What Is Theory of Mind? The Definitive Guide for Adults and Relationships

Attachment Issues

Nov 18

Written By Daniel Dashnaw

Tuesday, November 18, 2025. This is for Liz.

Theory of mind is the quiet miracle you don’t notice until it fails.

It’s the human capacity to understand that other people have minds—full interior landscapes with beliefs, emotions, anxieties, and private meanings that differ from your own.

You’d think this would be the most basic human skill. Somehow it’s the rarest.

The term entered the scientific bloodstream when psychologists asked a now-famous question: “Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind?” The answer, as usual, said more about humans than chimpanzees.

We discovered that even humans misunderstand each other constantly—and with appalling confidence.

Theory of mind is not a child’s milestone. It’s an ongoing moral discipline.

Adults may lose it under stress, under shame, and especially under inter-personal conflict.

Modern life—with its Limbic Capitalism, algorithmic outrage, and the performative certainty of the Feed—has placed theory of mind on the endangered-cognition list.

Let’s take it from the top, with the full weight of philosophy, anthropology, neuroscience, trauma studies, and couples therapy behind it.

Theory of Mind: How We Misread Each Other and Call It Understanding

Long before psychologists built their clever tasks for preschoolers, philosophers were already panicking about the impossibility of directly knowing another mind.

Wittgenstein warned us that mental states are expressed in behavior like grammar in language.

Dennett argued that humans survive by taking the “intentional stance”—predicting others’ behavior by assuming they have beliefs and desires.

Every relationship you’ve ever had rests on this philosophical gamble:
I cannot see inside your mind, but I must act as though you have one.

The problem is not that we lack this capacity; it’s that we assume it works automatically.

It doesn’t. It decays. It misfires. And it collapses most dramatically with the people we claim to love.

The Evolutionary Backstory: Our Species Survived by Becoming Mind-Readers

Anthropologists such as Tomasello have argued that human survival hinged on dyadic bestowed attention, intention-tracking, and collaborative cognition (see Tomasello, 2019, “Becoming Human”).

Sarah Hrdy’s intellectually gorgeous work on cooperative breeding shows how our infants—helpless, needy, demanding—forced adults to become exquisitely attuned to internal states not their own.

In other words:
Our species didn’t stumble into mindreading. We sorta evolved around it.

Our modern problem is that the evolutionarily honed system is being asked to interpret thousands of strangers online, using nothing but text and our own unexamined wounds. This ends predictably.

The Neuroscience: How the Brain Constructs Other Minds

Here’s the wonky shit. Mentalizing draws on a distributed neural network, including:

The medial prefrontal cortex
The right temporo-parietal junction
The posterior cingulate and precuneus

These areas collectively fuel what neuroscientists call the “mentalizing network.”

Rebecca Saxe’s work on the right temporo-parietal junction shows this region selectively engages when evaluating others’ beliefs—particularly beliefs different from reality.

Here’s the wicked complicated part:

Your brain uses your own self-representational systems to simulate someone else’s mind. You read others using the only tool you’ve ever had—yourself.

This is where marital disasters essentially come from.

Trauma further distorts this process. Chronic threat can produce:

Hypermentalizing: over-interpreting neutral cues as hostile (hello Liz!) common in neurodivergence (specifically ADHD), trauma survivors and borderline traits; see Sharp et al., 2011 in Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry).
Hypomentalizing: flattened or limited access to one’s own and others’ internal states (see Fonagy et al., 2002 in Attachment & Human Development).

In other words, your past becomes the lens through which you misread the present. Yikes.

How Children Build a Theory of Mind

Children do not begin life with theory of mind; they earn it through a long apprenticeship in human difference. Starting with desires, then knowledge, then false beliefs, they slowly realize that:

Your thoughts are not my thoughts.
Your feelings are not my feelings.
Your knowledge is not my knowledge.

Henry Wellman’s entire research program—starting with his 1990 book The Child’s Theory of Mind and extending through his 2004 scaling study with Liu in Child Development—maps this sequence in achingly exquisite detail.

Cross-cultural research (e.g., Liu et al., 2008 in Child Development) shows that while the sequence is universal, the timeline varies by culture, language, and parenting norms.

A child discovering that someone else can have a wrong belief is a cognitive revolution.
An adult remembering it is a relational one.

Autism, Neurodiversity, and the Double Empathy Problem

Early autism research—especially Baron-Cohen’s Mindblindness (1995)—suggested autistic people had impaired theory of mind. Many clinicians still repeat this as if it were unimpeachable, but, to be fair, it’s a kind of shorthand, really.

The modern view neuroscience view is more nuanced, more accurate, and far more humane.

Autistic folks may differ in how they approach mentalizing—They are often more explicit, detail-driven, and rule-based.

But neurotypicals frequently struggle to interpret autistic minds just as much. Damian Milton’s “double empathy problem” captures this beautifully.

The real issue is mismatched expressive styles—not deficits.

