Individual Differences in Mentalizing Tendencies

Abstract

The human capacity to represent others and oneself in terms of internal mental states—mentalizing—varies across individuals. In this paper, we assess the extent to which commonly used mentalizing measures successfully capture meaningful individual differences in mentalizing tendencies and explore how these tendencies relate to broader variability in cognitive and social functioning. To this end, we administered a battery of behavioral and self-report measures of mentalizing, fluid intelligence, personality dimensions, sense of self, cognitive tendencies, and psychopathology symptoms in an online study (N=150). In a series of preregistered analyses, we found that fluid intelligence scores were most predictive of mentalizing variability while dimensions such as psychopathy, empathy and sense of power were also significantly associated with this variability (though to a lesser extent than fluid intelligence). Of the psychopathology symptoms assessed, somatization and self-harm were most strongly associated with inter-individual variability in mentalizing and uncertainty about mental states was the mentalizing dimension most tightly correlated to psychopathology symptoms. Our findings point to the need for more research to explore ways in which mentalizing tendencies are tied to other domains, such as general cognitive functioning and psychopathology. Additionally, our findings highlight the potential for merging clinical assessment tools with social cognition research.