How minds differ
What we expect from other people
In shortWhat we expect from other people is learned from experience and then shapes each new meeting.
The idea
Everyone brings expectations about other people: whether they will help, whether they will understand, whether what they say can be trusted. These expectations are learned from experience and then shape each new encounter. Someone who has learned that adults help asks for help early; someone who has learned that they do not understand stops explaining. Differences also run both ways: two people who predict in different ways can find it hard to understand each other.
What to try
- Be predictable in your responses: the same tone, the same reaction, doing what you said.
- Show you have understood before correcting: ‘I can see you think…’.
- When there is a misunderstanding, ask what each person expected of the other.
The common mistake
Explaining a misunderstanding only from the child’s side, as if the other person brought no expectations too.
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Short, plain pieces by the researchers and good writers.
Books
How the predictive brain shapes what we see, feel and do, with many everyday examples.
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The science behind itHow strong the evidence is, the model, videos and references.
How strong the evidence is
A way of thinking A lens for interpreting what a child does, not a rule from trials.
Internal working models of attachment can be described as priors about the availability and responsiveness of others (Howe, 2011). Fonagy and Allison (2014) propose epistemic trust, a readiness to take what others communicate as relevant and generalisable, as a condition for learning from them. Milton (2012) describes the ‘double empathy problem’: difficulties of understanding between autistic and non-autistic people run both ways, not from one side only. Veissière et al. (2020) show how shared expectations let us think through other minds. For formulation: ask what expectations about others the person holds, where they come from, and which consistent responses could update them.
More technical books
Attachment and internal working models across life, written for professionals.
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References
- Milton, D. E. M. (2012). On the ontological status of autism: the ‘double empathy problem’. Disability & Society, 27(6), 883–887.
- Fonagy, P., & Allison, E. (2014). The role of mentalizing and epistemic trust in the therapeutic relationship. Psychotherapy, 51(3), 372–380.
- Howe, D. (2011). Attachment Across the Lifecourse: A Brief Introduction. Palgrave Macmillan.
- Veissière, S. P. L., Constant, A., Ramstead, M. J. D., Friston, K. J., & Kirmayer, L. J. (2020). Thinking through other minds: A variational approach to cognition and culture. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 43, e90.
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