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Two uses of folk psychology:

Implications for psychological
science
a
Garth J. O. Fletcher
a
Psychology Department , University of Canterbury ,
Christchurch, New Zealand E-mail:
Published online: 10 Jun 2008.

To cite this article: Garth J. O. Fletcher (1995) Two uses of folk psychology:
Implications for psychological science, Philosophical Psychology, 8:3, 221-238, DOI:
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 PHILOSOPHICAL PSYCHOLOGY, VOL. 8, NO. 3, 1995 221

Two uses of folk psychology: implications

for psychological science

GARTH J. O. FLETCHER
University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand
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ABSTRACT This article describes two uses of folk psychology in scientific psychology. Use1 deals with
the way in which folk theories and beliefs are imported into social psychological models on the basis
that they exert causal influences on cognition or behavior (regardless of their validity or scientific
usefulness). Use2 describes the practice of mining elements from folk psychology for building an
overarching psychological theory that goes beyond common sense (and assumes such elements are
valid or scientifically useful). This distinction is then applied to both common practices within
psychology and the philosophical arguments concerning the scientific validity of folk psychology.
Adopting a social psychological perspective, I argue that (a) the two uses are often conflated in
psychology with deleterious consequences; and (b) that the arguments for the elimination of folk
psychology as a basis for scientific psychology presented by Churchland and others, are weakened by
the failure to attend to this distinction.

Folk psychological knowledge and theory are used in two principal ways in psy-
chology. The first use is based on the assumption in contemporary psychology that
lay beliefs and psychological theories exert a substantial causal influence on social
judgments and behavior. Indeed, commonsense thinking is, in part, the subject
matter of psychology, especially for areas such as social psychology and social
cognition. Accordingly, psychological models will often include an account of
related cognitive structures and processes. This usage will henceforth be termed
Usei. Folk psychology is also often used as a resource for helping to build an
overarching psychological theory that goes beyond the aims and purview of com-
monsense "theory" itself. This second usage will be termed Use2.
I will duly illustrate and expand upon these two principal ways in which folk
psychology is exploited in psychology. First, let me build a base for this account with
a few central ideas. To begin with, note that the validity or truth value of folk
psychology is not an issue when thinking of the former usage of folk theory (Usei).
Folk beliefs and lay theories may be completely addled, yet still exert a real causal
influence on subsequent thought or behavior. A person may believe that Australians
are unusually stupid or that he or she is chosen by God for some divine purpose—
such beliefs may be patently absurd, yet plausibly be held to cause an individual's
subsequent behavior (e.g. telling inane jokes about kangaroos or running for Presi-
0951-5098/95/030221-18 © 1995 Journals Oxford Ltd
 222 GARTH J. O. FLETCHER

dent of the United States, respectively). In contrast, to use folk psychology as a

resource for an overarching professional psychological theory (Use2) clearly assumes
that commonsense theory is valid or at least plausible—if folk psychology is a crock
(as some have claimed) then this procedure is dubious to say the least.
Second, it bears reiterating that scientific psychology, especially social psy-
chology, is obliged to pay attention to folk psychology if it is accepted that folk
theories play a causal role in producing the very behavior and cognition that
psychologists are interested in. This is a curious and important fact that decisively
separates psychology from the other sciences. Of course, ordinary folk also have lay
theories about physics and biology, and possibly even paleontology. But the physi-
cist, biologist, and paleontologist are not obliged to consult such folk theories in the
development of scientific theories, because such lay theories do not causally
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influence the phenomena in question (e.g. the orbits of the planets, the action of
cells, or the evolutionary history of life on earth). More on this issue later.
Third, the double-barreled role that folk psychology can play in the develop-
ment of psychological theories has important and widely unrecognized implications
for both psychology and the philosophy of psychology. For example, I shall argue
later that those philosophers who have pressed for the elimination of folk psychology
from scientific psychology have largely assumed that the sole role played in psy-
chology by common sense is as a source for our master psychological theories
(Use2), and have stunningly missed the point that even if psychology is so purged,
folk psychology may still form a substantial component in scientific psychological
theories (Usei). Psychologists, unfortunately, are also not without sin; namely, they
often conflate and confuse the two functions of folk psychology, at both the
methodological and theoretical level. Some examples of this confusion and its
deleterious consequences will be given in due course.
One of the themes running through this article will be the application of
research and theorizing from social psychology to the questions at hand. This
strategy is based on my belief that social psychology has some special contributions
to make to the controversy that has swirled around folk psychology—contributions
that have largely gone unnoticed in the philosophical and cognitive science litera-
ture.
In the first section of this article I will further explicate Usei and Use2 in relation
to psychology. Next I will discuss and illustrate the invidious consequences that
occur when the two uses of folk psychology are confounded in psychology. Finally,
I will outline some important implications that this distinction has for the debate
that has gone on in the philosophy of psychology and in cognitive science concerning
the scientific credibility of folk psychology.

