Here’s a quick and easy way to understand mentalizing. Fill an empty crayon box with birthday candles, and then ask a 3-year-old what’s inside. The child will assume crayons—until show you them the candles.
If you then ask the child what their doll thought was in the box, they’ll say the doll thought it was candles all along.
For the 3-year-old the, perception of reality is no different from the actual reality. The they know is what you know.
Don’t Believe Liars!
The child knows there are candles, thus the doll must have that same knowledge.
Give them another year? Their understanding of the mind evolves. A four- or five-year-old will to tell you their doll thought there were crayons inside the box, too. They recognize that one person may experience things differently than another person.
This study is called the false belief test. It is the first step towards understanding the process of mentalizing. To sum it up, mentalizing is the capacity to reflect on one’s own thoughts and feelings and those of others to predict and understand behavior. Mentalizing is a form of imaginative mental activity, namely perceiving and interpreting human behavior in terms of intentional mental states (needs, desires, feelings, beliefs, goals).
Trust, however, is the foundation for mentalizing, the currency that actually closes the deal. Money is great, but if you don't trust you'll get it, it doesn't conclude transactions—emotional or business. If you don’t trust information, it’s not safe learn it. It doesn’t make sense to learn new things from goddamn liars. We have a brain system for that. Our first pass in our brain is a giant filter of all of our experiences that asks the question: should I trust the source of this information?
If the answer is no, we have a series of strategies in our cognitive operating system to avoid, dodge, forget, fight back against, and generally make sure none of that information changes the way we act in the future. This is colloquially termed “bullshit detection.” Teenagers refer to this sort of information as "boring.” When you ask teens what they learned at school, and you get the answer "I don't know, whatever” – you are bearing witness to a remarkable system that allows humans to sift through unbelievable amounts of information and only remember the most relevant.
Learn the Role of Trust
My goal is for your to learn how to build trust with yourself and others. The surprising part about this recipe? It doesn’t involve knowing anything specific. You need no information other than this: not knowing the answer leads to all the actual answers.
You don’t stop at not knowing. But you always start there. Here are some quick examples to drive the point home:
Would you like someone to calm down?
Won’t work: “You need to calm down!”
Might work: “It seems like you’re really upset?”
Trying to convince someone of your conspiracy theory?
Won’t work: 9/11 was an inside job!
Might work: “On a scale of the number 9 through the number 11, can you give me a numerical rating for how confident you are that 9/11 was not an inside job?”
“Um. 10.9”
“Oh, that’s interesting. What made it 10.9 and not 11?
“Well, there’s this one little doubt I have…”
These techniques–mentalizing by both not assuming I know, and being curious about what the other person thinks– work in all kinds of situations, not just the clinic in which I work as a psychiatrist. If this sounds dangerous to you, like it could be misused, you are absolutely right. People misuse mentalizing all the time. People build trust in order to steal or kill. Or you can make your mom feel bad if she didn’t let you play more video games. Or you can guilt your children into going to bed.
Artificial intelligence designers (and now we) fret, endlessly about building ethical AI, and well they should. But for humans, unethical human intelligence is wildly common, because of course it is. The special fail safe built into mentalizing is that when we are actually connected to someone else—not just faking caring but really do — it’s almost impossible to hurt somebody else. If you’re faking caring, you can do something awful to someone. But actual mentalizing is a shared mental state. This mirror neurons are firing in both people. You understand each other. And in a state of understanding, it’s just not one of the options to punch someone else in the face.
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