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.
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Notes
See Korman and Malle (2016) for a recent study that calls this idea into question.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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).
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).
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.
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.
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).
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This study was funded by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship 756-2018-0012.
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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
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02566-7