Theory of Mind and Literature

Paula Leverage, Howard Mancing, Richard Schweickert

• Publisher: Purdue University Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781557535702
• eBook ISBN: 9781612492001
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Essays
• Index: Literature

Theory of Mind is what enables us to "put ourselves in another's shoes." It is mindreading, empathy, creative imagination of another's perspective: in short, it is simultaneously a highly sophisticated ability and a very basic necessity for human communication. Theory of Mind is central to such commercial endeavors as market research and product development, but it is also just as important in maintaining human relations over a cup of coffee. Not surprisingly, it is a critical tool in reading and understanding literature, which abounds with characters, situations, and "other people's shoes." Furthermore, it is becoming increasingly apparent that reading literature also hones these critical mindreading skills. Theory of Mind and Literature is a collection of nineteen essays by prominent scholars (linguists, cognitive scientists, and philosophers) working in the cutting-edge field of cognitive literary studies, which explores how we use Theory of Mind in reading and understanding literature.

Theory of Mind and Theory of Minds in Literature

KEITH OATLEY

PART 1. THEORY OF MIND

Not far into The Way by Swann’s (the title of the rather good new translation by Lydia Davis of the first book of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu) readers find this:

A real human being, however profoundly we sympathize with him, in large part is perceived through our senses, that is to say remains opaque to us, offers a dead weight that our sensibilities cannot lift. If a calamity should strike him, it is only in a small part of the total notion that we have of him that we will be able to be moved by this. (87)

Because of the opacity of others, human beings need a theory or model, or simulation, or image (Proust’s term) of mind to infer what a real human being might be thinking and feeling. Theory of Mind, in this sense, has become an important topic in developmental psychology. Thus psychologists have discovered that the soul enters the body not at conception or at birth, but at age four. It is at this age that a child can start to experience herself or himself as a thinking and feeling being who is separate from others. It is at this age that the child can begin to peer through the opacity of others, to infer what they might be thinking and feeling. The same applies to the child’s own self: it is at this age that a child begins to know that what she or he thinks and feels now can be different from what she or he had thought and felt in the past (see, for instance, Gopnik and Astington 1988).

Proust was also onto the comparison with other versions of oneself that Gopnik and Astington described. He says: “Even more, it is only in a part of the total notion he has of himself that he will be able to be moved by himself” (The Way by Swann’s 87).

So, being able to know others and oneself requires imagination. The response of psychologists to these issues has been to conduct many experiments to find out what kinds of inferences children make about others, and at what ages they can make them. There has been considerable progress. But we might think that in literature, progress has been yet greater, for as Proust says:

The novelist’s happy discovery was to have the idea of replacing these parts [of the real human being], impenetrable to the soul, by an equal quantity of immaterial parts, that is to say parts which our soul can assimilate . . . [the novelist] sets loose in us all possible happinesses and all possible unhappinesses, just a few of which we would spend years of our lives coming to know. (The Way by Swann’s 87)

Having a Theory of Mind is like having a watch or a clock. These devices are models of the rotation of the earth. The positions of sun and stars are indications of time, but they are difficult to judge accurately, and heavenly bodies are not always visible. A model—a watch or clock—is much better. It allows us to synchronize our activities with each other, as in the following passage from Simenon’s Les vacances de Maigret, in which the Commissioner has gone on holiday with his wife to the seaside town of Sables-d’Olonne. Recovering from an emergency operation for appendicitis, Mme Maigret is in a clinic run by a strict order of nuns. Maigret is allowed to visit her each day for just half an hour, at three in the afternoon.

Before putting his foot on the door-step, Maigret took his watch from his pocket: it said three o’clock. At the same moment he heard a bell call lightly from the chapel, then, above the roofs of the little houses of the town, another one, more serious, from Notre Dame. (trans. K. Oatley. Les vacances de Maigret 5-6)

After his visit to his wife, Maigret returns to the brasserie, where he takes his meals. There he sits, smoking his pipe, sipping a glass of white wine. There, every afternoon, toward the back of the restaurant, some of the town’s wealthy men—the old money—who include a ship-owner, a property developer, and an eminent doctor, gather to play bridge. Just as the position of the sun can be difficult to judge, so can facial expression.

The doctor was not a man to shock anyone. Not a trace of anything on his face. He glanced at his hand and said:

“Two clubs.”

Then, as the game progressed, for the first time he began to examine Maigret, mentally undressing him. It was scarcely noticeable. His inspections were so brief, he made them as he glanced casually around . . .

Rarely had Maigret seen eyes that were at the same time so eager and so dry, a man who was master of his nerves, capable of completely concealing his feelings. (trans. K. Oatley. Les vacances de Maigret 24-25)

THE REQUIREMENT HYPOTHESIS

Without a Theory of Mind—which psychologists now often call “mind-reading” (see, for example, Ickes 2003)—one would scarcely know what this passage from Simenon was about. With a Theory of Mind, the game of bridge primes us for inferences about what others may know, and for possibilities of deception. The juxtaposition of bridge with Maigret’s and the doctor’s attempts at mind reading is a metonymic figure in the sense of Jakobson (1988). Maigret and the doctor both have reasons for hiding their thoughts and feelings as they try to comprehend each other. Each tries to assess the other man’s character, to know what he is up to.

We can call the relation of mind reading to literature the Requirement Hypothesis. Theory of Mind is a requirement to understand this kind of narrative. As Lisa Zunshine (2006) has further proposed, we seem to enjoy being able to exercise this skill. So that may account, at least partly, for our enjoyment of detective stories: working out what others keep hidden.

