Anti‐social learning
The impact of language on mentalizing
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 9619553 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Bryony Payne (0000-0003-2252-2005, Department of Psychology Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King's College London London UK), Geoffrey Bird (0000-0003-4788-5865, Department of Experimental Psychology University of Oxford Oxford UK), Caroline Catmur (0000-0001-6996-4295, Department of Psychology Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King's College London London UK, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 116 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 1028-1049 |
| Publication date | 2025-07-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | British Journal of Psychology (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0007-1269 • E-ISSN: 2044-8295 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/bjop.70001 |
| PMID | 40598807 |
| OpenAlex | W4411919068 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 29 |
Theories of cultural evolution suggest that humans may learn to represent others' minds through cultural practices including verbal instruction. It has been demonstrated that humans use less sophisticated mental state words when describing out‐group members compared to in‐group members, but whether this impacts on how out‐group members' minds are represented has not yet been determined. The media is one of the main ways in which information about out‐groups is shared; therefore, across three experiments we explored whether the language used in the media to describe out‐groups, specifically language about mental states, shapes how recipients represent the minds of out‐group members. All three experiments measured the extent to which participants represented out‐group members as individuals with distinctive minds. Experiment 1 compared language in a left‐leaning versus a right‐leaning UK news source. Experiment 2 tested the effect of including or omitting mental states or first‐person language, while Experiment 3 examined the impact of varying the amount of mental state language. We show that participants are more prone to take into account each out‐group member's mind when inferring their mental states when mental state language is used to introduce them. This demonstrates the clear role of cultural learning on how people think about others' minds
Cognition · Cognitive psychology · Developmental psychology · Linguistics · Mental representation · Mental state · Mentalization · Social group · Theory of mind · Cultural Differences and Values · Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation · Language and cultural evolution · Psychology · Social Psychology
Scaling of Theory-of-Mind Tasks
Social categorization and empathy for outgroup members
The Relation between Children's and Mothers’ Mental State Language and Theory-of-Mind Understanding
The cultural evolution of mind reading
Mindreading in Infancy
Gorilla in our midst
Least-Squares Means
Stereotype Content
The Influence of Media Coverage on the Negative Perception of Migrants in Chile
Emotional prejudice can lead to infra-humanisation
Social neuroscience evidence for dehumanised perception
The Role of the Media in the Construction of Public Belief and Social Change
Beyond the ‘refugee crisis’
Uncertainty, Threat, and the Role of the Media in Promoting the Dehumanization of Immigrants and Refugees
Representing other minds
The representation of refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants in British newspapers
Unmasking Deviance
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |