Dr. Nick Epley, welcome. Thank you so much for having me. We make a lot of assumptions about other people and in my case because I have a new puppy about animals. You know, we are always thinking that we know what other beings are thinking. Yeah. But as you have pointed out and as a colleague of mine in neurosciences, Dr. Carl Dyeroth has pointed out, most of the time we do not even know what we are thinking. Like there is stuff going on in there, but like we are not that good at thinking, oh, that last thought was a complete sentence that means blank. That is not how the human mind works. So, usually when we hear the word anthropomorphism, we are talking about humans making assumptions about other animals. But humans are animals. We just happen to be the curators of the planet. So why and how do we anthropomorphize about other people and how does it hurt us and how does it help us? Yeah. So I think the way to think about anthropomorphism is that what we are doing is we are trying to understand what is going on within another agent essentially. And so anything that acts independently, right? You got a ball rolling across the table. If something else bumps into it and it moves in perfect, you know, perfect deflection off of it, you do not need anything to explain why that ball moved as it did. But if this ball is coming across the table and another one hits it and it just keeps going or goes some other direction, well then it seems like there is something going inside that thing that might be driving it, right? And that in that thing that is inside that ball might be a mind, right? Might be a set of thoughts or beliefs or attitudes, some kind of psychology that is pushing it. At least that is the way we interpret what an independent agent might be doing. We do this when we think about other people, right? You are nodding your head now. I think you are thinking about something, right? You move this way or that. You wanted to do this thing or that thing. We do that same kind of mind reading, right? With non-human agents, animals, gods, sometimes the planet, even ourselves, right? We reflect on ourselves. We have experience at least with having certain mental states come to mind and we use that experience as a guide to what is going on in other people too. That kind of anthropomorphism, that kind of mind reading, right, where we infer others thoughts or beliefs or attitudes, that is helpful to us for at least two reasons. One is it gives me some sense of why you are doing what you are doing now. It allows me to understand what you are doing right now. Are you trying to be kind? Are you trying to be aggressive? Are you trying to be friendly? But it also is pretty good at allowing me to predict what you are likely to do next. So if I think you feel hungry, well, you are going to go try to eat something. If I think you do not like me very well, you are going to behave a particular way towards me. So this kind of mental state inference, this kind of mind reading serves us pretty well for getting around in a social world. Do not always get it right, but in general, it is better than not doing it at all.
As we make assumptions about others and their intentions and their past choices in some cases, right? Like if somebody hits somebody else, we make an assumption about the certain things might have led up to that. Yes. Right. Are we mainly paying attention to behavior and or are we paying attention to what they seem to be paying attention to? So theory of mind. Yeah. So it depends a lot on what kind of environment we are in. We think about the minds of others in lots and lots of different contexts. My wife right now is back home in Illinois. I can think about what she might want for dinner, right? Or what she is feeling at any given time. We can think about people when they are not present. We can think about strangers, people we know nothing about. I write a book. I am trying to think about how will people understand this book. Right? These are all cases where there is not somebody in front of us at all. Right? And when we are doing that, particularly with strangers, people we know nothing about, things we know nothing about, then the one thing we have at our disposal is ourselves. We can use our own minds. Right? So, if I walk into a classroom and I think it is kind of cold in here, well, I can assume that other people will think it is cold, too. I am using myself as a guide. Once I know a little more maybe about you, right? I learned that you are, you know, you are a PhD from Stanford. I learn that um, you know, somebody is a is an athlete or whatever. I learn something about you. You are a doctor or you are a lawyer. Then I can use that information, my beliefs about groups of people as a guide. That is stereotyping. And stereotypes contain a fair bit of accuracy to them. If I know that you are a Democrat or a Republican, I can make some reasonable inferences about other thoughts you might have, other beliefs you might have. Not perfect, but better than chance guessing. And then once I see you like what we are doing right now, if I can see you, then I am watching your behavior. And then behavior dominates. Behavior though is tricky. I am watching you, right? You could have two people kissing. They seem, you know, delightfully in love, right? They seem just so nice together. And you can you can make one set of inferences. When you see that that happening based on that, you can infer what is going on behind that based on what you are seeing. And when we can see the behavior in front of us, that is then what we are paying most attention to. But each of these different mechanisms, egocentrism, stereotyping, and behaviorism, we might think about working backwards from your behavior. They all give us some accuracy, but they also create some error. Egocentrism creates egocentric biases. I assume that you think more like I do than you actually do. Stereotyping tends to create a different set of mistakes. I tend to think that groups are more distinct and different from each other than they actually are because stereotypes are about the defining features of groups which tends to exaggerate the differences between groups. And when it comes to behavior, I tend to assume a simpler, more simplistic mind behind that behavior than actually exists. Psychologists refer to this as the correspondence bias. I tend to infer an intention or set of beliefs or attitudes that corresponds with your behavior as I see it. So if I see you hit somebody, I might assume you are an aggressive person. That is how I interpret right away. Had I known it was in self-defense, then I would interpret it very differently, right? But we tend to leap to mental states or intentions from behavior. Sometimes that can get us into trouble when the relationship between intentions or thoughts and behavior is a little complicated. So each of those gets us some accuracy, but each of them also creates some error.
