Humans are herd animals. We cooperate every day, and compete every day.

To survive, and thrive, we have to be able to guess what other people will do. But how do we do that, when we can’t know what someone else is thinking unless they tell us? We can’t read minds, and words can be used for deception as readily as truth.

Humans, and perhaps some other animals, have developed a tool for addressing this problem, and it’s called THEORY OF MIND.

In simple terms, Theory of Mind (ToM) is the realisation that other people are different from us. They see the world differently, they want different things, and they go about getting what they want in their own unique way. If we want to be able to reliably predict their behaviour, we must have some kind of model for how they see the world.

That tool that allows us to build that model is Theory of Mind, and its application is at the heart of psychological subtext, specifically the PROJECTION half.

ToM allows us to reverse engineer observed behaviour to infer the intentions that drive the actions.

The simplest indicator that an individual has developed Theory of Mind is pointing. When infants are very young, they look at the finger rather than the thing being pointed at. By about 12 months, they learn to look at what is being pointed at. This is the tiny beginnings of ToM, because they are inferring the intention behind the action. Some dogs pass this test, others don’t.

In humans the realisation that other people are different from us and separate from us generally strikes at around two years old. This is when human infants discover that their mother has suddenly split into two people – the fairy godmother who always says ‘Yes, darling’, anticipates all your needs, and meets them post-haste; and the evil step-mother who always says ‘No!’, who withholds what you want, and forces you to do things you don’t want to do.

An infant’s response to this earth-shattering discovery is what is generally known as the terrible twos, and is extremely challenging for all concerned.

Over the following years this develops into what we call Theory of Mind. By 4-5 humans can reliably distinguish between what is, and what someone believes. If they see something get moved while someone is out of the room, they understand that the person will think it is still in the original hiding place. Younger children don’t understand the distinction between what they know, and what someone else knows.

A great deal of research has gone into exploring whether other species have Theory of Mind. Many apes, some dogs, some cetaceans (whales etc) and corvids (crows) – exhibit signs of Theory of Mind.

Here’s an observed example from the world of baboons, which are amongst the most studied of all animals.

A troop of baboons is filing along a narrow path winding through the rainforest. Suddenly, a low-ranking young female begins to limp. She sits on the ground to examine her paw, (as if) searching for a thorn.

 

As soon as the last of the troop goes out of sight around the corner, she scampers up a nearby tree to a small clump of ripe figs and quickly devours them. Then she scurries down the tree and hurries after the troop – resuming her limp as she catches up with them.

Baboons are very hierarchical. As a young female, if the rest of the troop noticed the figs, there’s no way she would have got any. The dominant male would have stolen the figs and beaten her up if she got in the way. If she wants the figs, she needs to deceive the rest of the troop to get the figs. And then she has to remember to maintain that deception to avoid suspicion, and likely punishment.

But to do that she must have a mental ‘picture’ of what the other baboons would think and how they would respond. It certainly appears that she has Theory of Mind.

Perhaps this is no more than anthropomorphism – our human tendency to inappropriately ascribe human emotions and human thought processes to animals (and sometimes even to inanimate objects like computers and cars).

But in a way, that’s the point. Whether the baboon felt and thought those things, we cannot read this story without applying our own ‘theory of mind’ to her behaviour – we ‘recognise’ her behaviour by constructing an inner narrative that explains her actions. In a sense we create an ‘inner monologue’ for the baboon by asking ourselves, ‘What would get me to behave like that?’

When psychologically healthy humans don’t have enough information about what someone is thinking, they have a very strong instinct to use ToM to presume those hidden thoughts – an instinct that’s almost impossible to suppress. But ToM tends to recruit the viewer’s own attitudes and experiences to build the picture because it has nothing else to work with, and this interacts with drama in an interesting way.

When we project our own experiences onto the behaviour of others, we subconsciously recollect the feelings that accompanied those experiences, in a process very closely allied to the ‘emotion memory’ tool in some acting schools.

To make sense of someone else’s behaviour, we draw on our own experiences. But when we do that, we also rekindle the emotions we felt during those experiences. We add to the emotional depth of the story by donating our emotional memories to the character.

See: Stories without Psychology

And it’s not just a one-way street. Projection can also take emotions that we are unwilling to confront in real life, and by having us ‘lend’ them to a fictitious character in a fictitious story, allow us to discover things in ourselves that we couldn’t otherwise ‘see’ or acknowledge.

Projection: The Dark Mirror

Sometimes the conclusions we come to using Theory of Mind are more about us than them.

It’s tempting to impose our worldview on others. Because we’re extrapolating from our own experiences, we find it very convincing. It ‘rings true’ to us (of course it does).

Perhaps the most interesting application of ToM occurs when a character in a story does something that we ‘understand’ but reject (‘I would never do that!’).

Where does this ‘understanding’ come from? It doesn’t come from the character. We don’t know what the character is thinking, only what they did and the circumstances in which they did it. It must come from us. There was a gap, and we filled it.

But if it comes from us, why do we react so strongly against it? There is always more than one potential set of thoughts that could have connected the situation and the subsequent action. Could it be that, of all the possible choices we could have made for the thoughts behind a character’s actions, we have subconsciously chosen the one that most offends us?

As we all know, people who are essentially trusting tend to ascribe trustworthy motives to others, while people who are essentially suspicious tend to see others as mean-spirited and deceptive. The sort of gossip that people are interested in tells you much more about them than about the people they are gossiping about.

Is it possible that, like gossip, our choice says more about us than about the character? Are we really reacting to a hidden and perhaps shameful part of ourselves?

Freud wrote that without desire there is no taboo, and without taboo there is no desire. The dark mirror of theory of mind often plugs into – and arguably helps us confront – our own desire/taboo dualities.

It also has powerful connections to comedy, which is built on the duality between fear and desire. See: Why do we Laugh? The Nature of Comedy

The Key Takeaway for the Writer?

Don’t tell us a character’s intentions and then show us the actions that flow from them. Instead, show us their actions, and invite us to infer the intentions that drove those actions.

Show the action. Keep the emotional footnotes to yourself.