The article aims at focusing attention at selected aspects of pop culture which may, from the point of view of evolutionary psychologists, be deemed approximate to animal proto-cultures and social systems observed among the three-year-olds, i.e. — people who have not yet developed a psychological skill called “theory of mind”. The Author tries to point out that elements of proto-culture in the time of pop -industry development gain on dominance, as a result of which the quality of culture creating processes as well as culture transmission processes may be different than, let’s say, fifty years ago. It is not only about the mass media, but it is most of all about deep psychological processes which are the basis for understanding the essence of culture and participation in culture. In other words, the author tries to argue that norms, ideas and values, i.e. what culture is made of in general — are understood and disseminated in ways which are different in quality from the ones prevailing in the past.

The article is a critical analysis of Ingarden’s theory of how we learn about other people’s mental states. The author discusses arguments that have been offered by Ingarden against competing theories and highlights their shortcomings. Next, he presents Ingarden’s original theory, underlining its strengths and weaknesses. He shows that Ingarden’s theory, apart from giving an insight into the mechanisms underlying the cognition of other people’s mental states, has a limited explanatory power even if treated as a phenomenological description of a select class of cognitive situations.