If you are willing, I would like to return to the example you gave at the beginning of a ball rolling on a table and another ball striking it or not. You know, in the second example you gave that the ball simply takes off on a different trajectory, you said that we are going to make some assumption that the ball has something like a mind, something controlling its decisions. What I am about to say reflects a strong bias, which is that I have long been interested in the visual system of non-human and human primates because we are so visual and the eyes are two pieces of the brain. They are the only pieces of the brain in healthy individuals that are outside the cranial vault. And they give us a lot of information. And I think people know that, but I do not think they appreciate just how much information they give us. Not just pupil size and whether or not our gaze is locked with theirs. All that is true, too. But if I could just alter your experiment for a second. Let us say that first ball had eyes. Oh, yeah. And it is rolling forward, but then the eyes shift to the left and then the ball goes to the left. Now I have additional information. I have a window literally into the brain where I can say what is over there that might have motivated that decision. And I think with humans, we do this, right? Like if somebody is going down the street just swinging their arms wildly and hitting people, we think this person is out of control, they are crazy. Whereas if they see somebody then they orient to their gaze toward them. Now we start making all sorts of assumptions about the operations of that mind. And in my worldview no pun intended the eyes are the best source of information about intent about goals etc. So limiting the conversation to conditions where we can see the other person and what they see. Are there any examples of our judgments about other people’s thoughts and behavior and etc improving by virtue of. Sure. Yeah. I mean so the eyes are do provide a lot valid information. Absolutely. The voice also contains an awful lot. So that is the other thing we spend a lot of time studying. But we are the most socially sophisticated primate species on the planet. We have a brain uniquely equipped for connecting with the minds of others. And that means that we are hyper sensitive to certain things. The eyes are one of them. There is this great paper in 2008 on the cultural intelligence hypothesis. It is a science paper where they compared, you know, they try to assess what is it that makes humans sort of unique on this planet. And they compared a little over 100 two-year-old toddlers, right? Imagine running this experiment if you would. A little over 100 two-year-old toddlers. This was done at the Max Planck Institute in Germany. One of the Max Planck institutes over 100 chimpanzees and then just for good measure another 36 orangutans who apparently had nothing better to do. What a funny. Yeah, it is crazy. Exhausting. Exactly. Men, I can not. Yeah. I would like to know the background of of details of this, how it was actually done and how long it took. But what they did essentially is ran each of these groups through two different kinds of IQ tests. You might think of them as one was an IQ test involving physical objects, right? So things like, you know, tracking where a reward was placed under a shell game or using a tool to solve some kind of problem. Jane Goodall once, you know, psychologists once believed, biologists once believed that tool use was what made humans unique until Jane Goodall watched the chimpanzees using twigs to get termites out of a termite mound. Right? On the physical IQ test problems, the human toddlers, the adult chimps, and the orangutans performed equally well. There was not a difference. It is not reasoning about physical things in space that make us unique. The other group of IQ problems were social problems where it required reasoning about the mind of another person. And this involved doing things like tracking where someone’s eyes are looking in order to monitor what somebody is thinking because we tend to look at things we are thinking about and think about things we are looking at. If I want to know what is on your mind, what is governing your attention, I want to be really good at tracking your eyes. And we are amazing at this as human beings. I can tell whether you are looking at me right now or looking at my right ear from this far without any trouble. I can tell from 50 feet away, whether you are looking at me or looking at, you know, 10 feet above me. We are amazingly good at this. Super sensitive this. I could not calculate the angle on a roof if you gave me a month and an arm load of protractors to do it but I can detect the angle in your eyes in an instant. Also involve things like being able to understand somebody’s intentions from their actions right so if I reach out to for this glass of water and I miss it you can infer I am thirsty and I want a drink you could oh you could hand me the glass Nick right if if I wanted a drink and because that is you could read my mind essentially you could infer my thoughts when. And they tested the two-year-old toddlers, the chimps, and the orangutans on in these social IQ tests. That is where the 2-year-old toddlers were shining. That is where we were crushing the competition on those social IQ problems. You can do this, you know, in front of a chimpanzee all day long and they will do nothing for you, right? Nothing for you. I do that in front of you and you can hand me the glass of water super easily. So yes, the eyes give us a lot and we are extremely sensitive to all of those social cues that convey might convey what is on the mind of another person because it allows me to anticipate what you are doing before you do it.