Folk Psychology Research Articles

First-person Folk Psychology: Mindreading or Mindshaping?

Proponents of mindshaping argue that third-person folk psychology (i.e., the ascription of mental states to others) is not primarily about "reading" mental states for the purpose of behavior prediction and explanation. Instead, they claim that third-person folk psychology is first and foremost a regulative practice -- one that "shapes" mental states in accordance with the norms of a shared folk psychological framework. This paper investigates to what extent the core assumptions behind the mindshaping hypothesis are compatible with an account of first-person folk psychology (i.e., the ascription of mental states to ourselves) that is based on the notion of "self-regulative agency."

A Principle of Intentionality.

The mainstream theories and models of the physical sciences, including neuroscience, are all consistent with the principle of causality. Wholly causal explanations make sense of how things go, but are inherently value-neutral, providing no objective basis for true beliefs being better than false beliefs, nor for it being better to intend wisely than foolishly. Dennett (1987) makes a related point in calling the brain a syntactic (procedure-based) engine. He says that you cannot get to a semantic (meaning-based) engine from there. He suggests that folk psychology revolves around an intentional stance that is independent of the causal theories of the brain, and accounts for constructs such as meanings, agency, true belief, and wise desire. Dennett proposes that the intentional stance is so powerful that it can be developed into a valid intentional theory. This article expands Dennett’s model into a principle of intentionality that revolves around the construct of objective wisdom. This principle provides a structure that can account for all mental processes, and for the scientific understanding of objective value. It is suggested that science can develop a far more complete worldview with a combination of the principles of causality and intentionality than would be possible with scientific theories that are consistent with the principle of causality alone.

Perceptions Regarding the Care and Education of Children from Birth to Age Three among Students of Early Childhood Education: Changes between Pre-training and Post-training

Many theoreticians focus on understanding the belief system regarding the mind of the learner – The Mind Theory. Olson & Brunner (1996) referred to this belief system as "folk psychology". They named the processes required to promote learners' knowledge and understanding "folk pedagogy". In their opinion, folk pedagogy reflects the learners' folk psychology. In other words, the study of folk psychology has focused on how everyday people—those without formal training in the various academic fields of science—go about attributing mental states. This domain has primarily been centered on intentional states reflective of an individual's beliefs and desires.The present study set up to characterize the folk psychology (contains expressions and summaries of various settings as a way of informally shaping quite general meanings or organizing experience) and the folk pedagogy, which deals with where, when and why people teach or educate one another in various ways for the sake of making out of things (Olson & Bruner, 1996) in early childhood education students with respect to education and care during the first three years of life and examine whether these views change during the course of their formal education.The sample comprised of 379 students of education majoring in early childhood education at three colleges in Israel. Data was gathered by a structured questionnaire examining five domains: the impact of year of life on child development, domains affecting child development, care and educational settings, care and educational methods and the role of caregivers. The findings reveal that the perceived influence of family care centers and daycare centers influence on child development decreases between the beginning and the end of their studies. The perceived effectiveness of coping through awareness increased, while strict coping methods were perceived as less effective after the training.

Behavioral Circumscription and the Folk Psychology of Belief

Is behavioral integration (i.e., which occurs when a subject’s assertion that p matches her nonverbal behavior) a necessary feature of belief in folk psychology? Our data fromover 5,000 people across 26 samples, spanning 22 countries suggests that it is not. Given the surprising cross-cultural robustness of our findings, we argue that the types of evidence for the ascription of a belief are, at least in some circumstances, lexicographically ordered: assertions are first taken into account, and when an agent sincerely asserts that p, nonlinguistic behavioral evidence is disregarded. In light of this, we take ourselves to have discovered a universal principle governing the ascription of beliefs in folk psychology.

Causal generative models are just a start.

Human reasoning is richer than Lake et al. acknowledge, and the emphasis on theories of how images and scenes are synthesized is misleading. For example, the world knowledge used in vision presumably involves a combination of geometric, physical, and other knowledge, rather than just a causal theory of how the image was produced. In physical reasoning, a model can be a set of constraints rather than a physics engine. In intuitive psychology, many inferences proceed without detailed causal generative models. How humans reliably perform such inferences, often in the face of radically incomplete information, remains a mystery.

