callous. Pets can be thoughtful or devious. And every now and then,
computers can have a mind of their own.
Having the capacity to reason about other minds enables people to form deep social connections with others, to empathize with others’ pain and share in their joy, and to anticipate others’ actions. But having a capacity and actually using it are two different things. People are not naturally inclined to see invisible things in the environment. People do not automatically see into other minds, either, but instead do so only under certain circumstances and with some psychological effort. This chapter will describe how people come to see other minds, how other minds can become more or less visible, and why the visibility of other minds matters for everyday life.
Kinds of Minds
Studying how people understand other minds first requires understanding how people intuitively define another mind. Research suggests that people think of minds as having two distinct dimensions, the ability to act (agency) and the ability to feel (experience)’. Mindful agency involves the cognitive activities that enable action, such as the capacity to plan, to have intentions, to engage in deliberate self-control, and to pursue one’s own goals. Conscious preferences, attitudes, and beliefs follow from these capacities. Mindful experience, in contrast, involves the cognitive activities involved in reacting to the external world, such as the capacity for self-awareness, and the experience of basic psychological states (like hunger, thirst, or pain), and other- oriented emotions (such as empathy or sympathy). Mindful experience also
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involves the capacity for metacognition—the capacity to think about one’s own thoughts or emotions— exemplified in experiences such as confidence and doubt, or in secondary emotions such as shame, guilt, joy, or hope. People seem to represent these two capacities in others quite independently. A sociopath, for instance, can appear to act with a high degree of mindful agency but no mindful experience, whereas a baby might appear full of mindful experience with relatively little mindful agency. Seeing other agents as mindful essentially means seeing them as able to consciously think and/or to feel.
Because you are aware of both your own thoughts and feelings, you likely consider yourself—like most people do—to be very mindful.
Making Other Minds Visible
Introspection provides a kind of flashlight that seems to provide direct access to one’s own agency as well as experience. Although research demonstrates that introspection is actually a process of indirect inference, it appears to us that introspection provides direct access to the workings of our own brain. It seems that we can look on the inside and fee/ when we are suffering, know when we are experiencing regret, or be aware of our intentions to lose weight. We can use our introspective abilities to make inferences about what others are likely thinking or feeling (and we very often do), but such inferences are likely to seem inherently less direct, less immediate, and less illuminating. We cannot see into other minds as clearly as we seem able to see our own.
When something is difficult to see, people may doubt whether it
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