Jessica E. Black

No support for the claim that literary fiction uniquely and immediately improves theory of mind: A reply to Kidd and Castano’s commentary on Panero et al. (2016).

Kidd and Castano (in press) critique our failure to replicate Kidd and Castano (2013) on 3 grounds: failure to exclude people who did not read the texts, failure of random assignment, and failure to exclude people who did not take the Author Recognition Test (ART). This response addresses each of these critiques. Most importantly, we note that even when Kidd and Castano reanalyzed our data in the way that they argue is most appropriate, they still failed to replicate the pattern of results reported in their original study. We thus reaffirm that our replication of Kidd and Castano (2013) found no evidence that literary fiction uniquely and immediately improves theory of mind. Our objective remains not to prove that reading literary fiction does not benefit social cognition, but to call for in-depth research addressing the difficulties in measuring any potential effect and to note the need to temper claims accordingly. (PsycINFO Database Record

Impossible or Improbable: The Difficulty of Imagining Morally Deviant Worlds

Prior research has investigated children’s ability to distinguish between possible and impossible events in our own world, but relatively little empirical research has investigated adults’ intuitions about the boundaries or limitations of imaginary worlds. Here, we presented participants with brief scenarios that were either Morally Deviant, Factually Unlikely, or Conceptually Contradictory. Participants rated how easy it was for them to imagine a world in which each description held true and assessed whether such a world was improbable or impossible. Worlds in which morality operates differently were significantly harder to imagine than worlds that contained unlikely events and significantly easier to imagine than worlds that contained inherent conceptual contradictions. When forced to choose whether Morally Deviant worlds were impossible or improbable, a significant majority of individuals classified them as improbable; however, among individuals who rated these worlds as maximally difficult to imagine, they were seen as impossible.

An IRT Analysis of the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test

ABSTRACT The Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET; Baron-Cohen, Wheelwright, Hill, Raste, & Plumb, 2001), originally designed for use in clinical populations, has been used with increasing frequency as a measure of advanced social cognition in nonclinical samples (e.g., Domes, Heinriches, Michel, Berger, & Herpertz, 2007; Kidd & Castano, 2013; Mar, Oatley, Hirsh, de la Paz, & Peterson, 2006). The purpose of this research was to use item response theory to assess the ability of the RMET to detect differences at the high levels of theory of mind to be expected in neurotypical adults. Results indicate that the RMET is an easy test that fails to discriminate between individuals exhibiting high ability. As such, it is unlikely that it could adequately or reliably capture the expected effects of manipulations designed to boost ability in samples of neurotypical populations. Reported effects and noneffects from such manipulations might reflect noise introduced by inaccurate measurement; a more sensitive instrument is needed to verify the effects of manipulations to enhance theory of mind.

Chimpanzee vertebrate consumption: Savanna and forest chimpanzees compared

There is broad consensus among paleoanthropologists that meat-eating played a key role in the evolution of Homo, but the details of where, when, and why are hotly debated. It has been argued that increased faunivory was causally connected with hominin adaptation to open, savanna habitats. If savanna-dwelling chimpanzees eat meat more frequently than do forest chimpanzees, it would support the notion that open, dry, seasonal habitats promote hunting or scavenging by hominoids. Here we present observational and fecal analysis data on vertebrate consumption from several localities within the dry, open Ugalla region of Tanzania. Combining these with published fecal analyses, we summarize chimpanzee vertebrate consumption rates, showing quantitatively that savanna chimpanzee populations do not differ significantly from forest populations. Compared with forest populations, savanna chimpanzees consume smaller vertebrates that are less likely to be shared, and they do so more seasonally. Analyses of chimpanzee hunting that focus exclusively on capture of forest monkeys are thus difficult to apply to chimpanzee faunivory in open-country habitats and may be misleading when used to model early hominin behavior. These findings bear on discussions of why chimpanzees hunt and suggest that increases in hominin faunivory were related to differences between hominins and chimpanzees and/or differences between modern and Pliocene savanna woodland environments.