H: Men are all alike.Notice the strategies used: to repeat back the person's statements as questions, to run off canned responses to keywords such as 'father', to talk in very general terms using preprogrammed sentences. Weizenbaum was astounded by the response to his program, which he had really intended as a spoof:
E: IN WHAT WAY
H: They're always bugging us about something or other.
E: CAN YOU THINK OF A SPECIFIC EXAMPLE
H: Well, my boyfriend made me come here.
E: YOUR BOYFRIEND MADE YOU COME HERE
H: He says I'm depressed much of the time.
E: I AM SORRY TO HEAR THAT YOU ARE DEPRESSED
H: It's true. I am unhappy.
E: DO YOU THINK COMING HERE WILL HELP YOU NOT TO BE UNHAPPY
H: I need some help, that much seems certain.
E: WHAT WOULD IT MEAN TO YOU IF YOU GOT SOME HELP
H: Perhaps I could learn to get along with my mother.
E: TELL ME MORE ABOUT YOUR FAMILY
H: My mother takes care of me.
E: WHO ELSE IN YOUR FAMILY TAKES CARE OF YOU
H: My father.
E: YOUR FATHER
H: You are like my father in some ways.
E: WHAT RESEMBLANCE DO YOU SEE
H: You are not very aggressive but I think you don't want me to notice that.
E: WHAT MAKES YOU THINK I AM NOT VERY AGGRESSIVE
H: You don't argue with me.
E: WHY DO YOU THINK I DON'T ARGUE WITH YOU
H: You are afraid of me.
E: DOES IT PLEASE YOU TO BELIEVE I AM AFRAID OF YOU
H: My father is afraid of everybody.
E: WHAT ELSE COMES TO YOUR MIND WHEN YOU THINK OF YOUR FATHER
H: Bullies.
E: DOES THAT HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH THE FACT THAT YOUR BOYFRIEND MADE YOU COME HERE
"I was startled to see how quickly and how very deeply people conversing with DOCTOR became emotionally involved with the computer and how unequivocally they anthropomorphized it."His secretary knew very well how Weizenbaum had designed ELIZA, but after only a few interchanges with it, she asked Weizenbaum to leave the room so they could 'talk'. The extent to which the success of the conversational interchange depends upon projection on the part of the human interlocutor is evident from the following exchange where ELIZA as DOCTOR is conversing via a network with PARRY, Kenneth Colby's program that simulates a paranoid.
Parry: I don't understand your motives.This 'conversation' clearly does not work; it reveals that the computer-human 'conversations of the sort described above with Eliza rely upon the human reading a lot into the computer's 'answers'. humans asked Weizenbaum to leave the room so they could converse with Eliza in private precisely because they heavily interpreted her utterances as carrying intentionality. Humans felt like Eliza was reading their minds because they attributed mental states to 'her'. In the computer-computer interaction above there is a marked lack of mental content and subsequent interaction on the basis of perception of the other's beliefs. Neither computer has either communicative intent; they both can be said to lack a 'theory of mind'. The term 'theory of mind' refers to the understanding that people have mental states including thoughts, beliefs and desires. It results in a way of thinking and talking about self and others that involves mental states.
Doctor: Why don't you understand my motives?
Parry: Shouldn't I be?
Doctor: Why do you say that just now?
Parry: That's just the way it is.
Doctor: Suppose that's just the way it were not.
Parry: So?
Doctor: I am not sure I understand you fully.
Parry: You harp on the same questions too much.
Doctor: What does that similarity suggest to you.
Parry: I don't get you.
Doctor: Do you wish that you did get I?
Parry: It's about time you showed some interest in my feelings.
Doctor: Oh? I showed some interest in your feelings?
This may seem like a perfectly obvious and basic capacity; we must understand that others have mental states in order to communicate with them. This recognition, however, is not immediately given; children take some time to develop this fundamental realization. One way to demonstrate this is as follows: show a 3 year old child a highly recognizable candy box, a Smarties (British M&Ms) tube, that contains pencils rather than the expected candy; ask them what it contains, and they will answer 'Smarties'; show them the true contents; then ask them what their friend who has not seen inside the box will think it contains. Astonishingly, they will answer 'pencils' even though they answered differently themselves. This finding belies a lack of 'theory of mind': the child cannot attribute a belief other than their own to another person. They cannot think through what another would think given knowledge that differs from their own.
