Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Theory of mind is often referred to as “belief-desire” psychology, as these mental states (belief, desire) are accorded a central role. However, extant research has made it clear that defining the notion of belief or characterizing a consistent set of key characteristics is no trivial task. Across two studies (N=283, N=332), we explore the hypothesis that laypeople make more fine-grained distinctions among different kinds of “belief.” Specifically, we find evidence that beliefs with matching contents are judged differently depending on whether those beliefs are seen as playing predominantly epistemic roles (such as tracking evidence with the aim of forming accurate representations) versus non-epistemic roles (such as social signaling). Beliefs with epistemic aims, compared to those with non-epistemic aims, are more likely to be described with the term “thinks” (vs. “believes”), and to be redescribed in probabilistic (vs. binary) terms. These findings call for a refinement of the concepts posited to underly theory of mind and offer indirect support for the idea that human psychology in fact features more than one kind of belief.