Humans are inherently social beings, and our daily interactions with others – whether family, friends, colleagues, or strangers – shape our ability to understand the minds of those around us. I’m Bryony, a cognitive psychologist, and I’m interested in how the brain works and how we think about other people’s minds. In my latest research, my team and I found that people frequently misunderstand those who differ from themselves. In this article, I’ll explore why this happens, the consequences of these misunderstandings, and how we can improve the situation.
Where does it all start?
People categorise each other into different social groups. This helps us to make sense of the busy social world around us, and where we belong in it. One of the ways we categorise people is in terms of whether they are ‘in-group’ to ourselves (i.e., they belong in the same group as us) or whether they are different and therefore part of an ‘out-group’.
You may perceive someone to be different to yourself for many reasons. Perhaps because they hold different political views to you, speak a different language, or perhaps because they are of a different gender-identity (e.g., cisgender vs transgender), or neurotype (e.g., neurotypical vs neurodivergent). It may simply be because you’ve had different life experiences. This social categorisation is not, inherently, a bad thing.
However, we tend to spend more time with the people in the same social group(s) as us. This allows us to develop a nuanced understanding – or representation – of the individuals within our ‘in-groups’. In other words, spending more time with people similar to us allows us to recognise the diversity within the group.
This isn’t the case for out-groups though. Because we spend less time with out-group members, our understanding is often based on limited interactions or second-hand information from media or social networks. If that information is inaccurate or overly simplistic, then our representation of them will be as well. This is important because research suggests that if we have a poor representation of people, we are more likely to make inaccurate assumptions about them.
What did our research find?
In our study, we asked 256 people from the US to predict the social and political beliefs of others. First, we asked participants their own view, i.e., how far they agreed or disagreed with statements such as “my own race is not superior to any other race”. We then showed them the responses of other people who had been asked the same question. If the participant said they strongly agreed that their own race is not superior, they would be presented with someone who said they strongly disagreed with this. This would make them “out-group” to the participant. Now aware that the other person disagreed with them on one belief, we asked participants to predict this other person’s view on a different topic, such as “immigrants are good for society”. The participant might assume that someone who believed in the superiority of their own race, might also be anti-immigration.
Each time, we asked participants how confident they were that their prediction was correct. We found that people were consistently very confident that their predictions were accurate (75% confident) but they were wrong more than 60% of the time. In fact, the more confident they were, the more likely it was that their prediction was wrong.
How does this affect our day-to-day lives?
The consequences of this are vast and wide-ranging, manifesting at the individual level and on a societal level.
For instance, imagine you are interviewing someone for a job and they suddenly leave the room without explanation. You might assume they are rude or uninterested, leading you to question their suitability as a colleague. However, if your representation of them included the knowledge that they had an anxiety disorder and suffered from panic attacks, you’d probably interpret their behaviour – and the type of mind they have – very differently.
A broader range of experiences with diverse individuals allows us to form a more complete understanding of others, making it easier to interpret their actions and intentions accurately. Without that diversity, we may mistakenly assume that everyone’s mind works like ours, or like the other minds we have been exposed to.
For instance, children who have experienced abuse or neglect may be more likely to represent other peoples’ minds as ‘nasty’. That is, they may overestimate the likelihood that others are aggressive, deceitful, and lacking in empathy because of their prior experience. In such children, who may be later diagnosed with Conduct Disorder, their incorrect assumptions about what other peoples’ minds are like may make them more likely to react with suspicion or aggression towards others. Thus, the previous experience one has of others may reduce their ability to understand people who have minds that deviate from what they’re used to.
People’s lack of awareness about their proneness to misjudge differential others can have wider impacts at a societal level. For instance, in the UK riots this summer, we saw far-right protesters targeting asylum seekers and Muslims, as well as those who were helping or housing them. The riots were started after an attack on children in Southport, in which the perpetrator was wrongly identified as a Muslim asylum seeker via social media posts. Thereafter, it is likely that many of the people comprising the far-right in-group took their understanding of this single ‘asylum seeker’ as wanting to intentionally harm children, and attributed the same intention to all asylum seekers and Muslims. This led to wide-spread violence against swaths of people in the UK, the vast majority of whom had no such intention.
What can we do to help?
The good news is, it seems that when people are made aware that their assumptions about other people are incorrect, they do reconsider. In a second study (which is still in progress), we asked participants to complete the same task, but this time told them when their initial prediction was incorrect. Receiving this feedback helped participants to make their predictions more accurate. Further, participants learnt that they were more likely to misunderstand the views of out-group members than in-group members.
If people are aware that they are less able to understand out-group minds, they may become less likely to rely on their initial assumptions, and seek more information. Indeed, having conversations with people who hold different views, beliefs, and experiences could help challenge our incorrect assumptions about each other. This is why it is so critical that people are exposed to people who are different from themselves, and hear their real stories to gain insight into who they are as individuals. This helps us to understand that, like our in-group, the out-group is made up of many people with different personalities, beliefs, desires and emotions. Over time, this helps us to understand how their mind works and, hopefully, makes it likely that we will treat out-groups fairly and with humanity.