Bayes factors for the pairwise comparisons.

Understanding what other people think is crucial to our everyday interactions. We seem to be affected by the perspective of others even in situations where it is irrelevant to us. This intrusion from others’ perspectives has been referred to as altercentric bias and has been suggested to reflect implicit belief processing. There is an ongoing debate about how robust such altercentric effects are and whether they indeed reflect true mentalizing or result from simpler, domain-general processes. As a critical test for true mentalizing, the blindfold manipulation has been proposed. That is, participants are familiarized with a blindfold that is either transparent or opaque. When they then observe a person wearing this blindfold, they can only infer what this person can or cannot see based on their knowledge of the blindfold’s transparency. Here, we used this blindfold manipulation to test whether participants’ reaction times in detecting an object depended on the agent’s belief about the object’s location, itself manipulated with a blindfold. As a second task, we asked participants to detect where the agent was going to look for the object. Across two experiments with a large participant pool (N = 234) and different settings (online/lab), we found evidence against altercentric biases in participants’ response times in detecting the object. We did, however, replicate a well-documented reality congruency effect. When asked to detect the agent’s action, in turn, participants were biased by their own knowledge of where the object should be, in line with egocentric biases previously found in false belief reasoning. These findings suggests that altercentric biases do not reflect belief processing but lower-level processes, or alternatively, that implicit belief processing does not occur when the belief needs to be inferred from one’s own experience.理解他人的想法对于日常社交互动至关重要。即便在与自身无关的情境中，人们似乎也会受到他人视角的影响。这种来自他人视角的侵入效应被称为他人中心偏差（altercentric bias），且被认为反映了内隐信念加工过程。目前学界仍存在持续争论：这类他人中心效应的稳健性如何，以及它们是否真的反映了真正的心理化加工，抑或是源自更简单的领域一般性加工机制。作为检验真正心理化加工的关键范式，眼罩操控（blindfold manipulation）被提出。具体而言，参与者会先熟悉两种眼罩：一种为透明材质，另一种为不透明材质。当后续观察佩戴该眼罩的行动者时，参与者仅能基于自身对眼罩透明度的认知，推断该行动者能否看见目标物体。本研究采用该眼罩操控范式，检验参与者检测物体的反应时是否取决于行动者对物体位置的信念——而该信念通过眼罩操作进行操控。作为第二项任务，我们要求参与者判断行动者将会前往何处寻找该物体。我们开展了两项实验，招募了大规模被试样本（N = 234），并采用了线上、实验室两种不同的实验设置。结果发现，在检测物体的反应时任务中，并未出现支持他人中心偏差的有效证据。不过，我们成功重复了一项已被充分验证的现实一致性效应。而在要求参与者判断行动者的动作时，参与者会受到自身对物体所在位置的认知的影响，这与此前错误信念推理研究中发现的自我中心偏差（egocentric bias）相一致。上述研究结果表明，他人中心偏差并非反映信念加工过程，而是源自更低层级的加工机制；或者说，当信念需要通过自身经验进行推断时，内隐信念加工并不会发生。