A friend reads your message but does not reply. By evening, the silence has acquired a meaning. Perhaps you have offended them. Perhaps they are overwhelmed. Perhaps they opened the message between errands and forgot. You have observed one action, yet several different inner experiences could explain it. Much of social life unfolds in this space between what people do and what we think their behavior means.

Theory of mind is the capacity to understand people in terms of mental states, including beliefs, desires, knowledge, intentions, and feelings. It allows us to recognize that another person’s understanding can differ from our own and from reality, and to use that understanding to explain or anticipate behavior (Premack & Woodruff, 1978; Doherty, 2009).

This capacity helps us make sense of communication and misunderstandings. In children, understanding what another person knows also contributes to learning and teaching (Carlson et al., 2013). These interpretations also introduce uncertainty. Recognizing that someone has a mind does not give us direct access to its contents. We still have to distinguish what we know about a person from what we have supplied ourselves.

What Is Theory of Mind

Imagine that a colleague walks to a meeting room that has recently changed. You know the new location; your colleague missed the announcement. Their behavior makes sense once you consider what they believe. The room they approach is wrong according to the updated schedule, but reasonable according to their information.

Beliefs and desires work together in these explanations. Someone wants to attend a meeting and believes it is in a particular room. Someone wants a quiet evening and believes declining an invitation will make that possible. Henry Wellman’s account of children’s developing psychology places this relationship between beliefs, desires, and action near the center of everyday social understanding (Wellman, 1990).

Several distinctions follow. Wanting something does not mean obtaining it. Intending to help does not mean helping successfully. Knowing what happened does not mean everyone else knows. A mental state concerns a person’s relationship to a situation, and that relationship can differ from the situation itself (Wellman, 1990).

The word theory sometimes causes confusion. Here it refers to an organized understanding that makes otherwise puzzling behavior intelligible. We need not consciously formulate a psychological explanation each time someone reaches for a coat. We often understand the action immediately in its setting (Doherty, 2009; Leudar et al., 2004).

How We Explain Other Minds

Researchers offer different accounts of how this understanding works. In theory-theory, people develop an interconnected understanding of how mental states relate to experience and behavior. A belief that rain is coming, together with a desire to stay dry, helps explain taking an umbrella. Simulation accounts emphasize using our own minds to imagine another person’s situation and anticipate a response (Doherty, 2009).

These are explanations of the process, rather than different definitions of the capacity. Doherty discusses the possibility that understanding other minds draws on both conceptual knowledge and simulation. We may recognize familiar patterns, imagine an experience, and use what we know about a particular person. Considering several processes leaves room for the fact that imagining how we would respond does not necessarily reveal how someone else responds (Doherty, 2009).

Theory of Mind and Empathy

Understanding another person’s belief and caring about that person’s welfare are distinguishable. You might correctly recognize that someone expects rejection without feeling much concern. You might feel deeply concerned about a friend while misunderstanding what has upset them. Singer and Klimecki distinguish mental-state inference from sharing another person’s emotions and from compassionate concern for their welfare (Singer & Klimecki, 2014).

Terminology varies across research traditions. Cognitive empathy sometimes refers to understanding another person’s perspective, overlapping with theory of mind. Emotional empathy often refers to sharing an emotional experience. The useful distinction here concerns what we are doing: considering a belief, sharing a feeling, or becoming motivated to respond with care. These experiences can occur together without being identical (Singer & Klimecki, 2014).

Theory of mind concerns the understanding and attribution of mental states. That understanding can support a considerate response, but it can also support deception. Someone who knows what another person believes may use that knowledge to mislead them. Deception was part of the early experimental work and remains an instructive reminder that social insight is not, by itself, a moral virtue (Wimmer & Perner, 1983; Doherty, 2009).

The practical implication is that accurate understanding and humane action require separate attention. Knowing where someone is vulnerable does not determine how we treat them. Likewise, a misunderstanding does not establish indifference. We need to look at the person’s response to clarification and the pattern of their actions.

How Researchers Study Theory of Mind

Origins of the Research

David Premack and Guy Woodruff introduced the term in their 1978 paper, Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind? Their experiments asked whether a chimpanzee could select solutions to filmed problems faced by a human. The work helped focus attention on a question that also matters in research with children: Does an appropriate response demonstrate understanding of another’s mental state, or could a different process explain it? Wimmer and Perner later developed influential tests involving a character’s mistaken belief (Premack & Woodruff, 1978; Wimmer & Perner, 1983).

