Mindwise
More specifically, I conduct experiments that test your sixth sense to learn exactly how, and how well, you reason about the thoughts, motives, attitudes, beliefs, and emotions of others. This ability is one of your brain’s greatest because it allows you to achieve one of the most important goals in any human life: connecting, deeply and honestly, with other human beings. Mind reading allows you to cooperate with those you should trust and avoid those you shouldn’t. It allows you to track your reputation in the eyes of others, helping you to ensure that others think of you as a competent and reliable person worth befriending. At its best, being able to read the minds of others enables understanding between friends, forgiveness among enemies, empathy between strangers, and cooperation between countries and couples and coworkers. Without it, cooperative society is barely imaginable.
At times, the size of the gap between what we think we know about others and what we actually know can be shocking.
Seeing someone for only fifty milliseconds, faster than the blink of an eye, gives us enough time to form an impression of their competence.2 These snap judgments matter. In one experiment, politicians who looked more competent than their rivals after a fleeting glance were significantly more likely to win their election (about 70 percent of the time), suggesting that those snap judgments put people into our most powerful positions.3 Your sixth sense works quickly and is not prone to second-guessing.
First, the good news. These experiments suggested that people are pretty good, overall, at guessing how a group of others would evaluate them, on average. The overall correlation in these experiments between predicted impressions and the average actual impression of the group was quite high (.55, if you are quantitatively inclined). To put that in perspective, this is roughly the same magnitude as the correlation between the heights of fathers and the heights of sons (around .5). It is not perfect insight, but it is also very far from being clueless. In other words, you probably have a decent sense of what others generally think of you, on average.
These experiments also assessed how well people could predict the impression of any single individual within a given group. You may know, for instance, that your coworkers in general think you are rather smart, but those coworkers also vary in their impression of you. Some think you are as sharp as a knife. Others think you are as sharp as a spoon. Do you know the difference? Evidently, no. The accuracy rate across these experiments was barely better than random guessing (an overall correlation of .13 between predicted and actual evaluations, only slightly higher than no relationship whatsoever). Although you might have some sense of how smart your coworkers think you are, you appear to have no clue about which coworkers in particular find you smart and which do not.
These studies found that people are only slightly better than chance at guessing who in a group likes them and who does not (the average correlation here was a meager .18).
The same barely-better-than-guessing accuracy is also found in experiments investigating how well speed daters can assess who wants to date them and who does not, how well job candidates can judge which interviewers were impressed by them and which were not, and even how well teachers can predict their course evaluations.
When one group of researchers evaluated decades of studies and hundreds of experiments that measured how well people could distinguish truths from lies, they found that people’s ability to spot deception was only a few percentage points better than a random coin flip: people were 54 percent accurate overall, when random guessing would make you accurate 50 percent of the time.7
“strangers read each other with an average accuracy rate of 20 percent” when videotaped and later asked to report their moment-by-moment thoughts and feelings.9 “Close friends and married couples,” he reports, “nudge that up to 35 percent.” So yes, you do know what your spouse or a close friend likes and dislikes more than a random stranger would, but the gain may be surprisingly modest. The second part of this answer, however, is that the confidence you have in knowing the mind of a close friend or romantic partner far outstrips your actual accuracy. Getting to know someone, even over a lifetime of marriage, creates an illusion of insight that far surpasses actual insight.10
One member of a romantic couple predicted how the other would rate him or her on a series of different measures, including feelings of self-worth, self-rated abilities, and activity preferences. The lines across the bars show the accuracy rates one would expect by chance alone. The white bars show the percentage that the partners, on average, actually predicted correctly. The gray bars show the percentage that the partners predicted they answered correctly. Dating partners were more accurate than would be expected by chance alone but nowhere near as accurate as they thought they were. This figure illustrates the main goal of this book: to reduce the gap between the gray bars and the white bars in your own life, both by instilling a sense of one’s limitations to reduce the height of the gray bars and by
One member of a romantic couple predicted how the other would rate him or her on a series of different measures, including feelings of self-worth, self-rated abilities, and activity preferences. The lines across the bars show the accuracy rates one would expect by chance alone. The white bars show the percentage that the partners, on average, actually predicted correctly. The gray bars show the percentage that the partners predicted they answered correctly. Dating partners were more accurate than would be expected by chance alone but nowhere near as accurate as they thought they were. This figure illustrates the main goal of this book: to reduce the gap between the gray bars and the white bars in your own life, both by instilling a sense of one’s limitations to reduce the height of the gray bars and by offering suggestions for how you can better understand others and thus increase the height of the white bars.