This phenomenon is reminiscent of some earlier studies by the great developmental psychologist Jean Piaget. In some of his earliest work in the 1920s Piaget asked children aged 4 to 12 questions with a philosophical slant, such as, 'Where do dreams come from?', 'What do you think with?' and 'If you pricked this stone, would it feel it?'. Their answers revealed much about how children think of themselves and others. For example, Piaget asked a child, just turned seven, 'You know what it means to think?'
"Yes"From analysis of interviews such as these Piaget devised three key concepts: realism, animism, and egocentrism. The above excerpt illustrates the realism that children exhibit with respect to mental phenomena: thought is equated with speech, dreams are considered external events that are viewed by the child, and any others present in the room. Mental entities are endowed with physical characteristics. The phenomenon of animism is complementary to realism: the physical world, the moon, rocks, are endowed with mental life. In Piaget's view realism and animism can both be explained using his central theoretical term: egocentrism. Within Piaget's explanatory framework egocentric does not have its conventional sense of selfish, rather it refers to an unthinking centering on the self without an awareness of the self/other or subjective/objective distinction. Without subjectivity children see their thoughts and dreams as part of the physical world, and without objectivity they see physical things as being like themselves which leads to animism.
"Then think of your house. What do you think with?"
"The mouth."
"Can you think with the mouth shut?"
"No."
"With the eyes shut?" "Yes"
"Now shut your mouth and think of your house. Are you thinking?"
"Yes."
"What did you think with?"
"The mouth."
Another task Piaget used to demonstrate the difficulty children have with conceiving of point of view is the 'three mountains task'. The child views a scene composed of, not surprisingly, three mountains with a distinguishing marker on each. They are asked to draw or choose a picture that represents their own view, then do the same for a doll sitting opposite them. If the child is under 9 years of age she will tend to draw or choose the same picture in both circumstances. Piaget attributed this difficulty to an inability to take the other's perspective, and extended it to the social-emotional domain. This test of egocentrism has been roundly criticized by Margaret Donaldson and Martin Hughes due to the perceptual difficulty such as achieving left/right reversals and the remoteness of the task from the child's everyday experience. When the task is modified to make more 'human sense' by having the doll is to hide from policemen in a quadrant maze, children as young as 4 can escape their egocentrism. While Hughes and Donaldson revise the age estimates for the onset of 'decentering' or escaping egocentrism, they do not doubt that the process of representing others' perspectives based on knowledge of their mental states is a crucial development.
In the last few years a mass of new empirical work on 'theory of mind' has appeared in the
developmental literature. The modern beginnings of this new subfield can be traced to an article
written in 1978 by Premack & Woodruff entitled 'Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind?'.
These researchers investigated one chimpanzee's understanding of the mental states by
showing her videos of a human actor faced with problems such as trying to reach inaccessible objects,
such as a bunch of bananas, outside the cage. At the end of the tape Sarah, the chimp, was shown two
pictures, one of which depicted a solution to the problem, such as the actor reaching outside
of the cage with a stick. Sarah reliably chose the picture depicting the solution. Premack and
Woodruff took this as evidence that Sarah was imputing mental states, such as wanting
to get bananas, to the human actor. This extravagant claim generated great debate; the article
was published in Behavioral Brain Sciences where the format is a 'target' article followed by
a series of short responses by cognoscenti. In one of these responses the philosopher Daniel Dennett
proposed a task that more clearly targets theory of mind. He commented on children's
love of 'Punch and Judy'
shows, pointing out that they squeal in anticipatory delight as Punch prepares to throw the box
off the cliff because they know that Punch thinks that Judy is in the box, while they know that Judy
escaped earlier. In other words, they are aware that Punch has a false belief. The developmental
psychologists Heinz Wimmer and Josef Perner adopted Dennett's suggestion by devising
a false belief test for young children.
Wimmer & Perner (1983) tested three and four year olds ability to attribute a false
belief to another in the context of a story that was acted out for them with dolls and
toys. For example, in one scenario, a boy puts some chocolate in a drawer in the living room
and goes out to play. While he is out his mother moves the chocolate to a cupboard in the kitchen.
The children are then asked 'Where will the boy look for the chocolate when he comes back inside?'
Four year olds say 'the drawer in the living room', but three years old typically answer 'the
cupboard in the kitchen'. And so a field was born...
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