Humans cannot literally read the minds of others; however, one cognitive capacity required of most social interactions aspires to do just that. Mentalizing, or reasoning about others’ mental states, is crucial to navigating the complexities of everyday social life, interpreting others’ intentions, and facilitating communication. To illustrate, imagine you are reading a story in which a protagonist rushes to lock their front door immediately after watching a television news report about a spike in neighborhood break-ins. Many people would intuitively infer that the protagonist’s action arose from their fear, concern, or anxiety about someone breaking into their home. However, past work and everyday experience have shown that people vary considerably in whether and how they draw such mentalizing inferences. Thus, an open question is whether certain life experiences can make people better at mentalizing.
In a study published in the Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychologyopens in new window, Mehrgol Tiv, Ethan Kutlu, Elisabeth O’Regan, and Debra Titone used innovative network science tools to examine whether the life experience of socially interacting with people who have diverse perspectives would predict people’s mentalizing capacity. The researchers hypothesized that people who occupy central positions in their social network (i.e., those with a high degree of betweenness centrality) would have more opportunities to bridge or broker information between people with diverse perspectives within their network and that this would strengthen their ability to draw mentalizing inferences. Indeed, betweenness centrality has been linked to mentalizing in previous neuroscientific studies and seems to aid people in understanding the minds of others. However, currently unknown is the degree to which language use in multilingual settings plays a role in modulating the expression of this link.
Like brokering in a social network, residing in a linguistically or culturally diverse location also offers opportunities for people to interact with others who are in different mental states and who have different perspectives. Therefore, the authors examined whether the link between social network betweenness centrality and mentalizing performance differed across two regions that varied in sociolinguistic diversity. Bilingual adults performed a mentalizing rating task in Montreal (Quebec, Canada), where multilingual diversity is common and positively regarded, and in Gainesville (Florida, United States), where multilingual diversity is less common and arguably stigmatized.
Across both locations, respondents who bridged unconnected others (i.e., with general betweenness centrality), irrespective of language use, showed higher mentalizing performance. Thus, consistent with past work, people who functioned as social brokers tended to have greater mentalizing capacity. Potentially more interesting, however, is what happened when the authors recomputed betweenness centrality in a language-specific way that accounted for the language communities in people’s networks (i.e., their language betweenness centrality). According to this measure, when respondents bridged different language communities, their mentalizing performance tended to be higher only in Montreal, where multilingualism is common and highly regarded, but not in Gainesville, where multilingualism is less normative or valued in daily life.
These results suggest that human cognition is highly sensitive to people’s experiences of socially interacting with others in unique sociolinguistic environments, both through direct interpersonal interactions in daily life and from more subtle cues present in one’s ambient environment. The results also suggest that language use is an important part of this process. Mentalizing can potentially be strengthened by experiences common to multilingualism, including the need to anticipate the languages that other people know or might prefer to use in everyday conversations. Thus, people’s cognitive capacity to draw mentalizing inferences—to understand the minds of others—may be influenced by the people they regularly interact with using specific languages and the many sociolinguistic features of the locations in which they live.
This article is in the Basic/Experimental Psychology topic area. View more articles in the Basic/Experimental Psychology topic area.