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  • What to Expect When You Pick up a Graphic Novel
  • Lisa Zunshine (bio)

We live in other people's heads: avidly, reluctantly, consciously, unawares, gropingly, inescapably. A stranger sitting across the table at the library turns away from her laptop screen, extends her forearm, and begins to move her eyes from the tip of her index finger to her nose and back. It's a kind of eye calisthenics; she obviously wants to keep her nearsightedness under control. I sigh and look away: I really should do the same exercises, but I am too lazy. When I look at her again, I see that she sees me looking at her, so I let my glance slide past her casually: I don't want her to think that I am staring.

Our daily lives are unimaginable without such constant nonverbal interactions. We explain other people's observable behavior in terms of unobservable mental states and assume that they explain our behavior the same way. Mental states: thoughts, desires, feelings, intentions. She does that exercise because she wants to improve her eyesight. I sigh because I feel bad about my laziness. I don't know what she thinks when she notices my look, but I think up a little narrative about what she might think and what I should do so that she doesn't think this. Note that to describe this for you now I construct a neat sequence of sentences, making it seem like an evenly paced, conscious, and fully verbalized process, but when it was actually happening it was fast, messy, intuitive, not particularly conscious, and certainly not verbalized.

We've been doing this daily for hundreds of thousands of years. (Nightly too: we attribute intentions to creatures populating our dreams.) Psychologists have a special term for the evolved cognitive adaptation that makes us see behavior as caused by underlying mental states. They call it theory of mind, also known as folk psychology and mind-reading. The latter term is particularly inapt. Given how many of our attributions and interpretations of thoughts and feelings are wrong or only approximately correct, they might as well call it mind-misreading. But since evolution doesn't deal in perfection, we have to fumble through by "reading minds" as well as we can. Because when we can't do it—that is, when the cognitive architecture that makes an automatic attribution of mental states possible [End Page 114] is impaired, as it appears to be with autism spectrum condition—we are faced with social challenges of a different order of magnitude.1

In the last five years, theory of mind has become a major research topic among cognitive, developmental, comparative and social psychologists, as well as cognitive neuroscientists.2 Though everything they learn opens up more questions and will remain the subject of debates for years to come, theory of mind is increasingly thought of as a crucial cognitive endowment of our species—a cornerstone of imagination, pretense, morality, and language, indeed of every aspect of human sociality.

The emphasis on the social aspect of mind-reading is central to the argument of this essay. I suggest that graphic narratives build on theory-of-mind adaptations to offer their readers a pleasurable exercise in navigating complex social situations. I also suggest that these narratives use a variety of visual cues to signal to their readers what levels of mind-reading complexity—I call it sociocognitive complexity—they may expect when they pick up a particular graphic novel or memoir.

The overarching claim of my essay is that all narrative-oriented cultural representations, such as fiction, movies, plays, team sports broadcasts, as well as some forms of art, singing, and dance, reflect the workings of our theory of mind. This means that we can understand better how specific representations, such as graphic narratives, affect us if we ask how they engage our theory of mind. I lay out this larger claim in the first part, in which I invite you to imagine what our culture would be like if our theory-of-mind adaptations were magically turned off. The second part elaborates the concept of sociocognitive complexity with a particular emphasis on the pleasure...

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