What Is Theory of Mind?

Richard (2000) defined theory of mind (often referred to as TOM or ToM,) as “the ability to understand how other people think and feel” (p. 131). Howlin, Baron-Cohen and Hadwin (1999) defined theory of mind in a more complex manner as “the ability to infer other people’s mental states (their thoughts, beliefs, desires, intentions, etc.), and the ability to use this information to interpret what they say, make sense of their behavior and predict what they will do next” (p. 2).

Theory of mind is a term used to describe a set of skills and abilities. While it does have some of the properties of a theory, researchers have debated whether or not this ability is truly a theory or not. However, as we can’t see what other people are thinking, we are trying to explain and predict thoughts and behavior with a theory (Baron-Cohen & Swettenham, 1997).

Individuals with theory of mind challenges may exhibit a wide range of behaviors and have a broad scope of experiences. These may include:

• insensitivity to other people’s feelings
• inability to take into account what other people know
• inability to negotiate friendships by reading and responding to intentions
• inability to read the listener’s level of interest in one’s speech
• inability to detect a speaker’s intended meaning
• inability to anticipate what others might think of one’s actions
• inability to understand misunderstandings
• inability to deceive or understand deception
• inability to understand the reasons behind people’s actions
• inability to understand “unwritten rules” or conventions
  (Howlin, Baron-Cohen, & Hadwin, 1999, p. 9-11)
  
• Difficulty explaining and predicting the behaviors and/ or emotional states of themselves and others
• Problems understanding the perspectives of others
• Lack of understanding that behavior impacts how others think and/or feel
• Problems with joint attention and other social conventions
• Problems differentiating fiction from fact
  (Myles & Southwick, 1999 p. 8-11)
  
• Difficulty understanding pretending and deception
• Failure to understand social interaction, leading to difficulties with turn-taking, poor topic maintenance in conversation, and inappropriate use of eye-contact
• Difficulty taking into account what other people know or can be expected to know, leading to pedantic or incomprehensible language
• Limited sharing of attention, leading to idiosyncratic reference
  (Cumine, Leach, & Stevenson, 1998, p. 21-22)

Many individuals with ASD think that what they are thinking and feeling is what everyone else is thinking and feeling. They may not understand that others have separate thoughts and feelings and that others are able to access to same information in the environment as they are. It may be difficult for those with ASD to take others’ perspective. In fact, because of their often literal thinking, the phrase “put yourself in someone else's shoes” could leave some individuals with ASD bewildered, pondering how they could put the other person's shoes on their own feet.

Twachtman-Cullen (2000) describes several components of a theory of mind in action (p. 38):

• Step 1: inferring what another person is thinking, feeling, etc., by the external behavior that you see
• Step 2: predicting the future behavior of that or other individuals based on your inference of their mental state
• Step 3: changing/modifying your own behavior based upon the judgments that you made

Theory of mind is more than just being able to take another person’s perspective. It involves being able to change one’s behavior because one took a perspective and read someone else’s body language or external behavior. Then, because of a prediction based on what was observed and inferred, one can change one’s own behavior.

Theory of mind may be thought about as consisting of varying degrees (Perner & Wimmer, 1985):

• First-order belief is when you can describe what another person is thinking about actual events.
• Second-order belief is when you can understand what another person is thinking about another person’s thoughts.
• Higher-order belief is when you are able to think about what others think about what you are thinking about your own thoughts.

It is critical to remember that one’s understanding of those beliefs about others can be either true or false. We may look at someone and read their body language and think that they are mad at us but we may be wrong! That is part of the difficulty of social interaction, especially for individuals with ASD.