Is it normal to be a principal mindreader? Revising theories of social cognition on the basis of schizophrenia and high functioning autism-spectrum disorders.
Train natural social rhythm before explicit mindreading lessons.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Booth et al. (2013) wrote a theory paper. They looked at stories from people with autism and schizophrenia.
The authors asked: Do we usually understand others by ‘mindreading’ step-by-step, or by just feeling the vibe?
They argue that fast, gut-level social sensing is the real normal skill. Step-by-step mindreading is only a back-up plan.
What they found
The paper does not give new data. It links personal reports with older studies.
The main claim: intuitive engagement, not explicit mindreading lessons, should guide social help for autism.
How this fits with other research
Callenmark et al. (2014) tested teens with autism. The teens passed classic mindreading tests but failed quick, unplanned social tasks. This lab result lines up with Tom’s idea that the problem is intuitive, not rule-based.
Gillespie-Lynch et al. (2019) pooled 133 studies. Theory-of-mind scores correlated only weakly with real social life. The small numbers back Tom’s warning not to over-train mindreading.
Ponnet et al. (2008) found that young adults with autism mindread better when talk is highly structured. That seems to clash with Tom’s view, yet both agree structure is a crutch, not natural social flow.
Pellicano (2013) tracked preschoolers for three years. Early executive function predicted later social skills; early theory-of-mind did not. This longitudinal fit supports Tom’s shift away from mindreading primacy.
Why it matters
If social intuition is the core, drill-and-practice on false-belief tasks may waste time. You can swap some worksheets for real-peer activities that build comfortable rhythm: shared games, joint music, parallel craft. Watch if the child stays in sync, not if they can verbalize mental states.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Schizophrenia and high functioning autism-spectrum disorders (ASD) are neurodevelopmental conditions that mainly impair social competence, while general intelligence (IQ) is spared. Both disorders have a strong ancillary role in theoretical research on social cognition. Recently the debate has started to be inflected by embodied and phenomenological approaches, which claim that the standard portrayal of all social understanding as so-called 'mindreading', i.e. the attribution of mental states to others in the service of explaining and predicting their behavior, is misguided. Instead it is emphasized that we normally perceive others directly as conscious and goal-directed persons, without requiring any theorizing and/or simulation. This paper evaluates some of the implications of abnormal experiences reported by people with schizophrenia and ASD for the current debate in cognitive science. For these people the practice of explicit mindreading seems to be a compensatory strategy that ultimately fails to compensate for - and may even exacerbate - their impairment of intuitive and interactive social understanding. Phenomenological psychopathology thereby supports the emerging view that 'mindreading' is not the principal form of normal social understanding.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2013 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2013.01.005