78 CHAPTER THREE
simulation could get in the way of, rather than promote, intersubjective un-
derstanding. A projection of one’s own experience onto another person denies
the specificity of the other’s world. It refuses to recognize difference, say, be-
tween the thinking of a city police officer, who expects to see hands, and those
of a young immigrant who expects to have to show his id. Another possibility
is that I am unable to see someone as like me at all if, for example, I view
them as wholly different or alien. (I am on the right side of the law, he is not;
I am American, he is a foreigner; and so on.) I am unable to put myself in
their shoes, so I’m unable to grasp their intentions. This latter possibility could
account for an absence of theory of mind. However, it doesn’t quite explain
a wrong theory of mind; I would have to resort to propositional thinking if I
couldn’t simulate, and the error would again be attributable to my mistaken
beliefs.
Perhaps the mistake was not exclusively propositional, in other words, not
wholly a matter of failed logic, presupposition, or ideology. Perhaps it was also
affective. It’s not irrelevant that this event often is cited as an example of con-
tagious shooting.^3 Contagious shooting is a term used to describe how when
after hearing or seeing one of their colleagues fire, officers fire their own guns,
not accidentally, but without explicitly deciding to do so. They do not weigh
the situation, nor do they consciously decide to trust their colleagues’ decision
to fire and join in. Instead, their explanation is that firing itself is contagious.
“It spreads like germs, like laughter, or fear. An officer fires, so his colleagues
do, too,” as the Times puts it (M. Wilson 2006). In contagious shooting the
agentic act of firing a deadly weapon takes place in some liminal space be-
tween thought and bodily deed, a space that does not end at the boundary of
an individual body but extends to other bodies. If that is the case, its modifi-
cation or curtailment cannot be achieved through exclusively rational means.^4
Contagious shooting may or may not have been a factor in the astonishing
number of bullets fired at Amadou Diallo.^5 But the suggestion underscores the
possibility that perception and action can be tied together at a bodily, felt level
that does not involve explicit theorizing or conscious awareness.
The neural version of simulation has the benefit of addressing the bodily,
felt, and contagious realm of interaction; this is why affect theorists have em-
braced mirror neurons. However, embodied simulation theory makes even
less room for error or conflict than the other two accounts of theory of mind.
As I explain, embodied simulation works — generates a felt attunement of the