The Meaning of a False Belief

Consider a simple example adapted from the logic of these experiments. Maya places her keys in a drawer and leaves. While she is away, someone moves them into a bag. When Maya returns, where will she look first?

The relevant answer is the drawer. Maya has not seen the move, so she has no reason to update her belief. A child who points to the bag may remember the keys perfectly while struggling to predict action from someone else’s mistaken understanding. The issue is the difference between where the keys are and where Maya thinks they are (Wimmer & Perner, 1983; Doherty, 2009).

Across many standard verbal tasks, children show substantial gains in false-belief understanding during the preschool years, commonly succeeding around four or five. This is a broad developmental pattern. It is not a birthday on which an understanding of other people suddenly appears, and one unsuccessful answer cannot establish that a child lacks social understanding (Carlson et al., 2013).

Task performance also depends on understanding the question, remembering the story, and resisting an answer based on the actual location. These demands matter when interpreting a result. Researchers must ask both what the child understands about belief and what the task requires the child to do with that understanding (Carlson et al., 2013; Doherty, 2009).

How Theory of Mind Develops

Early Social Understanding

The beginnings of social understanding precede success on verbal false-belief tasks. Infants attend to people’s gaze and goal-directed actions, and later participate in shared attention. Such experiences create opportunities to learn that other people attend to particular things and act toward particular ends. They should not automatically be treated as evidence that infants understand belief in the same way as older children (Carlson et al., 2013; Wellman, 2017).

Researchers have also used looking measures and other tasks that require little speech to investigate early sensitivity to false beliefs. Interpreting these findings requires care because looking toward an expected event and explicitly explaining a person’s mistaken belief involve different responses. Carlson and colleagues discuss competing explanations of the relationship between early sensitivity and later conceptual understanding; these different measures should not simply be treated as interchangeable (Carlson et al., 2013).

Desires and Beliefs

Children’s understanding does not develop evenly across every kind of mental state. They can appreciate aspects of wanting before they reliably understand mistaken belief. Wanting a different snack is easier to grasp than believing something about a snack that is untrue. Wellman’s developmental work describes these changes as a progression toward a richer understanding of how minds represent the world (Wellman, 1990; Wellman, 2017).

Developmental scales therefore examine several achievements: recognizing different desires, different beliefs, differences in access to knowledge, false beliefs, and the possibility that an expressed emotion differs from a felt one. These distinctions reveal more than a single pass-or-fail score (Wellman, 2018).

Experience also affects the sequence. Wellman’s historical review describes research in which Chinese and American children showed differences in the relative ordering of knowledge-access and diverse-belief understanding. This complicates the idea of one rigid timetable applying everywhere. Shared developmental changes can coexist with variation associated with language and social experience (Wellman, 2017).

Language and Executive Function

Talking about thinking gives children ways to compare perspectives. There is a difference between saying that a toy is under the bed and saying that someone thinks it is under the bed. Words such as think, know, and guess help mark the relationship between a statement and the person making it. Doherty discusses language as one important contributor to children’s developing understanding of mental states (Doherty, 2009).

To answer the keys question, a child has to remember what Maya saw and set aside what the child now knows. These demands draw on executive function: the abilities that help us hold information in mind, shift attention, and pause an immediate response. Carlson and colleagues review evidence that these abilities develop alongside success on theory-of-mind tasks. Researchers still debate how the abilities influence one another (Carlson et al., 2013).

These findings support a view of development involving interacting capacities. They do not justify reducing social understanding to vocabulary, self-control, or a single parenting practice. Children participate in relationships while their language, attention, and conceptual understanding are changing together.

Theory of Mind Beyond Childhood

Passing an early false-belief task leaves much to learn. A person may conceal disappointment to avoid hurting someone. A speaker may use irony. Two people may interpret the same event differently because they bring different experiences to it. Understanding these situations involves more than recognizing that someone has not seen an object move (Wellman, 2017; Wellman, 2018).