For neurodiverse couples, theory of mind must be explicit, not implied; stated, not assumed.
Assumption is the enemy of connection.

How Theory of Mind Fails Adults: The Real Reason Couples Break Down

Adults do not lose theory of mind; they abandon it when their nervous system feels threatened.

A partner withdraws to self-regulate; the other instantly interprets abandonment.
A blunt question is misread as contempt.
A quiet mood is reinterpreted as hostility.

What you are actually seeing is more often the collision of two autobiographies.

Here’s a live example from my therapy room.

A woman feels ignored when her husband doesn’t text back. She builds a rapid-fire narrative of disinterest, avoidance, and emotional coldness.

Meanwhile, he was staring at the grocery shelf trying to figure out which of the seven identical oat milks she prefers.

Both realities feel true from the inside. Both are mind-generated stories.

When couples repair, it is not because their communication improves.
It is because their imagining improves.

The Dark Side of Theory of Mind: Precision Without Compassion

Theory of mind is morally neutral. It is merely a tool. Some people use it to connect; others use it to manipulate.

Covert narcissists, con artists, and certain highly attuned but emotionally shallow personalities often display exquisite cognitive skill with mentalizing.

They can map your vulnerabilities, your hopes, your triggers—sometimes better than you can. But without emotional empathy or a chewy moral center, theory of mind becomes a shitshow in the wrong hands.

Never confuse relational insight with relational integrity.

Culture, Loneliness, and Why Theory of Mind Is Dying in Public

American culture rewards certainty, not curiosity.

We have engineered a world where people interact primarily through truncated text, performative posts, and rage-baiting algorithms in the Feed..
No wonder everyone reads each other as threats.

Theory of mind shrivels in environments where ambiguity is weaponized.
Shame thrives; nuance dies.
Everyone becomes a cardboard villain in someone else’s story.

The collapse of theory of mind isn’t a psychological problem—it’s a cultural one. Perhaps even an extinction -level event, no?

Theory of Mind in Couples Therapy: The Engine of All Repair

If you want to understand why couples therapy works, the answer is infuriatingly simple:

People finally start treating each other as minds.

When partners begin to articulate their internal states with precision—“A part of me is scared, a part of me is angry, a part of me feels small”—their partner suddenly has something to mentally represent. The relationship becomes populated with real minds instead of imagined villains.

Theory of mind transforms blame into curiosity, judgment into discovery, and conflict into negotiation.

It is not empathy. It is not communication. It is the foundation beneath both. It is the decision to become curious instead of furious, as Ellyn Bader famously said.

Final Thoughts: Theory of Mind as a Moral Art

The more I practice, the more convinced I become that theory of mind is a moral art disguised as a cognitive skill.

It requires humility: the humility to admit that your interpretation is merely but one hypothesis among many.

It also demands curiosity: the willingness to revise your story in light of new information.

Perhaps most compellingly, it demands a leap of faith: the notion that your partner’s mind is not your enemy—it is, in fact, your only true collaborator in lifelong meaning-making.

To understand theory of mind is to understand the diverse folk wisdoms of human connection.
But to practice them is to risk becoming human in the fullest sense.

Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.

REFERENCES:

Baron-Cohen, S. (1995). Mindblindness: An essay on autism and theory of mind. MIT Press.

Dennett, D. C. (1987). The intentional stance. MIT Press.

Fonagy, P., Gergely, G., Jurist, E., & Target, M. (2002). Affect regulation, mentalization, and the development of the self. Routledge.

Frith, C. D., & Frith, U. (2006). The neural basis of mentalizing. Neuron, 50(4), 531–534. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2006.05.001

Hrdy, S. B. (2009). Mothers and others: The evolutionary origins of mutual understanding. Harvard University Press.

Liu, D., Wellman, H. M., Tardif, T., & Sabbagh, M. A. (2008). Theory of mind development in Chinese children: A meta-analysis of false-belief understanding. Child Development, 79(3), 696–716. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2008.01151.x

Milton, D. (2012). On the ontological status of autism: The “double empathy problem.” Disability & Society, 27(6), 883–887. https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2012.710008

Premack, D., & Woodruff, G. (1978). Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1(4), 515–526. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00076512

Saxe, R., & Wexler, A. (2005). Making sense of another mind: The role of the right temporo-parietal junction. Neuropsychologia, 43(10), 1391–1399. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2005.02.013

Sharp, C., Pane, H., Ha, C., Venta, A., Patel, A. B., Sturek, J., & Fonagy, P. (2011). Theory of mind and emotion-regulation difficulties in adolescents with borderline traits. Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 50(6), 563–573.e1. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaac.2011.01.017

Tomasello, M. (2019). Becoming human: A theory of ontogeny. Harvard University Press.

Wellman, H. M. (1990). The child’s theory of mind. MIT Press.

Wellman, H. M., & Liu, D. (2004). Scaling of theory-of-mind tasks. Child Development, 75(2), 523–541. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2004.00691.x