Developing our theory of mind can help us understand the “other.”
Election Day is nearly upon us, and the 2024 primaries will follow close behind. This will be another long slog of electioneering, two baffling years of those idiots on the other side getting everything wrong.
You know the ones. It’s like they don’t live in the same reality, don’t have a clue about the real problems facing this country. The way they vote isn’t just mistaken. It’s frustrating, mystifying, stunning—a little frightening, honestly. And there are millions of these people making an unimaginable choice.
There’s a name for that utter bewilderment many of us feel toward political discussion. It’s called mind-blindness, the inability to recognize that other people have different experiences, wants, values, and knowledge and that this leads them to make decisions different from our own. The capacity to imagine those differences and intuit the choices they inform is called theory of mind.
It’s a faculty we typically develop throughout childhood—young kids don’t have it, a fact of which I’m reminded daily during my twins’ Why? phase. We employ it constantly to interpret why others behave as they do, infer how they’re feeling, and anticipate their next move.
It’s possible to love people, to be “devoted to one another,” and to honor one another above ourselves (Rom. 12:10) without a working theory of mind. But it’s difficult, particularly in politics. It’s hard to love our political opponents and to will their good—not just abstractly but concretely, in our prayers and conversations and as we vote and peruse the news—when we’re dumbfounded by all they do.
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