Theory of mind
Social cognition or theory of mind (ToM) is commonly included in the study of cognitive biases that are import- ant for understanding psychosis, although this concept may overlap more with cognitive impairment than with cognitive biases. Social cognition encompasses a wide range of aspects, including social knowledge/compe- tence, emotion detection (e.g. faces, prosody, and irony) and social reasoning, and there is a tendency to subsume very different cognitive processes under the umbrella term ToM. Prominent paradigms tapping social cognition are first-order and second-order ToM tasks, which map the ability to theorize accurately about what is on another person’s mind and to consider how situational context leads to a divergence of another person’s understanding of a situation from one’s own understanding of the same situation. Deficits in this area have repeatedly been found in schizophrenia, but the results are equivocal with regard to their association with paranoid schizophrenia [8 ] (however, see Janssen et al. [32]). This does not, however, preclude an important role for ToM in the formation of
false beliefs. Cognitive biases such as JTC and BADE may be rather benign in conjunction with normal neuropsychological faculties and social reasoning (i.e. a type of reasoning that is perhaps most popularly exem- plified by the character of Sherlock Holmes). Under specific conditions, fast and frugal heuristics are even superior to cautious reasoning style models [57]. When hasty decision making (and any of the other cognitive biases) combines with the well documented neuro- psychological and social cognition impairments in schizo- phrenia, however, this may lead to serious consequences, including psychotic misinterpretations. Studies address- ing the interrelationship and redundancy of these biases have only just begun to emerge [15 ,58] (Woodward TS, Mizrahi R, Menon M, et al., unpublished data).