Abstract

Imagination is not just fun and children's games but underpins many of the key skills we need for navigating our social world. Other people's thoughts and minds are not visible but at some stage in development children take a mental leap to attribute other people with these invisible mental states. This results in the skill to 'get into the heads of others', allowing for meaningful disentanglement of communication, being discrete, tactful, empathic and also understanding and predicting other people's behaviour.
Seeing into the future is important when we make decisions, because we have to imagine what the outcome of a decision is going to be and which one will make us happier. But why, if imagination is so powerful, do we often fail to see things from someone else's point of view and get some small and some big decisions quite wrong? The development, the success and the failures can tell us much about the workings of the mechanism itself.