Social Cognition and Theory of Mind

Social Cognition and Theory of Mind

Social Cognition

When you see the two terms “social” and “cognition” together, you can probably figure out what the topic of this chapter means. Also, since this text is oriented around a sociocultural perspective, by this time, I am sure that you may have a hard time even thinking about cognition — or thinking — outside of a social context.

So that would be correct, but the term social cognition is actually a technical term meant to signify some pretty specific ideas in children’s thinking. Instead of it being “thinking in a social context,” as we have been discussing all along, it is “the intersection between social understanding and thinking.”

It will take more than a single phrase to explain it, though, and you will come to understand social cognition better as we go through some of the major categories of thinking it involves.

As an overview, social cognition encompasses:

• The mind: we all have one and can think
• Perspective-taking: different people can have different thoughts
• Metacognitive awareness: being aware of mental processes (i.e., attention, memory, problem-solving, etc.)

Video 12.1 What is social cognition?

Social cognition relates somewhat to Piaget’s idea of egocentrism, which occurs in his sensorimotor stage. So, while we have not gone into detail about his stages, this idea of egocentrism is helpful here because, in some ways, it is the polar opposite of social cognition!

When a young child is unable to see or imagine others’ perspectives, that child is in the egocentric stage. This is not a value judgment — it does not mean the child is selfish or egotistical. Instead, it means that the child can only view the world from their own standpoint, simply because they have not yet even defined the parameters of their and others’ thoughts and intentions. They act according to their own understanding, and that understanding does not extend to others in complex ways until later in childhood.

When Piaget identified social cognition in his work, he talked about young children past the egocentric stage; typically, five-year-old  children are thought to “have developed social cognition.” But we know from other scholarly work that much younger children exhibit different types of thinking about others’ perspectives and using others as a means of development — even if they do not engage in a complex type of perspective-taking that many Western researchers have tested in laboratories.

Theory of Mind

Theory of mind refers to one’s ability to think about other people’s thoughts and to perceive and interpret other people’s behavior in terms of their mental states. This mental “mind reading” helps humans to understand and predict the reactions of others, thus playing a crucial role in social development. Infants and toddlers have a relatively simple theory of mind. They are aware of some basic characteristics: what people are looking at is a sign of what they are paying attention to; people act intentionally and are goal directed; people have positive and negative feelings in response to things around them; and people have different perceptions, goals, and feelings. Children add to this mental map as their awareness grows. From infancy on, developing theory of mind permeates everyday social interactions—affecting what and how children learn, how they react to and interact with other people, how they assess the fairness of an action, and how they evaluate themselves.

One-year-olds, for example, will look in their mother’s direction when faced with someone or something unfamiliar to “read” mother’s expression and determine whether this is a dangerous or benign unfamiliarity. Infants also detect when an adult makes eye contact, speaks in an infant-directed manner (such as using higher pitch and melodic intonations), and responds contingently to the infant’s behavior. Under these circumstances, infants are especially attentive to what the adult says and does, thus devoting special attention to social situations in which the adult’s intentions are likely to represent learning opportunities.

Other examples also illustrate how a developing theory of mind underlies children’s emerging understanding of the intentions of others. Take imitation, for example. It is well established that babies and young children imitate the actions of others. Children as young as 14 to 18 months are often imitating not the literal observed action but the action they thought the actor intended—the goal or the rationale behind the action (Meltzoff, 1999). Word learning is another example in which babies’ reasoning based on theory of mind plays a crucial role. By at least 15 months old, when babies hear an adult label an object, they take the speaker’s intent into account by checking the speaker’s focus of attention and deciding whether they think the adult indicated the object intentionally. Only when babies have evidence that the speaker intended to refer to a particular object with a label will they learn that word (Baldwin, 1993).

