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. 2014 Dec 3;9(12):e114172.
doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0114172. eCollection 2014.

Inference or enaction? The impact of genre on the narrative processing of other minds

James Carney  1 , Rafael Wlodarski  1 , Robin Dunbar  1
Affiliations

Inference or enaction? The impact of genre on the narrative processing of other minds

James Carney et al. PLoS One. .

Abstract

Do narratives shape how humans process other minds or do they presuppose an existing theory of mind? This study experimentally investigated this problem by assessing subject responses to systematic alterations in the genre, levels of intentionality, and linguistic complexity of narratives. It showed that the interaction of genre and intentionality level are crucial in determining how narratives are cognitively processed. Specifically, genres that deployed evolutionarily familiar scenarios (relationship stories) were rated as being higher in quality when levels of intentionality were increased; conversely, stories that lacked evolutionary familiarity (espionage stories) were rated as being lower in quality with increases in intentionality level. Overall, the study showed that narrative is not solely either the origin or the product of our intuitions about other minds; instead, different genres will have different-even opposite-effects on how we understand the mind states of others.

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Conflict of interest statement

Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1. Interaction effect of genre and mentalizing levels on participant literary ratings.
Figure 2
Figure 2. Espionage Genre—Interaction effect of language complexity and mentalizing levels on participant literary ratings.
Figure 3
Figure 3. Relationship Genre—Interaction effect of language complexity and mentalizing levels on participant literary ratings.
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Grants and funding

JC was funded by a European Commission Marie Curie Fellowship (no. 297854); RD and RW were funded by a European Research Council Advanced Investigators' Grant (no. 295663). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

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