The two most important theoretical schools of mind reading are:
1.？ Imitation theory (simulation? Theory)
According to the imitation theory, the secret of mind-reading is to put yourself in the other person's shoes and think about what you will do in the other person's situation. We can read other people's psychological state through this prediction.
For example, you need to solve a problem now: how to find a seat in the subway faster? At this time, your strategy requires you to assume that you are a passenger who is about to get off the bus, and predict who will get off the bus by thinking about the actions you will make when you get off the bus (such as who will read the sign more frequently, move your body, who will start to tidy up your things, make up, etc.). ).
? 2.？ Theory-theory
Theoretically, mind-reading is essentially a kind of reasoning. People have gradually developed a kind of "naivety" (Na? ve？ Theory) to help them better explain these phenomena.
So much for mind reading. For example:
During the break, I often see my colleagues fumbling for lighters to smoke. Over time, you have formed a simple "inference": during work breaks, colleagues grope for cigarettes. When you see your colleague fumbling in his pocket during a break, you can infer and interpret his thoughts according to this "theory".
Mind-reading in the background of psychological research is not the same as the "deified" mind-reading in the market (to some extent, the theory seems to be closer to our fantasy mind-reading). Psychological "mind reading" is actually widely used in daily life. It helps us to communicate better, cooperate with each other and establish close relations.
For example, in the elevator, we will consciously or unconsciously try to figure out other people's intentions. When someone reaches out, we will predict that he wants to press the elevator button to make room. If someone flinches inward, it means that he may think that the elevator is too close to people. This ability to read other people's thoughts spontaneously all the time is an important guarantee to ensure the continuation of social life.
Traditional psychology and cognitive science believe that the body is not important for understanding people's psychological state and cognition, and people's cognitive ability and psychological state can exist independently of the specific body. For example, when we want to do a mathematical operation, we can do it without any part of the body. When calculating 2*3=6, we don't necessarily need to break our fingers to count. Anyone with normal intelligence can do this by accessing the memory.
In most cognitive activities, the body only acts as a receiver (such as listening to sounds, watching images, smelling, etc.). ) or output devices (such as mechanical movement, speech, etc. ), and the function of this instrument can basically be replaced by other artificial devices, such as hearing AIDS, artificial limbs and other auxiliary devices. Therefore, traditional theories tend to think that cognitive function is not necessarily related to body, and the function of body in cognition is auxiliary.
The emergence of "embodied cognition" challenges this view. They believe that cognitive activities should be closely related to the physical characteristics of the human body. They think that the definition of cognition in traditional cognitive science is too narrow, and it is necessary to redefine cognition in behavior and sensory perception.
For example, the study of gestures and postures has greatly promoted the development of embodied cognition, a new research direction. McNeil found that the use of gestures not only improves the efficiency of communication, but also helps us to deal with language. In the process of using gestures, gestures are no longer the mechanical actions of the speaker's hands, but become a symbol like language.
You can refer to the Italian speech here. If we tie their hands and feet in the process of speaking, they will often feel depressed. (Because in the process of speaking, Italians often use gestures to convey the implication. Recommended video:
/watch? v=Hxu50kiDVGc)
Donald further believes that the body and the surrounding environment are a way of cognitive unloading (note: cognitive unloading refers to using our bodies to reduce memory load and simplify cognitive processing).
To understand this, we only need to remember the "right-handed spiral law" taught by our senior high school teachers-through the image interpretation of specific body parts, the difficulty of remembering a complex physical law is reduced, so as to achieve the purpose of cognitive unloading.
Various studies show that complex psychological phenomena that are difficult to analyze in traditional research seem to be closely related to the physical characteristics of organisms. From this perspective, mind-reading that seems difficult to analyze is nothing more than reading body information.
Different from mind-reading in popular books and Hollywood movies, mind-reading with embodied cognitive understanding occurs in our daily life every day. From the handshake between colleagues to the wonderful save by the goalkeeper on the court, people are reading each other's psychological state all the time.
People often have a strong shallow mind-reading ability. The so-called shallow mind reading is different from the ability to read other people's thoughts and spy on other people's psychological activities in works of art, but a kind of ability to read other people's intentions. This ability enables us to predict the next actions of others in life, so as to better participate in interaction or avoid danger.
Take the handshake as an example. When you reach out, your sensorimotor nervous system has planned in advance where your hand needs to reach. This seemingly casual hand actually contains a lot of information, including reading out the intention of others to shake hands with you and predicting where his hand will reach.
1.？ Your expression says it all.
Different from the traditional theory, embodied cognition holds that the ability of mind-reading to give others a certain psychological state is actually an automatic and direct activity, which only depends on the information of sensory perception-motor system. People don't need to think, reason or any prior knowledge at all, but they can know their psychological state immediately by seeing other people's behavior.
A simple example is the photo of refugees in the newspaper. We don't need any mental activity to understand their sad emotions. The facial expressions of the refugees in the photo are exactly the same as those we make when we are sad. We don't need to establish a set of "theories" about emotional reading as theoretically said, but we can activate the relevant modules about "sadness" in the brain by reading facial information in photos. Such rapid emotional reading benefits from the very similar biophysical structure between people (such as mirror neurons), which we usually show when we are sad.
Therefore, to understand other people's pain, just remember your sad instant expression (in fact, it is only a low-level muscle memory).
Your behavior exposed your motives.
Theoretically, we can interpret other people's motives by observing their behaviors.
Marteniuk found that the same type of action will lead to different trajectories and completion times due to different ultimate goals. Similarly, when grabbing a plate, the completion time, action speed and behavior track of different targets (safely placed or placed in a nearby box) will be different.
Therefore, when observing a person holding a glass of water, we only need to observe the initial stage of his action to judge whether he is drinking water or splashing water on his face.
For love rat, this is definitely a practical skill. Careful observation can basically help him avoid most sudden "attacks" (in fact, this is also a skill used by goalkeepers or table tennis players in the game, so a good player is a powerful mind reader).
3.？ Socialization is an artificial performance.
When people want to interact with others, they tend to exaggerate the scale of the action, making it take longer and wider to complete the action. ? An important measure to judge whether a person's behavior is for others is to observe whether the scope of his behavior is exaggerated. Quiz. It is found that people's social intention will change the dynamic characteristics of object-oriented behavior.
4.？ What does embodied cognitive mind-reading say?
Rotten chicken soup tells us that details determine success or failure. To some extent, embodied cognitive mind-reading proves this famous saying of success that has been sung for a long time.
The strategy of mind-reading with body cognition is to use the details that people inadvertently reveal in their actions to "peek" into your heart. This ability to read details ensures that people who make good use of it gain greater advantages in social interaction, and they accumulate "success or failure in life" from a little advantage. If these complicated studies have taught you anything, it may be that you have carefully observed the "details" in your life. They are not worthless.
Therefore, seeing through other people's hearts is not the patent of psychological professionals. Everyone will guess others' hearts more or less, but the amount of experience has an influence on the degree of judging right and wrong ~
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This article is excerpted from the article "Life is like a play, it's all acting | mind reading with body cognition" of WeChat official account "Friends".
Friendly people (ID: yosumn) encourage critical thinking, interesting and professional psychological science community.