Mind reading competence is learned through cultural scaffolding from birth

Evidence

Folk psychology, Bruner writes, is “a set of more or less connected, more or less normative descriptions about how human beings ‘tick,’ what our own and other minds are like, what one can expect situated action to be like, what are possible modes of life, how one commits oneself to them, and so on. We learn our culture’s folk psychology early, learn it as we learn to use the very language we acquire and to conduct the interpersonal transactions required in communal life” (Bruner, 1990, p. 35). Parents, friends, and older children scaffold the active developing infant into this domain, starting with the location of birth, who helps in the birth, how the baby is wrapped, and when and how it is fed and by whom—and that is just the beginning. (One of us was startled to see during a hospital visit that the nursery had a group of newborns with pink bows Scotch taped to their heads. Without guessing or analysis, these were obviously the baby girls.) — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 431

Categorization

• DEFINE: Bruner’s folk psychology is defined here as the culture-specific normative descriptions of how minds work.
• XREF: connects to: Cultural learning machinery must activate early in development — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture…, 187; Mentalizing abilities emerge by eight months and sharpen in toddlers — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture…, 189; Individual intelligence results from culturally accumulated tools rather than raw brainpower — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture…, 53