Abstract: Children’s mindreading (or mentalizing or “theory of mind”) is commonly understood as a series of conceptual changes, and shows good psychometric properties. It can be measured reliably, it shows longitudinal stability, it is distinct from other social and cognitive measures, and it predicts later outcomes, such as friendship quality. The current state of the art in adults is very different. In a recent systematic review we found many proposed “measures” but little evidence that they were reliable or valid. Moreover, it is not even clear how mindreading could vary between adults, over and above effects of domain-general processing or motivation. We believe these problems are related.

We propose that neurotypical adults share the same basic mindreading concepts, but differ in their capacity to use these concepts to make inferences that are plausible and appropriate for a variety of people and situations. Informed by this idea we have crowd-sourced 9 biographical social narratives from a demographically diverse set of people, who also define the mindreading question about what a target individual in the story was thinking or feeling. We are currently analysing data from 2.5k participants aged 13-30. Our first findings suggest that the stories show a good range of performance, load onto a single latent “mindreading” factor, and that this measure shows good psychometric properties. In my talk I will share new results, and will also contextualise this new work alongside other recent findings on how and why mindreading varies in adults.

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