A fellow psychology student and I sat with my son, aged 3, and let him watch us as we emptied an M&Ms container of its contents and refilled it with pencils. “If you showed this container to your best friend” we asked, “what would they think was inside?” “Pencils” he answered.

We then sat down with my daughter, aged 5. Again we emptied an M&Ms container of confectionary and refilled it with pencils. When asked what she thought her best friend would think was inside, my daughter responded “M&Ms.”

The test, in differing forms, has been replicated on children around the world and the results suggest that the understanding others can have a mental representation different from our own generally emerges between the ages of 3 and 5. However, the development of a theory of mind continues throughout our lives and facilitates our social interactions, helping us to interpret other people’s intentions and behaviours.

Theory of mind is discussed in terms of an individual’s cognitive development, but our ability to infer other people’s mental states from observation of their situations, behaviours and expressions must also be informed by our social and cultural environment.

Another theory of development that emerged in the 70s was psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner’s ecological system’s theory that saw the child develop in the context of the interactions between their immediate family environment, their neighbourhoods, schooling, and the larger social system – media, government, industry and cultural attitudes.

Bronfenbrenner’s model is depicted as a set of nested circles, the individual couched comfortably in the middle of a widening set of influences. I was born in the 70s and the world my children are growing up in is quite different. The diversity afforded by increased migration and access to the rest of the globe via the internet, brings the individual into contact with multiple influences daily. Furthermore culture is no longer something so easily imposed from without, but a process that the individual contributes to defining through these various encounters. This shifting reality prompted Vélez-Agosto and colleagues (2017) to reimagine Bronfenbrenner’s neat circles as a spiral, “an ever historical transforming sphere” (p. 906), moving past political policies, social services, laws, media, neighbourhood, workplace, school, day care, home to eventually arrive at self in the centre.

I was fascinated by this article earlier in the year both as a psychologist and someone of South East Asian background. It tells the story of Siti, the so-called “index case” of a mass psychogenic illness or hysterical contagion among a group of high school students in Malaysia preparing for their final exams.

Siti and others who were affected, experienced what they described as possession by spirits. The experts interviewed for comment were American medical sociologist Robert Bartholomew who attributed the experience to “a collective stress response prompting an overstimulation of the nervous system” and UK psychiatrist Dr Simon Wessely who attributed transmission to “psychological and social factors”.

These ideas were familiar to me as a psychologist, but so too was the idea of toyol, child ghosts my Indonesian mother had told me about as I was growing up. I grew up in a family with two parents educated to a postgraduate level, one in the arts and one in science. I was also raised Catholic and in the folk beliefs of Java. I’ve never seen spirits and I don’t go to church, so neither of these systems of belief are part of my daily experience. But I consider that my exposure to these beliefs enhances my therapy work.

I related most to the comments of two people in the article. One was Siti Ain, a witness to another case that saw 100 people affected after seeing a “dark, shadowy figure”, who said “I couldn’t see what they saw but their reactions were real”. The other was clinical psychologist Irma Ismail who, commenting on the divide between spiritual and scientific responses to the issue, said “Malaysian culture has its own take on the phenomenon. A more realistic approach is integrating spiritual beliefs with adequate mental health treatment”.

While there is amazing opportunity today to be exposed to a wide variety of perspectives, it appears to have also created an adversarial climate, in particular on social media, as discussed here by Haidt and Rose-Stockwell.

But not everything on social media is ugly and I wept when I read this incredible exchange between a worried parent and an incredibly empathetic model. I hope such exchanges initiate a contagion of empathy. In this exchange, model Rain Dove embodies a principle espoused by humanistic therapist Carl Rogers known as “unconditional positive regard”. In this era of growing diversity, where we are increasingly called upon to integrate multiple influences, may we choose empathy over opposition, and find security in a sense of identity in community with others.