Theory of Mind

A few weeks ago Andrew gave an FHE lesson that involved us learning about theory of mind and watching a demonstration of the Sally-Anne test. In this test a girl named Sally places a marble into her basket and then leaves the room. While she's out, Anne takes the marble from Sally's basket and puts it into her own box. 

He paused the video mid-demonstration and asked everyone where they thought Sally would look for her marble first—noting that we should please hold our answers until...

"In the box!" Phoebe (and Benjamin!) blurted out.

"No! In the basket!" all the other kids said. 

"Hey!" I reminded them as they all squabbled, "Dad said to wait to give your answers."

"No, it's okay," he chuckled. "I mostly wanted to see what Phoebe would say...but the fact that Benjamin gave the same answer is, uh, revelatory." 

Theory of mind, Wikipedia (top-notch citation) tells us, is the "understanding that [someone can have their] own beliefs that may not correlate with reality," though I am not sure that I love the word reality there. I think I would say that people might have beliefs that do not correlate with your knowledge/understanding of the world...because we are all going through life with limited information and it's tricky to say what is real outside of one's own perception/understanding.

And that's kind of the point of this test—to measure how well you're able to think about a situation from another's point of view. 

For many, if not most, of us it would be clear that Sally would look in her basket first since that's where she left her marble. Why would she think to look in Anne's basket simply because we know the marble is there? She wouldn't. And that's the thing—the question isn't whether you know where the marble is. The question is whether you know where Sally thinks the marble is...which is kind of a complicated bit of reasoning.

And Phoebe has not quite developed that way of thinking yet.

Andrew was laughing about Phoebe the other day because she had been outside talking to me as I worked in the garden. And then she came inside and just kept talking to me. When he asked her who she was talking to, she said, "Mom!"

"Mom is outside!" he said. 

"She was just right here!" she said. 

"No," he said. "You were just outside. You came inside by yourself. Mom isn't with you."

She had no idea. She figured that since she had been talking to me outside, our conversation could continue when she went inside...even if I wasn't there...because why wouldn't I be there? After all, she was there!

We've been using the phrase "theory of mind" a lot since that FHE lesson, reminding people to kind of read the room and/or consider about whether they should scream and yell at one of their siblings about something they have no knowledge of. We're all lacking information. We all struggle to be empathetic, to think of things from other's points of views. But it's a good thing to practice. 

Anyway...today the kids played outside for quite a while. And then Benjamin and his friend Reed went to jump on the trampoline. Phoebe decided she wanted to bounce with them. They said no because they didn't want to play with her anymore...or have her get hurt on the trampoline. They're teenagers and she's...four...so this sounds like it was a pretty fair call to me, especially considering how long those boys had kept all the neighbourhood kids playing together before traipsing off alone. 

Phoebe, however, was furious.

"Too bad, so sad!" Ben told her. "Go inside and cry about it to Mom."

So she did. 

She stumbled her way up the deck stairs in a blind rage and ran to the back door...only to find it locked.

So she stood there—sobbing—for who knows how long. I don't know. I was at my computer (at the front of the house) working, still hearing the sounds of happy children playing in the front yard, completely oblivious to the sobbing child on the back deck. 

Then Zoë came inside to get a drink of water from the fridge, which is conveniently located quite near the back door...

"Oh, no!" I heard Zoë cry. 

She opened the door and let Phoebe in and Phoebe blubbered the whole story to her (I thought about going downstairs, but that "Oh, no!" wasn't like a "Call 9-1-1!" level of "Oh, no!" It was more like a "Did you rip your paper? That's...tragic..." level of "Oh, no!"). 

"Let's go and tell Mom!" I finally heard Zoë say. 

So then I did get out of my chair so I could collect the still-weeping Phoebe in my arms. She told me the story again and I said, "That is so sad! I think it's probably okay for the big boys to have some alone play time but I can see how that maybe made you feel left out. That must have been frustrating. And it must have been scary to find the back door was locked!"

"It was!" she sniffed, having calmed down a little bit. 

"I just have one little question..."

"What?"

"Why...didn't you go around to the front of the house where you know the door is unlocked? And the garage is wide open...so there's really two open doors at the front of the house... Why sit at the back door crying when..."

"I don't knoooooow!" she wailed, dissolving into tears again. "I'm only four! I have no theory of mind!!!!"

Problem solving's not quite her forte yet, it would seem. 

Although...

Here she is rocking a shorts-over-leggings look for gardening club yesterday. She was frustrated that the pockets on the front of her shorts were fake (so lame) so she decided to put her shorts on backwards in order to make her back pockets more accessible. 

Who said she's not a problem solver?