Skip to main content
Log in

Folk personality psychology: mindreading and mindshaping in trait attribution

  • Folk Psychology: Pluralistic Approaches
  • Published:
Synthese Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Character-trait attribution is an important component of everyday social cognition that has until recently received insufficient attention in traditional accounts of folk psychology. In this paper, I consider how the case of character-trait attribution fits into the debate between mindreading-based and broadly ‘pluralistic’ approaches to folk psychology. Contrary to the arguments of some pluralists, I argue that the evidence on trait understanding does not show that it is a distinct, non-mentalistic mode of folk-psychological reasoning, but rather suggests that traits are ordinarily understood as mentalistic dispositions. I also examine several ways in which trait attribution might also serve regulative, ‘mindshaping’ functions by promoting predictable norm-governed behavior, and argue that mindreading plays several important roles in these cases as well. I conclude that an appreciation of the relationship between trait attribution and mindreading is crucial to understanding the role it plays in our folk psychology.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. See Korman and Malle (2016) for a recent study that calls this idea into question.

  2. In Westra (2018), I also suggested that the correspondence bias functions as a kind of mindreading heuristic: rapidly attributing traits to a person upon first encountering helps us derive an initial set of priors for the kinds of mental states they might have.

  3. Non-linguistic associationspi, are distinct from linguistic associationspi, which emerge later in development and require the possession of an explicit, lexicalized trait concept (e.g. the word “generosity”). Unlike their non-linguistic counterparts, they are said to permit more flexible behavioral predictions, since they allow that behavioral and contextual information can be associated with trait words, as well as specific individuals.

  4. It is not clear from this experiment just how broad these representations are, or how many other situations they would generalize to. It may be that children’s trait-like representations are at this stage still relatively “local” and limited to a small range of situations, and only become more “global” as children make more social observations and acquire trait language. Or it may be that these initial trait-like concepts actually pick out very broad evaluative categories (e.g. “good guy” and “bad guy”), and only become more refined over time.

  5. Another possible interpretation is that infants in studies like these are merely relying upon an “implicit” or “minimal” theory of mind, and that their performance does not require “full-blown” forms of mindreading (Apperly and Butterfill 2009; Butterfill and Apperly 2013). This appears to be what Fiebich and Coltheart (2015) think is going on in preference attribution studies. However, the two-systems theory is itself quite controversial, and the evidence and theoretical motivations for it has come under significant criticism from a number of authors (Carruthers 2015; Christensen and Michael 2015; Heyes 2014b; Michael and Christensen 2016; Santiesteban et al. 2014; Westra 2017). Given these concerns, I will leave a two-systems interpretation of these findings for another venue.

  6. Notably, Zawidzki’s account of mindshaping is committed to a version of the two-systems theory of mindreading (Apperly and Butterfill 2009; Butterfill and Apperly 2013), and thus distinguishes between “implicit” and “explicit” forms of mental-state attribution. His view thus acknowledges the role of “implicit” forms of mindreading in mindshaping, which involve relational, non-propositional, proto-mentalistic concepts. However, Zawidzki would deny that mindshaping requires explicit mindreading (i.e. predicting and explaining behavior in terms of “full-blown” propositional attitudes with linguistically specifiable contents) (Zawidzki 2011, 2013).

  7. This is by no means a universal feature of moral judgment: the relevance of mental states like intentions in judgments of blameworthiness has been shown to vary across cultures (McNamara et al. 2019).

  8. It is worth noting, however, that most virtue theorists would deny that the dispositions created by virtue-labeling count as genuine virtues on account of the fact that they lack the appropriate motivational structure; this is why Alfano calls the results of virtue labeling “factitious virtues” (Alfano 2013; Miller 2017).

  9. One of the reviewers of this paper suggested that a mindshaper in such a situation might knowingly make a false virtue-attribution in order to bring about a particular behavior in the target without ever considering the fact that this behavior is caused by a false belief. In this case, the mindshaper would achieve their desired behavioral end without any sort of mindreading. This possibility is interesting, but also highly speculative. The broad consensus in the literature on lying and deception is that it involves mindreading.