中国鬼文化中“鬼上身”等民间俗信心理初探

“鬼”泛指人死后与躯体相脱离而存在的各种“魂灵”，围绕“魂灵”问题而产生的各种现象以及与之有关的古籍、典章、礼仪、风俗统称为“鬼文化”(靳风林，1995)。中国的鬼文化源远流长，从丧葬仪式、祭祀活动到各种以鬼为题材的文学作品，一直延续流传到现代生活中。而民间大众和知识精英作为两个群体，他们的认识层面不一样，因此从古至今，民间文化和官方文化有着不同的话语体系，民间大众和知识精英对于人们精神疾病和心理冲突的认识和解决途径也不相同。知识精英大多崇尚科学，常常愿意以医学的手段去解决心理问题，而对于广大深受中国传统民间文化影响的中下层群众来说，深受神鬼信仰的他们更愿意把难以解释的社会现象看做灵性资源的释放，常常用“鬼上身”、“失魂”去表征人们异常的行为，相应的，会以“招魂”“驱鬼”等民间巫术作为解决这些问题的方法。本文在总结前人研究的基础上，通过搜索的多个案例，分析几种典型的“鬼”现象，比如：鬼上身，招魂，驱鬼等，从而进一步挖掘中国文化中的灵性资源，依托民间文化心理学视角探讨中下层民众的民间信仰以及民间疗法的作用机制，并用“现代性”的眼光对传统鬼文化进行反思。 Ghost refers to the soul that separated from the body after the people died. These some pheno-mena including ancient books, laws, rituals and customs are relevant to soul, which is collectively referred to “ghost culture”. Chinese ghost culture existing a long history, wherever in the funeral ceremonies, ritual activities or the various literary creations in ghost as the theme, it has been extending to modern life. As two different groups, the public and the intellectual elites have disparate understanding. So from ancient times, folk culture and official culture have the distinct discourse system. As for mental illness and psychological conflicts, the understanding and solution methods of the public and the intellectual elites are so different. Most of the intellectual elite advocate science, often willing to adopt medical means to solve the psychological problems. And the majority of lower masses, by the impact of traditional Chinese folk culture, are more willing to explain the difficult social phenomenon in spiritualism, such as “ghost possession”, “losing souls” as the means to express the abnormal behavior of the people. In order to solve these problems, the public use the “evocation” and “exorcism” on behalf of folk witch-crafts. Based on previous studies, we searched several cases which were used to analyse some typical “ghost” events, such as ghost possession, exorcism, phychic and so on. Then the spiritual resources would be excavated in Chinese culture. In the perspective of folk psychology, the folk faith of the lower class people was discussed in this study, and we reflected the traditional ghost culture in the view of modernization.

Folk Psychology Wins the DAY! Daubert and the Challenge of False Confessions

Folk Psychology Wins the DAY! Daubert and the Challenge of False Confessions

Revisiting the Mind-Brain Reductionisms: Contra Dualism and Eliminativism

In this paper, I should like to argue against both eliminative materialism and substance/property dualism, aiming more specifically at the reductionist arguments offered by the Churchlands’ and Swinburne’s versions thereof, insofar as they undermine moral beliefs qua first-personish accounts dismissed as folk psychology by the former, as the latter regards them as supervening on natural events extendedly, that is, necessarily both ways of the biconditional linking mental and physical substances (for every A-substance x there is a B-substance y, such that necessarily if y exists x exists).

In Search of a Theory: The Interpretative Challenge of Empirical Findings on Cultural Variance in Mindreading

Abstract In this paper, we present a battery of empirical findings on the relationship between cultural context and theory of mind that show great variance in the onset and character of mindreading in different cultures; discuss problems that those findings cause for the largely-nativistic outlook on mindreading dominating in the literature; and point to an alternative framework that appears to better accommodate the evident cross-cultural variance in mindreading. We first outline the theoretical frameworks that dominate in mindreading research, then present the relevant empirical findings, and finally we come back to the theoretical approaches in a discussion of their explanatory potential in the face of the data presented. The theoretical frameworks discussed are the two-systems approach; performance-based approach also known as modularity-nativist approach; and the social-communicative theory also known as the systems, relational-systems, dynamic systems and developmental systems theory. The former two, which both fall within the wider modular-computational paradigm, run into a challenge with the cross-cultural data presented, and the latter - the systemic framework - seems to offer an explanatorily potent alternative. The empirical data cited in this paper comes from research on cross-cultural differences in folk psychology and theory-of-mind development; the influence of parenting practices on the development of theory of mind; the development and character of theory of mind in deaf populations; and neuroimaging research of cultural differences in mindreading.