The incorporation of folk psychology into psychological theorizing

The role of folk psychology as a causal component of scientific psychological theories (Usei)
There are two major ways in which psychologists incorporate folk psychology into
psychological models (in terms of Usei): as abstract content-free rules, structures, or
 TWO USES OF FOLK PSYCHOLOGY 223

processes, or in terms of categories that reflect the content of commonsense beliefs,

attitudes, expectations, and the like. I will give a few examples to illustrate the
explanatory power that can be generated from both approaches.

(1) Representing folk psychology in terms of abstract knowledge structures

This mode of representation is a common approach in cognitive psychology, social
psychology, and social cognition. To illustrate, I will take one of the most influential
and successful theories within social psychology over the last few decades known as
attribution theory. All of the standard accounts (which deal with how laypeople
explain behavior) assume that what matters is not the content of the causal
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attribution, but where the attribution lies along a handful of content-free causal
dimensions such as stability, locus of attribution, and perceived controllability.
For example, Kelley's (1967, 1973) influential theory postulated that causal
attributions are based on schemata that include information from three sources: (i)
consensus information (do all or only some people respond to the stimulus in the
same way as the person?); (ii) distinctiveness information (does the target person
respond in the same way to other stimuli of the same class?); and (iii) consistency
information (does the target person always respond in the same way to this
stimulus?). Kelley's model predicts that the location of attributions along the
internal-external dimension will be governed by the way that these information
dimensions are combined. For example, a combination of high consistency, high
distinctiveness and high consensus should produce an external attribution—if John
always laughs at the comedian, hardly ever laughs at other comedians, and other
people almost always find the same comedian funny, then one should conclude that
John laughed at the comedian because he or she was funny. In contrast, a high
consistency, low distinctiveness, and low consensus pattern should produce an
internal attribution (e.g. John has a warped sense of humor).
Now, clearly, there is more to the causal attribution process than encompassed
in Kelley's model, and, indeed, more elaborate attribution models have subse-
quently been developed. Nevertheless, a voluminous body of research has been
published that supports Kelley's model, and buttresses the proposition that such
abstract dimensions play a central role in causal schemata (for reviews see Ross &
Fletcher, 1985; Hewstone, 1989).

(2) Representing folk psychology in terms of content-related knowledge structures

It has become increasingly apparent over the last two decades in the study of social
cognition that models of cognitive structure and process can be strengthened by
taking into account the content of lay cognition, which means considering the
particular beliefs or social judgments that individuals hold.
Take, for example, the work dealing with how ordinary folk attribute traits or
dispositions. Most earlier work dealing with this process adopted the standard
cognitive approach and treated dispositions as an homogeneous class. Yet the work
of Reeder and his colleagues demonstrates that the underlying schemata tracking the
 224 GARTH J. O. FLETCHER

relations between behavioral criteria and the attribution of dispositions, will differ
according to the kind of disposition attributed (for a review see Reeder, 1988). Some
traits (e.g. talkativeness, punctuality, etc.) appear to be associated with a straightfor-
ward frequency schema in which the strength of the attribution is directly associated
with the relative frequency of behavior. There is good evidence, however, that other
traits (e.g. ability and morality) are asymmetrical with respect to positive and
negative behavioral criteria. For example, people confidently make extreme dishon-
esty attributions on the basis of one example of dishonest behavior, but make weak
honesty attributions on the basis of one example of honest behavior.
A second illustration comes from the social psychological work dealing with
close relationship lay beliefs. In general, this body of work demonstrates the
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importance of taking into account the theories that people have with respect to
relationships (Fletcher & Fincham, 1991). For example, consider the question, how
do people know if they are in a good relationship? Or, how do folk decide whether
a given close relationship is worth pursuing or likely to be a long-term success? In
a continuing program of research, Fletcher and his colleagues (Fletcher & Fitness,
1993; Fletcher & Kininmonth, 1992; Fletcher et al, 1994) have found evidence that
judgments of an ongoing relationship will be generated, in part, by the match
between what actually occurs in the relationship and prior beliefs or theories
concerning the "ideal" relationship.
Consider, for example, a person who believes that romance and passion are
essential ingredients of a successful intimate relationship. The evidence suggests that
such an individual is likely to pay particular attention to the occurrence of related
behaviors (candle-lit dinners, admiring glances, surprise gifts, and the like). Ro-
mance and passion will, thus, play a central role in the development of the mental
model of such a relationship and also strongly influence relationship satisfaction. In
contrast, someone who believes that romance and sex are generally unimportant
factors in determining relationship success will pay less attention to this category of
behaviors, and not base his or her evaluations of the relationship on the quality and
quantity of romantic behavior and sex.
Thus, close relationship beliefs appear to guide and focus the processing of
close relationship interaction, and so influence the specific theories that people
generate of their own relationships and any attendant relationship evaluations and
judgments. This does not mean that people are necessarily aware of how this process
works. Indeed, recent evidence suggests that general close relationship beliefs may
influence processing in specific relationships in a relatively automatic and uninten-
tional fashion (Fletcher et al., 1994).

