Evidence for multiple kinds of belief in theory of mind.

IF 3.7 1区心理学 Q1 PSYCHOLOGY, EXPERIMENTAL

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General Pub Date : 2025-05-19 DOI:10.1037/xge0001765

Alejandro Vesga,Neil Van Leeuwen,Tania Lombrozo

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引用次数: 0

Abstract

Lay people routinely appeal to "beliefs" in explaining behavior; psychologists do so as well (for instance, in explaining belief polarization and learning). Across three studies (N = 1,843, U.S.-based adults), we challenge the assumption that "belief" picks out a single construct in people's theory of mind. Instead, laypeople attribute different kinds of beliefs depending on whether the beliefs play predominantly epistemic roles (such as truth-tracking) or nonepistemic roles (such as social signaling). We demonstrate that epistemic and nonepistemic beliefs are attributed under different circumstances (Study 1) and support different predictions about the believer's values (Study 2) and behavior (Study 3). This differentiation emerges reliably across three distinct signatures of attributed belief and even when the believed content and attributed level of certainty about that content are held constant across cases. Our findings call for a more fine-grained characterization of theory of mind and provide indirect support for the hypothesis that human cognition itself features multiple varieties of belief. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

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心智理论中多种信仰的证据。

门外汉在解释行为时经常诉诸“信念”；心理学家也这样做（例如，在解释信念极化和学习）。通过三项研究（N = 1843名美国成年人），我们挑战了“信念”在人们的心智理论中挑选单一结构的假设。相反，外行人将不同类型的信念归为不同的信念，这取决于信念是主要发挥认知作用（如真相追踪）还是非认知作用（如社会信号）。我们证明了认识论和非认识论信仰在不同的情况下被归因于（研究1），并支持对信仰者的价值观（研究2）和行为（研究3）的不同预测。这种差异可靠地出现在归因信念的三个不同特征中，甚至当所相信的内容和关于该内容的归因确定性水平在不同情况下保持不变时也是如此。我们的研究结果要求对心智理论进行更细致的描述，并为人类认知本身具有多种信仰的假设提供间接支持。（PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA，版权所有）。

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来源期刊

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General PSYCHOLOGY, EXPERIMENTAL-

CiteScore

6.20

自引率

4.90%

发文量

300

期刊介绍： The Journal of Experimental Psychology: General publishes articles describing empirical work that bridges the traditional interests of two or more communities of psychology. The work may touch on issues dealt with in JEP: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, JEP: Human Perception and Performance, JEP: Animal Behavior Processes, or JEP: Applied, but may also concern issues in other subdisciplines of psychology, including social processes, developmental processes, psychopathology, neuroscience, or computational modeling. Articles in JEP: General may be longer than the usual journal publication if necessary, but shorter articles that bridge subdisciplines will also be considered.