Language requires a lot of inference. Consider the following three conversations:
A: Are there lots of people at the party?
B: Well, most people have left already.
A: How long has the party been going on?
B: Well, most people have left already.
A: Is it a good party?
B: Well, most people have left already.
In each of these cases, B's statement literally means the same thing, but the interpretation is different. Explaining (a) why this should be the case, and (b) how people figure out the implicit meanings is a very active area of research in modern linguistics and psycholinguistics.
The Mind Reading Quotient
Basically, understanding conversations like the ones above seem to require a certain amount of "mind reading" -- that is, guessing what the speaker (B, in this case) means to say. If you've ever wondered "what did she mean by that?" you were engaged in this kind of mind reading.
I just posted a new experiment -- the
Mind Reading Quotient -- which consist of several short tests of this kind of mind reading ability. A couple of the tests look specifically at trying to work out what somebody is saying. A couple of the tests look at similar skills in the non-linguistic domain.
My favorite of the non-linguistic tasks is
a coordination game. Thomas Schelling won a Nobel Prize in part for pioneering work on the topic. He found that people are very good at guessing what another person is thinking under certain conditions. For instance, if you tell two people they must meet up in New York City -- but without communicating with each other in any way -- they are actually fairly likely to succeed. Most likely, they would both show up on the corner of Times Square (or in one of a very small number of likely locations). The Mind Reading Quotient includes several such problems.
The goal of this study in part is to get a sense of how good people are at such tasks. There are a lot of thought experiments out there, but not nearly enough data. I will also be looking to see if people who are better at one of these tasks are also better at the others -- that is, is there a single underlying "mind reading ability," or does each task require a separate set of skills?
Reports so far are that the experiment runs 20-25 minutes. Because this is broken up into 7 separate activities, it should seem faster than that. And a lot of the tasks are fun (at least, I think so). Plus, at the end of the experiment, you'll be able to see your scores on many of the different sub-tasks. In two cases (a vocabulary test and an empathy test), I also have percentile scores already worked out, so you can see how you compare to average.
Follow
this link to the study.
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For previous posts about pragmatics and other linguistic inferences, check out
this one,
this one and
this one.
image CC by
Ignacio Conejo.
Basically, understanding conversations like the ones above seem to require a certain amount of "mind reading" -- that is, guessing what the speaker (B, in this case) means to say. If you've ever wondered "what did she mean by that?" you were engaged in this kind of mind reading.
