Mind Sharing

Josh Landy
How do you know what someone else is thinking?

Ray Briggs
Can you really put yourself in another person’s shoes?

Josh Landy
Are we always doomed to get it wrong?

Ray Briggs
This is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Josh Landy
…except your intelligence. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. We’re coming to you from the Stanford Humanities Center.

Josh Landy
Continuing conversations that began at Philosophers Corner on the Stanford campus, where Ray teaches philosophy, and I direct the philosophy and literature initiative.

Ray Briggs
We’re very grateful to the center Stanford Symbolic Systems program for sponsoring this episode.

Josh Landy
Welcome, everyone to Philosophy Talk.

Ray Briggs
Today, we’re thinking about mind sharing.

Josh Landy
I love this topic so much. Human beings are constantly sharing their minds with each other. I mean, I’m doing it right now, just by talking to you.

Ray Briggs
Yeah. And it’s not just talking either. You know, I can tell just by looking at your face, that you’re excited to be here tonight, and that you’re kind of confused.

Josh Landy
How do you know that? You’re right, I’m actually a little. Here’s what I’m confused by. We seem to be able to pick up on other people’s beliefs, desires and intentions. And we can do it just like you said, even when they’re not saying anything, right? We we look at their movements, their gestures, their facial expressions, and just from that, like from the twitch of an eyelid, we know exactly what they’re thinking, how do we do that?

Ray Briggs
Well, I think we don’t know. We’re wrong all the time. You might think that, for instance, your friend is mad at you, but actually, they’re just really tired.

Josh Landy
Well, yeah, it’s true. I read a study recently saying that. We’re all vastly overestimating how much time other people are spending thinking about us, which I don’t know whether it’s think of as demoralizing or encouraging.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, exactly. Like you get it wrong all the time. And sometimes you’re just puzzled. Like, why do people go on reality TV shows? Like, who wants to marry a millionaire? What are they thinking?

Josh Landy
I don’t know, right? I mean, it’s not really so complicated. Maybe they want to find love. Maybe they need a little attention. Maybe they’re looking for the pocket money.

Ray Briggs
That was three possibilities. And you don’t know which one is the right one. If you just get reduced to spinning out option after option after option, you’ve got no idea what’s actually going on?

Josh Landy
That’s only because I don’t know them. But look, if a bunch of my friends were on reality TV, God forbid, I feel like I’d have a pretty decent idea of their reasons. Like each of them might have a different motivation for going on that show. But whatever it is, I’m 99% confident I could figure it out. Yeah, really, even without them telling you. Yeah, I mean, I know my friends. I know what they care about. I know what gets them out of bed in the morning.

Ray Briggs
But you don’t you know what they say? You know what they do? But you’ve never been inside their heads. So how can you possibly know what they’re thinking?

Josh Landy
But putting myself in their shoes? So you know, whenever one of my friends does something, I imagine what it would feel like if I were doing it, and that clues me into what they must be thinking.

Ray Briggs
No, that’s you imagining what you would feel like, not what they would feel like, and people are different. Just because you wouldn’t feel a certain way. Why does that mean your friends would feel the same?

Josh Landy
I don’t know. I mean, I feel like I can use what I know about human nature. I mean, each one of us has some kind of main goal in life, right? And we’re very likely to be spending a lot of our time and energy pursuing that goal. So if one of my friends is constantly hustling for money, and playing the stock market and all that kind of stuff, and then that person goes on Big Brother I feel like I can be very confident. It’s all about the Benjamins.

Ray Briggs
Well, that was some excellent theorizing from a literature professor who’s got big ideas about human nature. What are the rest of us schmooze supposed to do when we want to know what other people are thinking?

Josh Landy
That sounds like a huge problem, right? Seriously, I think our guest today is going to help us figure all this out. It’s Yale psychologist Julian Jara-Ettinger. He is an expert on social cognition.

Ray Briggs
But first, are twins better than the rest of us at knowing what’s going on inside another’s mind? We sent our Roving Philosophical Reporter, Holly J. McDede, to find out. She files this report.

Holly McDede
The year is 1976. In the small farming town of Twinsburg, Ohio about halfway between Akron and Cleveland the twins are gathering for the first ever Twins Day.

Andy Miller
My sister and I were both in the parade.

Holly McDede
Andy Miller, who has a twin sister, is now the executive director of Twinsburg’s annual twin festival. When the country’s bicentennial was approaching the town’s residents were thinking of new ways to celebrate. Twinsbug was founded in 1818 by identical twins Moses and Aaron Wilcox, who died just hours apart

Andy Miller
Since the founding fathers of Twinsburg were twins they decided well, let’s celebrate that way. There was one day but the town square that originally 36 sets of twins in attendance, you know they had a bike parade, you could decorate your bike from bicentennial.

Holly McDede
And the tradition continued year after year in the 80s. Andy and his sister were even the grand marshals.

Andy Miller
I think going through the list of local twins. I think we were kind of next on the list.

Holly McDede
Andy says at the heart of twins day is pride twins can feel like oddballs. They are rare about 3.3% of all live births. And a lot of popular culture paints an otherworldly image of twins,

Andy Miller
This is the only place where they can go where they feel normal. They don’t necessarily feel gawked at, they actually are proud.