There are also beliefs about beliefs. A child might understand that Maya thinks the keys are in the drawer before finding it easy to follow a story about what another person thinks Maya believes. Increasing complexity creates new demands on comprehension and attention (Carlson et al., 2013). Later development extends the kinds of mental situations a person can understand; it does not guarantee an accurate interpretation in every encounter.

What Theory of Mind Tests Can Tell Us

What Different Tasks Measure

False-belief tasks are valuable because they expose a distinction that everyday agreement can conceal. When everyone knows the same thing, successful coordination tells us relatively little about whether one person understands another’s perspective. A mistaken belief makes the difference visible. Yet, as Wellman cautions, understanding desire, knowledge, emotion, and interpretation also belongs in the developmental picture (Wellman, 2017).

Research across adulthood and later life faces a measurement problem. Preschool tasks may be too easy, while more advanced tests draw on different combinations of language, inference, and emotional interpretation. Comparing people across the lifespan requires measures that capture meaningful developmental differences. A collection of tests labeled theory of mind does not necessarily measure one identical ability (Wellman, 2018).

Researchers also study how accurately people understand one another during actual encounters. Ickes describes a method in which people watch a recorded interaction and report what they were thinking or feeling at particular moments. An observer’s guesses can then be compared with those reports. This is called empathic accuracy. The comparison is useful, although a person’s report of their own experience can also be incomplete or mistaken (Ickes, 1997; Eyal et al., 2018).

These differences make a single score an incomplete description of social understanding. They also call for caution about broad claims that people invariably become better at understanding minds with age, or inevitably lose the capacity in later life. The answer depends partly on what is assessed and how the assessment works (Wellman, 2018).

Autism and Individual Differences

Theory-of-mind research has been influential in accounts of autism. Some studies report differences in performance on particular tasks, but sweeping claims that autistic people lack an understanding of minds go beyond what such results establish. Gernsbacher and Yergeau’s critical review challenges the universality and specificity of these claims, as well as the consistency and real-world relevance of the measures used (Gernsbacher & Yergeau, 2019).

That critique calls for precision. A result on one task should not become a judgment about an entire person’s empathy, credibility, or capacity for relationships. People differ in language, experience, and the ways they communicate. Understanding a test result requires attention to those differences rather than assuming that the label explains them all.

Understanding Minds in Shared Situations

Leudar, Costall, and Francis raise a broader question: Do we always understand people by working out what is hidden inside their minds? In a familiar situation, a shared routine or a brief exchange may already make an action clear. Their critique asks researchers to pay more attention to what people are doing together and the circumstances they share. It challenges the reach of theory-of-mind explanations without dismissing the findings of false-belief research (Leudar et al., 2004).

For a reader, this means keeping the concept useful without making it explain everything. Social understanding occurs between people in situations. Laboratory measures offer evidence about selected parts of that process.

From Imagining a Perspective to Asking About It

Recognizing that other people have perspectives is different from accurately identifying a particular person’s thoughts. Returning to the unanswered message, several explanations remain possible. Imagining your friend’s situation may help you generate alternatives, but the detail of an imagined explanation does not establish its accuracy. A convincing story can still be your story (Ickes, 1997; Eyal et al., 2018).

Understanding Accurately and Feeling Understood

There are several questions worth keeping separate. Can we recognize that another person has a different perspective? Is our interpretation of that perspective correct? Do we care about the person’s experience? Does our response help them feel understood? Together, these questions provide a way to organize the distinctions discussed here; they are not a validated psychological scale.

Perceived partner responsiveness concerns feeling understood, valued, and cared for. Itzchakov and colleagues describe listening as one way people communicate these qualities. In their account, attentive listening includes trying to comprehend the speaker’s meaning, asking relevant questions, and conveying positive regard (Itzchakov et al., 2022).

An experiment by Weger and colleagues illustrates the distinction. Among 115 undergraduate participants interacting with trained conversational partners, those receiving active-listening responses reported feeling more understood than those receiving advice or simple acknowledgments. The finding concerns participants’ experience of the conversation. It does not establish that listeners had more accurately inferred the participants’ unspoken thoughts or had developed stronger theory-of-mind abilities (Weger et al., 2014).

In the message example, learning that your friend was overwhelmed might correct your belief that they were angry. Responding by dismissing their difficulty could still leave them feeling misunderstood. Conversely, a reassuring response might feel caring while resting on an incorrect assumption. These examples illustrate why accuracy and the experience of being understood each deserve attention.

