3-207 - Are implicit theory of mind findings robust? Some doubts from converging non-replications across the lifespan

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Theory of mind (ToM) research has been revolutionized by spectacular novel findings with implicit measures in children and adults documenting early and spontaneous mindreading. These findings have been taken to show that traditional ToM research has vastly underestimated early competence and that children have innate, possibly modular ToM capacities. However, such ambitious theoretical conclusions are built on thin empirical grounds. In contrast to traditional verbal ToM research, positive findings with implicit measures are still relatively sparse, with sample sizes far below the recommended n=50 threshold (Simonsohn et al., 2013), and restricted to isolated paradigms without any evidence for convergent validation across tasks.
Given psychology’s replication crisis, and the accumulation of unpublished non-replications of implicit ToM studies in labs all over the world, it is time to address questions of the robustness, replicability and validity of implicit ToM more explicitly and systematically.
Therefore, this symposium brings together research from 4 labs in 3 countries trying to replicate and extend various paradigms on implicit and automatic ToM in infants, children and adults. Taken together, these studies, many using the original stimuli and procedures, supply converging evidence that published findings can either not be replicated or are subject to alternative more parsimonious explanations. Implicit ToM may thus be a much less robust phenomenon than previously assumed, and rich theoretical interpretations of these findings may have been premature.
The discussant, an internationally renowned ToM-researcher, will integrate and critically discuss these findings and their implications for theoretical debates about the nature and foundations of ToM.

Sub Unit

• Social Cognition

Chairs

• Hannes Rakoczy, University of Göttingen

• Louisa Kulke, University of Göttingen, University College London

Discussant

• Diane Poulin-Dubois, Concordia University

Individual Presentations

• Investigating the reproducibility of implicit theory of mind tasks with different levels of representational demand - Presenting Author: Lindsey Powell, MIT; Kate Hobbs, Harvard University; Alexandros Bardis, Harvard University; Susan Carey, Harvard University

• The Generalizability and Robustness of Spontaneous False Belief Tests. A Replication Attempt of Southgate et al. (2007) - Presenting Author: Tobias Schuwerk, LMU Munich; Beate Priewasser, University of Salzburg; Beate Sodian, LMU Muenchen; Josef Perner, University of Salzburg

• How reliable and valid are anticipatory looking measures in theory of mind task? - Presenting Author: Louisa Kulke, University of Göttingen, University College London; Hannes Rakoczy, University of Göttingen