Social mentality refers to a collection of social psychological traits such as values, social attitudes, social emotions, and social needs shared by most members within a certain time frame. A positive and healthy social mentality has important value and significance for maintaining social stability and innovative social governance.

As an integral part of social governance, strengthening and innovating social mentality governance requires understanding the development needs of the situation and actively innovating the path of practice. This will require efforts in four primary domains: building a solid material foundation, strengthening thought guidance, deepening the application of science and technology, and highlighting the rule of law.

Material foundation

The comprehensive and coordinated development of the economy should be realized.

Only by adhering to the new development concept to lead the new normal of economic development, optimizing the economic structure, and increasing the total economic volume and fiscal revenue can we lay a solid material foundation to solve various social mentality issues.

The focus of promoting common prosperity should be fully embraced. This involves improving the income distribution system and increasing social security benefits.

Healthy mentality

Core socialist values should guide social mentality development, and a healthy social mentality should be cultivated using mentality governance.

Mentality governance is a method of cultivating people’s social needs or changing their perception into the value of different needs, and then intervening in the thought processes of the human brain.

Intelligent governance

As new breakthroughs in the internet, big data, and artificial intelligence technologies continue to be made, promoting the intelligent construction of social mentality governance by means of science and technology will help to innovate the means of social mentality governance and improve its effectiveness across the board.

An intelligent early warning prevention and control system should also be established and the creation of a social mentality assessment index system should be explored.

With big data and cloud computing technologies, regional social mentality evolutionary dynamics could be accurately grasped so as to provide timely early warnings and intervention plans.

Rule of law

The rule of law is the best regulator for coordinating conflicts of interest and is an institutional guarantee for maintaining social justice. The key point of cultivating a good social mentality lies in meeting people’s expectations and interests for social justice. Therefore, to strengthen social mentality governance, rule of law construction, as a condition for its fundamental guarantee, should be strengthened.

The rule of law mindset should also be strengthened. In essence, thinking in terms of the rule of law is essentially considering worst-case scenarios. When dealing with social mentality, we should constantly review whether it meets the requirements of the Constitution and the law.

We should make good use of methods of the rule of law to deal with social mentality issues as they arise.

The concept of good law and good governance should be adhered to, and relevant laws and regulations and other social institutions should be continuously improved to advance the implementation of the rule of law approach through institutional guarantee.

In conclusion, effective promotion of social mentality governance is not only a practical requirement for building a social governance pattern based on collaboration, participation, and shared benefits, but also an important dimension to promote the modernization of social governance. Social mentality governance should strive to ensure and continuously improve people’s wellbeing.

It should be guided by thought construction, and implemented by means of intelligent management and the rule of law.

This will truly solidify the social cognitive foundation of social governance and its innovation, and promote the modernization of national governance system and governance capacity with “mentality governance.”

He Zhimin (professor) and Xiang Linjing are from the School of Public Finance and Public Administration at Jiangxi University of Finance and Economics.