I fell down a Reddit rabbit hole and am now confused. With the idea that the fastest way to learn on the internet is the say something wrong here we go:
This is how I understand it, the Definitions taken from Wiki:
Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.
Theory of mind In psychology, theory of mind refers to the capacity to understand other people by ascribing mental states to them (that is, surmising what is happening in their mind). This includes the knowledge that others’ mental states may be different from one’s own states and include beliefs, desires, intentions, emotions, and thoughts.
So similar but not equivalent to a Psychologist. If you learned a stranger just lost a child you would naturally feel bad for them because you could imagine that happening to you and it would be horrible. If a (insert religious leader) just lost a child you would still feel bad for them, but could image how a person with a different belief system and ideas from your own could cope differently, I guess that’s Theory of mind?
Ok, at the end of the third paragraph HERE this gem is dropped.
“Children from Iran and China in a culture of collectivism develop knowledge access earlier and understand diverse beliefs later than Western children in a culture of individualism.”
That is a bold statement.
The source is listed but not only can I not access it I doubt I would be able to understand it if I did.
So what I am asking is, is this true? If it is, why? Is it totalitarian regimes dissolving the self even at a young age to hold power or is this a truly cultural phenomenon witnessed even before dictators? And if so, how does that play out for people in their own country?
But I think you’re conflating a culture of collectivism with totalitarian regimes and making a second mistake of linking collective cultures as “dissolving the self”. They’re not talking about nerve-stapled drones
In both cases a ToM emerges, it isn’t suppressed but shaped in (and by) the environment the mind find itself in.
Not quite, no. Either situation is both empathy and theory of mind.
There is a great deal of overlap, but the basic distinction is that empathy is the sharing of emotion. Theory of mind is the ability to ascribe a mental state to another being. You take theory of mind for granted because you’re a human being, but it doesn’t necessitate emotion at all - for instance, if playing a game of strategy with an opponent, you are employing ToM to try to predict and manipulate their actions. Conversely, empathy doesn’t require theory of mind. Animals that are capable of little to no ToM can empathize with one another, but rather few animals have a well developed ToM that we can tell.
I would be also interested in details about the scale used.
It could be that the scale was validated in one culture and simply does not “translate” (not literally) well across cultures.
That said it is unsurprising if the exact sequence of developmental progressions varies across cultures that emphasize different domains differently. There are in fact many examples of this, including in language development (Western better nouns early, Asian cultures more relations of things to others).
This article is specific to the claim of the OP, more precisely correlating a specific parenting style that varies across cultures with rate of achievement of one marker of TOM. A very interesting read.