Theory of mind: did evolution fool us?

Theory of Mind (ToM) is the ability to attribute mental states (e.g., beliefs and desires) to other people in order to understand and predict their behaviour. If others are rewarded to compete or cooperate with you, then what they will do depends upon what they believe about you. This is the reason...

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Autores principales:	Marie Devaine, Guillaume Hollard, Jean Daunizeau
Formato:	article
Lenguaje:	EN
Publicado:	Public Library of Science (PLoS) 2014
Materias:	Medicine R Science Q
Acceso en línea:	https://doaj.org/article/5eba7c941b5b43c6a97b037c2b79d9fa
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spelling	oai:doaj.org-article:5eba7c941b5b43c6a97b037c2b79d9fa2021-11-18T08:33:45ZTheory of mind: did evolution fool us?1932-620310.1371/journal.pone.0087619https://doaj.org/article/5eba7c941b5b43c6a97b037c2b79d9fa2014-01-01T00:00:00Zhttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/pmid/24505296/?tool=EBIhttps://doaj.org/toc/1932-6203Theory of Mind (ToM) is the ability to attribute mental states (e.g., beliefs and desires) to other people in order to understand and predict their behaviour. If others are rewarded to compete or cooperate with you, then what they will do depends upon what they believe about you. This is the reason why social interaction induces recursive ToM, of the sort "I think that you think that I think, etc.". Critically, recursion is the common notion behind the definition of sophistication of human language, strategic thinking in games, and, arguably, ToM. Although sophisticated ToM is believed to have high adaptive fitness, broad experimental evidence from behavioural economics, experimental psychology and linguistics point towards limited recursivity in representing other's beliefs. In this work, we test whether such apparent limitation may not in fact be proven to be adaptive, i.e. optimal in an evolutionary sense. First, we propose a meta-Bayesian approach that can predict the behaviour of ToM sophistication phenotypes who engage in social interactions. Second, we measure their adaptive fitness using evolutionary game theory. Our main contribution is to show that one does not have to appeal to biological costs to explain our limited ToM sophistication. In fact, the evolutionary cost/benefit ratio of ToM sophistication is non trivial. This is partly because an informational cost prevents highly sophisticated ToM phenotypes to fully exploit less sophisticated ones (in a competitive context). In addition, cooperation surprisingly favours lower levels of ToM sophistication. Taken together, these quantitative corollaries of the "social Bayesian brain" hypothesis provide an evolutionary account for both the limitation of ToM sophistication in humans as well as the persistence of low ToM sophistication levels.Marie DevaineGuillaume HollardJean DaunizeauPublic Library of Science (PLoS)articleMedicineRScienceQENPLoS ONE, Vol 9, Iss 2, p e87619 (2014)
institution	DOAJ
collection	DOAJ
language	EN
topic	Medicine R Science Q
spellingShingle	Medicine R Science Q Marie Devaine Guillaume Hollard Jean Daunizeau Theory of mind: did evolution fool us?
description	Theory of Mind (ToM) is the ability to attribute mental states (e.g., beliefs and desires) to other people in order to understand and predict their behaviour. If others are rewarded to compete or cooperate with you, then what they will do depends upon what they believe about you. This is the reason why social interaction induces recursive ToM, of the sort "I think that you think that I think, etc.". Critically, recursion is the common notion behind the definition of sophistication of human language, strategic thinking in games, and, arguably, ToM. Although sophisticated ToM is believed to have high adaptive fitness, broad experimental evidence from behavioural economics, experimental psychology and linguistics point towards limited recursivity in representing other's beliefs. In this work, we test whether such apparent limitation may not in fact be proven to be adaptive, i.e. optimal in an evolutionary sense. First, we propose a meta-Bayesian approach that can predict the behaviour of ToM sophistication phenotypes who engage in social interactions. Second, we measure their adaptive fitness using evolutionary game theory. Our main contribution is to show that one does not have to appeal to biological costs to explain our limited ToM sophistication. In fact, the evolutionary cost/benefit ratio of ToM sophistication is non trivial. This is partly because an informational cost prevents highly sophisticated ToM phenotypes to fully exploit less sophisticated ones (in a competitive context). In addition, cooperation surprisingly favours lower levels of ToM sophistication. Taken together, these quantitative corollaries of the "social Bayesian brain" hypothesis provide an evolutionary account for both the limitation of ToM sophistication in humans as well as the persistence of low ToM sophistication levels.
format	article
author	Marie Devaine Guillaume Hollard Jean Daunizeau
author_facet	Marie Devaine Guillaume Hollard Jean Daunizeau
author_sort	Marie Devaine
title	Theory of mind: did evolution fool us?
title_short	Theory of mind: did evolution fool us?
title_full	Theory of mind: did evolution fool us?
title_fullStr	Theory of mind: did evolution fool us?
title_full_unstemmed	Theory of mind: did evolution fool us?
title_sort	theory of mind: did evolution fool us?
publisher	Public Library of Science (PLoS)
publishDate	2014
url	https://doaj.org/article/5eba7c941b5b43c6a97b037c2b79d9fa
work_keys_str_mv	AT mariedevaine theoryofminddidevolutionfoolus AT guillaumehollard theoryofminddidevolutionfoolus AT jeandaunizeau theoryofminddidevolutionfoolus
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Theory of mind: did evolution fool us?

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