The Problem of (Writing for) Other Minds
Do you know what I mean?
One day when I was a kid we went to the zoo. In the primates house, surrounded by other, highly social species, there was a game. It went like this: there were two kits of colourful shapes, and a barrier to put up between the two players. One player creates a design with the shapes, and then describes it to the other person, who is seated on the other side of the barrier with an identical kit but without any view of the first player’s arrangement.
The players go back and forth, one player describing and the other attempting to recreate their design. “The green triangle is sitting on top of the red square, but to the left,” says the describing-player. The other player can ask any questions they want. When everyone considers themselves to have communicated, the barrier comes down.
The results almost always are “wrong”, they don’t match. That’s where the fun comes in, actually: no matter how much the two players thought they were on the same page, their designs generally don’t line up, and in fact are often almost comically different.
What this game is (although I wasn’t told this as a child) is a test of theory of mind: the ability we have to model others’ minds, which especially includes the recognition that their minds, their beliefs, their ideas, their instincts, are truly and often radically different from our own.
In psychology research, the test for theory of mind isn’t usually the barrier game but “the smarties test”.
(Non-British folks: Smarties ™ are a small candy, a bit like M&Ms, that come in a tube and look like this:)
The Smarties test works like this. A child is put in a room with a psychologist (sorry kid). The psychologist says “mommy is going to go in the other room. We’ll see her later!” Mom leaves (she can usually secretly watch the kid through a two-way mirror).
The psychologist holds up a tube of Smarties. “What do you think is in here?” the psychologist asks. Obviously, the kids says, “Smarties!” they can’t wait to have some. Then, the psychologist opens the tube and there’s buttons inside. As you might imagine, this is rather disappointing. (I always hope the kid gets Smarties later).
Here’s the important bit, though. The psychologist then closes the tube and says “now we’re going to have mommy come back in the room. When I show her this tube, what do you think she will think is in it?”.
When children are pretty small, say around the age of two, they tend to say “buttons!”
Then, at a certain crucial point, perhaps around age three, they tend to say: “Smarties!”
This is when a child has developed this theory of mind: when they know that mom and dad have different minds than themselves, that they don’t have access to the fact that the tube actually only has buttons in it after all. It’s a major realisation, enormous, life-changing. Not the realisation that not all smarties-boxes have smarties in them, literally or metaphorically (though this is also a key realisation) but that other people don’t know the same things we do, other people don’t have our minds.
It is the end of fusion and the beginning of relationality and, arguably, intimacy.
It’s no coincidence that around this time, children learn to lie, and often do so compulsively and un-persuasively for a bit. Having just discovered that other minds are different than their own, they’re working away at discovering exactly how that works, and how much they can get away with.
But, weirdly, although most of us develop theory of mind, it turns out all of us do this only weakly; we’re always in danger of unconsciously flagging in our recognition that others really don’t see or model the world the way we do. There are a bunch of psychology studies that demonstrate this regular fault in our modelling, that show that we often forget all over again that other people don’t know what we know. I won’t rehash these studies here; I figure you’ve probably had your fill of these for the day.
No wonder I often get annoyed when my partners don’t seem to get something I’ve been trying to get across, and even feel that they must be being purposely difficult. It’s just tremendously difficult to hold on to the fact that they don’t actually have access to what’s obvious to me. No wonder it’s so easy to annoy other people without realising it, to upset, offend, or put people on edge, no wonder all of us have done this. It’s very very difficult to model the mind of the other. And, worse, we’re all at risk of underestimating just how likely we are to do this. At some level, the research shows, most of us think others really do know what we’re thinking, even if we don’t quite realise we’re operating with that assumption.
(As an interesting side point, autistic people are sometimes described as lacking a theory of mind. But since studies show they do pretty darn well at communicating with each other, just not with non-autistic people, it’s possible this is a bad description of what’s going on. Instead, it’s likely autistic people are simply better at modeling, and therefore relating to, other autistic people, just as ‘neurotypical’ people are best at modeling other neurotypical people. It’s simply always easier to model people who are ‘like us.’)