Holly McDede
Writers and filmmakers have long been fascinated by twins like Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Roderick and Madeline are biological twins. And when one twin gets sick, so does the other.

The Fall of the House of Usher
The soul shall find itself alone made dark thoughts with a grey tombstone. Not one, but all the crowd to pry into thine hour of secrecy.

Helena de Bres
There’s this really dark, pathological image which ones get presented as behave like unwell, often violent, you know, sometimes murderous psychopaths.

Holly McDede
Helena de Bres, a twin herself is author of “How to Be Multiple: The Philosophy of Twins.”

Helena de Bres
I don’t think that twins are the same person, but I think they can kind of act as a single person or they can kind of function as a single self and certain ways.

Holly McDede
Either twins are monsters or represent the perfect human relationship, mirror images of each other.

The Parent Trap
Then you and I are like… sisters. Sisters? Halley, we’re like twins!

Holly McDede
But on the other hand, twins shouldn’t be too close or for too long into adulthood. society wants us to be self sufficient and have good control of our boundaries. Twins mess up that whole idea.

Helena de Bres
Twins put pressure on a very narrow understanding of what it means to be a person particularly in Western culture.

Holly McDede
And that’s a good thing! Soon, thousands of twins will once again gather at Twinsburg, Ohio to join in on the parade, head to the beer tent and reflect on what it means to be multiples.

Alice in Wonderland
Why, what curious little figures. Tweedle Dee… and Tweedle Dum. If you think we’re waxworks, you ought to pay, you know. Contrariwise, if you think we’re alive, you ought to want to speak to us.

Holly McDede
Twins Day is just another chance for people to celebrate one of the many ways of being different—and similar-wise, being human. For Philosophy Talk, I’m Holly J. McDede.

Josh Landy
Thanks for that great report. Holly, I just find those twin studies infinitely fascinating. I’m Josh Landy with me is my Stanford colleague, Ray Briggs, and we’re with  live audience at the Stanford Humanities Center for a program generously sponsored by the Symbolic Systems program.

Ray Briggs
Our guest today is a professor of psychology at Yale University, where he runs the Computational Social Cognition Lab. Please welcome to the Philosophy Talk stage, Julian Jara-Ettinger.

Josh Landy
Julian, I know you’ve been thinking for quite a while now about how we know what other people are thinking but when did it first strike you as an interesting puzzle?

Julian Jara-Ettinger
It’s my parents fault. They remind me of my childhood social blunders. So one thing I love talking about is when I was about five years old, growing up in a semi rural part of Mexico, I was out playing. And I found this piglet on a twine leash tied to a pole. So I untied it and I brought it home, and proudly declared that I had found a feral pig that was now my pet. And my parents were, of course, concerned trying to explain that that was not a feral pig, and it was not mine. And I have to give back. And I was just baffled by how they couldn’t understand, like what had happened, and how I have now my new pet. And they were so ungrateful to you. I wasn’t allowed to keep the pig.

Ray Briggs
So Julian, I think this illustrates the point that Josh and I were arguing about, you know, about whether people actually know what each other are thinking. So Josh seems to think that they do. And I’m pretty skeptical. So who’s right?

Julian Jara-Ettinger
I think you’re both right, in different ways. So of course, we get people wrong all the time. I think that’s one of the most memorable things about being human, you just kind of sitting there wondering what was going on in that person’s mind or what happened or when they say something that sounds off to you. But if you consider how many times you interact with another person in a day, up, there’s just so many, and we’re so good at quickly figuring out what’s going on in other people’s minds, to the extent that it’s important for what we’re trying to do that we just forget about it, and we move on through our lives.

Josh Landy
So what makes the difference? Why, why did we so often get it right, but then sometimes get it wrong?

Julian Jara-Ettinger
I think it partially depends on the kinds of things that are really important to get, right. So if you think about, like these common problems that we face all the time, like you’re walking down the street, and you need to avoid people that are walking in the other direction, or you’re talking to someone and you’re trying to figure out if they’re paying attention to you, or if they got distracted, or if it’s someone that you really care about, and you’re really just trying to put in the effort to see what’s going on in their minds. And those are the kinds of situations where we need to be really good at it. And we failed in the cases where it often doesn’t matter that much.

Ray Briggs
So effort definitely makes sense that it would be part of it. But I can exert a lot of effort and still not be good at something. Why are we good at this really hard task?

Julian Jara-Ettinger
Yeah, that’s a great question. I think in some senses, because we we can’t afford not to be good at these basic things, right? We live this incredibly social life where we spend the most of our times just interacting with other people, whether it’s in person or online. And that’s in some sense, the, the key thing that allows us to do all of these amazing things like having language and being sitting here talking about how whether we’re good or bad at being able to understand other people’s minds.

Josh Landy
So you know, because we’re constantly doing all the time, right? So we’re, we’re observing people’s behavior and facial expressions. And on the basis of that we’re attributing beliefs and desires and intentions to them. And that allows us to predict their future behavior and to make moral judgments and to coordinate what what do you think it’s mostly for either from an evolutionary standpoint, or just why we should be grateful that we can do it? Is it mostly about this things like this, where we’re collaborating together and trying to, you know, produce a goal together?

