Against a normative view of folk psychology

Recently Elqayam and Evans (2011) have proposed that researchers studying human thinking should be moving away from normative accounts that specify how we “ought” to reason to a more descriptivist framework that describes how we reason. This is an approach that I very much support. The aim of the present article is to demonstrate how this can be applied to the study of mental state reasoning in terms of folk psychology (FP). Folk psychology refers to our everyday ability to attribute mental states to other people, including their beliefs, desires, intentions and so forth (e.g., Ratcliffe and Hutto, 2007). I do not want to deny that FP can be normative. Indeed, there are many instances where normative responding is required. For example, in the traditional false belief task (e.g., Baron-Cohen et al., 1985) there is a “right” or “wrong” answer a single norm paradigm (Elqayam and Evans, 2011). However, it may be the case that FP is normative in certain circumstances (e.g., the false belief task) but as I shall suggest below this is not always the case. By viewing FP as normative what researchers end up doing is ignoring the processes of how such inferences arise. What I want to propose is that viewing FP as normative is problematic since it reduces mental state inferences to simply being “right” or “wrong.” I propose that moving away from a normative agenda in FP and embracing a more descriptivist framework proves extremely useful for our understanding of how we understand others’ minds.