What is theory of mind?

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I was actually going to post exactly that analogy But my post was already pretty too long, so it got removed in the cutting stage. But that's just how I'd try to handle a "baseball situation" - I can't relate to the loss of a baseball-spectating situation, because in my case I'd just be glad of having the time freed up for something more interesting, but I can relate to a person who's lost an opportunity they'd set their heart on. So I'd delete "baseball game" and insert "music performance" and then I immediately understand how gutted he must feel.


Good question - to me it seems like it's more to do with not happening to share the obsession with baseball, and while I accept a great many people love the game, there must be NTs out there who don't. But I don't know whether our "workaround" is evidence of theory of mind or not. Maybe it's to do with the fact that as adults we've developed coping strategies and can therefore mimic the NT response in such cases. I suspect that NTs do the same trick but they never had to learn it, they'd perhaps do it much more intuitively, with their innate understanding of community.

Being able to know how other people are feeling could impede competitive behaviour, though it could also be used cynically as a way of competing and controlling. It's not really answering your question, but I've always felt the human race has a huge problem in deciding whether to co-operate or to compete, i.e. it never seems able to quite make up its mind what sort of a creature it is.

I agree that this ToM construct could turn out to be more trouble than it's worth. Maybe the Sally-Ann test works for full-blown autistic children, but apart from that I'm not sure ToM is very useful at all.

"theory of mind" is the theory that some people have a mind.

I'm wondering if you can explain what you're doing when you "read" someone? I think I'm the same way in terms of this particular trait but I don't see any way to test it. Usually what happens is I don't know how to react to whatever I think I'm reading and I get highly self-conscious.

I read their eyes and their face. Interestingly, it appears that most people here have very little trouble doing this. Check out the results of this thread: Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test. I scored a 27.

I think it's the trusting what we're reading that gets a lot more difficult because other non-verbal cues often come into play.

^
That's always my problem too - I never feel I can trust any of my insights. But I've heard that good therapists always check out their intuitions with the client before believing anything. So what makes NTs so smart that they don't need to bother checking anything?

I also do well at the "reading the eyes" test. I think I scored over 30 the first time I did it. I've also done some other tests out of curiosity and I generally get a score somewhere between the average male and average female score, i.e. I do better than the average NT male.

I feel way too emotionally neurotic (I'm a rigid perfectionist) and just plain un-social to be anywhere near NT though. I'm atrocious at making appropriate small-talk with new people. I never think of the right questions to ask in the moment. Minutes later I often realize that I should have asked something but then it's too late.

When the conversation is on me or one of my interests I communicate just fine and people enjoy listening to me. As an adult I know how to talk without boring people or making them annoyed. Yet when it comes to getting other people to talk about themselves I always fail. I smile and nod a lot but never think of much to add unless I have a similar experience to share. This is the feature of my personality that comes across as "lacking empathy". Am I really missing cues or am I just self-centered? NT's just seem to get a lot more energy out of asking people questions. I get bored. I guess I'm just really self-absorbed.

Last edited by marshall on 28 May 2009, 3:03 pm, edited 1 time in total.

They're one and the same thing. Our center of gravity is more internal than external. NTs' is more external than internal. We are more self-centered than NTs, which makes us miss social cues. We miss social cues, which makes us more inward-bound. It's all the same phenomenon of being more attuned to ourselves than to other people, of having a very weak people-radar and a very strong self-radar. In extremely strong cases, autistics don't even talk or listen to others. In the mildest cases, an autistic person just misses a social cue here and there, fails to attune to others here and there, but nothing that can break the natural flow of NT relating.

This is why I had to smile when the shrink said "that's not AS, that's a weak motivation to relate to people". Because he was actually defining AS by the latter. Only, he doesn't know enough about autism to realize that.

I agree. However there's a lot of externally self-centered NTs, if that makes any sense. They go through their entire lives manipulating people and acting to sell themselves. They might even be good altruistic people but their top concern is still about how they are perceived socially. These people are shallow and seem completely devoid of the ability to reflect on themselves or think deeply. I have a very strong gut-level aversion to these kinds of people. I seem to have a radar for them at a distance but I still can't avoid having to interact with them. I prefer interacting with internally self-centered individuals like myself over externally self-centered ones any day. I can't stand shallowness or fakeness.

Not surprisingly, many of the people I knew from high school that fit this description went into sales...

I wouldn't say that's a majority of NT folks are like this. It's just that the obnoxious ones are more memorable.

That's the popular use of the term "self-centered", which is a totally different concept. As you say, these people are actually not self-centered at all; on the contrary, their focus is strongly on others, they depend on others to fulfill their needs and desires.

Maybe we need to invent some new language since there's obviously more than a single type of self-centeredness.

They're focused on others but I still consider it self-centered if everything is based on their own needs and desires. They're definitely no less self-centered than I am. I think there are genuinely caring NT's in the world who fit into an entirely different category, who aren't self-centered.

I think a lot of people confuse the terms "self-centred" and "selfish"
You can have a self-centred person who is very unselfish.
And not all selfish people are self-centred. They can be very outgoing but it's all designed to get them their own way.

For some people, they see focussing on other people and developing relationships with them as very important. They put a lot of energy into this. They live for others. They see people in the foreground of their lives. They may take on a lot of responsibilities in running group events. Their self development to them is synonymous with their social network development. This is why it's very important for them to keep up to date on who's friends with who. They define themselves by the social relationships they form with others. I've noticed that many of these people focussed people are women.

I have been called incredibly self aware as a compliment.
I've also been called incredibly self centered.

That's perhaps because I define myself by what I choose to do (the task) and what I like. I view people in the background of my life even though I've cared about many of them a lot. For some reason my mind focusses on the physical details of the environment first. It's a quirk.

While I've scored off of the scale on intra-personal (self awareness) intelligence tests, I've scored low on interpersonal (social) awareness tests.

Some social extroverts that I've met have found it very hard to engage in self introspection. It's as if they don't want to, or perhaps some of them don't quite know how? Perhaps energy that they're directing outward to socialising with others means that they have less energy to look into themselves. It's almost as if some of them are afraid of a "dark void" within themselves, a void that can't be defined with reference to other people.

I'm always amazed that obnoxious people are actually successful. If NT's really have better theory of mind than I do then why do they fall for flashy BS so easily?

Thank you. Everything you said applies to me. I also have the same feeling with extroverts.

I'm definitely not unaware of other people's emotions but I don't automatically go out of my way in terms of other people. I observe and analyze more than I engage. My interactions usually consist entirely of sharing views/experiences, discussion of some topic, or humor.

A major problem I have is that I don't reassure people or say things just to please them. I wish I could but it just doesn't feel like "me" when I do it. Some sort of internal embarrassment prevents it. I get into fights when people want reassurance from me that I can't give. My father hates it when I talk about my depression but I can't just hide my suffering no matter how much I don't wish for him to worry about me. I feel like my hands are completely tied and I start lashing out in anger. I don't know how NT's act in situations like this but I always go into melt-down mode and start verbally assaulting in a really ugly way.

That amazes me too.......you'd think that a bully would last about 5 minutes before word got round the community and they kicked the crap out of him till he promised to be good.

Ditto re flashy BS - either I'm severely paranoid, or I really can see right through the hype in a way that many people just don't seem able to. Adverts deceptively linking a product with some or other glittering reward (usually sex), megaphone-altruists and megaphone-heroes with their non-externally-verifiable tales of their own courage and virtue, those "NEW!" stickers on things that attract the sheep, politicians and priests pretending to be oh-so resolute and virtuous.......I just don't understand why any of these sociopaths are still with us