Simulation-driven mentalizing facilitates projection and introjection (opens in new tab)

Mental life is filled with thoughts about the social world and one’s place in it. Mentalizing, or ascribing mental content (e.g., preferences, beliefs, visuospatial perspectives) to others and oneself, often requires considering self-representations and target representations in relation to each other. We propose a model of mentalizing wherein simulation, which, minimally, involves activating a self-representation, facilitates two phenomena: projection (using self-representations to construct...