Bryony Payne, Geoff Bird & Caroline Catmur (2025)
https://bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/bjop.70001
Understanding others means being able to represent what they might be thinking or feeling. This is often called theory of mind. Recent work by Geoff and collegues suggests that before we can guess someone’s specific thoughts, we first build a general mental model of their mind.. This representation is placed in what they call mind-space: a kind of multidimensional map where each person’s mind is located according to traits such as kindness, intelligence, or other characteristics. Where someone is placed in this Mind-space influences the assumptions we make about their likely beliefs and intentions. If we represent someone as very kind, we are more likely to infer that they value helping others or will want to help again in the future. If we place someone as unkind, our inferences will be very different.
Problems arise when these mental representations are inaccurate. In those cases, people draw faulty conclusions about what others think or believe. This is especially common when considering members of an out-group; people who differ in terms of politics, religion, nationality, gender, or neurotype. Misplaced representations in mind-space lead to inaccurate and often stereotyped assumptions about such groups.
This paper looked at how the words used in media can shape the way readers think about people they see as outsiders. The authors were interested in whether language that highlights thoughts and feelings encourages readers to view out-group members as unique individuals, rather than as anonymous representatives of a whole group.
To explore this, the researchers ran three experiments. In the first, participants read news-style passages adapted from either The Guardian (left-leaning) or The Daily Mail (right-leaning), but instead of being about real groups, the texts described fictional alien species (the Cloods and the Zyns). This avoided activating strong pre-existing political views. Importantly, ‘Clood’ was assigned to the right-leaning source and ‘Zyn’ to the left-leaning source or vice versa (counterbalanced across participants). After reading, participants were asked to rate how they felt towards these groups, including whether they thought of them as warm, competent, rational, trustworthy, or pessimistic. They were also asked whether they considered the individuals in the group as having distinct minds.
The second experiment used only Guardian-style writing, as right-leaning sources didn’t provide enough examples of using mental-state language. The researchers altered the texts so that some versions removed mental-state language, some included an average amount, and others added more. They then tested whether this manipulation changed how participants saw the fictional groups. In the third experiment, they refined this further, directly comparing low, medium, and high levels of mental-state language.
Across the studies, a clear pattern emerged. When participants read Guardian-style texts, they reported more empathy and more positive views of the out-group compared with those who read Daily Mail-style texts. Articles that used more mental-state words made readers more likely to imagine the group members as having their own separate thoughts and feelings. However, simply adding mental-state language was not enough to increase empathy by itself. Instead, empathy seemed tied to the left-leaning broader style of language.
The research suggests that the way media represents others has real effects on how readers think. Using complex language that highlights people’s thoughts and feelings can encourage us to see them as individuals, not just as faceless members of a group. This has wide relevance, including for those of us who communicate participatory research in areas such as autism and neurodiversity, where focusing on lived perspectives undoes stereotypes and helps build more inclusive understandings.