The case for redefining ‘theory of mind’: Q&A with François Quesque
About 12 years ago, François Quesque encountered a serious obstacle to his research on how people attribute mental states to others. It wasn’t technological or scientific. Rather, it was a question of word choice.
He realized that researchers frequently used the same terms to refer to distinct concepts, and distinct terms to refer to the same ones, blurring the meaning of “mentalizing,” “empathy” and related phrases. “It took me maybe eight or nine years to have a relatively clear, but probably not clear still, idea of what the literature was saying,” recalls Quesque, assistant professor of psychology at Université Paris Nanterre. “I thought it was impossible to conduct nice research with such a mess.”
For example, “theory of mind” is often used to describe a multitude of cognitive processes, Quesque and his colleagues demonstrated in a paper published in 2020. In response to that work, graduate students around the world contacted Quesque and told him they had struggled to reconcile their results with the literature because, despite identical terminology, their studies weren’t measuring the same concept.
Quesque has gathered a team of 44 other researchers—hailing from 12 countries—who are leaders in subfields of neuroscience and philosophy and who study mental state attribution. (Among them are Simon Baron-Cohen and Uta Frith, two of the co-authors of the 1985 paper that first showed that children with autism failed a theory of mind test.) Over six years, and thousands of emails, the collaboration discarded several commonly used terms and agreed upon eight key terms and their definitions.