Julian Jara-Ettinger
Yeah, it’s, of course, it’s always hard to know why a certain cognitive capacity evolved, because unlike the developed evolution of bodies, which leave a fossil record at the mind doesn’t so we don’t actually know why we got good at this. But I think a reasonable guess is that whenever you have creatures that want to live in a social group, it’s just important to be able to understand a little bit the other agents behavior and predict what they might do. And if you start developing those capacities, it seems like a very good way of doing it as being able to kind of represent the other agent that you’re seeing the other creature as having a mental life that’s kind of like giving rise to everything that they do. And once you have that, then you can use it for all sorts of things like persuasion and moral judgments and so on.

Ray Briggs
This is Philosophy Talk coming to you from the Stanford Humanities Center. And we’re thinking about mind sharing with Julian Jara-Ettinger from Yale University.

Josh Landy
Do you have a favorite gesture you use with your friends and family? What does it mean? How else do you communicate non verbally?

Ray Briggs
If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands—along with questions from our live audience ,when Philosophy Talk continues.

No Doubt
I don’t need your reasons, don’t tell me cause it hurts.

Josh Landy
if I don’t speak, can I still show you that it hurts? I’m Josh Landy and this is Philosophy Talk, the program of questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs. Our guest is Yale psychologist Julian Jara-Ettinger. And we’re thinking about mind sharing. Special thanks to Stanford Symbolic Systems program for sponsoring today’s episode.

Josh Landy
Do you have a question or comment for our guests share what’s on your mind? Join the conversation by raising your hand. And Laura will bring the mic to you when it’s your turn.

Ray Briggs
So Julian, we’ve talked a little bit about how we can know each other’s minds through sort of mind reading, you also think about something called mind sharing. What is that? How is it different from mind reading?

Julian Jara-Ettinger
Yeah, I think in the this question of how it is that we’re able to understand each other so well, historically, people have called this mind reading as kind of like trying to highlight that, we’re just amazing that we can just see someone’s body movements and from that start to build a really good picture of what they’re experiencing and what they know and what they want. But there’s growing evidence that maybe that picture is incomplete, it’s, it’s really a joint activity. Often the reason people can understand this is because we are motivated for people to understand what we’re doing. So you know, how to behave in certain ways to kind of like ease the problem other people for for them to know what’s going on in their minds. So what’s a good example of that? One of the best examples of these very kind of classical studies showing that if you have people do some of the most basic tasks like reaching for an object, whenever someone else is watching, people tend to exaggerate their movements more than they would when they’re alone. And they exaggerate in the right directions to kind of like, help the other person realize what you’re going for. Interesting, that also happens when parents are in the presence of a baby. There’s also evidence that in those cases, people tend to exaggerate their movements, kind of like trying to make it a little bit easier for the baby to understand what you’re doing.

Ray Briggs
So how much of that is on purpose and conscious? And how much of it is just automatic? And how do you tell?

Julian Jara-Ettinger
Yeah, I think it’s a mixture of both. In these cases, these kinds of like variations that we do in our movement. I don’t think we notice I definitely don’t. But there’s of course, many cases where we’re very aware of what we’re doing. Often, I mean, the most common form of mind sharing is this very explicit thing that we do, which is talking right, right now we are explicitly with a clear goal, trying to share what our mind what’s going on in our minds.

Josh Landy
So we can be explicit. We can exaggerate our movements, we can indicate things with facial expressions. What about gestures? Gestures seem like a thing that we do? Maybe I’m doing it right now. radio listeners can’t hear. But I’m using my hands a lot. Sometimes unconsciously, but sometimes consciously, right? We can. Yeah, especially if you’re equally, Italians have a fantastic range of gestures to communicate, you know, it’s time to go or You’re boring me or you can’t be serious. So what are those? What are gestures about? Why don’t Why don’t people just say what they want to say instead of gesturing?

Julian Jara-Ettinger
Yeah, that’s actually something that we’ve done a little bit of research on. There. First of all, there’s, there’s good reason that you might want to use gestures on top of what you’re saying, we know that that actually helps with understanding. So when someone is trying to understand what you’re seeing, the addition of gestures helps. But there’s many cases where it’s just useful, like if someone is far away, and you want to wave at them, or if it’s too loud, or as you’re saying something you want to multitask and point to No, highlight that you notice someone and you’re greeting them. And in those cases, what we’ve come to find is that the way we tend to move seems to also be well designed to kind of make it easy for the other person to know that the reason we’re moving our bodies is to communicate and not to try to do something in the world. So a very simple example, as you think of the thumbs up, when you do when you give a thumbs up, you’re kind of putting your hand in a in a weird position that makes it very difficult for you to like, grab objects or do anything else. So if someone is watching you, when you take that body position is just kind of clear that you’re you’re not trying to act on the world. Another example of that is a gesture that’s very common in Mexico. And it’s going to be tricky, I’m gonna try to describe it, you basically take your palm, and you raise it, and then you flip it, so your palm is facing inwards. And that’s a polite way of saying thank you. And again, again, it involves putting your body in a weird position that makes it very difficult to act on the world. So that’s, that’s a very useful way to help people immediately know that what you’re doing is a gesture.

