Self And Others' Psychological Theory Reasoning: Automatic Calculation Based On The Control Of Processing

Social cognition is an important research field rising from the cognitive revolution of social psychology in the early 1970s. It focuses on how people understand themselves, the others and the society. Theory-of-Mind, or perspective taking, is just like one of the brightest windows of social cognitive research through which we can look into the mind of people, and the mechanism of it is one of the important research problems.In this paper, the visual perspective-taking task we chose is the type of tasks used by Samson et. al (2010). It comes from the Level Ⅰ perspective taking, requiring adult participants simply to judge whether or not someone can see a stimulus. In three visual perspective-taking experiments (the first study), participants of different discipline background and different gender were asked to judge the visual perspective of their own or that of someone else in situations where the two perspectives were either the same or different. And then step by step, participants did the same thing when they did a GO-NOGO task(the second study) at the same time, when they were in different states of emotion (the third study) and when they were in different interpersonal hierarchies (the fourth study). At last, we constructed a process reasoning model of dual systems and double types on the basis of this paper’s results and the former researches done by others.In the first study,131 college students were selected as participants, with half of them majoring in liberal art and the other half in science. In three visual perspective-taking experiments, participants were asked to judge the visual perspective of their own or that of someone else in situations where the two perspectives were either the same or different. In Experiment 1, trials in which participants were asked to judge their own perspectives and trials in which they were asked to judge the others’ perspectives were mixed within the same block. In Experiment 2, trials in which participants were asked to judge their own perspectives and trials in which they were asked to judge the others’ perspectives were in separate blocks to help reduce interference from taking the others’ perspectives when it was unnecessary to do so. In Experiment 3, we tested even more stringently to what extent participants could ignore the other’s perspective by having them exclusively judge their own perspective throughout the task. The results showed that:(1) Participants could not easily ignore what they themselves saw when taking others’ perspectives to judge. This was observed even when participants were only required to take the others’ perspectives within the same block of trials (Experiment 2) under the condition that it was unnecessary to do so. (2) Participants were more efficient in judging when taking their own perspectives than taking others’ perspectives. (3) Participants showed no gender difference when they took their own perspectives. However, women were significantly quicker in judging than men when take others’ perspectives. Arts students were lower in judging than students majoring in science whether taking their own perspectives or taking others’ perspectives. In summary, these results suggest that adults make use of more rapid and efficient processes to judge when taking their own perspectives than judging what other people see. Some results were different from those provided by Samson et al. (2010), which suggest that the fast and efficient calculation of what the other people see is unlikely certain, that is, it may depend on some other factors, such as culture, gender and participants’background.In the second study, we test the roles of the inhibition control and the factors influencing the process of Theory-of-Mind. A total of 69 people, including 31 males and 38 females, with half majoring in liberal art and the other half majoring in science, were selected as participants and E-prime procedure was used in research. In the single visual perspective-taking experiment, adult participants did the same thing as in the first study (Experiment 1). In the dual experiment, participants were asked to finish a voice task while taking visual perspectives at the same time. The results showed that:(1) from the single task to the dual task, the reaction time significantly slowed down, and participants were still significantly quicker in situations where perspectives were consistent than in situations where perspectives were inconsistent when judging their own perspectives; however, this effect disappeared when they take others’ perspectives, and the significant difference between judging their own perspectives and taking others’ perspectives disappeared too. (2)The response time of men and women were significantly different in the single task; however, no gender difference was shown in the dual task. (3) Arts students showed no difference in different conditions, but students majoring in science showed significant difference in different conditions. The result indicates that, reasoning others’ mental lives does need the ability of inhibition control, but high loading task has influence on both reasoning our own mental states and others’mental lives and it may depend on some other factors, such as gender and participants’ subject background.In the process of theory-of-mind reasoning, incidental mood could provide new perspectives into the mechanism of theory-of-mind. In the third study, we selected 69 university students as participants who were asked to do the same thing as in the the first study (Experiment 1) after three kinds of emotion---happiness, neutral feeling and sadness had been triggered among them with music at different times. The results showed that:participants could make judgments using others’view as fast as using their own in the sad condition; but judging through their own view was significantly faster than through others’view in both happy and neutral conditions. In addition, male participants’judgment was significantly slower through others’views than through their own in happy condition, while female participants showed no significant difference under this circumstance. These results show that sadness can actually promote taking others’perspectives and happiness does not exert any influence. And gender difference also exists so that males are easily influenced by happy mood while using theory-of-mind.In the process of theory-of-mind reasoning, the power is another important factor that governs theory-of-mind use. In the fourth study, we selected 60 participants who were asked to do the same thing as in the first study (Experiment 1) when they were assigned three kinds of hierarchy relationship with the human avatar—equal, superior and inferior. The results showed that:the reaction time was significantly slower when they took others’perspectives than judging their own perspectives, but the errors were more. Participants were still significantly quicker when judging their own perspectives than when taking others’perspectives in situations where perspectives were inconsistent; however, this effect disappeared in situations where perspectives were consistent. Second, the reaction time of liberal arts participants was significantly different in the three situations while for science participants no significant difference was observed. Arts students showed no difference in different conditions, but students majoring in science were significantly quicker when judging their own perspectives than when taking others’ perspectives. The result indicates that the power can govern the theory-of-mind use.The four interrelated studies on basic mechanism verify each other and different factors have different effect on restricting and regulating the basic mechanism. The conclusions are as follows:Firstly, when using theory-of-mind to reason, people have the tendency to automatically process the mind of their own and that of others, but the automatic processing of their own mind is more efficient than that of others’. Secondly, in reasoning with theory-of-mind, people will control and select between the information of their own and that of others, but the selection process of their own mind is more efficient. Thirdly, "one’s own mind system" and "others’ mind system" can be used as the two core mental representation systems whose concrete contents are decided and limited by the individual’s cultural background, gender and experiences. At the same time, when people use the two systems online process, the inhibitory control, emotional state and power will regulate and restrict the process. This paper provides solid experimental evidence and further explains the adult theory-of-mind which is a dual system in the two types of reasoning process.