  10. In reply to this point, a proponent of a strong, anti-mentalistic version of the mindshaping hypothesis could argue that participants in virtue-labelling tasks do not attribute any mental states to the attributor, and instead simply accept the assertions of certain informants by default, especially if the informant is an authority figure like the teacher in Miller et al. (1975). There is something to this objection: generally, the literature on trust in testimony in young children shows that they are strongly inclined to believe what they’re told (Jaswal et al. 2010, 2014). However, children as young as three are also less trusting when informants seem less confident in their assertions (Jaswal and Malone 2007), and by four their trust in testimony is moderated by information about a speaker’s ignorance and prior reliability (Kushnir and Koenig 2017). The fact that children’s trust in testimony is moderated by evidence of ignorance suggests that their default disposition is to tacitly attribute knowledge to informants, and to accept their testimony on that basis unless given reason to think that they are not in fact knowledgeable.

  11. Participants in this task also often used more colorful and profane epithets to describe non-cooperators in their gossip notes. Arguably, this amounts to a form of trait attribution as well: calling someone a “jerk”, for example, involves making a claim about the sort of person they are, rather than just a description of their behaviors (Schwitzgebel 2019).

  12. For discussion of the narrative, normative role of propositional attitude attributions, see Hutto (2009) and Zawidzki (2013).

References

  • Alfano, M. (2013). Character as moral fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Ali, S., & Frederickson, N. (2006). Investigating the evidence base of social stories. Educational Psychology in Practice,22(4), 355–377.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Aloise, P. A. (1993). Trait confirmation and disconfirmation: The development of attribution biases. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology,55(2), 177–193.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ames, D. R., Flynn, F. J., & Weber, E. U. (2004). It’s the thought that counts: on perceiving how helpers decide to lend a hand. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin,30(4), 461–474.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Andrews, K. (2008). It’s in your nature: A pluralistic folk psychology. Synthese,165(1), 13–29.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Andrews, K. (2012). Do apes read minds?: Toward a new folk psychology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Apperly, I., & Butterfill, S. A. (2009). Do humans have two systems to track beliefs and belief-like states? Psychological Review,116(4), 953–970.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Back, E., Ropar, D., & Mitchell, P. (2007). Do the eyes have it? Inferring mental states from animated faces in autism. Child Development,78(2), 397–411.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Baron-Cohen, S., Leslie, A. M., & Frith, U. (1985). Does the autistic child have a “theory of mind”? Cognition,21(1), 37–46.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Baumard, N., André, J. B., & Sperber, D. (2013). A mutualistic approach to morality: The evolution of fairness by partner choice. Behavioral and Brain Sciences,36(1), 59–78.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Butterfill, S., & Apperly, I. (2013). How to construct a minimal theory of mind. Mind and Language,28(5), 606–637.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Cain, K. M., Heyman, G. D., & Walker, M. E. (1997). Preschoolers’ ability to make dispositional predictions within and across domains. Social Development,6(1), 53–75.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Carroll, N. (2002). The wheel of virtue: Art, literature, and moral knowledge. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism,60(1), 3–26.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Carruthers, P. (2013). Mindreading in infancy. Mind and Language,28(2), 141–172.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Carruthers, P. (2015). Mindreading in adults: Evaluating two-systems views. Synthese,192, 1–16.

