Anti-social learning: The impact of language on mentalizing

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.