Knowing what another person’s mind is like is so difficult that we cannot manage even when it is merely a matter of literal geometry. No wonder there are so many misunderstandings even with (say) basic tasks in the workplace. But more to the point, perhaps, no wonder human relationships are so difficult. No wonder we cannot come to the depths of human emotion in others; we often simply give up and say “I can’t even imagine”. No wonder we cannot manage to understand each other in periods of difficulty and conflict; no wonder parents and children often are at odds forever over something. See also the cases of so many exes, and ex-friends. It’s heartbreaking that human relationships often fracture in this way, but we shouldn’t be surprised. It is simply unbearably difficult to even roughly model another person’s experience; it is amazing we ever manage to do it at all.
Having theory of mind is a fragile accomplishment for us all, something that we’re always at risk of lapsing from and something that gets harder when we socially atrophy or as we get older. It’s fragile and difficult simply because it requires so much of us, so much mental bandwidth, so much grappling with uncertainty, so much work to generate an entirely alternative and often contradictory reality. It’s the messy and imperfect work of the rest of our lifetime.
Still, we’re lucky. The barrier game was in the primate house for a reason; the curators wanted to point out that, while the other primates of the world seem to be able to occasionally learn sign language (maybe), we humans made up complex language for ourselves and we use it all the time, for tasks far more complicated than aligning colourful shapes. That’s sort of what language is: the tool for the task of trying to bridge the gap between two minds. Talking is a sacred little task of alignment. That’s the stakes whenever we ask: do you know what I mean?
The question that the barrier game poses isn’t just “see how hard it is to communicate?” but, taken wisely, “see how much we must work to get it right?.”
What, then, does this mean when it comes to writing? I’d like to suggest that writing is also a task of theory of mind, at least mostly. Or at least: by the time we send our writing into the world, we ought to have practiced theory of mind in a number of concrete ways.
Don’t get me wrong: like most writers, I also write solipsistically, for myself. I write at first to figure out what on earth I think: often because, once I put pen to paper, I frequently discover that many of my own ideas just don’t really hold up, and that I should have discarded them long ago. As Deleuze puts it, “We write only at the frontiers of our knowledge, at the border which separates our knowledge from our ignorance and transforms the one into the other. Only in this matter are we resolved to write. To satisfy ignorance is to put off writing until tomorrow...”
Once I have some sense, however, of what I think, my task is then to convey it to someone else. There are, it seems to me, at least two and perhaps three seemingly simple but actually very difficult tasks related to writing and theory of mind:
Testing your writing is the only way to know how you’ve done:
If my writing is easy to follow, easier than that of most academics anyhow, it’s not by accident. For years and years in my previous job, I taught. I stood up in front of a sea of adults and talked to them about ideas. When I was too slow, too repetitive, too fast, skipped an idea, or said it in the wrong order, the results were immediate: people checked their phones, complained, or (if I was really lucky) asked questions. After about ten years, an autopilot kicked in both when teaching and writing, a form of attention that is obsessively attuned to the perspective of the recipient. What do they know? Is this enough for them to grasp the next idea?
No wonder I seem to spend much of my waking hours obsessing over the order of paragraphs. Order might seem a trivial thing, beneath questions of either style or substance, but it’s actually crucial and profound. What does that pesky other know and remember? It’s difficult to keep track.
Every other weekend I read my manuscript out loud to a group of people on zoom and get their feedback. It’s a lot of extra work to do this when I’m already on a deadline. The most difficult bit is of course the end, when they tell me what they’ve understood, which is frequently very different than I imagined. But the hours and wincing are worth it, because it allows me to have access to what it is like to encounter my writing with a mind that is not my own.
I understand that we live in an age where social media is horrific; depression-and-paranoia inducing, stealing our time and attention, and so on. But I will say that in social media I do find one silver lining, at least for writers and presenters: it creates a place to test out one’s theory of mind with regard to one’s audience all the time. I am grateful to have a place to share my ideas in miniature and discover what people love and hate and simply don’t understand.
