I turn now to the third of the three types of experimental evidence mentioned in section 7.1. This evidence concerns what simulationists call ‘‘quarantine violation’’ and what is called in psychological literature either ‘‘projection’’ or
‘‘egocentrism.’’
There is an extensive literature on egocentric biases in mindreading, and this section and the next one argue that these egocentric biases are best explained by the simulation-plus-projection model. Most of the pertinent studies examine the mindreading of other people, but some concern future (or hypothetical) states of the self. For many purposes, attributing states to others (interpersonal attribution) and attributing future states to oneself (intertem-poral attribution) are equivalent.15 In speaking of ‘‘projection’’ here, I shall somewhat refine the characterization given in section 2.6.
In its most general sense, ‘‘projection’’ refers to ascribing one’s own char-acteristics to others (Kawada, Oettingen, Gollwitzer, and Bargh, 2004). But in the psychological and psychoanalytic literature, ‘‘projection’’ usually refers to something suspect, untoward, or inappropriate. In Freud’s case, it referred to a motivational process by which individuals ascribe their own negative char-acteristics to others while also denying these same charchar-acteristics in them-selves (Freud, 1915/1953). Our characterization of projection in section 2.6 did not make out projection as a notably suspect or inappropriate process. To bring the notion of projection more in line with its current use in psychology (es-pecially social psychology), perhaps we should understand it more narrowly.
In terms of the ST framework, we can profitably understand projection in terms
of a quarantine-violating simulation process in which the quarantine violation strongly affects, or contaminates, the resulting attribution. In other words, projection occurs when a genuine, nonpretend state of the attributor seeps into the simulation routine despite its inappropriateness (as judged by information the attributor possesses). This results in an attribution that is inappropriately influenced by the attributor’s own current states (genuine, nonpretend states). I won’t try to settle the question of when, exactly, being influenced by one’s own genuine states is inappropriate. This description, however, helps convey the connotation of projection as the term is used in psychology, especially social psychology. The simulation approach makes sense of the projection findings reported here without having to settle the question of how, exactly, appro-priateness and inapproappro-priateness should be specified.
The most important point is that projection, in the sense of inappropriate quarantine violation, can account for egocentric bias. I review a body of work about egocentric bias that is readily interpretable within the projection frame-work. This evidence is divided into three sectors: knowledge, valuations, and feelings.
7.7.1 Knowledge
That young children suffer from egocentric biases is well known from the literature on false-belief tasks. But egocentric biases were demonstrated in other kinds of tasks long before developmentalists became interested in
‘‘theory of mind’’ as a well-defined field of inquiry. Krauss and Glucksberg (1969) had two children sit across from each other with a screen placed between them so they could not see one another. One child was designated the speaker, and the other the listener. The speaker’s job was to communicate what objects he or she is selecting so the listener can choose the same objects.
The speaker had to calculate the information needed by the listener to mentally pick out the desired object. In effect, this was a mindreading task for the speaker. Krauss and Glucksberg found that most 4- and 5-year-old chil-dren provide too little information for the listener to choose the correct object. This is presumably because they have an egocentric tendency to project onto the listener their own knowledge states that the listener lacks.
Recent experimental findings on children by Birch and Bloom (2003) yielded very similar results, as reported in section 4.3.
Quite similar findings have been made even for adults. Camerer, Loe-wenstein, and Weber (1989) investigated situations in which well-informed people were required to predict corporate earnings forecasts by other, less-informed people. The better-less-informed people stood to gain if they completely discounted or neglected their own knowledge when making predictions about the less-informed people who they knew lacked the same knowledge. None-theless, the predictors failed to discount their own knowledge completely, so
their predictions partly reflected their proprietary knowledge. The inability to purge this knowledge from their mindreading routine was called the curse of knowledge.
In a study of adults by Keysar et al. (2003), a ‘‘director’’ in a communi-cation game instructed a participant to move certain objects around in a grid.
Participants first hid an object in a bag, such as a roll of tape. The participant knew what was in the bag, but the director didn’t know—and the participant knew that the director didn’t know. When the director said, ‘‘Move the tape,’’
there were (from the participant’s perspective) two candidate tapes: a vid-eotape that both participant and director could see and a secret roll of tape in the bag. Which tape should be moved? This was a mindreading task for the participant. If the participant read the director’s mental state correctly, the matter was unambiguous. The director couldn’t be referring to the tape in the bag, because he didn’t know about it, so he must be referring to the video-tape. Nonetheless, adult participants behaved ‘‘egocentrically,’’ wrongly in-terpreting what was said in terms of their own knowledge rather than the (lesser) knowledge of the speaker.
A study by Newton (1990; described by Pronin, Puccio, and Ross, 2002) vividly illustrates how difficult it can be to divest oneself of privileged knowledge or experience. Participants were assigned to one of two roles:
‘‘tappers’’ or ‘‘listeners.’’ Each tapper was given a list of 25 well-known songs and asked to choose a song, whose rhythm they then tapped out to a listener.
