Over at Brains on Purpose™, I have posted about the research of Jason Mitchell because I think it is helpful to keep in mind about homophily (i.e., the in-group/out-group or birds-of-a-feather phenomenon). Because of my past references to his research, my eye was caught when I saw that Mitchell was one of the presenters at the 2010 NeuroLeadership Summit.
A question Mitchell addressed was how one may better take the perspectives of other people. From the summary of his talk:
Jason Mitchell is the head of the Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Lab at Harvard University. He uses functional neuroimaging (fMRI) and behavioral methods to study how we infer the thoughts, feelings, and opinions of others (i.e., how we mentalize), as well as how we reason about counterfactual experiences. During Jason’s session on Day 1 of the 2010 Summit he explored the subject of “Making Sense of Others”.
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We are veracious [sic] mind readers and are constantly trying to make sense of others. In every day life we are very readily, almost continuously, tracking the various mental states of those with whom we engage.
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So is there anything we can do to promote more of this overlap between self and other, to increase activity in the brain region to promote and encourage our brain to see a person as similar to us?
One way to increase the overlap is through explicit attempts to take that persons perspective. Jason suggests that by thinking for 1-2 minutes about what that person’s perspective might be like, what that person’s internal subjective experience might be like, you can subsequently demonstrate all sorts of pro-social effects.
Click to read the rest (NeuroLeadership Summits Blog).
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