Psychology between science and common sense: William James and the problems of psychological language in the Principles

The suspicion that language can become an obstacle to human knowledge is not new in the Western intellectual tradition. Following the empiricist legacy, many authors have suggested the perils and pitfalls of common sense language for science. Applied to psychology, this leads to the issue of the reliability of psychological language for scientific psychology. William James, in his Principles of Psychology, was one of the first psychologists to address this problem explicitly. The goal of this paper is to situate his position and contrast it with contemporary debates over the status of folk psychology. The results indicate that James conceived of common sense psychology in a very complex manner, and pointed to a kind of illusion that remains ignored in the current literature, with negative consequences for psychology. I conclude by suggesting the relevance of James for contemporary debates in theoretical and philosophical psychology.

The theory of constructed emotion: an active inference account of interoception and categorization.

The science of emotion has been using folk psychology categories derived from philosophy to search for the brain basis of emotion. The last two decades of neuroscience research have brought us to the brink of a paradigm shift in understanding the workings of the brain, however, setting the stage to revolutionize our understanding of what emotions are and how they work. In this article, we begin with the structure and function of the brain, and from there deduce what the biological basis of emotions might be. The answer is a brain-based, computational account called the theory of constructed emotion.

Intentional Sin and Accidental Virtue? Cultural Differences in Moral Systems Influence Perceived Intentionality

Indians and U.S. Americans view harmful actions as morally wrong, but Indians are more likely than U.S. Americans to perceive helping behaviors as moral imperatives. We utilize this cultural variability in moral belief systems to test whether and how moral considerations influence perceptions of intentionality (as suggested by theories of folk psychology). Four experiments found that Indians attribute more intentionality than U.S. Americans for helpful but not harmful (Studies 1–4) or neutral side effects (Studies 2 and 3). Also, cross-cultural differences in intentionality judgments for positive actions reflect stronger praise motives (Study 3), and stronger devotion to religious beliefs and practices among Hindus (Study 4). These results provide the first direct support for the claim that features of moral belief systems influence folk psychology, and further suggest that the influence is not inherently asymmetrical; motivation to either blame or praise can influence judgments of intentionality.

Kant’s Perspectival Solution to the Mind-Body Problem

Kant’s Critical philosophy solves Descartes’ mind-body problem, replacing the dualism of the “physical influx” theory he defended in his early career. Kant’s solution, like all Critical theories, is “perspectival,” acknowledging deep truth in both opposing extremes. Minds are not separate from bodies, but a manifestation of them, each viewed from a different perspective. Kant’s transcendental conditions of knowledge portray the mind not as creating the physical world, but as necessarily structuring our knowledge of objects with a set of unconscious assumptions; yet our pre-conscious (pre-mental) encounter with an assumed spatio-temporal, causal nexus is entirely physical. Hence, today’s “eliminative materialism” and “folk psychology” are both ways of considering this age-old issue, neither being an exclusive explanation. A Kantian solution to this version of the mind-body problem is: eliminative materialism is good science; but only folk psychologists can consistently be eliminative materialists. Indeed, the mind-body problem exemplifies a feature of all cultural situations: dialogue between opposing perspectives is required for understanding as such to arise.

Teaching Games for Understanding and the Psychology of Intuition

One of the top research questions that have been identified in relation to teaching games for understanding (TGfU) pertains to possible contributions by scientific psychology. In principle, this co...

Major Depression With Seasonal Variation

Seasonal affective disorder (SAD) is based on the theory that some depressions occur seasonally in response to reduced sunlight. SAD has attracted cultural and research attention for more than 30 years and influenced the DSM through inclusion of the seasonal variation modifier for the major depression diagnosis. This study was designed to determine if a seasonally related pattern of occurrence of major depression could be demonstrated in a population-based study. A cross-sectional U.S. survey of adults completed the Patient Health Questionnaire–8 Depression Scale. Regression models were used to determine if depression was related to measures of sunlight exposure. Depression was unrelated to latitude, season, or sunlight. Results do not support the validity of a seasonal modifier in major depression. The idea of seasonal depression may be strongly rooted in folk psychology, but it is not supported by objective data. Consideration should be given to discontinuing seasonal variation as a diagnostic modifier of major depression.

