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A MOTIVATION FOR MAPPING THE OTHERS' INNER WORLD. SPONTANEOUS MENTALIZATION AND MACHIAVELLIANISM

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Esperger Z., Bereczkei T.
Magyar Pszichologiai Szemle (Hungarian Psychological Review)
|
2011
|
vol. 66
|
issue 3
487-506
EN
Theory of mind, through which we can assess the others’ mental states and predict their behaviour, is a crucial cognitive device in the social interactions of our everyday life. In the former studies mindreading has been primarily regarded as a cognitive ability. In our study, we rather emphasize a motivational approach, and use the term ‘spontaneous mentalization’. It means that in our social interactions we strive for assessing the other people’s thoughts and goals, and we are motivated to set up hypotheses about their mental states. As a reaction to the former unsuccessful studies on the relationship between theory of mind and Machiavellianism, we assumed that spontaneous mentalization as a kind of motivation, rather than theory of mind as an ability, is associated with Machiavellianism. For measuring spontaneous mentalization, we created a stimuli material of photographs, and asked the subjects to report their impressions about the scenes on these pictures. Their answers were decoded by a special method of content analysis. The individual differences of Machiavellianism were measured by the Mach-IV test. We found profound individual differences in spontaneous mentalization, and these differences were positively correlated with scores of Machiavellianism. This result could be interpreted that those persons who have a higher capacity for mapping the other people’s mental states would be more successful in misleading and cheating of the social partner. The successful manipulation often lies on the ability of making one step ahead of the others and striving to rapidly assess the other people’s inner world. This endeavour (spontaneous mentalization), however, does not necessarily relate to the mindreading capacity itself; only future studies would clarify if they result from different psychological mechanisms, and how they influence each other’s development.
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