One member of a romantic couple predicted how the other would rate him or her on a series of different measures, including feelings of self-worth, self-rated abilities, and activity preferences. The lines across the bars show the accuracy rates one would expect by chance alone. The white bars show the percentage that the partners, on average, actually predicted correctly. The gray bars show the percentage that the partners predicted they answered correctly. Dating partners were more accurate than would be expected by chance alone but nowhere near as accurate as they thought they were. This figure illustrates the main goal of this book: to reduce the gap between the gray bars and the white bars in your own life, both by instilling a sense of one’s limitations to reduce the height of the gray bars and by offering suggestions for how you can better understand others and thus increase the height of the white bars.
In fact, they did no better than what would be expected by chance alone, correctly identifying truths and lies only 52 percent of the time (when chance is 50 percent). As people gained more information about the person in the video, they became more confident but did not become any more
In fact, they did no better than what would be expected by chance alone, correctly identifying truths and lies only 52 percent of the time (when chance is 50 percent). As people gained more information about the person in the video, they became more confident but did not become any more
In fact, they did no better than what would be expected by chance alone, correctly identifying truths and lies only 52 percent of the time (when chance is 50 percent). As people gained more information about the person in the video, they became more confident but did not become any more
In fact, they did no better than what would be expected by chance alone, correctly identifying truths and lies only 52 percent of the time (when chance is 50 percent). As people gained more information about the person in the video, they became more confident but did not become any more accurate. When,
People so habitually underestimate how long it will take to get tasks done that psychologists have come up with a name for it: the planning fallacy.
But we can only guess at what’s going on inside our heads to construct those conscious experiences. We can report feeling happy but are only guessing when explaining why. We can report loving our spouse but are guessing when explaining why. And we can feel ourselves thinking through important decisions that lead to an important choice but are again guessing when trying to explain why we chose option A rather than
This does not mean that our introspective guesses are never accurate, just as you might guess the correct answer to a multiple choice question. It means that you should be skeptical about their accuracy.
If your upper lip is now curled ever so slightly into an expression of disgust without any actual barf or snot in front of you, then you get the point. Thoughts can activate the behavioral responses commonly associated with them, like an expression of disgust to go along with the feeling triggered by these words. Once thoughts of gross bodily fluids are activated, the associated behaviors they elicit follow naturally, without any conscious intervention on your part. Psychologists know that consciousness is not required to guide behavior because you get the very same reactions even if those words are flashed in front of you so quickly that you can’t recognize that you have seen any words at all.10
One of the primary determinants of attractiveness is a signal that has proven useful over millennia for finding healthy and fit partners to have babies with. Do you know what it is? Big muscles? Big smiles? Big breasts? Yes, for some, but there’s one that’s far more consistent around the globe: bilateral symmetry. That is, the degree to which the left and right sides of your body are identical.12 I know: it sounds hot, doesn’t it? It doesn’t get much conscious attention because your brain is so good at assessing symmetry that it constructs your feeling of attraction almost instantaneously.
You can see the importance of this request-plus-reason association by considering an experiment in which people waiting in line to use a copy machine were given a request by an experimenter. In particular, the experimenter asked if she could budge ahead in line by requesting, “Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine because I’m in a rush?” That script follows the routine and, sure enough, 94 percent of people granted the favor and let the experimenter budge ahead in line. In a second condition, the reason was dropped: “Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine?” Hmm … that breaks the normal routine because there’s no reason. As expected, far fewer—only 60 percent of people—granted the favor. The third condition is the most interesting one, the request-plus-dumb-reason condition. Here, the experimenter asks, “Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine, because I need to make some copies?” That’s right, because I need to make some copies. This follows the standard script but includes a nonsensical reason. Of course you have to make copies. What else are you going to do with the copy machine, make sandwiches? But because the request follows the well-learned routine, it automatically triggers compliance. So sure enough, a full 93 percent of people granted the favor, statistically identical to the good-reason condition.
