Abstract
Disagreeing with others about how to interpret a social interaction is a common occurrence. We often find ourselves offering divergent interpretations of others’ motives, intentions, beliefs, and emotions. Remarkably, philosophical accounts of how we understand others do not explain, or even attempt to explain such disagreements. I argue these disparities in social interpretation stem, in large part, from the effect of social categorization and our goals in social interactions, phenomena long studied by social psychologists. I argue we ought to expand our accounts of how we understand others in order to accommodate these data and explain how such profound disagreements arise amongst informed, rational, well-meaning individuals.
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Notes
You can access this episode at http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/548/cops-see-it-differently-part-two?act=0#play.
Of course, not all disagreements about this and other such cases stem solely from disagreements about the mental states of the observed agents. Disagreements have many causes, e.g., misinformation, limited knowledge, false beliefs. Three kinds of disagreement stand out as theoretically interesting, though: those that result from (1) disagreements about mental states (about what someone was thinking, feeling, or intending), (2) disagreements about norms (about what is appropriate to think and do in a given situation), and (3) disagreements about both mental states and norms. I take it that many disagreements about the Garner case and others like it are of the third sort. Disagreeing observers tend to have different opinions about how citizens and police ought to behave, but they also disagree about what Garner and the police were thinking and trying to do, e.g., whether a police officer felt mortally threatened or about what a citizen was intending to do. The commentary from This American Life illustrates this well. In these cases, disagreements about norms and mental states often are intertwined and difficult to pull apart. This is one reason that conversations about such cases are so difficult. I focus on the different inferences about mental states because, unlike disagreements about norms, this has received relatively little attention in the analyses of these deep-rooted disagreements. Thanks to a reviewer for highlighting norms as an additional source of disagreement in these cases.
In a foundational study on this topic, Hastorf and Cantril (1954) found that students from rival universities interpreted a video of a football game between the rivals dramatically differently. Disagreements emerged over whether the game was played fairly, which team played dirty, whether particular charges were justified, whether a non-call was justified, the proportion of infractions the other team made, etc. As any sports fan knows, one’s allegiance to a team colors one’s interpretation of what happens in the game. For excellent contemporary social psychology research, see Malle (2004), Ames (2004a), Epley and Waytz (2010), Barresi (2004), and Van Bavel et al. (2014). Not all of these are disagreements are about mental states—some are simply disagreements about the facts—but many of the disagreements are about mental states, e.g., whether the referees are biased and whether an interaction was incidental contact or targeting.
Though it is presented in different terms, this is one reason why civil rights advocates urge that police departments’ racial makeup be similar to the communities they police.
Perhaps one reason for this is that social psychologists often are interested in global character traits whereas philosophers studying mindreading are interested in our ability to infer specific propositional attitudes. However, as I argue in the main text, these social psychological phenomena are highly relevant to how we infer specific propositional attitudes. Thanks to a reviewer for pointing out this difference between the two literatures.
Race is salient in multicultural societies. However, in a racially uniform society in which one never encounters a person of another race, race would not be a salient social category.
Social psychologists call social categorization conditionally automatic (Macrae and Bodenhausen 2000). The term “automatic” often invites confusion because people use it many different ways. In this context, automatic means reflexive or spontaneous. It does not mean fast, innate, subconscious, etc. Thus, social categorization is automatic in the sense that it is reflexive, and it is conditionally automatic in the sense that the categories we employ are conditional on the context. So-called conditionally automatic social categorization is compatible with sorting by some categories faster than others—indeed, the evidence is that we sort faces by age, race, and gender faster than other categories. It is also compatible with it taking longer for us to process the entire stereotype associated with a category than it takes to sort people into basic categories like age, race, and gender. Thanks to a reviewer for pushing me to clarify these issues.
The speed of spontaneous trait inferences is a disputed matter. For example, Todorov and Uleman (2003) report that spontaneous trait inferences occur as quickly as 100 ms after exposure to a face. In contrast, Malle and Holbrook (2012) find that spontaneous trait inferences occur within 1400–1600 ms, depending on the task and type of stimulus. In either case, spontaneous personality trait inferences occur very rapidly in social interactions.
