Psychological Mindedness

Psychological mindedness (PM) is the ability to process information with reference to a psychological system. Hatcher and Hatcher (1997) explain that different psychological systems may lead to different conceptualizations of PM. Fundamentally, however, PM requires identifying some data as psychological (rather than biological, religious, economic, etc.) and finding psychological meaning in the data. Therefore, the psychologically minded person is capable of making psychological rather than purely biological, religious, economic, or any other nonpsychological attributions for behavior. For example, a psychologically minded person might explain an aggressive outburst by saying, “I did it because I was angry,” rather than “The devil made me do it” or “I have a chemical imbalance.”

Keywords: psychological mindedness; awareness; social cognition; ego function; insight