Parents’ simulated theory of mind about newborns is what brings infants into human community

Evidence

The newborn infant bears minimal resemblance to the adult that it will become. Its brain has one third of the cortical surface area that it will have as an adult (Hill et al., 2010), and its visual acuity, contrast, and field of vision is considerably limited (Farzin, Rivera, & Whitney, 2010). Objectively, the newborn is strange, unhumanlike—its form is out of proportion, it makes funny noises, it has a distinctive smell, and its movements are jerky and uncoordinated. Remarkably, the infant is not seen objectively, least of all by its parents. This gap between the “objective” (or embodied) infant and the “subjective” (or enacted) infant merits research from embodied and evolutionary perspectives precisely because the objective infant seems to lie beyond the bounds of common folk psychology. Caregivers attribute a subjective life to infants, simulating desires and intentions on behalf of the newborn without regard for its initial limitations. Such attributions, of a theory of mind so to speak, appear essential to bringing the infant into a human community. — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 411

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the ‘wooden leg’ / anthropomorphism literature and to how we treat non-human agents as minded; also resonates with simulation theory of mind-reading. — connects to: Selfhood is formed socially through others from earliest infancy — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 737; Prenatal sonograms mediate parental attachment to a fetus as image — Theresa M. Senft, Camgirls: Celebrity and Community in…, 259
• DEFINE: Distinguishes the objective/embodied infant from the subjective/enacted infant caregivers construct — a useful conceptual pair for caregiving and social cognition.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that adults’ objectively-ungrounded simulation of a newborn’s mind is what instantiates the infant’s humanity is a dense, counterintuitive inversion: the fiction of mind precedes and creates the human.