How do you know that? Automatic belief inferences in passing conversation
Name
StrangersPaper PSYARXIV.pdf
Description
Submitted version
Size
315.85 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
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Author(s)
Rubio-Fernandez, Paula
Mollica, Francis
Oraa Ali, Michelle
Gibson, Edward A
Date Issued
December 2019
Journal
Cognition
Publisher
Elsevier BV
Citation
Rubio-Fernandez, Paula et al. "How do you know that? Automatic belief inferences in passing conversation." Cognition 193 (December 2019): 104011 © 2019 Elsevier B.V.
Version
Original manuscript
Abstract
There is an ongoing debate, both in philosophy and psychology, as to whether people are able to automatically infer what others may know, or whether they can only derive belief inferences by deploying cognitive resources. Evidence from laboratory tasks, often involving false beliefs or visual-perspective taking, has suggested that belief inferences are cognitively costly, controlled processes. Here we suggest that in everyday conversation, belief reasoning is pervasive and therefore potentially automatic in some cases. To test this hypothesis, we conducted two pre-registered self-paced reading experiments (N1 = 91, N2 = 89). The results of these experiments showed that participants slowed down when a stranger commented ‘That greasy food is bad for your ulcer’ relative to conditions where a stranger commented on their own ulcer or a friend made either comment – none of which violated participants’ common-ground expectations. We conclude that Theory of Mind models need to account for belief reasoning in conversation as it is at the center of everyday social interaction.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2019.104011