Ray Briggs
Are there any gestures that do double duty as useful actions? Or is it always about doing something inefficient so that the person doesn’t know you’re trying to do something useful or sorry, knows that you’re not trying to do something useful, but you’re trying to communicate with them?

Julian Jara-Ettinger
Yeah. So there’s an interesting distinction that they’re aware of. Sometimes there’s gestures that we use to communicate abstract concepts. So when I wave and I’m saying hi, that’s Not something physical in the world. So things like yes, no, hi, thank you. Those are in some sense, easy because all you need to do is make sure that the person knows you’re not trying to do something in the world. And they need to know what this gesture means. Then there’s this whole other category of gestures that we produce, which is when we’re trying to kind of pantomime something or teach something. And in those cases, there’s less research on that. But it seems like it’s this interesting balance, where on the one hand, you’re trying to make sure it looks recognizable to what you’re doing, but adding the right kinds of exaggerations to get feel know that you’re not actually just doing the behavior itself.

Ray Briggs
So one gesture I often do is to say, well, on the one hand, you might have this idea, and I put the idea somewhere in space in front of me. And on the other hand, you might have that idea. And you can look at the first idea where I put it in space, or you can look at the second idea. Does that count as functional? Or arbitrary? How do I even think about that?

Julian Jara-Ettinger
I think we currently don’t know, the problem with a lot of these kind of improvised gestures is that there’s reason to believe that they’re also helpful for our own thinking. So the ability to kind of like move our bodies as we’re talking is just kind of like helpful in it. And it’s this problem where these gestures, these spontaneous gestures seem to both be helpful for production and for comprehension. And it’s possible that that’s just a side effect. Maybe we just like to move our bodies because it’s helpful as we’re thinking, and we’re kind of like trying to think with our bodies in some ways. And then it just happens to be coincidentally helpful that it helps other people understand you. Um, so it’s, it’s difficult scientifically to distinguish between those two forces.

Josh Landy
Let’s talk a little bit about language, because it seems like there were equivalents of these things in language, I think about interjections like oops. So if you knock something over and you’re on your own, you might or might not say, oops, but if you’re watching me, yeah, I want to let you know, presumably, I did not intentionally smash your mug in front of you. So did the some aspects of language function this way as well, it was as a way to share our minds by introducing a bit more inefficiency, like I didn’t need to say ouch, I expend a little bit of energy. And it’s just for you. Is that? Is there some uses of language like that?

Julian Jara-Ettinger
Yeah, I think that’s a phenomena that’s been saw the understudy relative to the broad range of things that have been studying in language. But that does seem to be the case. So in the case of interjections, when it’s true that it’s very convenient, we have all of these very brief sounds that help align what’s happening in our mind so that other people understand. So things like oops, or low o or hum, or, um, like all of those you can think of is like very quick forms of mind sharing to help the other person keep good track of what’s happening in your mind. But also, what we’ve found is that people will often when they’re talking, they will add in efficiencies that they think will help the other person, figure out what you’re talking about faster than you would otherwise. So, for instance, if we are in a room like this one that has a lot of objects, even if there’s just one mug here, if I called it the mug, I might put a lot of work on the listener to find what I’m talking about. But if I say something like the white mug on the coffee table, that’s technically being a little bit inefficient. I didn’t need to say all of that, because there’s just one mug, but it’s been very helpful at getting you to know what I’m talking about.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk, we’re thinking about mind sharing with Yale psychologist Julian Jara-Ettinger, along with a live audience here at the Stanford Humanities Center. And we’ve got a question from the audience.

Larry
Yes, Larry, from Oakland. What about interspecies mind reading, my dog is looking up at a shelf, wants the stuffed toy to tear it to pieces. And looking at me looking at the toy looking at me again. I know what’s going on in his mind. He knows what’s going on in my mind.

Julian Jara-Ettinger
So I love that question. So in the case of dogs, that’s kind of a relatively new topic in cognitive science that they sometimes call the “dognition.” And most people that have owned pets have this experience of feeling that of course they understand this. What we don’t know yet is if dogs and other pets are really good at actually learning how to communicate with us and try to manage them in some ways. Or if it’s us that we are just so good at thinking about things as if they have kind of like very complex mental states that are kind of like trying to these really interesting things and we just kind of like over read what’s happening. But I again, having having pets myself. I think once you have one, you just become convinced that they truly understand you and they communicate in all sorts of ways.

Ray Briggs
So let’s take another question from the audience.

David
Yes, my name is David. I’m from Menlo Park. And my question has to do with gestures. In your research, have you found that there are universal gestures or groups of gestures that have been exhibited by all humans? And over what periods of time going back to our ancestral gestures? Yeah,

Julian Jara-Ettinger
that’s something that we’ve been curious about. In terms of universality of gestures, it’s a little bit of a tricky time to study it, because now that you have the internet, they appear everywhere. In fact, when when we were collecting this gesture database to figure out what common signatures they have, you can have a gesture and you ask people, where is it from, and people from 10 Different countries will all tell you that it’s from their country. So it’s a little bit hard to tell. What we do know is we’ve tried to do a little bit of work tracing back and figuring out like, what are the oldest gestures we can find. And so we have some records, the records available from gestures in ancient Rome, and Greece. And we know that those also seem to have the same kind of signatures of acute consisting of body positions that make it kind of like very obvious that you’re not trying to act on the world. And what we’ve also done is we’ve also put people in experiments where they’re forced to suddenly just come up with a new gesture to see what they do. And when we find this, in those cases, people will spontaneously also try to do something that very quickly reveals that you’re not acting on the world. So that gives us reason to believe that it’s not a very slow process of cultural evolution, it seems that individual people are able to immediately consider that someone needs to understand what you’re doing, and try to, like, produce the right body movements that will make that clear.

