-olds autom...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science) 2010-12, Vol.330 (6012), p.1830-1834
Main Authors: Kovács, Ágnes Melinda, Téglás, ErnŐ, Endress, Ansgar Denis
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adults
Babies
Beliefs
Biological and medical sciences
Children
Cognition & reasoning
Computation
Culture
Cupboards
Developmental psychology
Female
Film criticism
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Human
Humans
Infant
Infants
Male
Mind
On-line systems
Online
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Reaction Time
Representations
Scientific belief
Sensory perception
Social Cognition
Social evolution
Social interaction
Social interactions. Communication. Group processes
Social Perception
Social psychology
Tasks
Theory of Mind
Toys
Visual
Young Adult
Young Children
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Summary:Human social interactions crucially depend on the ability to represent other agents' beliefs even when these contradict our own beliefs, leading to the potentially complex problem of simultaneously holding two conflicting representations in mind. Here, we show 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 agent (whose beliefs were irrelevant to performing the task) both modulated adults' reaction times and infants' looking times. Moreover, the agent's beliefs influenced participants' behavior even after the agent had left the scene, suggesting that participants computed the agent's beliefs online and sustained them, possibly for future predictions about the agent's behavior. Hence, the mere presence of an agent automatically triggers powerful processes of belief computation that may be part of a "social sense" crucial to human societies.
ISSN:0036-8075
1095-9203
DOI:10.1126/science.1190792