Bridging people and perspectives: General and language-specific social network structure predict mentalizing across diverse sociolinguistic contexts.

Abstract

Mentalizing, or reasoning about others' mental states, is a dynamic social cognitive process that aids in communication and navigating complex social interactions. We examined whether exposure to diverse perspectives, afforded by occupying influential social network positions, predicted bilingual adults' performances on a behavioral mentalizing rating task in regions of high and low linguistic diversity. We calculated the degree to which respondents' social network position generally bridged unconnected others (i.e., general betweenness) and specifically bridged language communities (i.e., language betweenness). General betweenness predicted mentalizing performance regardless of region, whereas language betweenness only predicted mentalizing in a high linguistic diversity region, where bilingualism is ubiquitous and mentalizing to resolve perspective differences on the basis of language may be an adaptive cognitive strategy. These results indicate that human cognition is sensitive to social context and adaptive to the sociolinguistic demands of the broader environment. Public Significance StatementOpportunities in social network structure to bridge diverse perspectives patterned with higher mentalizing capacities across two distinct sociolinguistic regions, whereas bridging between language communities patterned with higher mentalizing capacities only in a linguistically diverse region. These results suggest that mentalizing, or understanding others' mental states, is sensitive to social context and may be adaptive to the sociolinguistic demands of the environment.

Rethinking multilingual experience through a Systems Framework of Bilingualism

“…For example, at the level of Interpersonal Dynamics, we can track how a bilingual person may use one language with their parents or guardians and another language with their siblings. Additionally, we can track whether the ego critically bridges different language groups (Tiv et al, 2021; Tiv, Kutlu, O'Regan & Titone, in press). In past work (Tiv et al, 2021, in press), described below, we quantified these dynamics with social network attributes from the language(s) used in person-to-person interactions.…”

“…Other newly emerging research from our group provides further evidence that multi-layered social context constrains multilingual behavior. We examined how structural characteristics of bilinguals’ social network associated with individual differences in mentalizing, a social cognitive process of representing and reasoning about others’ minds (Tiv et al, in press; Tiv et al, 2021). Specifically, we considered egos’ position in their social network and whether the presence or lack of third-party ties afforded them unique opportunities to engage in mentalizing to broker information between otherwise disconnected people (e.g., López, 2020).…”

Psychological and nonpsychological inferences in reading comprehension in children: The role of initial level comprehension.

“…Lucas examines the waiting room and finds a small fish under the radiator inferences as described by Graesser et al (1994) with both emotion and causation dimensions, as described by Zwaan et al (1995). Until now, experimental research on psychological inferences has mainly been conducted with adults in psycholinguistic experiments (Tiv et al, 2021(Tiv et al, , 2022 or in neuroimaging studies (Ferstl & von Cramon, 2002;Lavoie et al, 2016;Saxe & Kanwisher, 2003). For instance, Saxe and Kanwisher (2003) showed that specific brain regions were activated when participants read stories about a character's mental states rather than stories describing people in physical details or nonhuman objects.…”

Social and emotional determinants of parental reflective functioning in a multinational sample.

“…Conversely, bilingual adults show less egocentric bias in perspective-taking compared with monolingual adults (Rubio-Fernández & Glucksberg, 2012), which would promote parental reflective functioning. Bilingual adults' accuracy in identifying when mental states must be inferred is higher when they play a connecting role for people speaking different languages in their social network and live in a region with higher language diversity (Tiv et al, 2022). Further research examining lived experiences and relational and regional contexts of linguistic minority parents will be necessary to understand associations with reflective functioning.…”