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actually exists, or may not see it at all.
This is true of the relative difficulty that
people have seeing other minds
compared to one’s own, in ways that are
sometimes very subtle and surprising.
For instance, we tend to evaluate
ourselves by consulting our mindful
intentions, but we evaluate others (and
their intentions) by observing their
actions. We may consider ourselves to
be conscientious if we planned to buy
our spouse a birthday gift, but need to
see an actual gift to infer that our spouse
is equally conscientious.³ We tend to
believe that we are more likely to
experience complicated mental emotions
like shame, guilt, or embarrassment than
are others.⁴,⁵ We tend to believe that our
own behavior will therefore be guided
by moral sentiments like empathy, guilt,
or compassion whereas others’ behavior
is more likely driven by the relatively
mindless motives of self-interest.⁶ Other
minds are more opaque than our own,
and some learning, attending, seeking,
and projecting is required for our brains
to become fully social and see into them.
Here’s how⁷.

Learning. Children do not enter
the world able to think about other
minds, but they learn to do so fairly
quickly. At around three months of age,
children start preferentially attending to
animate objects compared to inanimate
objects, and at around six months of age
start to distinguish between intentional
(goal-directed) and unintentional
(accidental) action. At this age, for
instance, children will look reliably
longer at a person who is reaching for a
cup than to a person who is making the
same reaching motion in the absence of
a cup. Over the next 18 months,
children become more likely to mimic
intentional than unintentional actions⁸, to
follow the gaze of another person and

therefore share his or her attentional
focus, and recognize that other people
may have preferences that differ from
one’s own. By age two, children’s
social ability to read other minds seems
to have already surpassed that of our
nearest primate relatives, and over the
next two years they pick up what appear
to be uniquely human mind-reading
capacities. By age five, children
demonstrate the most sophisticated of
mind-reading abilities—the capacity to
recognize that others’ beliefs may differ
from one’s own and to use those
differing (sometimes mistaken) beliefs to
predict the other agent’s behavior.
Variability from age five onward comes
from learning more specific details about
how other minds actually work, largely
gathered from personal experience,
religious practice, or broader cultural
norms.

Many psychologists and
neuroscientists speculate that learning to
read other minds comes from the deeply
social tendency, present at birth, to
mimic others’ actions. For example,
Steve Small examines a neurological
underpinning for mimicry, and Jean
Decety argues in his essay that an inborn
capacity for mimicry underlies the
human capacity for empathy. Looking
where others look and copying their
actions is a reasonable way to copy their
likely mental states as well. This
egocentric method of using one’s own
mental experience as a guide to other
minds continues to be employed
throughout adulthood, and can give
insight into others’ mental states but can
also lead people to overestimate the
extent to which others’ minds are similar
to one’s own. These biases tend to be
called egocentric when reasoning about
other people, and they tend to be called
anthropomorphic when reasoning about

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