The tapper was then asked to assess the likelihood that the listener would correctly identify the song and to estimate the proportion of listeners who would do so, given the same opportunity. Many of Newton’s tappers reported hearing the full orchestration of the song while tapping, because they knew the song and how it sounded in all its richness. They were apparently unable to quarantine this knowledge when making their predictions. The tappers’ aver-age prediction of listener success was 50 percent, whereas the listeners’ actual success rate was less than 3 percent. In trying to take the perspective of their listeners, it appears, tappers projected their own rich embellishment of a song and failed to construct the more impoverished experience of their listeners.
7.7.2 Valuations
Projecting one’s own mental states onto others extends to valuations and preferences. Van Boven, Dunning, and Loewenstein (2000) did a study in which certain participants were given Cornell coffee mugs and asked to indicate the lowest price they would sell their mugs for, while other partic-ipants didn’t receive mugs but were asked to indicate the highest price they would pay to purchase one. The first group, the mug owners, then estimated the highest purchase price of the average buyer, and buyers, the second group, estimated the lowest selling price of the average owner. Because
prices reflect valuations, these price estimates were, in effect, mental-state estimates. As previous studies had shown, being endowed with a mug makes a big difference to one’s valuation, but this difference—the so-called en-dowment effect—isn’t adequately appreciated. Both owners and buyers un-derestimated the difference between themselves and their opposite numbers.
They apparently projected their own valuations onto their opposite numbers and therefore misestimated how much these participants in opposite roles would set for their buying or selling price. Van Boven et al. called these differences ‘‘egocentric empathy gaps.’’ The only manipulation by the in-vestigators that substantially reduced these gaps was the creation of the role of ‘‘buyer’s agent.’’ Each buyer’s agent represented buyers in transactions with owners. Participants assigned to this role who never owned a mug continued to make unduly low offers, whereas buyers’ agents endowed with mugs made significantly higher offers. Van Boven, Dunning, and Loewen-stein propose that buyers’ agents who owned a mug were better able to imagine how they themselves would feel if they were in the other role; in other words, they could better simulate the sellers’ valuations.
In this last experiment, attributors tended to assume that their targets shared their valuations. This suggests that default attribution is not confined to default belief attribution, as Nichols and Stich (2003) assume. Default attribution of preference was also studied by Ross, Greene, and House (1977).
Subjects were asked to wear a large sandwich board reading ‘‘Eat at Joe’s’’
while walking around campus for half an hour and later were asked how many of their peers would agree to the same request. Subjects who had agreed predicted that 62 percent of their peers would agree, whereas subjects who had refused predicted that only 33 percent of their peers would agree (and the rest would refuse). Thus, subjects tended to predict that others would feel the same way they did.
Projection of desire or aversion also occurs in intrapersonal mindreading (e.g., self-prediction). Loewenstein, Prelec, and Shatto (1998; cited in Read and Van Leeuwen, 1998) refer to people’s inability when in a state of arousal to get into their own future shoes when unaroused, or vice versa. They call this perspective-taking deficiency an ‘‘intrapersonal empathy gap.’’ A cold-to-hot empathy gap is the gap between a nonaroused (cold) self and an aroused (hot) self when the cold self is doing the predicting. A typical case occurs when, after a huge dinner, we believe we will never want to eat again and may even announce plans to skip breakfast. The next morning, of course, when hunger returns, our preference is different.
7.7.3 Feelings
Van Boven and Loewenstein (2003) studied the prediction of hypothetical drive states like hunger and thirst. Participants were asked to predict the
feelings of a described group of hikers lost in the woods with neither food nor water. They made these predictions either before or after vigorous exercise, which presumably made them thirsty and warm. They were also asked how they would feel if they were in the hikers’ situation. Participants who had just exercised were more likely to predict that they would be more bothered by thirst than by hunger than participants who had not yet exercised. Similarly, those who had just exercised were more likely to predict that the hikers would be more bothered by thirst than by hunger. Participants’ combined feelings of thirst and warmth were positively associated with their self-predictions, and their self-predictions reliably indicated their predictions of the hikers’ feel-ings. Van Boven and Loewenstein conclude that people predict how others feel by imagining how they themselves would feel in their situation. People experience empathy gaps in self-predictions; that is, they project their current drives onto the states they would have in the imagined hiking situation.
Because this personal perspective taking is also used to predict the feelings of others (the described hikers), there is ‘‘social’’ projection of their own current feelings.
Most, if not all, of the foregoing studies report mindreading episodes that are readily understood in terms of the simulation-plus-projection model.
The cases all seem amenable to treatment in terms of simulation that is in-appropriately influenced by current states, which bleed into the process as unquarantined inputs. So all of the cases fit the ST story quite comfortably.
But, it will be replied, can’t they fit a TT story just as well?