    Google Scholar 

  • Carruthers, P., & Smith, P. K. (1996). Theories of theories of mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Christensen, W., & Michael, J. (2015). From two systems to a multi-systems architecture for mindreading. New Ideas in Psychology,40, 48–64.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Cloutier, J., Gabrieli, J. D. E., O’Young, D., & Ambady, N. (2011). An fMRI study of violations of social expectations: When people are not who we expect them to be. NeuroImage,57(2), 583–588.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Connelly, B. S., & Ones, D. S. (2010). An other perspective on personality: Meta-analytic integration of observers’ accuracy and predictive validity. Psychological Bulletin,136(6), 1092–1122.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ding, X. P., Wellman, H. M., Wang, Y., Fu, G., & Lee, K. (2015). Theory-of-mind training causes honest young children to lie. Psychological Science,26(11), 1812–1821.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Doris, J. M. (2002). Lack of character: Personality and moral behavior. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Dunbar, R. I. M. (2004). Gossip in evolutionary perspective. Review of General Psychology,8(2), 100–110.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Fein, S. (1996). Effects of suspicion on attributional thinking and the correspondence bias. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,70(6), 1164.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Feinberg, M., Willer, R., & Schultz, M. (2014). Gossip and ostracism promote cooperation in groups. Psychological Science,25(3), 656–664.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Feinberg, M., Willer, R., Stellar, J., & Keltner, D. (2012). The virtues of gossip: Reputational information sharing as prosocial behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,102(5), 1015–1030.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ferrari, C., Vecchi, T., Todorov, A., & Cattaneo, Z. (2016). Interfering with activity in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex via TMS affects social impressions updating. Cognitive, Affective, and Behavioral Neuroscience,16(4), 626–634.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Fiebich, A., & Coltheart, M. (2015). Various ways to understand other minds: Towards a pluralistic approach to the explanation of social understanding. Mind and Language,30(3), 235–258.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Fiebich, A., Gallagher, S., & Hutto, D. D. (2016). Pluralism, interaction, and the ontogeny of social cognition. In Routledge handbook on the philosophy of the social mind (pp. 1–21).

  • Fiske, S. T., Cuddy, A. J. C., & Glick, P. (2002). A model of (often mixed stereotype content: Competence and warmth respectively follow from perceived status and competition. Journal of Personality and Social Psychologyersonality and Social Psychology,82(6), 878–902.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gawronski, B. (2004). Theory-based bias correction in dispositional inference: The fundamental attribution error is dead, long live the correspondence bias. European Review of Social Psychology,15(1), 183–217.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gilbert, D. T., Malone, P. S., Aronson, J., Giesler, B., Higgins, T., Ross, L., et al. (1995). The correspondence bias. Psychological Bulletin,117(1), 21–38.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Goodwin, G. P., Piazza, J., & Rozin, P. (2014). Moral character predominates in person perception and evaluation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,106(1), 148–168.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gopnik, A., & Wellman, H. M. (1992). Why the child’s theory of mind really is a theory. Mind and Language,7(1–2), 145–171.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gopnik, A., & Wellman, H. M. (2012). Reconstructing constructivism: Causal models, Bayesian learning mechanisms, and the theory theory. Psychological Bulletin,138(6), 1085–1108.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gordon, R. M. (1986). Folk psychology as simulation. Mind and Language,1(2), 158–171.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gray, C. (2007). Writing social stories with Carol Gray. Arlington, TX: Future Horizons.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hassabis, D., Spreng, R. N., Rusu, A. A., Robbins, C. A., Mar, R. A., & Schacter, D. L. (2014). Imagine all the people: How the brain creates and uses personality models to predict behavior. Cerebral Cortex,24(8), 1979–1987.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Heyes, C. (2014a). False belief in infancy: A fresh look. Developmental Science,17(5), 647–659.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Heyes, C. (2014b). Submentalizing: I am not really reading your mind. Perspectives on Psychological Science : A Journal of the Association for Psychological Science,9(2), 131–143.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Heyman, G. D. (2009). Children’s reasoning about traits. Advances in Child Development and Behavior,37, 105–143.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Heyman, G. D., & Gelman, S. A. (1998). Young children use motive information to make trait inferences. Developmental Psychology,34(2), 310–321.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Heyman, G. D., & Gelman, S. A. (1999). The use of trait labels in making psychological inferences. Child Development,70(3), 604–619.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Heyman, G. D., & Gelman, S. A. (2000). Preschool children’s use of trait labels to make inductive inferences. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology,77(1), 1–19.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hooper, N., Ergogan, A., Keen, G., Lawton, K., & McHugh, L. (2015). Perspective taking reduces the fundamental attribution error.pdf. Journal of Contextual Behavioral Science,4, 69–72.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hutto, D. D. (2009). Folk psychology as narrative practice. Journal of Consciousness Studies,16(6–8), 9–39.

