Investigating the role of theory of mind in cooperative and competitive behaviors using approaches from cognitive neuroscience and developmental psychology

Abstract

People are often quite attuned to the minds around them, but it’s unclear whether the tendency to consider the minds of others differs depending on the context. Research on intergroup processes and interpersonal relations reveal that the tendency to consider the minds of others depend on factors like group membership; however, interactions with ingroup members and outgroup members tend to conflate with cooperative interactions and competitive interactions, respectively. Cooperation and competition are two categories of interactions that encompass most of collective human behavior and thus provide natural categories for grouping social behaviors. We test the idea that people’s tendencies to consider the minds of others depend on the type of social interaction by primarily focusing on cooperation and competition. Papers 1 and 2 directly compare theory of mind across cooperative and competitive contexts, whereas Paper 3 aims to understand the role of theory of mind in supporting one important aspect of cooperation—a sense of fairness—by studying responses to different forms of unfairness across a spectrum of ages in children. Altogether, these results show an influence of theory of mind on social evaluations and social behaviors and support the idea that sensitivity to context may emerge early in life but becomes more difficult to detect over time.