Humans have an amazing ability to adopt other views; they are a very important ability for social beings like us, but why do some of us excel in them more than others?
Imagine two friends, Sally and Anne, having a drink in a bar. While Sally is in the bathroom, Ann decides to buy another drink, but notes that Sally has left her phone on the table. In order not to be stolen, Anne puts her phone in her friend's bag before she goes to ask for a drink. When Sally returns, where do you expect to look for her phone?
Internal process.
If you say that she will look at the table where she left, we will be grateful to you! You have the theory of reason; the ability to understand that someone else may have knowledge, ideas, and beliefs that differ from your knowledge, thoughts, or beliefs.
If this sounds normal, perhaps because we usually consider it a given. But it requires doing something that no other animal can do; to temporarily put aside our thoughts and beliefs from the world - in this case; the phone is inside the bag - to adopt an alternative view of the world.
This process - also called "sanity" - does not make us believe that someone else can believe in something that is not only real, but also predicts the behavior of others, the identification of lies and the discovery of deception by others. Mind theory is a necessary component of the arts and religion. In the end, belief in the spiritual world requires us to imagine minds that do not exist, and perhaps even to determine the number of our friends.
But our understanding of this important aspect of our social intelligence is constantly changing, challenging new ways of examining and analyzing some of our deeply held beliefs. With the stability of concepts, we will get an idea of how this capability evolves, and why some of us are better than others. "Mind theory has enormous cultural implications," says Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary anthropologist at Oxford University. "It allows you to look beyond the world as we see it physically, and imagine how it can be different."
The first ideas about the theory of mind emerged in the 1970s, when it was discovered that at about the age of four, children experienced a remarkable leap of knowledge. The basic method of testing the child's mind theory is known as the Sally-Anne test, which includes the representation of the sequence of events
mentioned above, but this is done using missing dolls and a ball (see figure).