Conclusions
My purpose in this section has been to illustrate how psychologists use folk
psychology in theory building (in terms of Usei). Let me reiterate a few central
points, and also append some caveats.
First, Usei of common sense does not embrace any commitment to the truth
value or scientific credibility of the relevant knowledge structures. Even if lay beliefs
 TWO USES OF FOLK PSYCHOLOGY 225

concerning the causes of relationship success are nonsense or folk causal theories are
erroneous, in order to explain how people make judgments about close relationships,
or make causal attributions, psychologists will still need to take such lay theories into
account.
Second, Usei of folk psychology (unlike Use2) is going to be restricted to those
domains where folk theories actually exist. As I have already indicated, common
sense does appear to be alive and well in areas such as social psychology and
personality theory; however, folk theories may be virtually non-existent in domains
like neuropsychology, auditory perception, and language learning (more on this
point later).
Third, making use of folk psychology in terms of Usei does not imply that the
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related professional theory is restricted to folk psychology. For example, some social
psychological theories explore such issues as the origins and consequences of folk
beliefs or knowledge structures, while others examine the sort of micro-cognitive
processes and structures that are not represented in folk psychology. In this way,
psychological theories that incorporate folk psychology may nevertheless produce
insights that go beyond common sense or are even counterintuitive.
Finally, it is important to distinguish Usei of folk psychology from Use2, a
distinction that will be expanded upon in the next section.

Folk psychology as a general source in theory building in psychology (Usez)

In contrast to the previous way of using folk psychology, to utilize commonsense
ideas, concepts, or approaches more generally as part of scientific theory (Use2) does
assume that such ideas are valid, plausible, or scientifically useful. I will discuss the
obvious related question (is this practice justifiable?) later on. For the moment, I
want to document a more straightforward empirical proposition—that psychologists
do in fact routinely make use of folk psychology in their theorizing (apart from the
more restricted Usei outlined previously).
To begin with, most psychological theories contain certain fundamental com-
monsense assumptions that are inherently difficult to justify; e.g. that mental states
can cause behavior, and that knowledge structures are somehow stored in one's
mind or brain (see Fletcher, 1984). Moreover, folk concepts and categories of all
kinds abound in personality and social psychology and to a lesser extent in cognitive
psychology—concepts such as needs, attitude, belief, emotion, drive, reward, pun-
ishment, attitude, intention, trait, and so forth.
Empirical examinations of the similarity between lay theories and professional
psychological theories confirm the existence of considerable overlap between the two
spheres, partly in terms of Use2 (for a review see Furnham, 1988). For example,
substantial overlap has been found between lay conceptions and psychological
theories concerning introversion-extroversion (Semin & Krahe, 1987), intelligence
(Steinberg et al., 1981), delinquency (Furnham & Henderson, 1983) and depression
(Rippere, 1977).
There seem to be three major ways in which elements of folk psychology are
incorporated into our master psychological theories (other than through the
 226 GARTH J. O. FLETCHER

sense described previously). First, psychologists on occasion deliberately and ex-

plicitly exploit their own folk knowledge in designing theories. Second, common-
sense ideas almost certainly implicitly inform the expert's theory-building process in
ways psychologists may be (and I suspect often are) blithely unaware of. Third, the
methodologies used by psychologists sometimes automatically build folk theory into
the overarching theory, a fact which is typically either mentioned in passing or
apparently goes unnoticed.
The first method noted previously (explicit use of folk psychology) is apparently
benign, unless we were to believe that most commonsense thinking is false or
implausible (a claim that I will touch on in this section, but will deal with more fully
later on).
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The second procedure (unconscious or automatic use of folk psychology) is

more worrisome, because it implies that folk psychology is being smuggled into our
psychological theories in an uncontrolled way. The extent to which this occurs is
bound to be variable, and may depend, in part, on how far the specialist knowledge
base has developed in a particular field. Original theorizing in a given area has to
come from somewhere, and if the specialist knowledge base is minimal then
informed common sense may be all one has. In addition, given the pervasive nature
of our folk knowledge structures, the implicit acceptance of a set of commonsense
fundamental assumptions (such as the permanence of causal relations), and our
necessary reliance on a shared language (which carries cultural theoretical baggage),
then a certain amount of leakage from our cultural/commonsense heritage into
psychological theories is probably inevitable, and indeed necessary. A scientific
theory that owed nothing to our folk cultural base, either in its content or the way
it was expressed, would probably be unintelligible.
Moreover, the fact that material from folk psychology is incorporated into
psychology (explicitly or implicitly) does not protect such concepts or ideas from
critical scrutiny, argument, or empirical test—the fate of any theory of note in
psychology. For example, there is considerable argument surrounding the concept of
automatic processing (Uleman & Bargh, 1989), even though such a concept may
indeed have had its genesis in folk psychology. Or, to take another example, the kind
of androcentric and sexist biases in Freudian theory (among others) has been
effectively challenged over the last few decades by feminist academics (e.g. see
Jacobus et al, 1990).
This is not to say that psychological theories often do not willy-nilly incorporate
values or ideas from folk culture (as will be clear from what I have been arguing),
and these may escape critical scrutiny for a time. However, I disagree with the
extreme view that science moves in perfect lock-step with ideologies and ideas from
the wider society. That this is often not the case is obvious to anyone with even a
cursory understanding of the history of scientific development in any given field. To
take one example, Darwinian evolutionary theory had to overcome deeply en-
trenched religious and scientific beliefs of the time before it was widely accepted. In
psychology there are many examples of popular or successful theories that have gone
against the conventional wisdom. Perhaps the most dramatic example is behaviorism
(especially radical behaviorism) which dominated psychology for several decades
 TWO USES OF FOLK PSYCHOLOGY 227

