Jara-Ettinger Julian, Rubio-Fernandez Paula
Department of Psychology, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA.
Department of Computer Science, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA.
Sci Adv. 2021 Nov 19;7(47):eabj0970. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.abj0970. Epub 2021 Nov 17.
Human social intelligence relies on our ability to infer other people’s mental states such as their beliefs, desires, and intentions. While people are proficient at mental state inference from physical action, it is unknown whether people can make inferences of comparable granularity from simple linguistic events. Here, we show that people can make quantitative mental state attributions from simple referential expressions, replicating the fine-grained inferential structure characteristic of nonlinguistic theory of mind. Moreover, people quantitatively adjust these inferences after brief exposures to speaker-specific speech patterns. These judgments matched the predictions made by our computational model of theory of mind in language, but could not be explained by a simpler qualitative model that attributes mental states deductively. Our findings show how the connection between language and theory of mind runs deep, with their interaction showing in one of the most fundamental forms of human communication: reference.
人类的社会智力依赖于我们推断他人心理状态的能力，比如他们的信念、欲望和意图。虽然人们擅长从身体动作推断心理状态，但尚不清楚人们是否能从简单的语言事件中做出具有可比粒度的推断。在这里，我们表明人们可以从简单的指代表达中进行定量的心理状态归因，复制了非语言心理理论的细粒度推理结构特征。此外，人们在短暂接触特定说话者的言语模式后会对这些推断进行定量调整。这些判断与我们语言心理理论计算模型所做的预测相匹配，但不能用一个更简单的定性模型来解释，该模型通过演绎来归因心理状态。我们的研究结果表明语言与心理理论之间的联系有多深，它们的相互作用体现在人类交流最基本的形式之一：指称中。