Babies can also perceive the unfulfilled goals of others and intervene to help them; this is called “shared intentionality.” Babies as young as 14 months old who witness an adult struggling to reach for an object will interrupt their play to crawl over and hand the object to the adult (Warneken & Tomasello, 2007). By the time they are 18 months old, shared intentionality enables toddlers to act helpfully in a variety of situations; for example, they pick up dropped objects for adults who indicate that they need assistance (but not for adults who dropped the object intentionally; Warneken & Tomasello, 2007). Developing an understanding of others’ goals and preferences and how to facilitate them affects how young children interpret the behavior of people they observe and provides a basis for developing a sense of helpful versus undesirable human activity that is a foundation for later development of moral understanding (Thompson & Newton, 2013).

One common method for determining if an older child has reached this mental milestone is the false-belief task. The research in the area of false beliefs began with a clever experiment by Wimmer and Perner (1983), who noted the response of young children to what they called the “Sally-Anne Test.”  During this test, the child is shown a picture story of Sally, who puts her ball in a basket and leaves the room. While Sally is out of the room, Anne comes along and takes the ball from the basket and puts it inside a box. The child is then asked where Sally thinks the ball is located when she comes back to the room. Is she going to look first in the box or in the basket? The right answer is that she will look in the basket because that is where she put it and thinks it is, but we have to infer this false belief against our own better knowledge that the ball is in the box. This is very difficult for children before the age of four because of the cognitive effort it takes. Three-year-old’s have difficulty distinguishing between what they once thought was true and what they now know to be true. They feel confident that what they know now is what they have always known (Birch & Bloom, 2003). Even adults need to think through this task (Epley et al., 2004). To be successful at solving this type of task the child must separate what he or she “knows” to be true from what someone else might “think” is true.  The child must also understand that what guides people’s actions and responses are what they believe rather than what is reality. In other words, people can mistakenly believe things that are false and will act based on this false knowledge. Consequently, prior to age four children are rarely successful at solving such a task (Wellman et al., 2001).

Theory of mind has been linked to better academic achievement. There are several explanations for this (Lecce & Devine, 2022). First, theory of mind is likely associated with better relationships with peers and teachers which may increase school engagement. Second, children who understand their own mind as well as the minds of others have higher levels of reading comprehension because they understand the message that the author is intending to convey and the minds of the characters in the texts that they read (Kim, 2017). Similarly, theory of mind is associated with scientific reasoning. Children who understand the minds of others are better able to create and evaluate hypotheses (Kyriakopoulou & Vosniadou, 2020).

There are individual differences in the development of theory of mind. Historically, research suggested that children diagnosed with some developmental disabilities, including autism spectrum disorder (ASD), have deficits in theory of mind (e.g., Baron-Cohen et al., 1985). However, more recent work demonstrates that individuals with ASD do not have a universal deficit in understanding the mental states of others. For example, the results of previous studies of ToM tasks in individuals with ASD are inconsistent, are often not replicated, and do not correlated with real-world social functioning (Gernsbacher & Yergeau, 2019). Poor performance on ToM tasks is not unique to individuals with ASD, as individuals with language impairments (Nilsson & de Lopex, 2016), lower socioeconomic status (Ebert et al., 2017) and those with fewer siblings (McAlister & Peterson, 2007)–including children with ASD (Matthews et al., 2013) are also likely to fail false belief tasks. When the demands of ToM tasks are reduced (e.g., nonverbal), individuals with ASD show intact understanding of others’ mental states (Long et al., 2025).

Cultural differences also exist. Children in collectivist cultures like China and India tend to recognize later than children in individualistic cultures like the United States and Australia that others have different beliefs and opinions (Shahaeian et al., 2011). A recent systematic review of studies on cultural variations in theory of mind and related constructs such as empathy and perspective-taking indicated that cross-cultural differences in language use, cultural values, and parenting styles may lead to differences in development of these skills (Aival-Naveh et al., 2019). A likely reason is that individualistic cultures emphasize recognizing differences in opinions, thoughts, and beliefs more than collectivist cultures do.