Rethinking Social Cognition: Power, Status, and the Myth of Mindreading

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?”.

Theory of Mind (ToM)—the capacity to infer others’ mental states—has long been considered the cornerstone of social intelligence. Yet its conceptual and mechanistic foundations remain vague and empirically fragile. The core claim that humans can reliably infer others’ hidden beliefs finds little empirical support: even in the most natural false-belief scenario—lie detection—people perform near chance, correctly identifying only about 54\% of deceptions.

Across humans and other social species, mental state inference is inconsistent, context-dependent, and error-prone, suggesting that “mindreading” reflects memory-based social inference—pattern matching over noisy interactional signals—rather than a dedicated cognitive module. In contrast, status recognition and power-relevant strategies are behaviorally robust, contextually stable, and consistently observed across 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, supported by behavioral, ecological, and neuroscientific evidence, grounds social intelligence in observable interactional dynamics and offers a unified, mechanistic, and cross-species account for understanding the architecture of social mind and society.

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.