We then showed people all eleven versions of their own faces—their actual face, the five blended with the highly attractive face, and the five blended with the highly unattractive face—in a randomly ordered lineup and asked them to identify which face was their own. We found that people tended to select attractively enhanced images of themselves, thinking
We then showed people all eleven versions of their own faces—their actual face, the five blended with the highly attractive face, and the five blended with the highly unattractive face—in a randomly ordered lineup and asked them to identify which face was their own. We found that people tended to select attractively enhanced images of themselves, thinking they were more attractive than they actually were.15 The image you carry of yourself in your mind’s eye is a function, at least in part, of the associations you have formed about yourself rather than simply of the image that appears in the mirror. Now you know why most of the pictures taken of you seem to look so bad.
This creates what psychologists refer to as naïve realism: the intuitive sense that we see the world out there as it actually is, rather than as it appears from our own perspective.
Now again, how many times do you think the Asian couple was actually refused service? Ninety percent of the time? Ninety-two percent? No, not even close. LaPiere and his friends were refused service only once, “in a rather inferior auto-camp into which we drove in a very dilapidated car.” Only once! Over 90 percent of people at the establishments contacted in this experiment believed they would act like bigots, but less than half of 1 percent actually did. UNKNOWING THYSELF This experiment has its flaws, but it inspired decades of research that revealed a startling message—that there can be a significant disconnect between what people think about themselves and how they actually behave.
Unconscious processes seem largely responsible for much of what we do habitually in daily life, and conscious processes seem largely responsible for making sense of what we do so that we can explain it to ourselves and others.
You can see the importance of this request-plus-reason association by considering an experiment in which people waiting in line to use a copy machine were given a request by an experimenter. In particular, the experimenter asked if she could budge ahead in line by requesting, “Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine because I’m in a rush?” That script follows the routine and, sure enough, 94 percent of people granted the favor and let the experimenter budge ahead in line. In a second condition, the reason was dropped: “Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine?” Hmm … that breaks the normal routine because there’s no reason. As expected, far fewer—only 60 percent of people—granted the favor. The third condition is the most interesting one, the request-plus-dumb-reason condition. Here, the experimenter asks, “Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine, because I need to make some copies?” That’s right, because I need to make some copies. This follows the standard script but includes a nonsensical reason. Of course you have to make copies. What else are you going to do with the copy machine, make sandwiches? But because the request follows the well-learned routine, it automatically triggers compliance. So sure enough, a full 93 percent of people granted the favor, statistically identical to the good-reason condition.
Finally, once eyes and bodies are merged, our minds tend to merge as well. Thoughts and feelings come from what we’re looking at and how our bodies are reacting to it, so when two people are watching something and reacting similarly, they are likely to be feeling and thinking similarly as well. Adam Smith thought imitation reflected your understanding of another person’s experience—your body shows what you think another person feels. In fact, the reverse is also true: you feel what your body shows. When you see a pained expression on a friend’s face, your face may also contort into a pained expression, thereby making you feel a touch of pain yourself.6 Sit up straight and you’ll feel more proud of your accomplishments.7 Smile and you will feel happier.8 Even furrowing your brow, as if you are thinking harder, can lead you to actually think harder.9 This link from imitating another person’s actions to experiencing the other person’s emotions is a critical link for understanding the minds of others. If a researcher disables your ability to imitate another’s facial expression, such as by asking you to hold a pen pursed between your lips10 or by injecting your face with Botox,11 your ability to understand what another person is feeling drops significantly. Botox dulls your social senses right along with your wrinkles. Buyer beware.
