In philosophy of mind and cognitive science, folk psychology, or commonsense psychology, is a human capacity to explain and predict the behavior and mental state of other people.[1] Processes and items encountered in daily life such as pain, pleasure, excitement, and anxiety use common linguistic terms as opposed to technical or scientific jargon.[2] Folk psychology allows for an insight into social interactions and communication, thus stretching the importance of connection and how it is experienced.
Traditionally, the study of folk psychology has focused on how everyday people—those without formal training in the various academic fields of science—go about attributing mental states. This domain has primarily been centered on intentional states reflective of an individual's beliefs and desires; each described in terms of everyday language and concepts such as "beliefs", "desires", "fear", and "hope".[3]
Belief and desire have been the main idea of folk psychology as both suggest the mental states we partake in. Belief comes from the mindset of how we take the world to be while desire comes from how we want the world to be. From both of these mindsets, our intensity of predicting others mental states can have different results. [4]
Folk psychology is seen by many psychologists from two perspectives: the intentional stance or the regulative view. The regulative view of folk psychology insists that a person's behavior is more geared to acting towards the societal norms whereas the intentional stance makes a person behave based on the circumstances of how they are supposed to behave.[5]