Walking in Someone Else’s Shoes: Theory of Mind and Writing
Jenny Morse, PhD
Author and CEO
You know the saying “Take a walk in someone else’s shoes”? What is that saying about? It’s asking you to consider what it’s like to be a different person, to see something from their perspective rather than your own. That ability is called theory of mind, the ability to imagine what another person is thinking or feeling.
Most humans develop this ability as toddlers, around age 3. Experiments about theory of mind in children work like this:
A child (the subject of the experiment) and an adult (the experimenter) are in a room with a blue box, a red box, and a ball. The child watches the adult put the ball in the red box. A new person enters the room. The adult asks the new person if the ball is in the blue box or the red box. Now, the child knows the answer: the red box. So, the experiment is about whether the child thinks the new person knows the answer. If the child thinks the new person knows the answer, then the child will either be unimpressed when the new person says “the red box” or will be surprised when the new person says “the blue box.” This child would not have acquired theory of mind yet. If the child realizes that the person doesn’t know the answer, then the child will be surprised when the new person says “the red box” or will be unimpressed when the new person says “the blue box.” This child does have the theory of mind ability.
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Why does this matter? Because by the age of about 3, most humans realize that the new person doesn’t know where the ball is because they weren’t in the room yet when the ball was put in the red box. We can imagine what the new person is thinking.
And, this skill develops into empathy. We see a person get hurt, and we understand that they feel pain, so we give them a hug. That’s because we can imagine how that person is feeling.
In communication, we are writing or speaking to get ideas that are in our heads out. We want to express ourselves (the word express literally means “press out”). But, for communication to be effective, those ideas have to be received by another person.
Most of our education in writing teaches us how to compose our ideas on paper or screens. This is a hard enough challenge. But, our education is not very good at teaching us to think about how that writing will be read. How will someone else interpret what I’ve written? How will they feel when they read it? What will they think when they read it? These questions are about theory of mind.
Adults have a working theory of mind, but we haven’t always been taught to apply that to our writing.
The first draft of writing is always just us expressing (pressing out) our ideas. Revisions are necessary so that we can craft those thoughts that now exist outside of ourselves into content that has meaning to the people who will read it.
The more we practice thinking about how our writing will be received, the better writers we become.