Josh Landy
But that raises the question, if if these movements are designed to be essentially arbitrary, they can’t be movements that are trying to achieve something in the world, then different cultures are going to involve different kinds of gestures. And that seems like it would be a block to mind reading across cultures. How is someone from Italy going to share their mind with someone from the United States, for example, if we have such different systems of gestures?

Julian Jara-Ettinger
So I think there’s two different questions there. One of them is, different cultures have different sets of things that they try to accomplish, and that shapes their behavior. I think that it’s actually more important that the time. So compared right now to see 50 years ago, we have very different kinds of objects and technologies that we interact with. So we don’t know this yet. But I suspect that that might end up shaping the kinds of gestures that we produce, because now you can imagine with things like the Apple vision, pro VCRs, there’s a lot of movements that now suddenly people are gonna be producing in the air. And that means that now there’s this whole space of body movement that used to be good for producing gestures that is going to become unavailable. So we’re gonna need to move them in and use them in different ways.

Ray Briggs
This actually reminds me of just the experience of walking down the street and hearing somebody talking and thinking they’re talking to me and discovering they’re talking on their phone. We can if we can figure out how to navigate that I’m sure we can figure out how to navigate gesture gestures of people using VR headsets. But we got another question from the audience. Hi, I’m Henry from Houston, Texas. I’m actually a twin of 19 years, and I’ve still not been invited to Twinsburg. Maybe next year. So my question was, do you think that the young children who, you know, maybe just four or five, six, who spent almost two years of school, on Zoom, have a less developed ability to kind of do this mind reading, you know, because they didn’t get to really learn it? You know, in the flesh?

Julian Jara-Ettinger
Yeah, I think that’s one of the new frontiers in cognitive science. The pandemic has created a whole generation, basically, all of us miss some kind of period of our lives at different stages. And I think we don’t know yet how how that has impacted us. What we do know is that the basic building blocks that we have to be able to understand other people’s body movements, including their gestures, seem to be at work surprisingly early, basically, kind of like, as early as we can do experiment with infants, they seem to already have some understanding of these notions that agents generally move efficiently in like deviations and efficiency are meaningful in some way. So it’s very possible that this lack of experiences might cause some differences. But I think it’s unlikely that it will cause a kind of like, significant problem that’s irreversible.

Josh Landy
That brings me to a related question about virtual communication, right? We spend a lot of our lives on Zoom. And some of us are still spending part of our lives a lot of our lives on Zoom. When we don’t have our full embodiment to draw on, do we do more? With our voice? We do more with our facial expressions, maybe with our hands or something like that to be compensated in some way?

Julian Jara-Ettinger
That’s a great question. I don’t know of any research on this. But we do know that we do that. Not in this new generation of a lot of zoom. But when emails started, we found ways to start modifying how we talked to kind of like, convey additional sentiments that are not just captured by plaintext.

Ray Briggs
Through thinking about emoticons and emoji.

Julian Jara-Ettinger
That’s right. And an exclamation signs and uppercase sentences.

Josh Landy
It all worked so well.

Ray Briggs
I mean, we were confused about each other anyway. But we’ve got another question from from our audience.

Kamuthi
Hi, I’m Kamuthi from Palo Alto. And I have a question regarding group dynamics and gestures. Have you ever done any studies or come across a situation where a group of strangers is placed together and not allowed to verbally communicate and studied how they organized themselves into a coherent group that can function?

Julian Jara-Ettinger
I haven’t done any research on that. But that reminds me this is not exactly a question about gesture itself. But we know that there’s been these kind of like natural, you can call them natural experiments. Where if you put children that can’t speak, so they have to gesture, they can very quickly come up with a full blown language of comparable complexity to any of these languages, I’ve said for a long time. So this is the case of the Nicaraguan sign language where they took a lot of children that were death in Nicaragua. And when they were put together in school, within a few years, suddenly, there was a full blown language. So yeah.

Ray Briggs
So I think this kind of raises a puzzle for me about how these arbitrary symbols sort of get going. So if you’re making an arbitrary assign, then maybe I know that you’re not reaching for some something, you’re trying to communicate something, how do I figure out what it is that you’re trying to communicate?

Julian Jara-Ettinger
Yeah, I think that’s where you can think of it there’s these reinforcing powers, right. So on the one hand, even if you don’t recognize a particular the meaning of a gesture, we’re really good at knowing when something is a gesture. If people haven’t had that have the opportunity to travel abroad sometime notice that you might see some kind of body movements. And even if you don’t know what it means, you can get the sense of saying like, Oh, what I just saw some kind of gesture. In that case, once you know that you can kind of use your mind reading abilities and figure out well, what are the possible things that someone might want to communicate here? How are people responding to that? Or you can just ask them, and then once you have that, then you’ve basically added one more gesture to your repertoire.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re thinking about mindshare, with Julian Jara-Etinger from Yale University.

