ABSTRACT
I argue that existing mindreading theories often are too narrowly focused on belief attributions. As a result, they neglect other aspects of social interaction, such as how automatic social categorization and situational context influence how we interpret social behavior. These other aspects filter input to mindreading and thus directly influence the mindreader’s mental state attributions. I explain how social categorization and situational context prime certain interpretative schemata, activate stereotypes and social biases, and make certain personality trait and mental state inferences salient and sometimes hard to override.
