Do you have a theory of mind for the other side?

I'm confident readers here can do this, but reading the internet it's clear many cannot

Illustration by Alexander Glandien

There’s a difference between not knowing what someone believes and not understanding why they believe it. Any shallow internet conversation on politics or really any hot topic treats these as the same thing, but they’re not, and confusing them causes a lot of problems.

Liberals aren’t confused about where conservatives stand on immigration, they know the position just fine. What’s frequently missing is any model of how a reasonable person actually gets there. So when you ask someone to explain it, the answer frequently devolves into “of course, they’re just racist.” Point that out and you’ll get a long thread about how desperate you are for approval, which is, ironically, just another version of the same thing. They can’t model your motive either so they resort to the same flattening move. It’s not that different from a lot of the takes I read online why the Dems lost the last presidential election, honestly. People weren’t confused about what voters wanted, they just never bothered asking why they wanted it.

The term for this is theory of mind. Not knowing what someone thinks is an information problem, but not knowing why they think it, what values or fears or tradeoffs actually produced that belief, is a theory of mind problem (this is also really just another form of context understanding). All behavior makes sense once you know enough about the person behind it, and political belief doesn’t get some special exemption from that. You need both because they’re different failures, and they get fixed in different ways.

Here’s a useful test, and from what I observe it’s a missing piece of what healthy debate actually requires. Can you argue the other side’s position as well as they’d argue it themselves, without sneaking in “and that’s why they’re wrong, dumb, or evil” as part of the case? If you can’t, you don’t really understand the debate.

We can crystallize the above with some examples. Let’s try it out on a conservative position, we’ll do an easy one: gun ownership. The steel man isn’t “they like guns” or “they’re scared of everything.” It’s that a population capable of defending itself is a check on state power that no law or court can fully replace, and that historical cases of mass disarmament before a crackdown looks, to someone holding this view, a lot less like paranoia and a lot more like pattern recognition. You don’t have to agree with any of that. But if your model of a gun-rights conservative is “gets off on feeling powerful” or “is horny to have a gun collection” you’re not arguing with a person, you’re arguing with a cartoon. And if you’re a reasonable person, you can’t honestly think another human being is a cartoon.

Now let’s try it on a liberal position, we’ll do another frequently debated topic: abortion rights. The steel man isn’t “they don’t value life” or “they’re selfish.” It’s that bodily autonomy, the idea that no one, including the government, can force you to use your body to sustain another life against your will, is treated sacred in almost every other context, including ones conservatives themselves defend, like the right to refuse medical treatment or decline organ donation. At its strongest, the pro-choice position is simply an argument for applying that principle consistently. Again, you don’t have to agree. But if your model of that position is “doesn’t care about babies,” you’ve skipped the argument and gone straight to the ending you already wanted.

None of this is both-sidesism, and it’s not even a request to be nicer to people you disagree with (or change your mind). Today’s thought experiment is merely a diagnostic tool I wish more people would use. If you can pass this test on a position you reject, you actually understand the disagreement, and you can fairly argue against it on its merits. If you can’t, what you’ve got isn’t a real political opinion, it’s a tribal marker and you’re basically just being an NPC. And the people who fail this test the loudest are usually the first to reach for whataboutism or another form of deflection the second you ask them to actually try it.

If more people did this before commenting on the news of the day, that alone might be most of what it takes to climb out of our ideological era and back into something that resembles a conversation.