Ray Briggs
Do you ever wonder what your loved ones are thinking? Could science help you improve your communication? How can we get better at understanding one another?

Josh Landy
We’re coming to you from the Stanford Humanities Center for Program, generously sponsored by the Symbolic Systems program. We’ll take more questions from our live audience when Philosophy Talk continues.

The Killers
Can you read my mind?

Josh Landy
Can you read my mind? If not, I’ll help you. I’m Josh Landy. And this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs. Our guest is Julian-Jara-Ettinger from Yale University. And we’re at the Stanford Humanities Center, thinking about mind sharing for a program generously sponsored by Stanford Symbolic Systems.

Josh Landy
So Julian, these are such interesting psychological questions and insights. I’m wondering if people can use what you and others have discovered to communicate better with their friends and family?

Julian Jara-Ettinger
Yeah, I think the main lesson in a lot of this research is that well, first of all, we are remarkably good at a lot of mind reading and understanding people very quickly. But for that reason, sometimes we can overestimate how much people understand what’s going on in our minds. And what we’re finding is that it’s not just about mind reading, it’s about mind sharing. So often, when we have the experience that someone gets us wrong in some way, we can feel some some frustration and feel like maybe this person didn’t care that much about me or they weren’t paying attention. And another way of thinking about it saying like, well, we have to also mindshare, and it’s okay if sometimes someone doesn’t get us right, and we need to help them.

Josh Landy
So we have a kind of almost a moral obligation both to understand other people and to help other people understand.

Ray Briggs
And this is one thing that I often run into and struggle with is trying to figure out whether I’ve correctly mind shared so once I’ve tried to share what I’m thinking there’s this extra step of did the other person Get me. Are there ways to get better at that? Or do you have advice about that?

Julian Jara-Ettinger
Yeah, there’s some research on this and language. And I think the basic lesson there is sometimes we don’t have to worry too much. When we’re talking, sometimes we can accept that we’re not going to say exactly the perfect thing. And it might not be right and the other person is going to help us. This is often called repair. So as you’re speaking, if you say something confusing, the other person you just asked for clarification, and then you can just move on from there. So you don’t have to feel like the whole burden on saying everything perfectly clearly assign you, you can just give it a shot. And if it doesn’t work, they’ll let you know.

Josh Landy
And how does neurodiversity play into all of this?

Julian Jara-Ettinger
I think, historically, particularly in the case of autism, there was this really big idea that autism was, in some sense, deficit of, of mind reading. That was a very popular idea that received a lot of attention. But it seems to not necessarily be the best theory that explains the full both spectrum of neurodiversity, and then autism spectrum disorders. And so that the whole range of things. So I think what’s clear is that some neurodiverse people, and it’s common in autism, sometimes have trouble, mind reading or understand situation. And those are also particular cases where just being helpful is the is the best thing to do.

Ray Briggs
I think I have a question about how to identify why somebody has failed at mind reading, even if it’s myself, who I’m trying to identify, they’re there. So mind reading seems like a kind of complicated skill that requires you to do a lot of other little things that aren’t mind reading. So for instance, if I want to know what Josh is thinking by looking at his face, as people that see his face properly, and maybe I have to not be in pain or distracted by other stimuli. So is there a specific ability of mind reading that you can isolate? Or when I have failures? Like should I sometimes be looking for other places?

Josh Landy
In other words, is it my fault?

Ray Briggs
Exactly. Of course it is.

Julian Jara-Ettinger
Yeah, what we know so far is that it’s, it’s a mixture of both. So there’s certain processes that seem to be automatic and inevitable. So these seem to be happening within perception that we can quickly detect things like attention and other people’s intentions. And then there’s the heavier, the harder layer, which is, you can quickly tell that someone might be looking at something or might have passed to think. And then you have the challenge of well, what are they thinking about or what’s happening? And that’s where you really need to bring the whole context to bear. And I think those are the cases where if you don’t have a good sense of what’s actually happening, that’s the experience of feeling like there’s something going on in the other person’s mind. And I have no idea what it is.

Josh Landy
It’s so interesting, this whole question about success and failure and also about variation. It’s really interesting, right? Seems like some people are probably just better at this than other people. Some people are very good at mind. Reading doesn’t necessarily make them good people, right? Presumably common, are very good at mind reading, and presumably, some people are very good at mind sharing. I wonder if actors might be particularly good at mind sharing. I wonder if poets you know, to write my hobbyhorse? You know, could it be the case that at least some painters, movie makers, poets and so on, they’re kind of blessed, either. They’re either a gift that they were just given or they’ve somehow worked their way to being really great at mind sharing a getting across subtle and complicated emotions.

Julian Jara-Ettinger
Yeah, I think that’s the case of there’s probably like, most or yeah, all cognitive biases, there’s variability across people. What I would suspect, though, is that it’s not just that some people are objectively better in every possible way. It’s rather mind reading involves a lot of different situations and a lot of context and we develop certain expertise. That’s, I think, also what happens when we develop expertise with certain people when we know someone very well, we know very quickly how to mind we then mindshare in ways that we can’t do when we meet a stranger or someone from a different culture.

