Is Mentalizing the Key to Improving Intergroup Relations?

By Kayden Costantino

One of the largest areas of research in social psychology is intergroup relations, where researchers aim to build theory and develop interventions to improve the ways that different groups of people interact in a diverse world. Within this area, researchers have taken various perspectives to better understand group interactions and attitude formation. One approach that scientists interested in social cognition take is to study “mentalizing.” Mentalizing, defined as “the ability to attribute mental states (e.g., knowledge, intentions, emotions, perception) to self and others,” has historically been used to study differences in clinical populations (i.e., individuals with autism spectrum disorder and anxiety disorders). More recently, however, mentalizing has helped psychologists understand how individuals attribute mental states and human qualities to others (Quesque et al., 2024). With many questions still to be addressed in the field, mentalizing provides a compelling route for examining the cognitive mechanisms behind assumptions about outgroup members and the prejudice or empathy directed toward them.

Defining and Measuring Mentalizing

Mentalizing is a topic that has been around for many years in cognitive science, but it has gone by many names over time. Quesque et al. (2024) acknowledge the lack of clarity in the terms used to describe this process, noting that mentalizing has been referred to as theory of mind, mental state attribution, cognitive empathy, and more. This lack of consistency has burdened the progress of the research area. Without concrete terms and definitions, it becomes difficult to build upon existing knowledge, especially for early-career researchers (Quesque et al., 2024). Nonetheless, researchers who use the term “mentalizing” to capture this process seem to agree that they are describing the process of thinking about the mental states of others, which is a core ability for building human connection and fostering effective social interactions.

Another issue that researchers encounter when they set out to study mentalizing is that the process itself occurs in the perceiver’s brain and is entirely invisible. Still, cognitive researchers have thought outside the box and developed creative solutions for creating ecologically valid mentalizing tasks. Measures such as the faux pas task (Baron-Cohen et al., 1997) and the Strange Stories task (Happé, 1994) assess mentalizing through items that require respondents to take another person’s perspective and infer why they did or said something, indirectly tapping into how the respondent perceives that person’s thoughts and feelings. Other tasks use visual stimuli, such as the Movie for the Assessment of Social Cognition (Dziobek et al., 2006), while others assess the ability to represent another person’s visual experience (Piaget & Inhelder, 1956). Importantly, not all mentalizing tasks are created equal. Successful performance on some mentalizing tasks can be explained by more parsimonious processes, such as self-projection or emotional ascription (Quesque & Rossetti, 2020). With these considerations in mind, and following guidelines for creating ecologically valid mentalizing tasks, researchers should continue experimenting with new ways to tap into this phenomenon in psychological research.

How Mentalizing Relates to Group Processes

One important consideration, as mentioned above, is that when people mentalize about others, they may rely heavily on self-projection (Todd & Tamir, 2024). While this concern is relevant for some applications, it may be less problematic when studying how people mentalize about outgroup members. Individuals appear to rely less on self-information when a target is perceived as less similar to them, such as when the target is perceived as belonging to a different group (Todd & Tamir, 2024). Without the influence of self-projection or related response biases, measures of mentalizing about outgroups may therefore capture information more directly related to the outgroup member’s attributes or the perceiver’s implicit attitudes toward them. This makes mentalizing especially compelling for understanding outgroup perception.

Additionally, previous research suggests that individuals mentalize less about people from other groups than about members of their own groups (Gönültaş et al., 2020), even when those groups are completely arbitrary and artificially created (McClung & Stephen, 2000). Other experiments show that when mental states are attributed to groups of people, groups perceived as more similar in composition are more likely to be attributed a “group mind,” while individuals within those groups are attributed less agency or intentionality (Waytz & Young, 2012). These findings have implications for how perceivers attribute mental states to outgroups, especially to members who violate expected stereotypes, potentially leading differential perception compared to prototypical members of their groups.

Future Directions for Mentalizing

So much is still unknown about mentalizing, especially in the context of improving intergroup relations and reducing prejudice. One area that researchers should focus on is identifying the factors that increase people’s tendency to mentalize, with the expectation that greater mentalizing during social interactions may help people better understand the perspectives, emotions, and intentions of others. For example, Tiv et al. (2021) found that being in a linguistically diverse environment is associated with greater mentalizing. Similar work could build on this finding by examining how exposure to diverse social environments influences mentalizing about people from different groups. Understanding when and why people engage in mentalizing may ultimately help researchers identify ways to encourage more thoughtful and nuanced perceptions of others.

The future of mentalizing research is still unclear, but its ability to illuminate otherwise invisible processes of person perception and the attribution of human qualities makes it a productive area of focus for social scientists. Mentalizing can help us understand not only how people navigate everyday social interactions, but also how they think about groups and categories of people on a larger scale. In doing so, it may provide insight into the cognitive processes through which prejudice, stereotyping, and dehumanization emerge. As the field continues to develop, researchers should look beyond the traditional use of mentalizing in clinical assessment and consider how it can help us understand intergroup relations. For everyone else, mentalizing offers a useful way to reflect on our own social perceptions: How much do we think about the minds of people who are similar to us, and how does that change when someone belongs to a group different from our own? While mentalizing alone is unlikely to provide a simple solution to intergroup prejudice, understanding when and how we engage in it may be an important step toward understanding how people of all backgrounds perceive and ultimately relate to one another.

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Works Cited

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