    Google Scholar 

  • Jaswal, V. K., & Malone, L. S. (2007). Turning believers into skeptics: 3-Year-olds’ sensitivity to cues to speaker credibility. Journal of Cognition and Development,8(3), 263–283.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Jaswal, V. K., Croft, A. C., Setia, A. R., & Cole, C. A. (2010). Young children have a specific, highly robust bias to trust testimony. Psychological Science,21(10), 1541–1547.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Jaswal, V. K., Pérez-Edgar, K., Kondrad, R. L., Palmquist, C. M., Cole, C. A., & Cole, C. E. (2014). Can’t stop believing: Inhibitory control and resistance to misleading testimony. Developmental Science,17(6), 965–976.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Jones, E., & Harris, A. (1967). The attribution of attitudes. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology,3, 1–24.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kalish, C. W. (2002). Children’s predictions of consistency in people’s actions. Cognition,84(3), 237–265.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kestemont, J., Vandekerckhove, M., Ma, N., Van Hoeck, N., & Van Overwalle, F. (2013). Situation and person attributions under spontaneous and intentional instructions: An fMRI study. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience,8(5), 481–493.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Korman, J., & Malle, B. F. (2016). Grasping for traits or reasons? How people grapple with puzzling social behaviors. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin,42(11), 1451–1465.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Krull, D. S., Seger, C. R., & Silvera, D. H. (2008). Smile when you say that: Effects of willingness on dispositional inferences. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology,44(3), 735–742.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kushnir, T., & Koenig, M. A. (2017). What I don’t know won’t hurt you: The relation between professed ignorance and later knowledge claims. Developmental Psychology,53(5), 826–835.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lane, J. D., Wellman, H. M., & Gelman, S. A. (2013). Informants’ traits weigh heavily in young children’s trust in testimony and in their epistemic inferences. Child Development,84(4), 1253–1268.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Liu, D., Gelman, S. A., & Wellman, H. M. (2007). Components of young children’ s trait understanding: Behavior-to-trait inferences and trait-to-behavior predictions. Child Development,78(5), 1543–1558.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Luan, Z., Poorthuis, A. M. G., Hutteman, R., Denissen, J. J. A., Asendorpf, J. B., & van Aken, M. A. G. (2018). Unique predictive power of other-rated personality: An 18-year longitudinal study. Journal of Personality,87(3), 532–545.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Luo, Y., & Johnson, S. C. (2009). Recognizing the role of perception in action at 6 months. Developmental Science,12(1), 142–149.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ma, N., Vandekerckhove, M., Baetens, K., Overwalle, F. V., Seurinck, R., & Fias, W. (2011). Inconsistencies in spontaneous and intentional trait inferences. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience,7(8), 937–950.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Malle, B. F. (2006). How the mind explains behavior: Folk explanations, meaning, and social interaction. New York: Mit Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mameli, M. (2001). Mindreading, mindshaping, and evolution. Biology and Philosophy,16(5), 597–628.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • McGeer, V. (2007). The regulative dimension of folk psychology. In D. D. Hutto & M. Ratcliffe (Eds.), Folk psychology re-assessed (pp. 137–156). New York: Springer.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • McNamara, R. A., Willard, A. K., Norenzayan, A., & Henrich, J. (2019). Weighing outcome vs intent across societies: How cultural models of mind shape moral reasoning. Cognition,182, 95–108.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Meltzoff, A. N., & Gopnik, A. (2013). Learning about the mind from evidence: Children’s development of intuitive theories of perception and personality. In Understanding other minds (pp. 19–34).

