When the theory of mind would be very useful.

Abstract

The theory of mind is certainly necessary. The dire consequences of a missing theory of mind in autism spectrum disorders are a clear proof for it. So, it might be interesting to examine how it is necessary and useful by looking at some specific (and possible) functions in the mind of a child as well as of an adult, beyond the more general comprehension of one's own and others' mental state. First of all, as the field of the theory of mind is full of different approaches, we want to specify, very schematically, our point of view about this topic. The theory (naive) of mind is based upon the capacity to think about thoughts as such, to represent the representations regardless of the “objective” reality (meta-representative thought). The analysis of the results of the common cognitive test for studying this topic, the famous false belief task, shows that, regarding the representations of others, a correct meta-representation has to desist from reality as well as from one's own representation: “I know X, but I understand that you know Y.” In our opinion, the meta-representative thought is the cognitive process that generates the decentralized thought (vs. the egocentric thought); in other words the ability to adopt the cognitive perspective of someone else. However, the meta-representative thought can be pointed not only towards the external world and to other people, constituting the basis of interpersonal relations, but also towards the internal world, i.e., to one's own representations, thus constituting the basis of consciousness and meta-cognition. Summarizing, one could say that the theory of mind is the basis for the representation of the world of subjectivity (we have exposed these concepts more broadly in Battacchi et al., 1998). When talking about everyday thinking, we must remember that people not always reason according to the formal logic, but often activate cognitive processes that are less rational and affected by important biases (heuristics, analogical thinking, etc…). We can apply this well-known principle also to the meta-representative thought. This is certainly a complex thought that we would be able to use, but that we don't necessarily use in every situation of daily life. Indeed it's easy to notice (and even to demonstrate, as had been done in some cases, Keisar et al., 2003; Bloom and Birch, 2007; Keisar, 2007; Ryskin and Brown-Schmidt, 2014) that in daily life people very often violate the properties of the meta-representative thought, as the ones that we have indicated above. Massaro et al. (2013), for example, investigated the so-called outcome bias and hindsight bias in primary school children and explored the possible predictive function of false belief understanding in reducing these biases. This is why our basic question should sometimes be: “How useful would the theory of mind be?” From this point of view, we believe it could be interesting to address two specific topics: one is what we will call the “naive realism,” the other is “ignorance,” once more of one's own as well as of others. We belief in fact that the theory of mind, as meta-representative thought, can contribute to reduce the bias of naive realism and to increase the meta-cognitive awareness of one's own and others' ignorance and that these functions can have relevant social implications.