Ray Briggs
We have another question from our live audience.

Ray
Hi, I’m Ray from San Mateo. I grew up in deaf culture, and expression and facial expressions and gestures are obviously important in American Sign Language, ASL. And given also children in bilingual, meaning oral hearing households will sign before they speak. And give us the gesture so fundamental to that language. Is there any evidence that the deaf are more accurate mind readers are more effective mind shares than oral speakers?

Julian Jara-Ettinger
That’s a really interesting question. I don’t know of any research that has tested did that. And I think it would go back to this. My best guess if I have to speculate is that? Probably yes, in some ways, they are better mind readers because they’re facing different kinds of social demands in their everyday lives. And I think, again, like every one, we ultimately live a certain kind of life that requires certain kinds of social interactions. And that kind of practice just makes us. Good. So actually, yeah, one study that we’ve done is we have tried to isolate how good we are at inferring different kinds of mental states. And what we find is that people are, in general, very good at inferring some mental states like what other people like if you see someone pick a few things, it almost feels obvious what they like, in free, what other people know it gets a little bit harder. But then if you move to inferring how other people see the world, and these hypothetical cases where people might see the world different than you do, people struggle a lot. But if you just keep giving them a little bit of practice, and have them do it over and over, within the span of 10 minutes, you start getting a lot better. So there’s reason to believe that there are these differences, but we can very quickly adapt to the kinds of inferences that we need to make.

Ray Briggs
So got another question from our audience? What’s your name and where you’re from? And your question or comment.

Katherine
Hi, my name is Katherine. And I’m originally from the UK. And my question is, where do overthinking and second guessing fit into all of this? Because I, I find that a lot of the time I get things correct. When I, like interact with someone and I do you know, what they’re thinking? And then later on, I’ll second guess myself and think, Oh, were they really annoyed at me and sort of changed things in retrospect. So where does the second guessing fit in?

Julian Jara-Ettinger
Yeah, I think I mean, there’s second guessing is something that we all experience, not only in social situations, but you can happen all over the place. I think in the case of mind reading, it’s the challenge is that there’s so many different things that someone could be thinking that there’s always space to think more about it. So it’s like, an infinite pool of possibilities. So I think that’s a case where the more you think about it, you can always keep coming up with new and new possibilities of what might be happening and someone else in someone else’s mind. And that basically makes it kind of an impossible task. Like you can just, every time you think more you realize there’s more to think about. And I think that’s part of what makes it difficult. I but we really try to get someone writing we try to kind of like exhaustively explore the possibilities.

Josh Landy
We’ve been operating as though it’s always you know, the more you know, the better the more access, the better and more sharing the better. But other context where we want a little bit of privacy in our minds, or, you know, we I mean, we were all wandering through our days being a little bit inauthentic just to get through our day, right. And sometimes we were competing rather than being collaborative. Aren’t there times when people are trying not to mind share? I mean, how does that work if we’re unconsciously prompted to share?

Julian Jara-Ettinger
Yeah, absolutely. I think this is something that there’s not too much that’s known about yet. But intuitively, it does feel like there’s many cases where we don’t want to mind sharing, and we know how to do it, we can just decide to just look down and move our bodies. And yeah, exactly have poker face. And of course, there’s so many cases where we don’t care to know that much about other people’s minds. Like if you’re walking in a busy train station, and you’re just trying to get to your train, every single person that’s walking by, you don’t need to know exactly what they know, by the train station, what they’re trying to accomplish. You just need to know roughly where they’re going and forget about the rest of what’s going on in their minds.

Ray Briggs
Next question from our audience.

Larry
Larry, from Oakland, again. Driving down here, it was pouring. And I really had to pay attention to driving. So what about mind sharing, when you can’t even see another person, they’re in a car, and you have to pay attention to what’s going around on around you. It’s a very intricate ballet almost, you know, you have to pay attention. And you know, is this person going to cut me off? Miscommunication, road rage? So how does all of this apply to those times, where you can’t even see someone and you’re in a, you know, vehicle speeding along, way over the speed limit, and it’s pouring out, and you need to pick up the cues from everybody around you?

Julian Jara-Ettinger
Yeah, that’s a great example that really shows how much we rely on the rich body movements and sounds that people make, because when you reduce them to a car that’s moving around, we have the experience of just wondering what is going on in that person’s mind. And in fact, what we have to do is add these kind of additional technologies to mindset, right? If you think of blinkers, those are essentially a way of kind of like broadcasting our intentions to other drivers.

Josh Landy
Julian, this conversation is giving a whole new meaning to thank you for sharing. We appreciate you joining us tonight so much.

Julian Jara-Ettinger
Thanks.

Josh Landy
our guest has been Julian Jara-Ettinger, professor of psychology at Yale University, where he runs the Computational Social Cognition Lab.

Ray Briggs
We’ll put links to everything we’ve mentioned today on our website, philosophytalk.org, where you can also become a subscriber and mind read our library of nearly 600 episodes.

