TY - JOUR
T1 - The social sense
T2 - Susceptibility to others' beliefs in human infants and adults
AU - Kovács, Ágnes Melinda
AU - Téglás, Erno
AU - Endress, Ansgar Denis
PY - 2010/12/24
Y1 - 2010/12/24
N2 - Human social interactions crucially depend on the ability to represent other agents' beliefs even when these contradict our own beliefs, leading to the potentially complex problem of simultaneously holding two conflicting representations in mind. Here, we show that adults and 7-month-olds automatically encode others' beliefs, and that, surprisingly, others' beliefs have similar effects as the participants' own beliefs. In a visual object detection task, participants' beliefs and the beliefs of an agent (whose beliefs were irrelevant to performing the task) both modulated adults' reaction times and infants' looking times. Moreover, the agent's beliefs influenced participants' behavior even after the agent had left the scene, suggesting that participants computed the agent's beliefs online and sustained them, possibly for future predictions about the agent's behavior. Hence, the mere presence of an agent automatically triggers powerful processes of belief computation that may be part of a "social sense" crucial to human societies.
AB - Human social interactions crucially depend on the ability to represent other agents' beliefs even when these contradict our own beliefs, leading to the potentially complex problem of simultaneously holding two conflicting representations in mind. Here, we show that adults and 7-month-olds automatically encode others' beliefs, and that, surprisingly, others' beliefs have similar effects as the participants' own beliefs. In a visual object detection task, participants' beliefs and the beliefs of an agent (whose beliefs were irrelevant to performing the task) both modulated adults' reaction times and infants' looking times. Moreover, the agent's beliefs influenced participants' behavior even after the agent had left the scene, suggesting that participants computed the agent's beliefs online and sustained them, possibly for future predictions about the agent's behavior. Hence, the mere presence of an agent automatically triggers powerful processes of belief computation that may be part of a "social sense" crucial to human societies.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=78650653569&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1126/science.1190792
DO - 10.1126/science.1190792
M3 - Article
C2 - 21205671
AN - SCOPUS:78650653569
SN - 0036-8075
VL - 330
SP - 1830
EP - 1834
JO - Science
JF - Science
IS - 6012
ER -