Evidence against implicit belief processing in a blindfold task

Abstract

Understanding what other people think is crucial to our everyday interactions. We seem to be affected by the perspective of others even in situations where it is irrelevant to us. This intrusion from others’ perspectives has been referred to as altercentric bias and has been suggested to reflect implicit belief processing. There is an ongoing debate about how robust such altercentric effects are and whether they indeed reflect true mentalizing or result from simpler, domain-general processes. As a critical test for true mentalizing, the blindfold manipulation has been proposed. That is, participants are familiarized with a blindfold that is either transparent or opaque. When they then observe a person wearing this blindfold, they can only infer what this person can or cannot see based on their knowledge of the blindfold’s transparency. Here, we used this blindfold manipulation to test whether participants’ reaction times in detecting an object depended on the agent’s belief about the object’s location, itself manipulated with a blindfold. As a second task, we asked participants to detect where the agent was going to look for the object. Across two experiments with a large participant pool (N = 234) and different settings (online/lab), we found evidence against altercentric biases in participants’ response times in detecting the object. We did, however, replicate a well-documented reality congruency effect. When asked to detect the agent’s action, in turn, participants were biased by their own knowledge of where the object should be, in line with egocentric biases previously found in false belief reasoning. These findings suggests that altercentric biases do not reflect belief processing but lower-level processes, or alternatively, that implicit belief processing does not occur when the belief needs to be inferred from one’s own experience.