Hi, my name is Jennifer Nagel.
I teach philosophy at the University of Toronto,
and today I want to talk to you about social cognition.
We are not alone in the world.
We live in the company of other people and animals,
and we experience many types of social interaction:
we compete, we cooperate, we communicate,
and we have all kinds of emotional responses to each other.
Our social lives are important to us;
they are also philosophically really interesting.
This series will focus on social cognition,
the branch of intelligence that enables agents to deal with other agents.
You will notice that I said “agents” and not people or human beings:
an agent is any being that can act,
and in this series,
we'll be quite open-minded about what could be included in that category.
Our main focus will be on humans interacting with other humans,
but we recognize that humans can use their social intelligence
to make sense of other creatures, and other creatures
can have some interesting forms of social intelligence of their own.
In fact, we'll look at some of the similarities and differences
between the social intelligence of human and nonhuman animals,
and we'll even talk about whether suitably trained artificial agents
could have some forms of social intelligence,
and whether it makes sense for us to interact with them as agents.
More generally,
this series will explore questions about how and indeed whether
it's possible to know the minds of other agents,
questions about the nature of mental states like beliefs, emotions and desires;
we'll look at theories about how social intelligence develops,
and about its natural limitations.
One reason why we need specialized social intelligence
is that agents do things that inanimate objects don’t do.
Billiard balls move immediately
and in mechanical and predictable ways when they are hit by other billiard balls;
the players, meanwhile, can take their time to calculate a move,
and surprise us with clever and unexpected tricks.
Players aren't totally unpredictable, of course:
we see agents as guided by their goals and feelings,
and by what they know or believe to be true.
Attributing lasting mental states like goals and beliefs
helps us figure out what others are likely to do as circumstances change.
Being able to predict what others will do helps us coordinate with them;
smart competition also requires being able to predict others.
Unlike billiard balls, agents can engage in rational planning and decision-making;
they can also have fits of irrational anger.
Also, unlike billiard balls,
the agents that you are tracking could be keeping track of you at the same time,
and even changing what they are doing in response to being observed.
If you ever find yourself acting differently
because other people are watching you,
your social cognition has been engaged.
Social cognition can be engaged in many different ways.
We instinctively notice what other agents are paying attention to,
and we can pick up their feelings instinctively as well,
feeling pain when we see another person being hurt,
or joy when we are with laughing friends.
We can also engage in much more controlled
and deliberate assessment of the minds of others,
for instance, when we're serving on a jury in a courtroom,
and we need to calculate the motives and beliefs
of various participants in a complex crime.
In this series, we 're going to use the word “mindreading”
to cover all the various ways we track what's going on in the minds of others.
This ability is also known as folk psychology
or mentalizing.
We're going to use these terms interchangeably.
The word “mindreading”
is sometimes used to refer to a special trick that magicians play on stage,
where they have an uncanny ability to figure out a secret
that an audience member has in mind.
When philosophers and psychologists talk about mindreading,
they mean something we do naturally in the course of everyday life.
We don’t just see other agents as turning their eyes from side to side
and waving their limbs;
we normally see others as striving for goals,
finding out facts, sometimes being mistaken,
and feeling happy or sad.
In some sense, we read the minds of others,
and see their actions as making more sense in light of their inner lives.
Our ordinary mindreading abilities aren’t as flashy as the magician’s tricks,
but they're no less interesting.
Mindreading works with a great variety of input,
from subtle hints like tiny shifts in facial expressions
or the direction someone is gazing,
to verbal statements that others make openly,
which can still be hard to read in the sense that
they might be intended to deceive,
or even just intended to be ironic or playful.
Reading someone else’s mind accurately
helps you predict what that person's likely to do,
and explain what they have done.
Other people’s states of mind
can also serve as clues to what's going on in the larger non-mental world:
if you see someone in the distance as reacting with delight or fear
to something they can see, when you can’t see it yourself yet,
their reaction could be informative for you.
As mindreaders,
we can learn about the world by noticing other people’s evaluations of it,
whether they are like-minded individuals
whose reactions we know we’re likely to share,
or whether those we are watching
are thought to have tastes different from our own,
so their positive response might signal that we might not like something.
So, mindreading can help predict future action, explain past action,
and help us find out about the world through watching how others react to it.
Mindreading helps us coordinate, manipulate, cooperate
and compete intelligently with other agents.
The next video in this series takes a closer look at the states of mind
that we detect when we are mindreading,
and then we’ll get into questions about how mindreading is even possible.