[Patrick]<\/p>\n
The football team at Harvard comes from different parts of the country and all walks of life. When we arrived on campus freshman year, none of us really had anything in common outside of football. Due to the fact that football is a fall sport, we arrived on campus just a few weeks before the season was set to start, and nobody really knew each other. This posed a challenge for us because the sport requires a tremendous amount of teamwork to win games. One of the ways we were able to engineer connections with each other before the season started was mind perception. The paper \u201cFrom Mind Perception to Mental Connection\u201d (Wheatley et al., 2012) discusses how shared past experiences allow people to form a social bond almost instantaneously. In the case of our team this shared experience was playing football and lifting weights since we were all in middle school. During our down time we would all talk about our experiences playing football in various parts of the country and this really allowed all of us to become closer. These shared experiences really helped us to understand how others were feeling and what others were thinking. This allowed us to work our hardest every day even if we had to wake up at 4:30 for practice or practice in the extreme heat or cold because we all understood it was a grind for everyone and we were all in pursuit of a common goal, an Ivy League Championship. It also allowed us to have a better connection on the field, helping us to execute plays quicker and more effectively.<\/p>\n
Wheatley goes on to discuss how synchrony can strengthen these bonds, and additional research done by Wiltermuth and Heath (2009) supports these claims. The results showed that participants who perform synchronous physical activity are more apt to perform cooperatively toward their common goal (Wiltermuth & Heath, 2009, as cited in Wheatley et al., 2012). The idea of performing as a cohesive group is extremely important in football, especially across the offensive line. On the offensive line all five players perform the same exact action as each other on every play, trying to work together to block a path through the defense for the running back. If one person messes up and is not doing the same thing as everyone else then the play is completely ruined. At the beginning of the season nobody on the offensive line really had a great mental connection and a lot of plays got messed up. But as we continued to practice and work together, we were able to perform our jobs with less instruction and communication due to the fact that we knew what the others were thinking as the play developed.<\/p>\n
Our team had an overwhelming positive experience with mind perception as we were able to come together and form virtually instantaneous bonds through these shared experiences and synchronous physical activity. The more we shared with each other and the more time we spent together, the more we were able to understand and predict how others on the team felt and how they would act. Our season started off very well, but we lost a few close games which eliminated us from contention in the Ivy League Championship. However, we still managed to blow out Yale at Fenway in front of our home crowd. As our time at Harvard progressed our team became significantly closer and our record since freshman year got progressively better.<\/p>\n
[Do Yeon]<\/p>\n
As mentioned above, mind perception can bring people together. However, there are also limits to mind perception, one of which is that it can perpetuate the distance people feel towards another. This \u201cdistance\u201d can be particularly harmful when thinking about the treatment and experiences of groups that deviate from societal norms and expectations. For example, those who identify as sexual minorities face substantial discrimination and stigma from multiple levels, including through interpersonal interactions (e.g., family, co-workers, classmates) and on a structural level (e.g., social norms, laws and policies).<\/p>\n
When Castro and Zautra (2016) discuss the idea of resilience in relation to mentalization, they establish that having strong social connections are a necessary key to resilience and that a way to forge these meaningful social connections is through mentalization. This was supported by researchers who conducted a diary study, finding that people who had an increased sense of social connectedness were able to recover from \u201cnegative emotional experiences\u201d faster than those with comparatively less social connectedness (Ong & Allaire, 2005, as cited in Castro & Zautra, 2016). However, resilience, as defined here, operates under the assertion that it is not achievable without close social connections. This definition of resilience would render people who belong to stigmatized groups (e.g., a sexual minority group) and may not live in a tolerating community, thus lack a strong support system, unable to be \u201cresilient.\u201d In addition, this idea of resilience overemphasizes the point that with meaningful close relationships, one can overcome\/avoid being adversely impacted by negative experiences. Within the context of stigmatized groups, arguing that resilience results from simply having and maintaining positive close relationships places the burden of coping with negative experiences onto those experiencing them, instead of to the people and\/or institutions that are perpetuating the stigma they face.<\/p>\n
Given this, I began to wonder about the ways that mentalization could be used\/studied that could flip this burden over to the sources\/perpetrators of stigma and discrimination instead. Thus, I found the ways that mentalizing could be used to work towards this to be particularly engaging.<\/p>\n
Because mentalizing requires one to infer what others are thinking and feeling (Waytz & Epley, 2012) it becomes more difficult to do so as the other person becomes increasingly different from oneself. The more different someone is from oneself, the more difficult it can be to understand what they have been through, how their experiences have impacted them, and the perspective they approach problems with. Someone who does not identify as belonging to a sexual minority group could not think like or navigate the world as someone who belongs to a sexual minority population would, with one reason being that the concerns and experiences that individuals who are a sexual minority face can be different than those of people who are cis and heteronormative. It is also more difficult because stigmatized populations often have widespread stereotypes and assumptions made about them, which could cloud or influence the mentalization process.<\/p>\n
When someone is not perceived as a part of one\u2019s group, it becomes easier to dehumanize them (Waytz & Epley, 2012), which can lead to these groups more easily perpetrating \u201cnegative experiences\u201d towards the groups they dehumanize. On the other hand, humanizing someone requires one to recognize that others also have emotions, goals, and struggles, just as they do themselves (Castro & Zautra, 2016). There is research that showed that across participants of differing racial groups, simply wondering about the other\u2019s favorite vegetable was able to humanize them (Wheeler & Fiske, 2005, as cited in Castro & Zautra, 2016).<\/p>\n
The use of mentalizing within this sort of research, is a branch of mind perception research that diverges from placing the burden of implementing a solution to \u201cnegative experiences\u201d solely onto stigmatized groups. While doing these readings, and writing this post, it was clear to me how powerful mentalizing is, with the ability to help us forge close connections and great teamwork, but also the ability to enable the dehumanization of others. This makes it that much more important that we are aware of the ways this process can be beneficial and productive as well as biased and harmful as we continue to learn about and discuss social connections.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
References<\/strong><\/p>\n Castro, S. A., & Zautra, A. J. (2016). Humanization of social relations: Nourishing health and resilience through greater humanity. Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, 36<\/em>(2), 64\u201380.<\/p>\n Waytz, A., & Epley, N. (2012). Social connection enables dehumanization. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 48<\/em>(1), 70\u201376.<\/p>\n Wheatley, T., Kang, O., Parkinson, C., & Looser, C. E. (2012). From mind perception to mental connection: Synchrony as a mechanism for social understanding. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 6<\/em>(8), 589-606.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [Patrick] The football team at Harvard comes from different parts of the country and all walks of life. When we arrived on campus freshman year, none of us really had anything in common outside of football. Due to the fact that football is a fall sport, we arrived on campus just a few weeks before […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10635,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-203","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/socialconnection\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/socialconnection\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/socialconnection\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/socialconnection\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10635"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/socialconnection\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=203"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/socialconnection\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":205,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/socialconnection\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203\/revisions\/205"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/socialconnection\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=203"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/socialconnection\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=203"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/socialconnection\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=203"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}