Implicit Beliefs at the Intersection of Intuitive Psychology & Intuitive Physics

Abstract

There are many implicit beliefs that influence our judgments about how the world works regardless of whether we are aware of them or not. The way in which we interact with and predict the behavior of simple physical systems can be called our “intuitive physics.” Similarly, our simplified, yet rich, representations or understandings of other people's minds can be called our “intuitive psychology” either of others or of ourselves. The task of knowing what people's intuitive notions are can be difficult because modern society and culture are thoroughly influenced by modern ways of thinking and ideas. However, other mental models may influence our perceptual judgments. To hone in on the underlying mechanism responsible for implicit belief, we designed a paradigm that elicits a biased response if a specific implicit belief is present. We found that people implicitly attribute a causally powerful, yet small, mechanical force to the gaze of another agent. Cognitive scientists might expect that people try to build as accurate of a model of the world as possible, or sometimes trade complex models for more simple ones in an attempt to produce better action. However, in this phenomenon, there is no obvious reason for computing a force or power tied to vision or gaze. When we tried to disentangle the origin of the force: whether it was the gaze orientation itself, or if it was the mental attention of the other agent which led to the observed bias effect, we did not see an effect of attentional or intentional modeling. This could be a problem with the significant increase in task complexity that was necessary to try and discriminate what aspect of the perception of the other agent was causing this phenomenon.