Do Homeless People Like Carrots? The Lesser Minds Problem

Repairing government trucks [...] garage (1937)
Harris & Ewing, photographer

 From Jenny Odell's Saving Time. P 146

Though I've associated it so far with colonialism, a version of this difference is visible in our everyday interactions with other people. Adam Waytz, Juliana Schroeder, and Nicholas Employ call it the "lesser minds problem," a cognitive bias that leads us to underestimate or overlook the emotional realities of others we perceive to be unlike ourselves, including a biased belief that those people are more biased than we are. We could interpret this to mean that we see people in these "outgroups" as being more automaton than human. The authors describe an incredible experiment in which participants were asked to consider "typically dehumanized outgroups" like drug addicts or people without housing. For someone outside them, thinking about people in these groups usually does not activate regions of the brain associated with theory of mind, the ability to imagine mental states in others. But "when [participants] are asked to engage directly with the minds of these outgroup members, such as by simply asking whether or not a homeless person would like a particular vegetable, then these neural regions become activated just as they are with higher status outgroup members."* The question abour the vegetable presumes a person with desires. And desire, an attitude toward the future and a reflection of one's past, can exist only in time-the time inhabited by that person.

And as a footnote on that same page: 

*Shonda Rhimes, the writer of Grey's Anatomy and Scandal, has made a similar point in a Master Class lesson on writing realistic TV show characters. Having argued that compelling characters have fully formed hopes and desires—in other words, attitudes toward time -- Rhimes adds that the risk of stereotypical, static, and boring characters is highest when people try to write characters whom they perceive to be most different from them.