Altercentric Bias: A Potential New Window into Implicit Theory of Mind
Kumulative Dissertation
Datum der mündl. Prüfung:2023-07-11
Erschienen:2023-07-24
Betreuer:Prof. Dr. Hannes Rakoczy
Gutachter:Prof. Dr. Hannes Rakoczy
Gutachter:Prof. Dr. Ulf Liszkowski
Dateien
Name:Dissertation_Haskaraca Kizilay_eDiss.pdf
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Zusammenfassung
Englisch
It has been traditionally assumed that theory of mind (ToM) -our ability to ascribe mental states to others and ourselves- emerges around age four, as indicated in performance on standard explicit false belief (FB) tasks (Wellman et al., 2001). More recent studies assessing FB understanding with implicit measures suggested that some form of ToM may be present even in infancy (Scott & Baillargeon, 2017). However, many of these studies now face replicability issues and thus cannot serve as robust evidence for implicit ToM (e.g., Dörrenberg et al., 2018). One type of implicit task, namely altercentric bias, still constitutes a promising alternative to tap implicit perspective-taking abilities. Altercentric bias is an indicator of spontaneous and implicit mentalizing of others' (irrelevant) perspectives: people get slower and more error-prone in making first-order judgments about the world if another agent in the scene holds a diverging perspective, even if this perspective is irrelevant or detrimental to the task (Samson et al., 2010). This bias has been studied in different task formats so far (e.g., dot-perspective task by Samson et al., 2010; object-detection task by Kovács et al., 2010); however, the existing altercentric bias measures have been shown subject to reliability and validity issues (e.g., Santiesteban et al., 2014). The current work takes a new approach to the altercentric bias and aims to develop and adapt reliable altercentric bias measures through the mediums of existing egocentric bias measures. Egocentric interferences refer to the interferences from our own perspectives on our judgments about others’ perspectives. Egocentric bias measures easily lend themselves to analogous tasks that can be used to reveal altercentric biases. The current study tests three different tasks that could provide potential new ways to tap altercentric interferences, with the ultimate aim of using this bias as a window into implicit ToM. All studies constituting this dissertation have been conducted with adult participants via unmoderated online sessions (except for the two baseline studies of Project 1, which were conducted in live settings). The first project of the current thesis capitalizes on the so-called Sandbox task (e.g., Sommerville et al., 2013) as a means to tap altercentric biases. This measure has been originally developed to tap egocentric biases. This project also aimed to replicate the earlier Sandbox studies, which revealed robust egocentric interferences across the lifespan. Across five different Sandbox studies, we found no evidence for egocentric and altercentric biases. The second project focuses on the so-called Director Task (e.g., Samuel et al., 2019) as a potential new way of tapping altercentric biases. Like the Sandbox task, this measure has predominantly targeted egocentric interferences in social cognition or egocentric heuristics in communication. Therefore, this project also aimed to replicate the earlier studies in terms of the egocentric interferences revealed. Across two studies, this task provided evidence for robust egocentric interference effects. The results, however, revealed inconsistent effects in terms of the altercentric version, raising critical issues regarding the validity of this task as a measure of altercentric biases. Finally, in Project 3, altercentric biases have been tested in typical level-I and level-II visual perspective-taking tasks (e.g., Flavell et al., 1981). In two studies, altercentric biases were revealed in both level-I and level-II visual perspective-taking tasks. However, the patterns revealed by the different measures drew a complicated picture and prevented us from arriving at a conclusion about the presence and nature of these biases. The findings of this dissertation contribute to the methodological debates in the altercentric bias literature and the theoretical debates in the field of implicit ToM. The current projects showed that altercentric biases might not be revealed at all or may be contingent on alternative explanations in some task formats. The one task that remained to be a somewhat promising measure of altercentric interferences (as revealed by Project 3) showed that these biases were likely to occur due to implicit mentalizing, and they hinted at unified ToM abilities. However, these claims stayed at the level of speculation as none of the tasks used in the current thesis was free from methodological concerns.
Keywords: Theory of Mind; Implicit Theory of Mind; Altercentric Bias; Egocentric Bias; Perspective-taking