Simenon is a rather good example here, because in the two kinds of books for which he is most famous—Maigrets and psychological novels—the focus is on a particular person. Although in each story in which he appears Maigret seems to set out to solve a crime, really he is making a mental model of another person’s character in a circumstance in which this person has, as it were, gone beyond his or her usual limits. So when Maigret works to understand each clue, it is, as in Les vacances de Maigret , a clue to character, to the mind of the person who is being analyzed, to some matter that the person prefers to keep private. If such a clue also helps solve the crime, so much the better, but for Maigret (and for Simenon) that aspect is almost secondary.

What about the opacity of which Proust wrote, and with which Maigret and the doctor struggle? What has been made of that empirically? Stinson and Ickes (1992) invited to their laboratory pairs of male participants who were either friends or strangers. Paired participants sat together in a waiting room where they chatted and were covertly video-recorded. Subsequently they were told about the recording. They then watched the tape of themselves, stopped it when they remembered having a specific thought or feeling, and wrote what it was. They also watched the recording of the other man and guessed what he was thinking or feeling at the points where he had stopped the tape. The mean content accuracy between friends was 48%, and this was 50% higher than accuracy between strangers. In a different kind of study, Oatley and Larocque (1995) asked people to record in structured diaries errors that occurred in plans that they had explicitly arranged with another person in their everyday lives. The researchers also asked the other person to recall the error and the emotions surrounding it. Participants were quite good at knowing, after the error, what the other person was feeling when that feeling was anger (73% correct), but they were less good at knowing when the other person felt happiness (27% correct), fear (24% correct), sadness (43% correct), shame (10% correct), or guilt (42% correct).

So, in the quotidian world we adults are good at Theory of Mind, but not that good. Alan Palmer (2004) proposes that fiction offers a fuller disclosure than we can obtain elsewhere of the contents of human minds. Although we are not conscious in our everyday lives of everything in the minds of others or even in our own minds, we can become more completely conscious of the minds of Emma Woodhouse or Emma Bovary . . . or of the people investigated by Commissioner Maigret.

Often the idea of Theory of Mind refers to knowing what another person may be thinking or feeling in the moment, but with people whom we are likely to interact with on future occasions, we gather information to build mental models of them over the long term, from their utterances, from their behavior, and from what other people say about them. Such sources of information are exactly those that a detective uses in a mystery novel. From them we can make a mental model of the person, including socially unacceptable aspects (the criminal, the unconscionable, the unconscious). And, as the study by Stinson and Ickes (1992) implies, the better our mental model of people over the long term (as in friendship), the better we can know what they are thinking and feeling on a particular occasion.

Overall, Theory of Mind has a projective quality: we cast a model onto another person in ordinary life, or onto a character in fiction. The model can be good, but as we interact more with the person or character, we sometimes find our model to be mistaken in some important respect: an opportunity to improve it, engaging in fiction but usually painful in real life.

EVOLUTIONARY ORIGINS OF MENTAL MODELS OF OTHERS

What do we know about the origins and neurological basis of this model-making function? The first clue was discovered by Robin Dunbar (1992) who recognized that primates—an order that includes lemurs, monkeys, apes, and humans—not only tend to live in social groups (an adaptation against predation), but that the size of these groups varies among different species. Dunbar surveyed group size and brain size across the whole order of primates: for example the maximum size of the social group for lemurs is about 9, for cebus monkeys about 18, for chimpanzees about 50, and for humans about 150. (This number in humans is of individuals with whom personal relationships are maintained, not just people who can be recognized by sight.) Dunbar found a close correlation between size of the social group and the size of the cortex, so for example in lemurs the cortex is about 1.2 times the size of the rest of the brain, in cebus monkeys about 2.4 times, in chimpanzees about 3.2 times, and in humans about 4.1 times.

The primate system of maintaining trust in relationships is by means of grooming: sitting quietly with another individual, stroking, and picking through their fur for insects and twigs. In chimpanzees this activity takes about 20% of each individual’s waking time. Dunbar (1993, 2003) has proposed that as group size kept increasing in our forebears, a problem was reached when the amount of grooming time needed to maintain an increasing number of relationships reached about 30%. The problem was that to devote any more time to grooming would not allow enough time to forage and do the other things that primates need to do. In the line that led to humans, the problem was solved by language emerging to replace grooming. So, contrary to what one might have thought, it was not to talk about where to find food or how to make flint tools that language came into being. It emerged in order to converse, and the primary function of conversation is to maintain relationships. Conversation is verbal grooming. Though we never lose the influence of touch, of cuddling, and other such ways of expressing affectionate emotions that our cousins the chimpanzees have, language emerged to supplement them. By means of conversation, we humans can maintain many more relationships than chimpanzees could. One can converse in groups, one can converse when foraging, or when working. Dunbar’s hypothesis is known as the social brain hypothesis. It is that the progressive enlargement of the cortex, which has occurred in the evolution of lemurs, monkeys, apes, and humans, has taken place because the brain needs to house the neural machinery to contain mental models of progressively more individuals in the social group, and that language has taken over from grooming as the primary means for maintaining relationships in the group. Although the social brain hypothesis was at first greeted skeptically, it is now regarded as the best hypothesis we have about the origins of language.

And with the new, more efficient, relationship-maintaining method of conversation, one can see in the graphs of hominid evolution that the straight line relating brain-cortex size to group size changed direction about 500,000 years ago. It became steeper than that for other primates. This is the point, argues Dunbar (1993, 2003), at which language-based conversation took over from grooming as the primary way—the more efficient way—of maintaining a large number of relationships.

So what do people converse about? Dunbar has found that some 70% of conversation in a university refectory is about the social lives and plans of ourselve...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1: Theory of Mind Now and Then: Evolutionary and Historical Perspectives
• 2: Mind Reading and Literary Characterization
• 3: Theory of Mind and Literary / Linguistic Structure
• 4: Alternate States of Mind
• 5: Theoretical, Philosophical, Political Approaches
• Contributors
• Index