and is four-square inconsistent with the mentalistic explanations of human behavior

which were, and are, an integral component of folk psychology (see Fletcher, in
press).
The third process noted above by which folk psychology is incorporated into
psychology was termed the methodological route. This particular procedure is part
of a more general problem in personality and social psychology where the two basic
uses of folk psychology for psychological theorizing (Usei and Use2) are at times run
together in a confusing way, and with problematic results. I now turn to this
important issue, taking personality research and attribution theory as examples of
how the two categories are quite commonly mixed up at both the methodological
and theoretical levels.
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Confounding Usei and Use2 of folk psychology in psychology

Personality research
There is compelling evidence from work in social psychology and social cognition
that traits or personal dispositions are a central and pervasive component in folk
psychology (Ross & Fletcher, 1985; Newman & Uleman, 1989). The importance of
such constructs is reflected in their prevalence in our language: of the 18,000
person-descriptive terms Allport and Odbert (1936) found in a standard English
dictionary, 4504 seem to describe stable dispositions (Eiser, 1983). Using a rep-
resentative selection of such terms, Norman (1963), Goldberg (1981), and more
recently McCrae and his colleagues (McCrae & Coster, 1985), have found that
factor analyses of subjects' self-ratings reveal an underlying personality structure
known as the big five: extroversion, neuroticism, conscientiousness, agreeableness,
and openness or intellect.
Now, personality theorists are invariably involved in the game of erecting
master personality theories. And, a major part of this enterprise involves determining
an appropriate taxonomy to order the multitude of personality dispositions—indeed,
this is how the above big five personality taxonomy is interpreted by the psycholo-
gists cited above. Yet, clearly, what this research has actually revealed (accepting its
validity for the moment) is one version of the outlines of our folk personality
structure (at least as encoded in the English language). To accept the results as a
reasonable base for a professional personality theory is to implicitly vouchsafe the
validity, plausibility, and usefulness of commonsense thinking as it extends to this
domain.
Given the enormity of this assumption, there has been remarkably little dis-
cussion in personality circles about the validity of this proposition, although some
personality theorists do occasionally indicate that they are aware of the problem (e.g.
McCrae & Coster, 1985). However, other personality theorists seem less cognizant
of the pitfalls of directly building a master theory from the materials of common-
sense thought. For example, in Buss and Craik's (1983, 1984) "act-frequency"
approach, naive raters are used to provide and rate the prototypicality of behavioral
exemplars for a particular trait (e.g. dominance). The best items are then used as the
set of measures for the trait in question. Clearly, such a procedure builds elements
 228 GARTH J. O. FLETCHER

of folk psychology into the heart of the theory, a fact which Buss and Craik appear
not to have noticed.
It should be understood here that, unlike social cognitive models of the sort
described earlier dealing with attributional processes or beliefs in close relationships,
Buss and Craik's personality theory does not represent such trait constructs as
separate knowledge constructs within an overall model. Rather, the trait constructs
essentially comprise the personality theory; these personality constructs are intended
to be used by professional psychologists, not as representations of lay
usage (although that is precisely what they are). An analogous example would have
been if I had interpreted the folk beliefs concerning the causes of relationship
success, in the research described earlier, as the basis for my own expert theory
concerning the actual causes of relationship success (something I studiously avoided
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doing).
This conflation between the two uses of commonsense psychological knowledge
is continued by Buss and Craik at the theoretical level. As noted, their approach is
clearly set up as an overarching theoretical model, rather than as an account of how
ordinary people attribute dispositions. Yet, Buss and Craik (1983) also talk of
dispositions as cognitive constructs that have emerged from cultural evolution, and
refer occasionally to the implications of their approach for everyday perception.
Their critique of Jones and Davis' (1965) attribution model illustrates well their
confusion between Usei and Use2 of folk psychology.
In Buss and Craik's (1983) approach, dispositions are defined purely in terms
of summary labels for behavioral patterns. Attributional research is faulted because
it assumes that people can infer a disposition from a single behavioral act. To use
Buss and Craik's (1983) words: "In contrast (to attribution theory) the act fre-
quency approach holds explicitly that a single act is an inadequate basis for
dispositional inferences; such inferences are more appropriately based upon act
trends over a period of observation. Neither the intensity or the consequences of a
single act offer a strong or sensible foundation for dispositional inference" (p. 120).
We can see here the confusion produced by failing to properly distinguish
between the aims of describing how the ordinary person makes personality attribu-
tions (which is one aim of attribution theory), and presenting a scientific personality
theory that specifies how psychologists should attribute such dispositions. It is clear
from the attributional research on dispositional inference that people can and do
infer dispositions from single acts. Buss and Craik's theory therefore is either wrong
or it implies that commonsense thinking is fatally flawed, but neither option is
articulated or discussed by these authors (for a more general and compelling attack
on Buss and Craik's act-frequency theory, see Block, 1989).

