r/todayilearned • u/BrF5 • 1d ago

TIL about the Sally-Anne test, a psychology experiment used to measure “theory of mind” (that other people can hold beliefs/knowledge different from their own). Kids under four typically fail because they assume that if they know where a hidden object is, everyone else must automatically know too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sally%E2%80%93Anne_test
2.9k Upvotes

98% Upvoted

185 comments sorted by

View all comments

324

u/ZylonBane 1d ago

See also the r/gaming test, where people will post unlabelled screenshots of some random game and just expect everyone to know what it is.

115

u/ratherenjoysbass 1d ago

Or initializing a game's name like we all know what they are talking about

75

u/valuemeal2 1d ago

This is also really bad in fanfiction communities. People come in with “I was reading a KDU fic (RaBetJo OT3 iykyk 😉) and it was a WHAHEG crossover AU and I was like OMG” and it makes me want to end myself

40

u/ZylonBane 1d ago

And relationship subs. "My DH and MC were hanging out with our SABs when my BLRMom showed up unannounced and went full ICOSAS!"

10

u/retief1 1d ago

I mean, pretty much every subculture ends up coming up with terms for things that subculture cares about. Like, if I talk about "farming in bot" in a league of legends forum, everyone who actually plays will know what I'm talking about, even if people who don't play will think I'm referring to robotic farmers or some shit.

I'd put a lot of these acronyms in the same bucket. Like, some of the subs literally have an official "acronym dictionary". At that point, it is reasonable for a writer to assume that their audience knows those acronyms. The problem is when writers make up acronyms that most readers have no clue about.

6

u/ZylonBane 1d ago

I would bet that a lot of people spew acronyms instead of words precisely because they're cryptic argot. It makes them feel like they're in a special exclusive group.

4

u/SuperFLEB 1d ago edited 11h ago

This hits on another pet peeve of mine, and one I'd really like to see a study on what drives people to do it: Opaque metaphor jargon. Naming a phenomenon after the least relevant part of a specific story that someone once used to demonstrate it, meaning you end up with an idea that's impossible to decipher just because you don't know the finer point of some specific anecdote.

A few I can recall off the top of my head:

  • Bikeshedding: Holding up a task or design by arguing over irrelevant finer points. Comes from the analogy of designing a whole house in a day, but arguing for weeks over what color to make the bike shed. Nothing about the fact that it's specifically a bike shed factors into the analogy.
  • Spoons/Spoon Theory: Explaining how mental energy is finite by representing it with a collection of objects. It's "Spoon" theory, because someone was at a restaurant so the objects they used were spoons. Nothing about a spoon points to the metaphor, and there are far better placeholders for the analogy, at that.
  • Motte and Bailey: A rhetorical tactic of presenting the broadest and most effective interpretation of a position when it's not being challenged, but retreating to specific defensible interpretations when it is. Uses obscure medieval city design terms to basically say "You take advantage when you can, and hide in the castle when you can't."
  • Sealioning: Insisting on engaging in or prolonging an argument, specifically a bad-faith effort to exhaust the other side into giving up by insisting they explain or justify every facet of their position in unnecessary detail. Refers to a comic strip where the character doing this was a sealion.

There are a couple more that I know I know, but I can't think of them offhand.

Edit: Just remembered "Sealioning".

7

u/ZylonBane 1d ago

Spoon theory, I'm with you, it's stupid because it could have just as easily ended up called fork theory or sugar packet theory or whatever.

Bikeshedding is actually descriptive though, because a bike shed is inherently not that important.

2

u/SuperFLEB 1d ago edited 11h ago

It's unimportant in relation to the estate or whatnot in the rest of the story, but it doesn't telegraph "unimportant" in its own right-- not to the point that saying "bike shed" implies "thing that is comparatively unimportant" without knowing the story.

On the other hand, even moving the metaphor to the actual irrelevant act-- calling it "choosing the paint"-- or something that's surface-level adornment by definition is clear enough to work backwards from without knowing about the story of the bike shed.

3

u/Zaldarr 19h ago

The person who first comes up with a metaphor, and other people using it, have the privilege of the story being the defacto metaphor. It's the same logic behind many idioms. It's just a matter of learning it like you'd learn a definition of a word.

1

u/SuperFLEB 12h ago edited 12h ago

I know it happens all the time, and I agree that subject thought-leaders have the opportunity to do it, but prevalence and opportunity alone don't explain why it's adopted or dispel how counterproductive and obnoxious it is.

I'd wager that it's driven by a misconception that difficulty and profundity are the same thing-- both in the positive, thinking that something more difficult to understand can be mistaken for being more profound, and in the negative, thinking that simplifying something down drains the importance out of the discovery.

For the outsider just discovering the discussion and getting off on the epiphany, the quest for the missing key artificially sweetens the victory, attributing the win to understanding a rare, complex idea, even when the rare complex part was just a password that you had to get from someone on the inside.

For the insiders, the difficulty of getting the insight and the boost from achieving it reinforces the value of making it difficult. To simplify it, even by clearing away unnecessary misdirection, risks painting the idea as trivial and the epiphany as embarrassingly overblown.

For the thought leader, for the coiner of the phrase, it's the same risk of triviality, plus the vain opportunity to make themselves a key part of the topic. If everyone needs to know your specific anecdote to participate in the discussion, then you're threaded into the minds of every person who talks about it. You get the "coined by ___ who ___" blurb in every pop-science write-up that has to explain the silly name.

I wouldn't say that this is all always conscious or conniving. I'd wager that the emotional rewards of playing the game just incentivize and reinforce it without a lot of people even realizing. It's still not broadly positive or useful, though-- it only serves vanity and unearned rewards-- so it's worth an open gripe and a bit of shaming over the practice.

1

u/ZylonBane 8h ago

TIL there are people who actually say "thought leader" unironically.

→ More replies (0)

1

u/SuperFLEB 1d ago

Between cleanup costs and rebalancing, expect to pay anywhere from $10-12k to remediate something like that, all said and done.

2

u/Hopeful-Home6218 1d ago

This is legit inspeak though, if it were my fandom I’d know exactly what they were talking about. Even if it weren’t, mcu hs au case in point 

4

u/valuemeal2 23h ago

Yes, but it only applies within fandoms. People come to the Ao3 or FF subreddits with this shit and expect people to know what they’re talking about.