Asking and Learning From the Answer

Across 25 experiments, Eyal, Steffel, and Epley examined whether taking another person’s perspective improves accuracy. Their findings did not support a dependable accuracy benefit from simply imagining that perspective. In the final experiment, involving 104 romantic couples, discussing a partner’s opinions improved accuracy when predicting the opinions they had discussed. Participants instructed to imagine their partner’s perspective did not become more accurate than those allowed to use their preferred strategy (Eyal et al., 2018). These findings concern the tested situations; they do not mean imagination has no interpersonal value or that conversation guarantees complete understanding.

One practical application is to separate an observation from an interpretation. The observation might be that a message has gone unanswered. The interpretation might be that the friend is angry. Keeping those statements separate leaves room for other information. A question such as whether they have had time to think about the message gives them an opportunity to explain.

The practical invitation is to ask in a way that leaves room for correction, then check what we have heard. A brief paraphrase can make our interpretation available for the other person to confirm or revise. The listening research supports the value of communicating attention and understanding; this particular message example is an application of the research, rather than a tested script (Weger et al., 2014; Itzchakov et al., 2022).

Asking also does not remove the need for judgment. People can be mistaken about themselves, reluctant to disclose, or intentionally misleading. Sperber and colleagues’ account of epistemic vigilance explains why evaluating communicated information involves considering both the source and the content. Another person’s explanation deserves consideration alongside relevant evidence and patterns of behavior (Sperber et al., 2010; Eyal et al., 2018).

Curiosity also has limits. Understanding someone’s intentions does not cancel the effects of harmful behavior, and uncertainty about motives need not prevent a boundary. When conduct is threatening or coercive, a person does not have to resolve the other person’s inner experience before taking steps to protect themselves. Theory of mind can inform understanding while leaving responsibility and safety intact.

A Few Words by Psychology Fanatic

We spend much of life responding to meanings we cannot directly see. A pause becomes hesitation; an offer becomes affection; silence becomes rejection. Sometimes our interpretations are well informed. Sometimes they reflect how we would feel in the same circumstances, with too little attention to how another person’s circumstances differ.

Theory of mind helps explain how we move from actions to possible beliefs and feelings. Its most useful lesson may be the space it leaves for correction, an openness explored further in intellectual humility. Another person has a perspective that deserves consideration, and our first account of that perspective may be incomplete. We can take what we observe seriously while allowing another person to tell us something we did not already know.

Associated Concepts

• Mentalization: Reflecting on mental states connects theory of mind with the emotional and relational work of understanding ourselves and others.
• Mind Reading: Treating an inference about another person’s thoughts as established fact illustrates how social interpretation can become an error.
• Behavioral Intentions: Understanding an intended action requires distinguishing what someone plans from what actually happens.
• Epistemic Trust: Judging what another person knows and whether to rely on their testimony connects mental-state understanding with learning from others.
• Perceived Partner Responsiveness: The sense that another person understands, values, and cares for us. This concept helps distinguish accurately interpreting someone’s thoughts from responding in a way that helps them feel understood.
• Intellectual Humility: Recognizing the limits of our knowledge and remaining open to correction. Applied to theory of mind, it means treating our interpretations of another person’s thoughts as potentially incomplete or mistaken.

References

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Doherty, Martin J. (2009). Theory of Mind: How Children Understand Others’ Thoughts and Feelings. Psychology Press. ISBN: 9780203929902. DOI: 10.4324/9780203929902.
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Eyal, Tal; Steffel, Mary; Epley, Nicholas (2018). Perspective Mistaking: Accurately Understanding the Mind of Another Requires Getting Perspective, Not Taking Perspective. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 114(4), 547–571. DOI: 10.1037/pspa0000115.
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Gernsbacher, Morton Ann; Yergeau, Melanie (2019). Empirical Failures of the Claim That Autistic People Lack a Theory of Mind. Archives of Scientific Psychology, 7(1), 102–118. DOI: 10.1037/arc0000067.
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Ickes, William (1997). Introduction. In William Ickes (Ed.), Empathic Accuracy (pp. 1–16). Guilford Press. ISBN: 9781572301610.
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