Attribution theory
Attribution theorists, from Heider (1958) to Kelley (1991), have stressed the
difference between treating common sense as the subject matter of psychology
(Usei), and exploiting commonsense concepts for use in our overarching theories
 TWO USES OF FOLK PSYCHOLOGY 229

(Use2). Yet, even in attribution theory these two aspects are sometimes mixed up.
A good example of this can be found in Shaver's (Shaver, 1985; Shaver & Drown,
1986) theory of the relations between causality, responsibility, and blame.
Shaver draws on much previous theoretical work and research to make the valid
point that such concepts have often been methodologically and conceptually con-
founded in previous attribution work, with researchers often treating these concepts
as interchangeable. Even minimal conceptual analysis of everyday examples sup-
ports Shaver's point. For example, an individual may have caused the bomb to go
off in his car by switching on the ignition, but not be held responsible for it; or the
person who supplied the bomb may be held responsible but not blamed for it
because his own life was threatened; or a person who had knowledge of the car
bomb may not have had any causal role in the detonation, but be held partly
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responsible because he failed to contact the authorities.

Related attribution research backs up this analysis, in part, by showing that
although causal judgments and attributional judgments with a strong evaluative/nor-
mative flavor (e.g. blame) are correlated, they are nevertheless not identical in lay
theory (see Shaver & Drown, 1986; Fletcher & Fincham, 1991).
Based on such reasoning. Shaver and Drown (1986) present an analysis in
which responsibility and blame are attributions made only after the occurrence of
events that have negative consequences. Attributed responsibility is held to increase
with the individual's (a) causal contribution to the effect, (b) awareness of the
outcome, (c) intention to bring about the effect, (d) absence of external coercion,
and (e) appreciation of the moral value of the action. Blame is a separate attribution
made as a consequence of the offending person's justification or excuse.
Now, obviously, this theory is concerned with the task of describing how the
layperson makes attributional judgments. But Shaver and Drown (1986) then
muddy the waters by treating the same account as a normative psychological theory
that stands separate from, and above, how laypeople actually proceed. For example,
they state, "It is not possible for a victim to be objectively blameworthy for the
occurrence of a crime or an illness, unless the victim intentionally behaved in a
manner to produce the suffering. This is not to say that victims are never blamed,
by themselves or by others. Indeed, the manner in which blame is inaccurately
applied by victims may prove valuable in understanding emotional adjust-
ment...Researchers should also attend to whether the suffering was produced by a
complex set of antecedants...or by a single, specific action of the stimulus person.
Only in the latter case would a self-attribution of causality be veridical, not with-
standing the fact that almost any perceived control appears to be beneficial to the
victims" (p. 710; emphases added).
To derive a descriptive theory from research and conceptual analysis that is
directly concerned with how laypeople think, should not then be used as a normative
model to evaluate systematic departures from such a model. To do so hopelessly
confuses the two uses of folk psychology, and results in a muddle.
Having admonished psychology for getting into trouble over the distinction
between Usei and Use2 of folk psychology, it is now time to direct attention towards
the philosophy of psychology.
 230 GARTH J. O. FLETCHER

Usei, Use2, and eliminative materialism

Why folk psychology won't go away
The role of folk psychology in scientific psychology has roused considerable debate
in cognitive science and philosophical circles over the last decade or so (Greenwood,
1991), especially in relation to a position known as "eliminative materialism"
developed in the main by Churchland (1981) and Stitch (1983).
For the sake of brevity I will take Paul Churchland as the main spokesperson for
eliminative materialism. Churchland stresses that folk psychology should be evalu-
ated for its scientific credentials "just like folk mechanics, folk thermodynamics, folk
meteorology, and folk biology" (Churchland, 1991, p. 51). The evaluation actually
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offered is scathing. He claims that folk psychology represents a false and radically
misleading conception of the causes of human behavior and the nature of cognition.
Folk psychology is held to "suffer explanatory failures on an epic scale" (1981, p.
76), and to possess a chimerical ontology—"Beliefs and desires are of a piece with
phlogiston, caloric, and the alchemal essences" (1991, p. 65). In fact, remarkably
little evidence is marshaled for such claims, a point I will return to later.
His second main argument is that folk-psychological phenomena (beliefs and
other mental attributions) do not appear capable of being reduced to neurophysio-
logical machinery or the sort of neural networks postulated in connectionist AI.
Churchland's arguments have attracted a good deal of criticism and discussion
(see Greenwood, 1991). I will not attempt to summarize that debate here or offer a
comprehensive critique of eliminative materialism. Rather, I will concentrate on how
consideration of the work in social psychology, and the distinction between Usei and
Use2, can contribute to this controversy.
First, it is clear that Churchland is concerned purely with Use2 for psychology
as we have outlined it. Indeed, this is true for almost all the debate in this area, with
one or two notable exceptions (e.g. Stitch, 1992). Consistent with this point,
Churchland often stresses the equivalence between folk psychology and other
commonsense theories such as folk physics. In so doing, however, he runs foul of the
argument made earlier concerning that curious feature of psychology which marks
it off from the other sciences; namely, that even if folk psychology is completely
useless as a psychological theory itself (Use2), it will still feature as part of the
content of an overarching psychological account (Usei). Moreover, as I hope the
earlier examples concerning social cognition illustrate, this use of folk psychology is
neither trivial nor unimportant. This fundamental feature of psychology is simply
not true of other sciences such as physics or chemistry. There is no equivalent of
Usei in the natural sciences.
One possible response to this argument is that although folk theory may be (in
some sense) represented in psychological models, it will not look anything like the
folk psychology that we know. Indeed, the criticisms of Churchland, Stitch, and
others have been principally directed against the views of Fodor (1975) that beliefs
and desires (or propositional attitudes as they are termed) are consistent with
commonsense theory, and are best interpreted as functionally discrete, semantically
 TWO USES OF FOLK PSYCHOLOGY 231

