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Behavior is a product of both the situation (e.g., cultural influences, social roles, and the presence of bystanders) and of the person (e.g., personality characteristics). Subfields of psychology tend to focus on one influence or behavior over others. Situationism is the view that our behavior and actions are determined by our immediate environment and surroundings. In contrast, dispositionism holds that our behavior is determined by internal factors (Heider, 1958).
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Related Experiment Video

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Do infants and nonhuman animals attribute mental states?

Tyler Burge1

  • 1University of California, Los Angeles.

Psychological Review
|May 8, 2018
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

This study challenges the common belief that young children and animals possess mental state attribution abilities. It proposes a nonmentalistic, nonbehavioristic framework focusing on action, conation, and sensation for a more accurate explanation.

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Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Science
  • Comparative Psychology
  • Developmental Psychology

Background:

  • Prevailing view attributes rudimentary mental state representation to pre-verbal infants and non-human animals.
  • This view is often based on overinterpreted experimental results.
  • A false dichotomy between mentalism and behaviorism is frequently assumed.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To challenge the prevailing view of mental state attribution in pre-verbal infants and non-human animals.
  • To introduce and explain a novel nonmentalistic, nonbehavioristic explanatory scheme.
  • To demonstrate the explanatory power of this new scheme for cognitive phenomena.

Main Methods:

  • Critically re-evaluating existing experimental interpretations.
  • Proposing a new explanatory framework centered on "action with targets" and "causation by interlocking internal conative and sensory states".
  • Applying the proposed scheme to explain phenomena like false belief understanding without recourse to language.

Main Results:

  • The proposed scheme explains various capacities including conation, sensation, and sensory retention without invoking mentality.
  • It provides an alternative to mentalistic and behavioristic explanations.
  • The scheme successfully accounts for performance on false belief tasks in non-linguistic subjects.

Conclusions:

  • The common belief in rudimentary mental state attribution in infants and animals is likely mistaken.
  • A powerful nonmentalistic, nonbehavioristic explanatory scheme offers a more parsimonious explanation.
  • Further research should explore and refine this alternative framework and develop better testing methodologies.