Loewenstein and Schkade (1999) discuss different possible accounts of how people predict future feelings, including the use of intuitive theories.
Intuitive theories of ‘‘hedonics,’’ for example, are extremely common. People have theories about what types of activities make them happy or unhappy (good food, human relationships, money, intoxicants), about how their cur-rent experiences will affect their future tastes (satiation, addiction, taste formation), and about serial correlation between moods at different points in time (theories about mood swings and monthly and yearly cycles). Could intuitive theories account for all the egocentric biases reported in this section?
No, that is highly implausible. How could an intuitive theory account for the curse of knowledge? Does everyone afflicted with the curse of knowledge accept as a general proposition that ‘‘other people believe whatever I be-lieve’’? Do they go on accepting that theory even when specifically informed that others are ignorant of what they themselves know? In typical curse-of-knowledge cases, an attributor is apprised of the fact that certain information in his possession is proprietary, that is, unshared by the target. Does he cling to the indicated theoretical generalization in the face of that fact and innu-merable other facts of divergent beliefs? Perhaps people don’t accept such a broad and unqualified generalization. Maybe they accept only a qualified, ceteris paribus generalization, like ‘‘other things being equal, others believe
what I do.’’ When things aren’t ‘‘equal,’’ such as when somebody lacks epi-stemic access to facts to which I have access, then he or she may believe something different from what I believe (or lack a relevant belief altogether).
The trouble with this approach is that attributors in curse-of-knowledge ex-amples are informed that their target lacks epistemic access to the relevant facts. If they were using the qualified generalization, they should not ascribe their own belief to the target. But attributors do ascribe their own beliefs to the target, all too frequently. So reasoning from the qualified generalization as the operative intuitive theory does not explain the phenomenon. A better approach, clearly, is a nontheorizing, nonpurely inferential model of mind-reading that somehow incorporates people’s predilection to inject their own knowledge or other genuine first-order states into mindreading activity. That is the sort of model provided by the simulation-plus-projection theory.
A mixed-method approach that accommodates both simulation and theo-rizing is becoming increasingly popular. It borrows the idea of ‘‘anchoring and adjustment,’’ originally described by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahne-man (1974). Subjects were asked to estimate various quantities stated in percentages, for example, the number of African countries in the United Nations. For each quantity, a number between 0 and 100 was determined by spinning a wheel of fortune in the subjects’ presence. Subjects were in-structed to estimate the value of the quantity by moving upward or downward from the given number. These arbitrary numbers had a marked effect on estimates. For example, the median estimates of the percentage of African countries in the United Nations were 25 and 45 for groups that received 10 and 65, respectively, as starting points. In recent work on perspective taking, a two-step procedure analogous to anchoring and adjustment has been sug-gested (Epley, Morewedge, and Keysar, 2004; Epley, Keysar, van Boven, and Gilovich, 2004; Gilovich, Savitzky, and Medvec, 1998). In a form I find particularly promising, a mindreading process might consist of a two- or three-step procedure in which an anchoring phase involves simulation-plus-projection and an adjustment phase uses general theoretical information to revise the initial, default attribution.
A clear example of this approach, applied to self-prediction, is found in Gilbert, Gill, and Wilson (2002). Although Gilbert et al. do not use the term simulation, they describe the first phase of their proposed model in the lan-guage of ‘‘mental proxies.’’ This description corresponds closely to what I have been calling ‘‘E-imagination.’’
If we wish to predict how we would feel upon finding our spouse in bed with the letter carrier on New Year’s Eve, we might imagine the event and then take note of how we react to the mental image. Because real and imagined events activate many of the same neural and psychological processes. . . reactions to imaginary events can provide useful information about one’s likely reaction to the events themselves. (2002: 431)
We can reformulate Gilbert et al.’s suggestion in ST terminology. A person E-imagines observing the hypothetical event, feeds this imagined observation into an affect-generating mechanism, and lets it operate on the input to pro-duce affective outputs, for instance, waves of jealousy and anger. The affec-tive reactions experienced are then used to predict how one would react in the hypothetical situation. So far, this sounds like a page out of an ST textbook.
Gilbert et al. call the output reactions ‘‘proxy reactions.’’ They do not hold, however, that predictors make unmodified use of proxy reactions. When trying to predict real (as opposed to hypothetical) future events, people realize that the events to be predicted are temporally removed from the current situation, so they commonly use a more complex, three-step procedure. They first imagine events without temporal information (‘‘atemporal representation’’).
Next they use their hedonic reactions to these mental images (‘‘proxy reac-tions’’) as the basis for a preliminary prediction. Third, they correct or adjust their preliminary forecast by explicitly considering the target event’s temporal location (‘‘temporal correction’’). The adjustment step, of course, introduces an element of theorizing, so the entire Gilbert et al. model is a simulation-theory blend. That is perfectly congenial to the hybrid approach endorsed here.