interprétable states that play a causal role in producing other psychological events
and ultimately behavior. Accordingly, the eliminationist set have fastened gleefully
onto the recent development of connectionist models in cognitive science because
such models postulate content-free neural networks in which information is dis-
tributed across the whole network, rather than the traditional computational cogni-
tive architecture that operates on discrete, functionally distinct, belief-like
representations {qua common sense).
However, such a response again fatally confuses Usei and Use2. All I am
claiming here is that folk theories need to be represented in social cognitive models
(Usei). The exact way in which commonsense knowledge or theory is so represented
seems to me to be an open question. It may very well be that descriptions of
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deep-level cognitive/neurological structures and processes that represent common-

sense, or that generate social judgments and behavior, may not resemble the surface
structure of folk theories. But this in no way implies that we can safely ignore folk
psychology in the building of our psychological theories according to Usei (at least
in those domains where folk models and theories exist).
A final objection to my line of argument could be that it entails that folk
psychology will feature in psychological theories, whatever common sense might
look like. For example, if folk psychology was to evolve into a radically different sort
of animal in the future, it would (on my account) maintain a critical role in any
overarching psychological theory. But the central question, so it could be argued,
concerns the merits and demerits of folk psychology as it is currently constituted. Just
so. But this moves us into considering the viability of Use2 of folk psychology, a task
I now turn to.

The scientific credibility of folk psychology

One general problem with the eliminationist perspective is that it tends to treat folk
psychology all of a piece, to be either completely discarded or exploited as the basis
for scientific psychology. Yet, common sense is a sprawling, ramshackle beast with
a variety of components—some bits may prove to be useful while other bits may turn
out to be of no use at all, or even pernicious.
For example, a good case can be made that psychological theories (along with
the rest of science) typically rest on a network of assumptive beliefs that are
quintessential common sense (see Fletcher, 1984). Among such bed-rock beliefs
would be included our assumption that the world exists independently (to some
extent) of our perception of it, that the causal relationships that have held in the past
will continue to hold in the future, that other people possess states of conscious
awareness, that we are the same person from day to day, that logical deductions are
correct, and so forth.
The fundamental nature of such beliefs is revealed in developmental research
that has shown that abstruse but central aspects of our commonsense model of mind
develop as early as 3 or 4 (see Wellman & Gelman, 1992, for a review). For
example, by the age of 4 children seem to understand that people respond to the
outside world in terms of their beliefs rather than the world itself, i.e. they under-
 232 GARTH J. O. FLETCHER

stand the difference between true and false beliefs. Indeed, there is evidence that the
failure to develop the most basic elements of our folk theory of mind results in the
disabling condition known as autism (Baron-Cohen, 1990; Baron-Cohen et ah,
1985). Autistic children fail to distinguish between people and objects; they can
reason as well as other children about physical causality but fail to appropriately
attribute mental states, such as beliefs, to others.
Folk psychology is also replete with proverbs and saws that express causal
generalizations or principles of human behavior. Rogers (1990) has tracked down 34
examples of proverbs for which there exist research that can be interpreted as tests
of their validity; e.g. birds of a feather flock together, ignorance is bliss, once bitten
twice shy, and so forth. To what extent such a knowledge base is viable or useful is
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another matter. But, there appears to be no reason why psychologists should, in