There is no consensus on how to interpret what IAT and other such tasks are measuring. Some philosophers interpret IAT and other such tasks as measuring of our implicitattitudes, e.g., Gendler (2008) and (Mandelbaum 2015). On that interpretation, IAT reveals that despite explicit egalitarian attitudes toward Blacks and Whites, many White people have implicit White supremacist attitudes. In contrast, Levy (2014) argues that IAT measures our patchy endorsements, which is something more fragmented than ordinary beliefs. Machery (2016) offers an alternative interpretation according to which IAT and other such tasks measure traits rather than attitudes. See Del Pinal and Spaulding (forthcoming) for an alternative interpretation of what IAT and other implicit bias tasks are measuring.
An approach for social interpretation is like a strategy that need not be conscious or deliberate. Each of these goals and corresponding approaches may be conscious or non-conscious. Like the goals that they correspond to, these approaches are not mutually exclusive. Social interactions often are complex diachronic events, and we may adopt multiple mindreading approaches when interpreting a social interaction. Many mindreading episodes involve some deliberation (for salient aspects of the situation that we want to get right), heuristics (for aspects of the situation that seem familiar or unimportant to us), and self-interested biases (for aspects of the situation that may threaten our self-image or ideology). Moreover, these approaches may interact in the sense that self-interested biases influence our careful deliberation, heuristics inform and influence the judgments we make when deliberating, and careful deliberation may correct the heuristics we use and combat the pull of self-interested biases.
The Self-Serving Attributional Bias is distinct from the Actor–Observer Effect, which holds that people explain others’ behavior in terms of dispositional factors and their own in terms of situational factors. In other words, behavioral explanations differ depending on whether one is the actor or the observer. The empirical evidence for this effect is mixed (Malle 2006), but see Malle et al. (2007) for a novel interpretation of the asymmetries in patterns of explanation.
Developmental psychologists working in theory of mind face this same lacuna (Apperly 2012; Rakoczy 2014). For example, Ian Apperly, writes, “although it has long been recognized in principle that there should be important links between ToM and research on social psychology, reasoning, and experimental pragmatics, these literatures have seldom meshed well in practice” (2012, p. 837).
In what follows, I draw broadly on Epley’s framework (2008), which holds that the accuracy of our mindreading attributions depends on what we take as input and how we process that information. One difference between his framework and mine is that he argues that we tend to reason about others’ mental states by reasoning about our own mental states first, and this serves as an anchor that we may subsequently adjust with deliberation. In contrast, I argue that when we perceive others to be different from ourselves, we tend not to use an egocentric anchor. In such cases, we rely on our stereotypes of members of that out-group.
Social categorization may shape the inputs to mindreading, as I argue in this section. However, social categorization may also run in parallel with mindreading, and in some cases social categorization and mindreading may influence each other. In the latter case, mindreading a target may cause us to re-categorize a target. In this kind of case, mindreading serves as a corrective for our categorizing. Thanks to a reviewer for pointing out this possibility.
For more on how the situational context modulates our social interpretations, see Spaulding (2017).
One could understand this discussion of the inputs to mindreading in terms of multiple mindreading systems, e.g., Apperly and Butterfill (2009). On such a view, the social categorization processes I describe may serve as input to either low-level/perceptual/system-1 processes or high-level/inferential/system-2 processes. Thanks to a reviewer for suggesting this idea.
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I have talked about the ideas in this paper with many people. I am particularly grateful for my conversations with the following people: Lauren Ashwell, Mikkel Gerken, Brie Gertler, Suilin Lavelle, Karen Neander, Carlotta Pavese, Guillermo del Pinal, Sarah Robins, Armin Schulz, Robert Thompson, Evan Westra, and Tad Zawidzki. Thanks also to the audiences at Coastal Carolina University, Mississippi State University, University of Houston, George Washington University, and University of Kansas. Finally, thanks to two anonymous referees at this journal. Their feedback helped me develop my critiques and and positive arguments.
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Spaulding, S. Do you see what I see? How social differences influence mindreading. Synthese 195, 4009–4030 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1404-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1404-1