27 February 2021 | New Scientist | 21B
ELITTLING the minds of
others is commonplace.
Stupid! Brainless! Imbecile!
Dozy! Just scroll through the
comments on pretty much any
contentious article and you will
find criticism by mental slander.
Social media is littered with
words like “unthinking” and
“idiot”, especially when people
are confronted with views with
which they disagree.
Indeed, Twitter is a lightning
rod of prejudices about minds.
Former US president Donald
Trump was perhaps the kingpin
here, before Twitter banned him.
Not only did he routinely boast of
his own mental prowess – “sorry
losers and haters, but my I.Q. is
one of the highest” – but he
persistently used mental slurs
to silence critics: “dummy!”.
Yet we can all be guilty of mental
slander. Right-wing supporters
frequently call those on the left
“libtards”. Meanwhile, according
to the Oxford English Dictionary’s
New Monitor Corpus, conservative
voters in the US are often derided
as “nutjobs”. Mental slurs are a
fast and simple trick to silence
an unwanted voice and to lower
trust in evidence we resist.
A growing body of research is
allowing us to understand where
this prejudice comes from.
Humans are group-living
animals. Probing and judging
other minds is a part of how we
coordinate with each other,
cooperate and make and break
alliances. By the age of 5, children
MImake assumptions about
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Comment
Melanie Challenger is the
author of How to Be Animal:
A new history of what it
means to be humanViews
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opera p30people’s mental states, such as
understanding that someone
can be mistaken in their beliefs.
Particular parts of the brain are
implicated: the medial prefrontal
cortex, the temporal poles and
the posterior superior temporal
sulcus. These work in concert to
enable us to detect and make
judgements about minds – both
our own and those of others.
All this doesn’t stop at the
neck. When we bond in a group –
whether that is with kin or co-
workers, friends or football fans –
our bodies produce hormones
like oxytocin that play a role in
bringing us together. But, as
psychologist Carsten De Dreupoints out, these hormones don’t
just unite us; they encourage
exclusivity. This – directly or
indirectly – can alter our views on
other minds. In effect, we believe
those in our group more readily,
often exaggerating the mental
abilities of those with whom we
feel allegiance.
What follows from this is that
we can undervalue the intelligence
of those whose views differ from
our own. Even more troubling,
we can find ourselves responding
more slowly to signals of emotion
or experience from outsiders.
Social psychologists Susan Fiske
and Lasana Harris have used
neurological imaging andbehaviour studies to show that we
shut down the medial prefrontal
cortex, which is involved in social
cognition, when confronted with
minds we wish to ignore. When we
suspend parts of our brain key to
recognising another’s mental and
emotional states, we not only
close our minds to one another,
we cease to care.
All this has real-world
consequences for whom we listen
to and whose voices we trust. In
an age of political polarisation
and misinformation, the echo
chambers created by social media
do more than just seal us off from
diverse possibilities and points of
view; they muffle our ability to
care about those whose views
we might not like.
What can we do about it? First,
we need to recognise the biases
that prevent us from keeping one
another in mind. We must make
it less socially acceptable to use
mental slander in the service of an
argument. Beyond this, we would
benefit from greater opportunities
to hear one another out.
This pandemic is a reminder
that we have very few mechanisms
for listening and deliberating
together. That needs to change.
But a more radical option lies in
a much larger paradigm shift. Is it
time for our species to stop using
the idea of own superior cognition
as validation? ❚Mental slander
We too often turn to insulting people’s brain power – and that closes
off our ability to understand others, argues Melanie Challenger