School of Psychology, University of Birmingham.
J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn. 2024 May;50(5):833-844. doi: 10.1037/xlm0001268. Epub 2023 Jul 13.
We investigated the relationship between Theory of Mind (ToM) and communicative cooperation. Specifically, we examined whether communicative cooperation is affected by the ToM ability of one's cooperative partner as well as their own. ToM is the attribution of mental states to oneself and others; cooperation is the joint action that leads to achieving a shared goal. We measured cooperation using a novel communicative cooperation game completed by participants in pairs. ToM was measured via the Movies for Assessment of Social Cognition (MASC) task and fluid intelligence via the Raven task. Findings of 350 adults show that ToM scores of both players were predictors of cooperative failure, whereas Raven scores were not. Furthermore, participants were split into low- and high-ToM groups through a median split of the MASC scores: high-ToM individuals committed significantly fewer cooperative errors compared to their low-ToM counterparts. Therefore, we found a direct relationship between ToM and cooperation. Interestingly, we also examined how ToM scores of paired participants determine cooperation. We found that pairs with two high-ToM individuals committed significantly fewer errors compared to pairs with two low-ToM individuals. We speculate that reduced cooperation in low-low ToM pairs is a result of less efficient development of conceptual alignment and recovery from misalignment, compared to high-high ToM dyads. For the first time, we thus demonstrate that it is not all about you; both cooperative partners make key, independent, contributions to cooperative outcomes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).
我们研究了心理理论（ToM）与交际合作之间的关系。具体来说，我们检验了交际合作是否受到合作伙伴的 ToM 能力以及自身 ToM 能力的影响。ToM 是指将心理状态归因于自己和他人的能力；合作是指导致实现共同目标的共同行动。我们使用参与者在配对中完成的新颖交际合作游戏来衡量合作。通过电影评估社会认知（MASC）任务测量 ToM，通过瑞文任务测量流体智力。350 名成年人的研究结果表明，两名参与者的 ToM 分数都是合作失败的预测因素，而 Raven 分数则不是。此外，通过 MASC 分数的中位数分割，将参与者分为低 ToM 和高 ToM 组：高 ToM 个体与低 ToM 个体相比，合作错误明显减少。因此，我们发现 ToM 与合作之间存在直接关系。有趣的是，我们还研究了配对参与者的 ToM 分数如何决定合作。我们发现，两名高 ToM 个体组成的配对比两名低 ToM 个体组成的配对错误明显减少。我们推测，与高-高 ToM 对子相比，低-低 ToM 对子的合作减少是由于概念对齐的效率降低和从失配中恢复的效率降低所致。我们首次证明，这不仅仅与你有关；两个合作伙伴对合作结果都做出了关键的、独立的贡献。
