The study compared close pairs and strangers using two different measures: empathic accuracy, which tests how precisely one person infers another’s thoughts and feelings, and mind-mindedness, which tracks how often someone talks about another’s mental states. Results point to empathic accuracy behaving like a property of the interaction itself. When one partner was accurate, the other tended to be accurate too. By contrast, the tendency to mention mental states and performance on a noninteractive mentalizing task did not align between partners. These patterns suggest different social-cognitive processes are at work depending on context and measure.
Why this matters for human potential is straightforward. If empathy can be emergent and mutual, interventions that shape the interaction—changing cues, task structure, or conversational norms—could boost mutual understanding across diverse groups. Conversely, traits that surface outside interaction may require individualized approaches. Follow the full article to see how these findings could inform inclusive practices in classrooms, workplaces, and therapies that aim to widen who can participate and thrive in social life.
Abstract
Successful social interaction requires attending to and accurately processing others’ thoughts and feelings, a social cognitive skill known as mentalizing. To date, however, mentalizing has most frequently been assessed in nondyadic contexts, leaving open questions as to whether variability in real-world interactive social cognitive performance is due to trait-level differences or to properties of particular interactions. The current study examined mentalizing about one’s social partner in both close social dyads (n = 50 dyads) and stranger dyads (n = 52 dyads). Within these dyadic contexts, we measured empathic accuracy—or the ability to accurately infer another’s thoughts and feelings—and mind-mindedness, the propensity to spontaneously discuss another’s mental states. We found that for both pre-existing close dyads and stranger dyads, the empathic accuracy of one partner significantly correlated with the empathic accuracy of the other partner, suggesting that empathic accuracy may be better conceptualized as a property of the specific social interaction rather than solely an individual trait. In contrast, across both dyad types, one partner’s level of mind-mindedness did not relate to their partner’s mind-mindedness. Further, a noninteractive measure of mentalizing accuracy did not show dyadic concordance. Individual levels of empathic accuracy, mind-mindedness, and noninteractive mentalizing accuracy were also uncorrelated. These findings underscore the importance of taking a multifaceted approach to measuring social cognition that considers the role of social context.