1.b. Our theory of mind is always incomplete, including when we write.
Writing can be addictive in part because, if we’re honest, many of us are using it for a certain kind of assertive venting, and an attempt to force the other to understand. By this I mean many writers, including myself, reach for the keyboard in part because we crave an arena for hermeneutic justice, a place where we are finally given the time and space to make ourselves properly known for once and for all. No, many of us are subtly, and indeed unsubtly, insisting in our writing, no, I’m not like that, it’s not like that, it’s like this. Take that, parents, lovers, exes, friends, critics, high school bullies. This is what I’m really like.
This is a losing game, however. As with the barrier game, something will usually go wrong, no matter what we do. (People see us the way they are, not the way we are, as the therapy-jargon advice goes.)
When a piece of mine takes off, and everyone writes me about, they write me about themselves, not me. This happened to me too, they tell me. This reminds of me of something profound in my life! And that is how I know I wrote well, because (again) my writing is truly for them and not for me. If it were otherwise one might as well just keep a diary and spare oneself the pain of exercising theory of mind.
Writing is audience specific. We need a different theory of mind for every audience.
Writers tend to ask each other a question that seems painfully basic: who is your audience? This question used to annoy me all the time, especially when I was stuck in the mode of writing for myself, figuring out what I thought. But, like many apparently simple questions, it was really getting at the one big question, which is about the reader: not only what they know and believe, but also what they will bring to the words on the page, which will always be more profound to them than anything the author can formally utter. It’s very difficult work to imagine exactly how an audience of thousands will on average relate to any given sentence; no wonder a lot of advice suggests you just pick one person (your mom, your auntie, your favourite teacher, whoever) and write for them. Having a single person simplifies the task of modelling the other.
What’s particularly important in all this, I’d suggest, is not just what the audience knows but what they actually care about, what lies within their ‘affective context’: the things that truly motivate us day to day. One’s affective context is the stuff we care enough about to stop texting and scrolling. Whenever I teach pedagogy I remind both myself and others: our affective context is remarkably, almost embarassingly small. We might in theory ‘care’ about climate change or literary fiction, but (if social media is anything to judge by) we mostly read about our own trauma, our relationships, and what we should make for lunch. Those topics are the things that are truly central in our affective context. Even (and indeed especially) if one has supposedly loftier topics to address in one’s writing, one competes with this context and this content, and would be wise to keep it in mind.
As in a long marriage, I try to recall that the audience and their cares change, too. We might assume we know them well, and then suddenly they’re interested in something entirely new. When I describe writing as influencing, this is part of what I mean: one is never really providing a static product or set of ideas; rather one is building a specific relationship with the audience which is necessarily dynamic like any real human relationship.
As in marriage, one should remain curious, asking questions, literally or figuratively, attuned to the new version of the other that emerges each day. It’s exhausting. Especially if you take a risk and choose an audience that isn’t really ‘like you’.
In one sense, the barrier game should be a warning for children of how the rest of life will be. It’s frustrating and even a bit scary to learn how bad we are at this modelling of the other, how much work it takes, how we’re almost always a bit wrong when the barrier comes down. But at least (I console myself) it makes things frustrating and interesting. It would be terribly dull if we really did get other people fully, if they were simple enough to model easily.
And, another consolation: the work of trying to reach the other is wonderfully intimate. My closest friendships let me test out my theory of mind, and play the barrier game with the big existential bits of life. I’m having a bad day, I’m having an unexpected year, I’m having a weird feeling I don’t know how to describe… I tell my closest people, and they listen and try to create a model of me and then I do the same for them. We crawl towards each other through a sea of words. Do you know what I mean?
The most important friends even help me feel less alone with the theory of mind problem itself. It’s so hard to know what others think, stranded as I am on my island of neurons. But at least (I console myself in writing this) I’m not alone with that problem. But at least there are others who struggle with this too. Do you know what I mean ?