Fictionalism and the Folk

1. INTRODUCTIONHow should we make sense of ordinary talk about the mind? When we say that someone has a particular belief or desire, are we claiming that they have a certain sort of causal state inside their heads? If we are, might future cognitive science show that we are wrong? Might it turn out that mental states, like beliefs and desires, do not exist? In this paper, I explore one way to approach these longstanding questions concerning the status of folk psychology: mental fictionalism. Put simply, mental fictionalism is the view that, even if mental states do not exist, it is useful to talk as if they do. Mental states are useful fictions.Recent philosophy of mind has seen a growing interest in mental fictionalism (e.g., Wallace 2007; Demeter 2013a). To date, much of the discussion has concerned the general features of this approach and the difficulties it faces.1 In this paper, I develop a specific form of mental fictionalism by drawing on Kendall Walton's work on make-believe (Walton 1990, 1993). According to the account I will put forward, when we say someone has a particular belief or desire, we are not making a claim about their inner machinery. Instead, talk about mental states is a useful pretence for describing people and their behaviour. As a result, the legitimacy of ordinary talk about the mind does not depend upon whether future cognitive science will discover beliefs or desires inside our heads.The structure of the paper is as follows. First, in Section 2,1 give a brief outline of Walton's theory, focusing on his discussion of metaphor and prop-oriented make-/ -believe. In Section 3,1 show how we may draw on Walton's analysis to develop a fictionalist analysis of folk psychology. In Section 4, I further clarify and motivate this account by comparing it to a number of well-known alternative positions, including behaviourism, instrumentalism, and eliminativism, as well as alternative forms of fictionalism. Finally, in Section 5, I consider some important challenges facing mental fictionalism.2. PROP ORIENTED MAKE BELIEVEImagine some children playing with a doll. They pick the doll up and hold it in their arms, push it down the hallway in a pushchair, cover it with a blanket, and so on. As they do so, the children imagine themselves picking up a baby and cradling it, taking it to the shops and lying it down in its cot to go to sleep. In Walton's theory, dolls and other objects used in make-believe are called props and the rules that govern their use in the game are called principles of generation (Walton 1990). Within a game of make-believe, the properties of the props, together with the relevant principles of generation, make propositions fictional. To say that a proposition is fictional, in Walton's sense, is simply to say that participants in the game are prescribed to imagine it. For example, if the doll's are closed, the children are to imagine that the baby is asleep. It is fictional that the baby is asleep. Notice that, since the content of a game of make-believe depends only on the props and principles of generation, it possesses a certain kind of objectivity: if the doll's eyes are closed then it is fictional that the baby is asleep, even if none of the children happen to notice this.One important feature of games of make-believe is participation. Children playing with a doll do not simply sit and look at it. Instead, they carry out various actions with the doll (e.g., putting a bottle to its mouth) and these actions generate imaginings within the game (e.g., that the children are feeding the baby). Like the doll, the children themselves become props in the game. The children also participate verbally. For example, David might sing a lullaby as he rocks the doll in his arms, thereby making it fictional that he is singing a lullaby to get the baby to sleep. Importantly, acts of pretence can be used to make genuine assertions. Suppose that Anna looks at the doll and says She's sleeping now! …

Winch on learning

Those in education committed to folk psychology (everyday talk about ourselves) reject the advances of neuroscience as the way to explain learning. Winch is one of the most determined defenders of folk psychology. Yet his account of folk psychology is weak and his rejection of neuroscience is deeply flawed. This article sets out Winch’s Wittgensteinian theory of learning then proceeds to critically examine a number of issues, including the folk psychology/cognitive science dualism, problems with folk psychology, the advantages of cognitive science and why folk psychology should be replaced by cognitive science.

