Psychological Understanding and Social Skills

Suppose we use the term ‘theory of mind’ in a neutral and inclusive way, so that having a theory of mind is simply having an ability to engage in our everyday folk psychological practices of attribution, interpretation, and prediction. This use of the term is noncommittal as to how the ability is to be explained. Perhaps the explanation is to be given in terms of possession of a substantive theory about how the psychological world works; perhaps in terms of a capacity to identify with others in imagination and to simulate their mental lives; or perhaps in terms of a mixture of these things. The neutral and inclusive use of ‘theory of mind’ is also non-committal as to whether the basis of our folk psychological abilities resides in a special-purpose module of the mind. Once we abstract away from questions about theory versus simulation and from questions about modularity, it can seem truistic that having a theory of mind – being able to engage in our everyday folk psychological practices or having psychological understanding – is fundamental to social functioning. Thus, for example, at the beginning of The Child’s Theory of Mind, Henry Wellman says (1990, p. 1): ‘Arriving at some sort of understanding of mind is an important accomplishment of childhood . . . An understanding of the mind is . . . fundamental to an understanding of the social world.’ Indeed, it seems natural to suppose that, just as a naïve or everyday understanding of physics enables us to negotiate the physical world, so also a naïve or everyday understanding of psychology enables us to negotiate the mental, and in particular the social, world. In a similar spirit, Simon Baron-Cohen says (1995, p. 30): ‘Mindreading [the ability to imagine or represent states of mind that we or others might hold] is good for a number of important things, including social understanding, behavioral prediction, social interaction, and communication.’ The truistic-seeming idea that having a theory of mind is fundamental to social functioning might suggest that individual differences in theory of mind will go neatly in step with differences in social functioning. However, as the chapters in this book make clear, the relationship between psychological understanding and social skills is very much more complicated. One indication of the complexity of the relationship is that there are striking mismatches between psychological understanding as evidenced in experimental tasks – including, centrally, false belief tasks – and social skills as evidenced in daily life. In some individuals, social skills outrun psychological understanding. Other individuals have a high level of psychological understanding even while their social skills leave much to be desired. We begin with a mismatch of the first kind.