Philip David Zelazo

Social Intelligence in a Multicultural World: What Is It? Who Needs It? How Does It Develop?

“George Washington liked good roast beef. Haym Solomon liked fish. When Uncle Sam served liberty they both enjoyed the dish.” When I was a child growing up in New York City in the early days of television that jingle was part of a public service advertisement linking American patriotism to tolerance for differences in the beliefs and customary practices of ethnic and religious minority groups in the United States.

Intuitive Psychology as Mind Designer: Scaffolding Cognitive Novelties in Early Childhood

Intuitive psychology, also known as theory of mind or mindreading, has been a dynamic and expansive academic industry for almost forty years. Perhaps the most important insight of the multidisciplinary work undertaken in this area is how central and indispensable intuitive psychology is to social interactions, communication, cultural and language learning and transmission, and education. Less explored and less well understood is the crucial contribution of intuitive psychology to mental development and the very construction of the human mind. It is a contribution that takes the form of new (mostly) cognitive abilities that emerge at different stages of ontogeny and reshape the developing mind. I call this the mind-design work of intuitive psychology. In several past works I have explored this mind-design role of intuitive psychology in a few areas of cognitive development construed in evolutionary terms – reflexive thinking or thinking about one’s own thoughts, learning word meaning and reference, predicative thinking, self-consciousness, and imagination (Bogdan, 2000, 2001, 2007, 2009, 2010, 2013). In sampling and expanding on key themes of this prior work, this chapter discerns several mind-design patterns through which intuitive psychology, in discharging its basic functions, scaffolds new cognitive abilities as ontogenetic adaptations to pressures arising at distinct stages of childhood. The basic idea is this. The business of intuitive psychology is to register, represent, and interpret mental states of oneself and of others (cognitive component) and, as a result, guide appropriate reactions by way of thought, speech, and action, as part of one’s goal-pursuing strategies (practical component). It is on the latter practical side, when in new domains children face new pressures on their actively initiated and pursued goal strategies, that the expertise of intuitive psychology is recruited to provide adaptive solutions that gradually end up scaffolding new cognitive abilities. The scaffolding follows several patterns that I call templates, matrices, assemblies, escalators and infrastructures. The earliest such scaffoldings, discussed below, occur in domains that generate some of the strongest pressures on young minds, such as meaning-based communication, learning word reference and mastering predicative communication and thinking. The first part of the chapter provides a theoretical background for this basic idea. It introduces a certain conception of intuitive psychology and explains its mind-