*Scientific opinions are mixed as to whether we’re entirely unique in having a theory of mind or whether we just can’t detect it as readily in nonverbal animals (a few other social species, such as great apes, dogs, dolphins, and crows, may have some ability to reason about other minds also). But there is a general consensus among researchers in this area that humans are the planet’s “natural psychologists.” This doesn’t make us “smarter” or “better” than other species—you wouldn’t say that a bat’s radar abilities make it smarter or better than an elephant with a trunk, after all—just different. See Mark Nielsen et al., “Social Learning in Humans and Nonhuman Animals: Theoretical and Empirical Dissections,” Journal of Comparative Psychology 126, no. 2 (2012): 109–13.
†The word “theory” here refers not to a formal academic theory but to the default human way of perceiving other minds in the world. It’s not fully functional at birth, but it develops rapidly over the first few years of life, with studies consistently revealing that a theory of mind is up and running by a child’s fourth birthday.
*Which is why sexually deviant thoughts are, in and of themselves, inherently harmless.
†Unless you want to adopt the extremist philosophy of solipsism, which posits that since we can’t directly perceive them, there’s no reason to assume that other minds exist at all.
*Each participant judged each model only once, but for every model there was a nude image and a clothed image that was identical aside from the amount of flesh shown. (In other words, all of the participants got a mixed batch of nudes and nonnudes, but no participant ever saw the same model both naked and clothed. It was one or the other.)
*Male participants who saw scenes of gay anal sex not only experienced more negative emotions than did those who watched a video of a solitary man masturbating but also reported more “genital sensations.” The authors interpreted this to mean that straight men’s anger and disgust toward gay men are reactions to their own suppressed desires. More recent work by the psychologist Henry Adams traded in self-reports for data from a penile plethysmograph. Adams found that, basically, the more hostile a man is toward gay men, the stronger his erectile response is to gay male porn. See Henry E. Adams, Lester W. Wright, and Bethany A. Lohr, “Is Homophobia Associated with Homosexual Arousal?,” Journal of Abnormal Psychology 105, no. 3 (1996): 440–45. An alternative interpretation does exist (essentially, that anger toward gay men induces a more general physiological arousal causing an erection). I’ll let you judge for yourself on this one.
*Consistent with sexual-imprinting theory, Boots believed that his fetish for these objects stemmed from his roughhousing with other boys: “My early childhood and schoolday pleasures became associated with the rubber boots my playmates wore. When wrestling, I would usually end up being ‘the fellow underneath,’ and the victor (I was secretly glad to have it so) would clamp my feet between his booted legs. Or I would deliberately push my head between a boy’s boot-clad legs, and he would stanchion my head between them, like a cow is stanchioned in a dairy barn” (Boots [pseud.], “The Feelings of a Fetishist,” Psychiatric Quarterly 10 (1957): 745).
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