Who Needs Emotions? The Brain Meets the Robot

how do we decipher others’ minds? 155
to the observed action and, thus, to having the possibility of being delayed
with respect to the observed action.
In the context of emotions, arguments for dissociating the recognition
of an emotion (as in contagion) from the recognition of the cause of that
emotion (and the appropriate response to be given to it) are twofold. First,
very young babies (at around 5 months of age) are able to recognize that a
person is expressing an emotion, although they do not seem to experience
this emotion themselves. It is only later (at 2 years of age) that they begin to
respond to the emotions expressed by other people (e.g., Nelson, 1987). In
other words, it is possible to recognize an emotion without having it. The
second argument is that pure contagion would not yield an appropriate response.
Imagine facing somebody who expresses anger and threat. The appropriate
response is not to experience anger oneself but to experience fear
and perhaps to run away. Because contagion cannot tell what the emotion is
about, it cannot be used as a useful means for reacting to others’ emotions.
Contagion of action and emotion would act as a relatively primitive form of
recognition of others’ behavior, with a role in activating imitation mechanisms,
particularly in young infants, a behavior that becomes progressively
inhibited at later stages. Pathology offers an example of disinhibition of compulsive
imitation in patients with frontal lobe lesions (Lhermitte, 1983).
Another way of getting close to others’ minds is empathy. The concept
of empathy is more clearly related to the idea of simulation than contagion
in that it implies that individuals involved in a given interaction share a similar
mental state. In contradistinction to contagion, empathy requires that one
has information on the experience and intentions of the person who is observed
and whose mental content one is attempting to understand. Observing
a person about whose intentions, thoughts, or experience one has no
information would provide only a limited access to what the person is experiencing
or doing, insufficient for empathizing with that person (this is what
Goldie, 1999, calls “in his shoes imagining”). Consider, for example, the two
characters described in the experiment of Kahneman and Tversky (1982).
These two persons arrive independently at the airport 30 minutes late. To
one of them, one explains that his plane left 30 minutes ago; one tells the
other that his plane was delayed and left only 5 minutes ago, too late for
him to catch it. The experiment consists in asking subjects which of the two
characters would be more frustrated. The response of most subjects is that
the second one will be more frustrated. As there is no rationale for that answer,
the way subjects proceed to give it is to place themselves in the shoes
of the person and to feel what it would be like to miss a plane by only
5 minutes. Obviously, subjects would give more circumstantial answers if
they could empathize more fully with the characters, that is, if they knew