The pull of reality: Egocentric bias in adult theory of mind

This project investigates the fundamental cognitive processes underlying our ability to understand other people's beliefs about the world, specifically when those beliefs are different to our own. Human beings have been described as "egocentric creatures": even as adults we often assume that other people share our perceptions, desires and knowledge about the world. However, the exact cognitive processes that lead to such errors in adults, in particular when thinking about other people's beliefs, are currently not well understood.

Research within psychology has traditionally focused on the egocentricism of children under 5 years of age. Young children show a profound difficulty in reporting that another person has a belief that differs from current reality. Imagine your friend watches you put some chocolate in the kitchen cupboard, and the leaves the room. While she is out, you then move the chocolate into the fridge. If asked "where does she think the chocolate is", as an adult you could relatively easily reply: "in the cupboard", even though you know it is now in the fridge (your "true belief" or "current knowledge"). Young children, however, typically will reply "the fridge", as though they expect their absent friend to also share their current knowledge.

Many explanations of this error focus on the immature ability of young children to inhibit their own current true belief, or knowledge. These theoretical accounts claim that thinking about a belief that you know to be false fundamentally involves inhibiting what you know to be true, and it is this process that young children struggle with. These accounts predict that even in adults, who can report another person's false belief with ease, processing the false belief, just as in children, requires successful inhibition of an egocentric bias towards one's current knowledge.

In the last decade, psychology has seen increasing research into the processes involved when adults attribute beliefs and other mental states to other people. Understanding how adults process beliefs is of key importance for understanding not only how we as adults are able to socially interact with each other, but also for understanding the developmental changes required for children to develop these abilities. A number of researchers have recently attempted to address whether adults show an egocentric bias towards their own knowledge when processing a false belief, as predicted by many developmental theories. Research to date, however, has failed to provide a definitive answer to this long-standing question.

In this project, we will address this issue by using the novel technique of mouse-tracking. Mouse-tracking allows researchers to measure the on-line attraction to different possible responses while participants make a decision. While it has been used across a range of fields in psychology, it has yet to be widely used within theory of mind research. We will use this technique to measure whether adults show an egocentric bias towards their own current knowledge when they are asked to report the false belief of another person. Across 4 experiments, we will use mouse-tracking to:
(i) Establish a direct measure of the egocentric bias in belief processing that has been claimed to be present when adults process another person's false belief.
(ii) Investigate the nature of this egocentric bias in order to understand what specific aspects of belief processing causes it in adults.

This project tests critical assumptions of long-standing theoretical accounts of belief processing in both adults and children, and as such will be of key interest to psychologists, neuroscientists and philosophers investigating social cognition. Furthermore, by improving our understanding of adult belief processing, in the long-term this project will also benefit those working with groups that typically have difficulty understanding other people's beliefs, such as in autism and acquired brain injury.

This project will investigate the fundamental cognitive processes underlying our ability to think about other people's beliefs by using a novel mouse-tracking paradigm. By directly addressing a current critical debate within theories of social cognition, it is anticipated that the immediate impact of this research will be within the wider academic community interested in theory of mind. We anticipate, however, that this project will also achieve impact both in the short- and long-term across a broad range of beneficiaries.

In the short-term, the topic of this research will be of wider interest to the general public. We live in a current climate of polarised political discourse, in which we experience the challenge of understanding other people's beliefs that are different to our own. The research in this project shows how today's cognitive psychologists are investigating the fundamental mechanisms that enable us to process and understand other people's beliefs. We aim to use this research to attract and engage public interest in current cognitive science, in order to increase public understanding of the broad aims, methods and relevance of modern cognitive psychology. This short-term impact will be achieved through popular science publications, media engagement and science communication events, detailed in the pathways to impact document.

In the long-term, we hope the outcomes of this research will benefit practitioners and clinicians working with populations known to show impairments in theory of mind, as well as those populations themselves. Many diverse populations show difficulties in belief processing, both developmentally and as adults, including autism, schizophrenia, patients with acquired brain injury, and in cognitive aging.

Across these populations, it is currently not clear what specific aspects of belief processing result in the different difficulties shown, nor how these difficulties in belief processing relate to other impairments in cognitive functioning shown by some of these groups. Given that the ability to inhibit an initial egocentric bias towards one's own belief is held by many theories to be critical to belief processing, understanding the nature of this ability in healthy adults is a key first step towards investigating this process in other populations in the future. This project will use mouse-tracking to establish a direct measure of egocentric bias when processing other people's beliefs. This will provide a key measure for future research to investigate whether the above populations show differences in that process, and how this might relate to their broader difficulties with belief processing. In the long-term, it is hoped that improving our understanding the nature of the difficulties faced by those different populations will eventually help improve treatment and well-being.

This long-term impact will be achieved through the dissemination of the results of this project to researchers and organisations working with populations with known impairments in belief processing. The research team has a track record of translating core social cognition research into projects that further investigate these processes in participant groups with known impairments, and has ongoing collaborations and connections with charities and support groups working with such participant groups (e.g., the National Autistic Society). Through research talks and briefings given throughout the course of the project, we will build upon these ongoing collaborations and establish new ones, such that by the end of this project the research team will be in a position to generate long-term research collaborations. This will allow us to translate the outcomes from this project into future research, in order to achieve the long-term impact of improving our understanding of the specific challenges different populations face in belief processing.