BDI agents in social simulations: a survey

AbstractModelling and simulation have long been dominated by equation-based approaches, until the recent advent of agent-based approaches. To curb the resulting complexity of models, Axelrod promoted the KISS principle: ‘Keep It Simple, Stupid’. But the community is divided and a new principle appeared: KIDS, ‘Keep It Descriptive, Stupid’. Richer models were thus developed for a variety of phenomena, while agent cognition still tends to be modelled with simple reactive particle-like agents. This is not always appropriate, in particular in the social sciences trying to account for the complexity of human behaviour. One solution is to model humans as belief, desire and intention (BDI) agents, an expressive paradigm using concepts from folk psychology, making it easier for modellers and users to understand the simulation. This paper provides a methodological guide to the use of BDI agents in social simulations, and an overview of existing methodologies and tools for using them.

The folk psychology of happiness in Korea

Happiness research has primarily been conducted based on the American model of happiness. The agentic concept of happiness in the West emphasizes the positive feeling state stemming from individual achievement and positive interpersonal relationships. However, previous studies on lay theories of happiness in other East Asian countries, such as China and Japan, have suggested that these meanings of happiness differ from those of the Western cultural context. The present study examined the lay theory of happiness among Koreans using qualitative and quantitative approaches. Furthermore, the authors compared the Korean model of happiness with that of the Japanese and Americans from Uchida and Kitayama (2009). The findings from the present research indicate that the Korean model of happiness involves both positive and negative states and consequences of happiness, unlike the uniformly positively connoted happiness in Western cultural contexts. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of the current findings on happiness research in the Korean culture.

The Mind of the Nation: Völkerpsychologie in Germany, 1851–1955 by Egbert Klautke

The Mind of the Nation: Volkerpsychologie in Germany, 1851-1955, by Egbert Klautke. New York and Oxford, Berghahn Books, 2073. vii, 788. $72.00 US (cloth). This concise and lucid book makes the case that scholars have consistently mischaracterized and unappreciated Volkerpsychologie, a now obscure but once robust set of approaches to understanding national or collective psychology. The idea that there is a German character, an Austrian Mind, or a French soul seems naive if not downright childish today, but these notions are merely a cartoonish version of more nuanced ideas, which, as Egbert Klautke argues, trace back to mid-nineteenth-century attempts to establish a science of national or collective involving the rigorous study of people as members of national groups. Klautke's project is to explicate these ideas, place them in their intellectual and political historical contexts, and argue for their ongoing relevance. He fulfills these tasks admirably and for the most part persuasively. The first issue to sort out in a discussion of Volkerpsychologie is how to define and translate this unwieldy term. If Klautke's protagonists had had their way and succeeded in establishing it as a discipline, indeed as the queen of the nascent social sciences, these questions would be moot today. However, this is a story of failure, and there are no departments of Volkerpsychologie in Germany or anywhere else, nor are there professional journals, endowed chairs, scientific societies, or annual meetings. So what was Volkerpsychologie? On its most literal level, as Klautke shows, it would be translated as psychology of peoples, but that term finds little resonance among English speakers. Folk psychology, the translation Klautke falls back on, sounds better but renders the plural Volker into the singular folk and thus has slightly different connotations. Ethnic psychology, social psychology, and ethnic anthropology are all close but likewise flawed. Another variant, race psychology, obscures more than it clarifies because of the shifting meanings of race from the nineteenth century through the Nazi period and indeed because of Volkerpsychologie's eventual accommodation with the Nazi regime. Finally, there is the problem that the authors and practitioners of this course of study regularly changed their minds about its core mission, and it meant something slightly different in the three contexts that form the core of this book. Klautke's first chapter concerns the creation of academic Volkerpsychologie by Moritz Lazarus and Heymann Steinthal. In 1859 the two scholars launched the Zeitschrift fur Volkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft (Journal of Folk Psychology and Linguistics), and the journal's twenty-year lifespan corresponded with the height of optimism about Jewish emancipation and social acceptance in Germany. Volkerpsychologie reflected this optimism, seeing the nation not as a fixed racial or ethnic entity, but as voluntaristic, open-ended, and evolving. Volkerpsychologie aimed to be an objective, scientific approach to understanding the spirit or essence of nations through the tools of linguistics, history, and anthropology, yet could never free itself of teleological thinking whereby Europe, and Germany in particular, was both the template for national development and the standard of cultural achievement. Interestingly, as German nationalism became more exclusive and xenophobic amid the anti-Semitic wave of the 1880s, Lazarus reoriented his method from valorizing the German people to extolling the Jews, whose synthesis of German Bildung with Jewish ethics, he believed, represented the height of human achievement. …