principle, ignore such a repository of casual generalizations.
And, finally, a third way folk psychology can be exploited is through the
borrowing of commonsense concepts and distinctions. As already argued, this use of
folk psychology is in fact endemic in psychology, with concepts like trait, emotion,
motive, attitude, and so forth, being adapted and refined for use in many domains.
Indeed, it is this particular usage which has been at the center of the debate about
folk psychology, with the eliminationists claiming that propositional attitudes, such
as beliefs, desires, and hopes, constitute the lynch pin of folk psychology.
Now, I would certainly not deny that propositional attitudes are an important
element in folk psychology, but there are other key commonsense concepts that have
quite a different definitional cum cognitive architecture, for example, emotions and
personality traits. I will take the concept of "traits". As previously noted, there is
substantial evidence from the work in social psychology that confirms the import-
ance and significance of this class of attributions in folk psychological theory. Yet,
the theoretical outlines of such attributions appear to be critically distinct from
propositional attitudes (Fletcher, 1995).
Unlike beliefs which are potentially infinite in their variety, in lay theory traits
constitute a countable and limited category and represent rough families of behav-
iors, cognitions, and emotions that cohere to form stable patterns in given individu-
als (see Fletcher, 1995 and Newman & Uleman, 1989 for more elaborate
discussions) [1].
Now, it is quite possible that propositional attitudes will bite the dust in future
psychological theories, but that the commonsense concept of traits will live on, or
that both concepts will vanish, but that the trichotomy of affect, cognition, and
behavior (derived from common sense) will remain with us. Such examples could be
easily multiplied to produce a long list of alternatives.
In summary, it seems to me that both the multi-faceted nature of folk psy-
chology and the variety of ways that folk psychology can be built into scientific
formulations render dubious, at best, any attempt to in principle exclude folk
psychology as a resource to be mined in the development of scientific formulations
(Use2).
I suspect that one source of the sweeping claims made about the inadequacies
(or vice versa) of common sense is that, from Fodor (1975) onwards, the debate has
 TWO USES OF FOLK PSYCHOLOGY 233

focused on the use of folk psychology within cognitive psychology: hence, the
concentration on propositional attitudes which can readily be incorporated into
computational theories of cognition (Greenwood, 1991). In retrospect, this would
appear to be an odd choice. The domain in psychology that most assiduously uses
folk psychology in terms of both Usei and Use2 is undoubtedly, and by a country
mile, social psychology.
The reason for social psychology's level of interest in folk psychology is not
difficult to discern; namely, both social psychology and folk psychology are princi-
pally interested in the same psychological domain—interpersonal behavior. Social
psychologists are interested in such questions as the causes of aggression, how sexual
relationships tick, the contribution of personality in explaining behavior, why groups
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make the decisions they do, how emotions work, and how people build up person-
ality impressions. So too are laypeople, although unlike psychologists, they may be
principally interested in specific relationships, people, or events. Folk psychology
assuredly contains a relatively elaborate theory of mind (Rips & Conrad, 1989), but
perhaps the most accurate overall characterization of folk psychology would be as a
social psychological theory rather than as a theory of mind.
Moreover, unlike cognitive psychology, a considerable amount of research
activity within social psychology has been directed towards evaluating the accuracy
and rationality of lay social judgments. The work in this area is rarely mentioned in
the philosophical literature (with one or two exceptions, e.g. Horgan & Woodward,
1985). Accordingly, I shall briefly review this body of work here, then draw some
implications for the controversy over folk psychology (for a more extensive treatment
see Fletcher, 1995).
First, a caveat: an evaluation of lay social cognition according to its everyday
successes and failures in prediction and explanation is not incontrovertible evidence
in relation to the scientific credibility of folk psychology. For example, lay judgment
might be flawed because of the limited access that people have to the powerful
experimental and research techniques available to the research psychologist, rather
than because of the barrenness of lay theories (i.e. the problem might be in the
quality of the available data rather than the folk theories themselves). Still, an
evaluation of lay judgment is germane to the issues at hand. If folk psychology is as
hopeless as has been claimed, then it would be surprising to discover that lay social
cognition (which relies on such theories) was immaculately rational and had the
capacity to produce accurate social judgments and predictions.
Indeed, by the early 1980s, according to mainstream psychology, it looked like
Churchland's assessment of folk psychology was not far short of the mark. Person-
ality psychology was in the throes of a debate concerning whether behavior was
consistent across situations, and, although the jury was still out on the issue,
powerful voices and persuasive data suggested that the concept of personality traits
was a quaint shibboleth of commonsense psychology. As Nisbett and Ross (1980)
put it, "the personality theorists' (and the layperson's) conviction that there are
strong cross-situational consistencies in behavior may be seen as merely another
instance of theory-driven covariation assessments operating in the face of contrary
evidence" (p. 112).
 234 GARTH J. O. FLETCHER

