Short Story Task MCQ (SST-MCQ)

Background

The Short Story Task - Multiple Choice Format (SST-MCQ) is a measure of an adult's ability to interpret the beliefs, intentions, and emotions of others ('Theory of Mind - ToM') based on implicit textual information. It is based on the Short Story Task (SST) by David Dodell-Feder and colleagues from 2013 who used the short story 'The end of Something' by E. Heminway to inquire about their participants' understanding of the beliefs and feelings of key characters in a series of open-ended questions. Responses in the SST are scored on how accurately the participants can infer complex, real-world mental states and motivations from the often implicitly described social context in the story.

Clinical validation studies prove the SST highly effective at differentiating fiction-based mentalizing strategies between autistic and non-autistic adults but the open-ended format of the questions and consequently labor-intensive scoring limit its utility for large-scale testing or situations requiring quick, accurate scoring. Stephanie C. Goodhew and Mark Edwards streamlined the task in 2026 by substituting the open-ended questions with multiple choice ones. The multiple-choice items were structurally formatted to ensure high internal consistency, ensuring that the test items consistently and uniformly measure individual differences in adult ToM capacity. In addition, the researchers conducted validation studies of the test to ensure that the changed question format preserves enough cognitive complexity to remain a sensitive measure of adult ToM . The resulting test, the SST-MCQ or multiple choice SST, can easily be administered and scored automatically in a fraction of the time making it much more suitable as a screening test or usable for large scale testing situations.

Task Procedure

Participants are asked to read a short story ("The End of Something" by E. Hemingway) and have to explicitly confirm that they read the story to move on to the question part of the test. All following questions provide 2 to 4 answer options. The first three questions are simple comprehension check questions to ensure that participants read the story. The remaining questions assess an individual's ability to infer the story characters’ mental states that are left implicit by the story teller. All participants get 10 core questions, however, depending on their answers they may get up to 10 additional questions. No feedback is provided throughout.

What it Measures

The Short Story Task - Multiple Choice Format (SST-MCQ) is a measure of ToM abilities

Psychological domains

• ToM: The ability to infer the beliefs, intentions and emotions of others
• Social Perception: Recognizing "rules" of social etiquette
• Working Memory: Participants must hold the details of the story in their head while simultaneously reasoning about the characters' internal states.
• Inhibitory Control: The ability to inhibit one's own knowledge to focus on a character's "false belief"
• Cognitive Flexibility: The ability to shift between different perspectives
• Language Comprehension: Ability to understand the literal meaning of the story before making social inferences

Main Performance Metrics

• Comprehension Score: Assigned accuracy score for the comprehension questions (Range: 0-3)
• SST-MCQ Score: Assigned accurcy score for answering the ToM questions (Range: 0-21); higher Scores imply better ToM abilities

Psychiatric Conditions

The following patient groups show impaired performance on the SST-MCQ test

• Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD)

References

Search Google Scholar for peer-reviewed, published research using the Inquisit Short Story Task MCQ (SST-MCQ).

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Dodell-Feder, D., Lincoln, S. H., Coulson, J. P., & Hooker, C. I. (2013). Using Fiction to Assess Mental State Understanding: A New Task for Assessing Theory of Mind in Adults. PloS One, 8(11), e81279. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0081279

Goodhew, S. C., & Edwards, M. (2026). Measuring Theory of Mind: A Multiple-Choice Response Format Version of the Short Story Task. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-026-07236-0