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Chapter 10¹⁰
Seeing Invisible Minds

Shortly after taking off from LaGuardia airport in the dead of winter, the engines of US Airways flight 1549 failed after inhaling several large geese. The pilots glided their plane onto the Hudson River, where all of the

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¹⁰ The lead author is Nicholas Epley, Ph.D., a Professor of Behavioral Science at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. His research investigates people’s ability to reason about others’ minds, from knowing how one is being judged by others to predicting others' attitudes, beliefs, and underlying motivations, and the implications of systematic mistakes in mind reading for everyday social interactions. His research has appeared in more than two dozen journals, has been featured by the Wall Street Journal, CNN, Wired, and National Public Radio, among many others, and has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the Templeton Foundation. Epley has written for the New York Times, produced lectures for the Financial Times, been elected as a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, and is the winner of the 2008 Theoretical Innovation Prize from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.

Other minds are inherently invisible. You cannot see an attitude, smell a belief, or touch an intention, and yet you can nevertheless “see” these mental states in other people with great ease. You can even see them in agents ranging from pets to gadgets to gods. How you are able to see other minds, and how they become visible, matters because it marks the difference between treating others as human beings worthy of moral care and concern versus treating others as objects or animals.

passengers were rescued, cold, wet, and almost completely unharmed. Explained one passenger, “God was certainly looking out for us.” New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin offered a very different assessment of God’s mind following the devastating impact of Hurricane Katrina when he explained that, “Surely God is mad at America. Surely he’s not approving of us being in Iraq under false pretense. But surely he’s upset at Black America, too.”

Depending on your own beliefs, such statements will seem somewhere between insane and insightful. To psychologists, they seem impressive. They seem impressive not because they reveal a keen sense of causal inference, but rather because they reveal what may be the most impressive capacities of the social brain—the ability to reason about, or “to see,” what other minds see. Introspection enables you to know your own intentions, report on your own thoughts, feel your own pain, and recognize when you are feeling shame rather than guilt. Other minds, however, are inherently invisible. You cannot know what it is like to be another person on the inside because your skull gets in the way.

The inherent invisibility of other minds poses a major problem for hard-nosed philosophers, who skeptically note that people cannot infer that other minds exist at all. Although it is surprisingly difficult for philosophers to reject the skeptical conclusion from the “other minds problem,” almost everyone else casts it aside altogether some time around the age of five. At this point people have developed such a strong capacity to think about other minds that they not only see minds in other people, but they seem to see other minds almost everywhere¹. Gods can be caring or

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