In social cognition circles, a flood of research on errors and biases in social

judgment apparently demonstrated that laypeople were subject to an extraordinary
range of invidious social judgment biases—laypeople were purported to underesti-
mate the causal role of situational determinants of behavior and overestimate the
role of personal determinants (the so-called fundamental attribution error), to be
poor statisticians, to be unduly influenced by prior theories while underutilizing
data, and much more (for reviews see Nisbett & Ross, 1980; Ross, 1977; Markus &
Zajonc, 1985). As Fiske and Taylor (1984) concluded in their textbook Social
Cognition, "Instead of a naive scientist entering the environment in search of the
truth, we find the rather unflattering picture of a charlatan trying to make the data
come out in a manner most advantageous to his or her already held theories" (p.
88) [2].
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However, since the mid-1980s further research and theorizing in this area has
produced a remarkable sea change in the standard view, which is at odds with the
bleak portrayal of commonsense social cognition described above. Various authors
have drawn similar conclusions based on literature reviews of this research (Fletcher,
1995; Funder, 1987; Kenrick & Funder, 1988; Klayman & Ha, 1987); namely,
under unfavorable conditions that promote a casual, automatic, or data-driven style
of information processing, laypeople will typically rely on fall-back heuristics or
easily used rules of thumb. On the one hand, these heuristics are often reliable,
adaptive and effective devices; on the other hand, they produce characteristic biases
or errors under certain conditions. However, under more friendly processing condi-
tions, that provide useful cues or promote more in-depth information processing,
these default heuristics tend to be corrected or discarded, hence reducing resultant
biases and errors.
Take as an example, the celebrated bias known variously as the correspondence
bias or the fundamental attribution error, the tendency to underestimate the causal
role of situational determinants (Ross, 1977). Recent studies have suggested that
under conditions that encourage an in-depth and careful processing of the stimulus
materials, compared to a superficial and casual analysis, correspondence bias will
decrease (Fletcher et al., 1990; Gilbert et al., 1988).
Individual differences form another, though not commonly researched, class of
conditions that may influence social inference biases. Fletcher and his colleagues
have examined the role that the complexity of attributional schemata has in relation
to the level of expertise exhibited in social judgment, using a recently developed
scale termed the Attributional Complexity Scale (Fletcher et al., 1986).
Using this scale Fletcher and his colleagues, and others, have found that
subjects who possess complex attributional schemata produce more accurate trait
and attitude judgments than do those with simple schemata, but that such an
advantage appears to be manifested most strongly under conditions that encourage
in-depth information processing that is goal driven (Devine, 1989a; Fletcher et al.,
1988, 1990, 1992). In a reaction-time study Fletcher et al. (1992) also found that
attributionally complex subjects displayed a clear-cut tendency to control the
amount of processing time according to the difficulty level of the causal problem; in
contrast, attributionally simple subjects did not control their processing time at all
 TWO USES OF FOLK PSYCHOLOGY 235

according to the difficulty level of the causal problem. In short, some laypeople
appear to be better naive (social) scientists than others [3].
With respect to the accuracy of lay personality or other dispositional judgments,
a similar story can be told. With increasingly sophisticated theories and methodolo-
gies being developed, it is clear that, depending on the conditions, the lay perceiver
has the ability to generate surprisingly accurate trait or attitude judgments of other
people (Funder & Sneed, 1993; Kenny, 1991; Kenrick & Funder, 1988).
The upshot is that folk psychology works rather better than we would expect,
if it was truly the basket case that Churchland and others have claimed it to be. Of
course, common sense is limited and flawed, and it would be foolish to expect that
we could appropriate it holus-bolus as an overarching psychological theory. How-
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ever, the body of research in social psychology is certainly consistent with the
proposition that folk psychology is a valuable resource for theory building in terms
of Use2.

Conclusion
In conclusion, it seems to me that attempts to either sanctify the central features of
folk psychology or reject them entirely as a basis for scientific psychology are likely
to founder on the complex and myriad ways in which folk psychology and scientific
psychology are related. The distinction between Usei and Use2 of folk psychology is
a useful springboard to further our understanding and evaluation concerning the
nature of those linkages.

Acknowledgements
Thanks are extended to the following people who provided valuable comments on
an earlier draft of this article: Tony Atkinson, Jack Copeland, Brian Haig, Glenn
Reeder, Gill Rhodes, Simon Kemp, and Tanya Tremewan.

Correspondence: Requests for reprints should be sent to: Garth Fletcher, Psychology
Department, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand. Email:
[email protected]

Notes
[1] Interestingly, one of the principal arguments offered by Stitch (1992) for the superiority of a
connectionist account over a (commonsense) cognitive theory which uses propositional attitudes,
is the implausibility of the idea that we have a virtually infinite number of beliefs cognitively stored.
Whatever the merits of this claim, it does not apply to such categories of social judgment as
emotions or traits.
[2] Folk psychology itself contains the idea that commonplace ways of acting or thinking are in error
or stupid. I have discovered, for example, that most of the cognitive biases or shortcomings studied
in psychology can be found in the stock of ancient proverbs and fables (of which there are estimated
to be over 3000). For example, the hind-sight bias, over-confidence in one's personal powers, and
the fundamental attribution error are exemplified respectively in the old saw about it being easy to
be wise after the event, the fable of the poor toad who blew apart when it imagined it could puff
 236 GARTH J. O. FLETCHER

itself up to the size of a bull, and the fable of the ass who mistakenly attributed cowardice to the
lion when he observed it being frightened by a crowing rooster and was subsequently eaten.
[3] Such a conclusion is perfectly consistent with folk wisdom which is full of proverbs and fables
presaged on the existence of individual differences in social intelligence.

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