  • Michael, J. (2014). Mindshaping: a new framework for understanding human social cognition. Journal of Consciousness Studies,21(11–12), 170–177.

    Google Scholar 

  • Michael, J., & Christensen, W. (2016). Flexible goal attribution in early mindreading. Psychological Review,123(2), 219.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Miller, C. B. (2013). Moral character: An empirical theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Miller, C. B. (2017). The character gap: How good are we?. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Miller, R. L., Brickman, P., & Bolen, D. (1975). Attribution versus persuasion as a means for modifying behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,31(3), 430–441.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Mitchell, P. (2013). Mentalizing in autism: Interpreting facial expressions, following gaze, reading body language and inferring traits. Journal of Educational Sciences and Psychology,LXV(1), 111–120.

    Google Scholar 

  • Moran, J. M., Jolly, E., & Mitchell, J. P. (2014). Spontaneous mentalizing predicts the fundamental attribution error. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience,26(3), 569–576.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Parsons, S., & Mitchell, P. (1999). What children with autism understand about thoughts and thought bubbles. Autism,3(1), 17–38.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Peevers, B. H., & Secord, P. F. (1973). Developmental changes in attribution of descriptive concepts to persons. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,27(1), 120–128.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Penn, D. C., & Povinelli, D. J. (2007). The comparative delusion: The ‘behavioristic’/ ‘mentalistic’ dichotomy in comparative theory of mind research 1 introduction 2 flogging the behavioristic strawman (pp. 1–25).

