McCullough et al. suggest that revenge and forgiveness rest upon risk computation. Risk computation is implemented by emotions that evolved for additional functions, giving rise to phenomena such as betrayal aversion and taboo-tradeoffs, and specific patterns of forgiveness we have documented. A complete account of revenge and reconciliation should incorporate broader constructs from social psychology, including emotions and values hierarchies.

Exploiting existing representations implies tapping an enormous domain, coextensive with human understanding and knowledge, and endowed with its own dynamics of piecewise and cumulative learning. The worth of Clark & Thornton's proposal depends on the relative importance of this dynamics and of the bottom-up mechanism they come to complement. Radical restructuring of theories and patterns of retrieval from long-term memory are discussed in the context of such an evaluation.

Schizophrenics exhibit a deficit in theory of mind (ToM), but an intact theory of biology (ToB). One explanation is that ToM relies on an independent module that is selectively damaged. Phillips & Silverstein's analyses suggest an alternative: ToM requires the type of coordination that is impaired in schizophrenia, whereas ToB is spared because this type of coordination is not involved.

In spite of extensive research on theory of mind, lay theories about the unconscious have scarcely been investigated. Three questionnaire studies totaling 689 participants, examined to what extent they thought that a range of psychological processes could be unconscious. It was found that people are less willing to countenance unconscious processes in themselves than in others, regardless of the time period considered – present, past or future. This is especially true when specific experience-like situations are envisioned, as opposed to considering (...) the question in abstract or generic terms. In addition, the notion of unconscious psychological processes is resisted for certain domains in particular: intending, sensing, believing, and thinking. We interpret this pattern by positing the existence of two conceptions about the unconscious that are differentially applied according to circumstances: one originating in prevalent social representations about the unconscious, the other based on self-model of the person as an intentional actor. (shrink)