actually exists, or may not see it at all

actually exists, or may not see it at all. This is true of the relative difficulty that people have seeing other minds compared to one’s own, in ways that are sometimes very subtle and surprising. For instance, we tend to evaluate ourselves by consulting our mindful intentions, but we evaluate others (and their intentions) by observing their actions. We may consider ourselves to be conscientious if we planned to buy our spouse a birthday gift, but need to see an actual gift to infer that our spouse is equally conscientious. * We tend to believe that we are more likely to experience complicated mental emotions like shame, guilt, or embarrassment than are others.” We tend to believe that our own behavior will therefore be guided by moral sentiments like empathy, guilt, or compassion whereas others’ behavior is more likely driven by the relatively mindless motives of self-interest.° Other minds are more opaque than our own, and some learning, attending, seeking, and projecting is required for our brains to become fully social and see into them. Here’s how’. Learning. Children do not enter the world able to think about other minds, but they learn to do so fairly quickly. At around three months of age, children start preferentially attending to animate objects compared to inanimate objects, and at around six months of age start to distinguish between intentional (goal-directed) and unintentional (accidental) action. At this age, for instance, children will look reliably longer at a person who is reaching for a cup than to a person who is making the same reaching motion in the absence of acup. Over the next 18 months, children become more likely to mimic intentional than unintentional actions’, to follow the gaze of another person and Page |95 therefore share his or her attentional focus, and recognize that other people may have preferences that differ from one’s own. By age two, children’s social ability to read other minds seems to have already surpassed that of our nearest primate relatives, and over the next two years they pick up what appear to be uniquely human mind-reading capacities. By age five, children demonstrate the most sophisticated of mind-reading abilities—the capacity to recognize that others’ beliefsS may differ from one’s own and to use those differing (sometimes mistaken) beliefs to predict the other agent’s behavior. Variability from age five onward comes from learning more specific details about how other minds actually work, largely gathered from personal experience, religious practice, or broader cultural norms. Many psychologists and neuroscientists speculate that learning to read other minds comes from the deeply social tendency, present at birth, to mimic others’ actions. For example, Steve Small examines a neurological underpinning for mimicry, and Jean Decety argues in his essay that an inborn capacity for mimicry underlies the human capacity for empathy. Looking where others look and copying their actions is a reasonable way to copy their likely mental states as well. This egocentric method of using one’s own mental experience as a guide to other minds continues to be employed throughout adulthood, and can give insight into others’ mental states but can also lead people to overestimate the extent to which others’ minds are similar to one’s own. These biases tend to be called egocentric when reasoning about other people, and they tend to be called anthropomorphic when reasoning about HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_021341