  • Peters, U. (2019). The complementarity of mindshaping and mindreading. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences,18(3), 533–549.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Pexman, P. M., Glenwright, M., Hala, S., Kowbel, S. L., & Jungen, S. (2005). Children’s use of trait information in understanding verbal irony. Metaphor and Symbol,21(1), 39–60.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Reeder, G. D. (2009). Mindreading: Judgments about intentionality and motives in dispositional inference. Psychological Inquiry,20(1), 1–18.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Repacholi, B. M., & Meltzoff, A. N. (2007). Emotional eavesdropping: Infants selectively respond to indirect emotional signals. Child Development,78(2), 503–521.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Repacholi, B. M., Meltzoff, A. N., Hennings, T. M., & Ruba, A. L. (2016a). Transfer of social learning across contexts: Exploring infants’ attribution of trait-like emotions to adults. Infancy,21(6), 785–806.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Repacholi, B. M., Meltzoff, A. N., & Olsen, B. (2008). Infants’ understanding of the link between visual perception and emotion: “If she can’t see me doing it, she won’t get angry”. Developmental Psychology,44(2), 561–574.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Repacholi, B. M., Meltzoff, A. N., Toub, T. S., & Ruba, A. L. (2016b). Infants’ generalizations about other people’ s emotions: Foundations for trait-like attributions. Developmental Psychology,52, 364–378.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Reynhout, G., & Carter, M. (2011). Evaluation of the efficacy of Social StoriesTM using three single subject metrics. Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders,5(2), 885–900.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Rholes, W. S., & Ruble, D. N. (1984). Children’s understanding of dispositional characteristics of others. Child Development,55(2), 550–560.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Santiesteban, I., Catmur, C., Hopkins, S. C., Bird, G., & Heyes, C. (2014). Avatars and arrows: implicit mentalizing or domain-general processing? Journal of Experimental Psychology Human Perception and Performance,40(3), 929–937.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Scholl, B. J., & Leslie, A. M. (1999). Modularity, development and ‘Theory of Mind’. Mind and Language,14(1), 131–153.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Schwitzgebel, E. (2019). A theory of jerks and other philosophical misadventures. New York: MIT Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Snow, N. E. (2010). Virtue as social intelligence: An empirically grounded theory. New York, NY: Routledge.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Sommerfeld, R. D., Krambeck, H.-J., Semmann, D., & Milinski, M. (2007). Gossip as an alternative for direct observation in games of indirect reciprocity. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,104(44), 17435–17440.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Spaulding, S. (2018a). How we understand others: philosophy and social cognition. London: Routledge.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Spaulding, S. (2018b). Mindreading beyond belief: A more comprehensive conception of how we understand others. Philosophy Compass,13, e12526.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Spence, S. A., Hunter, M. D., Farrow, T. F. D., Green, R. D., Leung, D. H., Hughes, C. J., et al. (2004). A cognitive neurobiological account of deception: Evidence from functional neuroimaging. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences,359, 1755–1762.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sperber, D., & Baumard, N. (2012). Moral reputation: An evolutionary and cognitive perspective. Mind and Language,27(5), 495–518.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sripada, C. S. (2012). Mental state attributions and the side-effect effect. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology,48(1), 232–238.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sripada, C. S., & Konrath, S. (2011). Telling more than we can know about intentional action. Mind and Language,26(3), 353–380.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Strohminger, N., & Nichols, S. (2014). The essential moral self. Cognition,131(1), 159–171.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Talwar, V., & Lee, K. (2008). Social and cognitive correlates of children’s lying behavior. Child Development,79(4), 866–881.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Tamir, D. I., & Thornton, M. A. (2018). Modeling the predictive social mind. Trends in Cognitive Sciences,22(3), 201–212.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Thornton, M. A., & Mitchell, J. P. (2018). Theories of person perception predict patterns of neural activity during mentalizing. Cerebral Cortex,28(10), 3505–3520.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Uhlmann, E. L., Pizarro, D. A., & Diermeier, D. (2015). A person-centered approach to moral judgment. Perspectives on Psychological Science,10(1), 72–81.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Van Overwalle, F. (2009). Social cognition and the brain: A meta-analysis. Human Brain Mapping,30(3), 829–858.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Vazire, S., & Carlson, E. N. (2011). Others sometimes know us better than we know ourselves. Current Directions in Psychological Science,20(2), 104–108.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wellman, H. M. (2014). Making minds: How theory of mind develops. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Wellman, H. M., & Liu, D. (2004). Scaling of theory-of-mind tasks. Child Development,75(2), 523–541.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Westra, E. (2017). Spontaneous mindreading: A problem for the two-systems account. Synthese,194(11), 4559–4581.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Westra, E. (2018). Character and theory of mind: An integrative approach. Philosophical Studies,175(5), 1217–1241.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Williams, S., Moore, K., Crossman, A. M., & Talwar, V. (2016). The role of executive functions and theory of mind in children’s prosocial lie-telling. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology,141, 256–266.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Woodward, A. L. (1998). Infants selectively encode the goal object of an actor’s reach. Cognition,69(1), 1–34.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wu, J., Balliet, D., & Van Lange, P. A. M. (2016). Gossip versus punishment: The efficiency of reputation to promote and maintain cooperation. Scientific Reports,6(1), 23919.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Yuill, N., & Pearson, A. (1998). The development of bases for trait attribution: children’s understanding of traits as causal mechanisms based on desire. Developmental Psychology,34(3), 574–586.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Zagzebski, L. T. (2017). Exemplarist moral theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Zawidzki, T. W. (2008). The function of folk psychology: mind reading or mind shaping? Philosophical Explorations,11(3), 193–210.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Zawidzki, T. W. (2011). How to interpret infant socio-cognitive competence. Review of Philosophy and Psychology,2(3), 483–497.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Zawidzki, T. W. (2013). Mindshaping: A new framework for understanding human social cognition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

This study was funded by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship 756-2018-0012.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Evan Westra.

Additional information

Publisher's Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Westra, E. Folk personality psychology: mindreading and mindshaping in trait attribution. Synthese 198, 8213–8232 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02566-7

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02566-7

Keywords

Navigation