Rethinking Social Cognition Beyond Mindreading

Theory of Mind (ToM)—the capacity to infer others’ mental states—has long been treated as a cornerstone of social cognition. Yet its conceptual boundaries and mechanistic foundations remain vague, and its empirical robustness is less secure than often assumed. This tension is especially striking because ToM originated in comparative work on chimpanzees, even though chimpanzee social life is best known for power-related behavior. The same problem appears in humans: lie detection—arguably the most iconic real-world false-belief task—reveals an accuracy of only about 54%, barely above chance. Across humans and other social species, mental-state inference is inconsistent, context-dependent, and error-prone, indicating that “mindreading” is better understood as pattern-based social inference rather than a dedicated cognitive module. By contrast, status recognition and power-relevant behavior are robust, contextually stable, and consistently observed across species. We therefore propose reframing social cognition as the tracking of status and the navigation of power dynamics rather than hidden mental-state inference. This reframing provides an empirically grounded account of social cognition that better reflects social interaction in real-world settings.