Failed Tasks in Animals
Animals consistently fail Theory of Mind tasks, leading many
to claim ToM is uniquely human. But these
tasks may be asking the wrong question.
Debated Minds, Clear Power
Theory of Mind research began with chimpanzees, yet
evidence remains weak and highly debated. In contrast, power behavior in chimps has never been in
question.
Fragile Inference in Humans
Human social inference is context-dependent, fragile, and
prone to error, in part because mental states are inherently unobservable—many people don’t even know what
they believe themselves.
Power Over Mindreading
Across species, power dynamics explain social behavior better
than belief inference. Mental inference in animals is hard to detect—but power tracking is always clear.
Social cognition is often centered on empathy—the capacity to feel or understand others’ emotions. But in many goal-driven interactions—like negotiation, interviews, or sales—empathy offers limited utility. Even if you pick up fragments of the other person’s internal state, that information is often partial, ambiguous, or unreliable—and rarely enough to influence the outcome.
ToM assumes we can access others’ mental states, but in reality, these states are unobservable and unstable. People often don’t know what they believe, change their minds without noticing, or deliberately hide their motives. This makes social inference less about accurate understanding, and more about inference based on memory and loosely related information.
To build a more realistic model of social cognition, we must shift from internal simulation to external structure: not “what is she thinking?”, but “who adjusts to whom?”, “who can afford to act?”, and “who holds leverage?”.
Empathy is often viewed as the cornerstone of social intelligence, with Theory of Mind (ToM)—the capacity to infer others’ mental states—framed as its core mechanism. Yet ToM remains conceptually vague, mechanistically underspecified, and empirically fragile.
Across both humans and other social animals, mental state inference is inconsistent, context-dependent, and error-prone, suggesting that “mindreading” reflects memory-based social inference rather than a dedicated cognitive module. In contrast, status recognition and power-relevant strategies are behaviorally robust, contextually stable, and consistently observed across social species.
We propose reframing social cognition—not as a faculty for mental state inference, but as a structured system for tracking status and navigating power dynamics. This view is supported by controlled behavioral experiments, ecologically valid social tasks, and neuroscience findings. It offers a more mechanistic, cross-species, and psychologically grounded account of social intelligence, providing a stronger foundation for empirical research, real-world application, and computational modeling.
For decades, we've built our theories of social intelligence on the idea of "mindreading"—that humans (and maybe machines) infer others’ beliefs to cooperate.
But the evidence doesn’t add up: animals fail ToM tests, humans misread each other all the time, and power dynamics often predicts behavior better than belief inference.
What if social cognition isn't about beliefs at all—but about power? Not internal beliefs, but external structure—who leads, who yields, who shapes the outcome.
Rethinking ToM around power shifts our focus from imagined minds to real, observable social dynamics. It changes how we study cognition, how we model agents, and how we explain the fabric of social life.