Beyond perspective-taking: Mind-reading motivation

Does a single session of reading literary fiction prime enhanced mentalising performance? Four replication experiments of Kidd and Castano (2013)

“…In our Experiment 3, repeated testing of the RMET appeared to lower RMET scores, suggesting that RMET performance may be susceptible to internal motivational influences, such as fatigue. Moreover, the willingness of people to effortfully engage in mentalising is not the same as the mind-reading ability (Carpenter, Green, & Vacharkulksemsuk, 2016), and it is shown that mind-reading motivation can be influenced from an external information, such as the source of the text (selected by researchers vs. computer-generated).…”

Anthropomorphism, social understanding, and imaginary companions

“…However, there was no robust evidence of this association in either Study 1 with adults or Study 2 with children (also see Willard & Norenzayan, ; who found only a weak association between mentalizing and anthropomorphism). It is possible that only a rudimentary understanding of humans as thinking and feeling entities is required for using these concepts to describe non‐humans, and that even individuals with a well‐developed understanding of human mental states might not choose to do so, maybe because they have ‘low mind reading motivation’ which refers to one's willingness to understand the mental states of others (Carpenter, Green, & Vacharkulksemsuk, , p. 358) which might then affect their motivation to attribute mental states to non‐human animals and inanimate objects. Note that although we predicted a positive link between social understanding and anthropomorphism, it was conceptually possible that the opposite pattern could have been found; a well‐developed social understanding might have resulted in a reduced tendency to anthropomorphize because of an enhanced awareness of when it is accurate to attribute mental states to other entities.…”

Feedback shapes snap judgments: Toward a dynamic model of making social judgments

“…First, as in Study 1, we assessed the time spent judging Feedback shapes snap judgments-12 target morality, with the expectation that the provision of low accuracy feedback would undermine participant confidence in the reliability of social judgments, and hence, would increase the time spent generating moral judgments. Second, the study was designed to control for the possibility that the time spent judging the target's morality after the feedback, might have been confounded with individual differences in general motivation to engage in the task (see Carpenter, Green, & Vacharkulksemsuk, 2016), and more particularly, baseline differences in the time devoted by the participant to social judgments. Thus, Study 2 included a measure of the baseline time devoted to making social judgments in the absence of accuracy feedback.…”

“…Time spent judging the target profile -The time spent judging the first target was used as a baseline to control for possible individual differences in participants' willingness to engage in social perception (cf., Carpenter, Green, & Vacharkulksemsuk, 2016).…”