Josh Landy
And if you have a question that wasn’t addressed in today’s show, we’d love to hear from you. Email us at comments@philosophytalk.org, and we may feature your question on our blog.

Ray Briggs
Now, a man so fast he’s already read your mind: it’s Ian Shoales the Sixty-Second Philosopher.

The Killers
Ian Shoales… It seems that the power to read minds is something we all fear.  One of those fears we picked up from mythology and B movies, like fear of quicksand, or bottomless pits, or someone entering from a secret passage to drop a tarantula on your pillow as you sleep in the bedroom of the enormous house you might inherit from the sinister uncle you haven’t seen since you were a child.  If someone can read your mind, they might know that you’re secretly the avatar of an Egyptian princess, for example, which draws the attention of the mummy in the local museum, who comes lurching to your house to drag you off to be his immortal bride.  Who needs that?  The ability to read minds is sometimes an idle fantasy, like flying, invisibility, getting three wishes from a genie, or going back in time to rehave that conversation that got you kicked out of the house.  Reading minds means you can see if a person is really into you, or is lying about being in the CIA, or where he goes when he goes away for two weeks every other month or so.  There goes the throughline of every other true crime story.  Discovery Channel reenactors would be out of work.  Lie detector sales would plummet.  All the psychics at the carnival would pick up their Tarot decks and make their sad way home.  Also, reading minds means YOUR thoughts are open.  You can be blackmailed.  Or embarrassed.  One of the offshoots of mind reading, and another great fear, in the wake of the Cold War, is brainwashing, where your thoughts are no longer your own, and you wind up assassinating your mother at a political convention.  Who needs that?   Or hypnotism, where you can be induced to do things, like clucking like a chicken at a party, about which you will have no memory.  But which, if repressed, can later be accessed through hypnotism.  Ironic!  There’s a big subset of pornography devoted to hypnotism and mind control, and a hefty chunk of mysteries whose solution turns around either a victim hypnotized to walk into a buzz saw, or a killer hypnotized to pull a trigger.  Sherlock Holmes could read minds, or at least trace intentions, just by looking at stuff people had lying around, like scuffed shoes, or a snake coming down from the ceiling, or the footprints of a giant hound.  Hypnotism has been a major factor in the truth about flying saucers department, not to mention the Satanic pedophiles department.  The early 20th Century was full of sinister hypnotists like Svengali and Dr. Mabuse, not to mention the rampant abuse of truth serum. Nowadays we don’t even need hypnotism.  We conned ourselves into thinking that Taylor Swift rigged the Superbowl, that there was a dungeon underneath a DC pizza parlor, that Putin was just a regular guy.  Some beliefs live in that gray area where dwell Santa Claus, professional wrestling, and Bitcoin.  Not quite fairy tale, not quite real, or only real as long as you believe it.  Like seeing a ghost, or a UFO, or the Blessed Virgin Mary. In a famous experiment, people were led to believe that they had had their picture taken with Bugs Bunny at Disneyland when they were a kid.  They remembered it vividly, even though Bugs is not a Disney character.  If he showed up at Disneyland, Goofy would tear him to ribbons with his soft gums.  So the mindscape of America can be horrifying and comforting at the same time.  Recently science has suggested that consciousness is a quantum wave that connects to the entire universe.  So that’s reassuring.  It makes mind reading seem like it can be a snap, once we suss the algorithms around that, and how to surf snaggy synapses using only our brain.  Of course, they could be surfing your brain as you’re surfing theirs, which could be migraine inducing.  Or just chaotic.  I mean, what are those thoughts?  If you’re thinking of a dog, for instance, well, which dog?  The dog you had when you were a kid?  How would I know that?  Is it Lassie?  Old Yeller?  Goofy?  Is Goofy even a dog?  Many thoughts have been wasted on that one.  I’ve had them all.  Then there’s the Jedi mind trick.  “These are not the droids you are looking for.”  But they were the droids you were looking for, weren’t they?  But then you wouldn’t have had the movie franchise, I guess.  Just a bunch of unemployed Storm Troopers, playing 3 card monte on the welfare line.  That’s what I’m thinking.  But you probably already knew that. I gotta go.

Ray Briggs
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW local public public radio San Francisco, and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University, copyright 2024.

Josh Landy
Our Executive Producer is Ben Trefny. The Senior Producer is Devon Strolovitch. Laura Maguire is our Director of Research. Dan Brandon is the technical director.

Ray Briggs
Special thanks to Merle Kessler, Rebecca Barron, Karen Adjluni, Linda Fagan and Pedro Jimenez.

Josh Landy
Thanks also to Michael Frank, Todd Davies, and the Stanford Symbolic Systems program which has generously sponsored today’s episode.

Ray Briggs
And thanks to Patricia Terrazas and the staff here at the Stanford Humanities Center.

Josh Landy
Support for Philosophy Talk comes from various groups at Stanford University, from subscribers through our online community of thinkers, and from the members of KALW San Francisco Bay area where our program originates.

Ray Briggs
The views expressed expressed on this program do not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or other funders.

Josh Landy
Not even when they’re true and reasonable. The conversation continues on our website, philosophytalk.org, where you can become a subscriber question everything in our library of nearly 600 episodes. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. Thanks for listening.

Josh Landy
And thanks for thinking.