Jakob Sverre Løvstad
CTO, Seema
22 October 2025
There are quite a few things that can feel crucial when working with diversity. We talk a lot about systemic and strategic considerations, and the research behind the challenges that arise. But if we move our gaze down to the individual level, the psychological concept of "mentalisation" is a key issue. To quote the most important name in the field of mentalisation, Professor Peter Fonagy, the term can be defined as follows:
Mentalising refers to the capacity to perceive and understand oneself and others in terms of mental states (feelings, beliefs, intentions and desires). It also refers to the capacity to reason about one's own and others' behaviour in terms of mental states, i.e. reflection.
In other words, it's about how and to what extent you understand the actions of others as a function of your inner life, based on your emotions, beliefs and more - and whether you are able to reflect correctly on these topics. This is an ability that we humans, given a decent upbringing, begin to develop early on and which becomes increasingly complex as we grow up. For those familiar with the developmental psychology term "Theory of Mind", mentalisation is the extension often used for adults.
And if you've heard people say things like "I can't understand why X did such and such", it's often what's known as a mentalisation failure - i.e. that you're not sufficiently able to understand why other people do what they do. It often boils down to statements like "they're just crazy", "they're mean" or similar platitudes because you can't wrap your head around what's happening at the other end.
Naturally, mentalisation also becomes more difficult when dealing with people who are far removed from your own identity and perspectives. Quite apart from mentalisation skills, it is also sometimes the case that you simply don't want to understand when something rubs you the wrong way or is too different.
The slightly bad news when it comes to mentalisation is that the ability to monitor one's own behaviour, thinking, emotional tendencies and so on is one of the more complicated things the brain does. In clinical neuropsychology, the "cognitive pyramid" is often used to describe what is considered to be simple and basic versus more demanding and advanced functions of the brain:
In other words, it takes a little more than average effort to be good at this. In addition, it should be said that what you think is a "normal ability to reflect on yourself and others" is not necessarily very impressive. I the assessment form normal function is defined as follows:
The person shows an ordinary ability to make sense of their experiences in terms of thoughts and feelings. The person has a model of "the mind" (their own and others') that may be simple, but is relatively coherent, personalised and well-integrated.
This isn't exactly something that smacks of deep interpersonal insight, and can definitely be a little inadequate if you want to get to know someone from a very different background to yourself.
On the positive side, not to get bogged down in the misery here, mentalisation is a so-called meta-cognitive property of humans. In practice, this means that, unlike cognitive abilities, mentalisation can be trained to a much greater extent. If you really want to, through practice, good interventions, exposure and so on, you can make good progress in this area. So in that sense, there's no excuse for being bad in the sense of "I'm just like that". That's too thin in this context. If you want to, you can do it.
In other words, if we're talking about something that can be done in purely practical terms to get managers and employees to become good at relationships and understanding the other person, this is a path that makes sense to follow. Fortunately, there is also a lot of good research on how things work and what you can do about it.
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