Journal
PERSPECTIVES ON PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE
Volume 15, Issue 2, Pages 384-396Publisher
SAGE PUBLICATIONS LTD
DOI: 10.1177/1745691619896607
Keywords
theory of mind; perspective-taking; empathy; mentalizing; social cognition
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Funding
- Labex/Idex CORTEX Grant [ANR-11-LABX-0042]
- Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
- Institut National de la Sante et de la Recherche Medicale
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In recent decades, the ability to represent others' mental states (i.e., theory of mind) has gained particular attention in various disciplines ranging from ethology to cognitive neuroscience. Despite the exponentially growing interest, the functional architecture of social cognition is still unclear. In the present review, we argue that not only the vocabulary but also most of the classic measures for theory of mind lack specificity. We examined classic tests used to assess theory of mind and noted that the majority of them do not require the participant to represent another's mental state or, sometimes, any mental state at all. Our review reveals that numerous classic tests measure lower-level processes that do not directly test for theory of mind. We propose that more attention should be paid to methods used in this field of social cognition to improve the understanding of underlying concepts.
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