You can see this distinction between senses and inferences working clearly in the minds of doctors. Over time, doctors naturally become desensitized to the distress and pain of their patients, just as you habituate to any repeated experience, yet doctors retain the ability to know when their patients are in pain and when they are not. Far from being a bad thing, dulling their empathic sense is essential to the practice of medicine. You and I would be physically crippled trying to give another person an injection.14 A doctor may not feel it when another person is in pain, but can infer that the other person is in pain without any difficulty. There seem to be two different routes to understanding the mind of another person. In fact, scientists can now pinpoint these different routes in the brain. In one experiment, physicians who practiced acupuncture lay on their backs in an fMRI machine and watched videos of people being poked with needles. Some videos showed people getting poked in the foot, others in the hand, and others in the lips. These are painful to watch, I promise, at least if you’re not a physician. Nonphysicians who watched these videos had the same reaction I do, with the neural regions that are active when actually experiencing physical pain firsthand also being active when watching other people experiencing pain. It quite literally hurts to watch someone else being hurt. The physicians, however, showed virtually no response in these physical pain regions at all. Instead, the physicians showed activity in a very different part of the brain, most notably a relatively small spot in their medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC). This spot is located about one inch above and behind the inside part of your eyebrows, on each side of your brain. For the good of your social life, try not to get injured there.15 More important for you than its location is the MPFC’s function: it is involved in making inferences about the minds of others.16 When you wonder, “What on earth are they thinking?,” your MPFC is engaged. When you are mulling over what your mom wants for her birthday, you’re using your MPFC. And when you are calmly noting, “That person is in pain,” your MPFC is engaged. When the physicians in this experiment saw someone getting poked in the face with a needle, they did not feel the person’s pain. Instead, their engaged MPFC indicated that they calmly inferred the other person’s pain. Most of us might wish that our doctors were more sensitive, perhaps better able to feel our pain, but what we really want is for them to know of our pain. We do not want a doctor’s empathy; we want a doctor’s MPFC.
Free will also requires being able to choose between different options—“life is what you make it,” as the saying goes. In another experiment, employees at two different restaurants were given a list of things they might be doing over the next ten years, from where they could be living (for example, the East Coast, the West Coast, the Midwest, an apartment in the same town) to where they could be working (in the same job, in an exciting job, in a boring job, having no job) to what their lives would be like (same lifestyle as now, more family-focused lifestyle, more carefree lifestyle). They circled all the possibilities that seemed likely, then did the same for a coworker they knew well. At the end, the researchers counted the number of genuine possibilities people had circled, and there were markedly more circles for one’s own future life than for the well-known coworker’s life. Having free will allows you to make wonderful choices, but it also allows you to make terrible choices. If you ask people to chart out their futures compared to others’, they don’t simply report having more freedom to end up with good options, such as owning a great house or having an exciting job. They also report having more freedom to end up with terrible options, such as owning a crappy house or having no job at all.
It’s not only free will that other minds might seem to lack. This lesser minds effect has many manifestations, including what appears to be a universal tendency to assume that others’ minds are less sophisticated and more superficial than one’s own.
The violent actors are overwhelmed by empathy for their own group, which all too often naturally leads to disdain for competing groups. They act out of parochial altruism, a strong commitment to benefit one’s own group or cause
The violent actors are overwhelmed by empathy for their own group, which all too often naturally leads to disdain for competing groups. They act out of parochial altruism, a strong commitment to benefit one’s own group or cause
The violent actors are overwhelmed by empathy for their own group, which all too often naturally leads to disdain for competing groups. They act out of parochial altruism, a strong commitment to benefit one’s own group or cause without regard for the consequences for oneself.27
Leaders have two kinds of incentives at their disposal: intrinsic and extrinsic. Intrinsic incentives are any inherent to the job itself, such as the pleasure of accomplishing something worthwhile, learning new things, developing skills, or feeling proud about your work. Extrinsic incentives are outcomes that are separable from the job itself, such as getting paid, earning fringe benefits, getting a bonus, or having job security. Notice that the effect of extrinsic incentives on other people can be observed directly because it involves an obvious exchange of goods for services, whereas the impact of intrinsic incentives can really only be felt and experienced on the inside. You can see that both you and others work harder when money is at stake, but the metrics of pride and meaning and a sense of self-worth are emotional states that you feel rather than see. As a result, you can recognize intrinsic motivations more easily in yourself than in others.
The turnaround was incredible. In just one year, the plant went from having the most defects in the GM system to having nearly perfect ratings. Estimates were that it would take roughly 50 percent more manpower at a typical GM plant in Fremont, California, to produce the same number of cars as NUMMI. The worst plant had become arguably the best, using nearly all of the very same employees. What was the secret? According to industry analyst Maryann Keller, it was “no secret at all, and it was as old as history: Treat both white- and blue-collar workers with respect, encourage them to think independently, allow them to make decisions, and make them feel connected to an important effort.”32 That is, treat employees like mindful human beings who care about doing a good job instead of like mindless idiots who care only about making money.
We know this because we actually conducted another experiment on the very same train line with the very same population of commuters. In this experiment, we asked people from the same group of train commuters, based on random assignment, to either (a) sit alone and “enjoy their solitude,” (b) talk to the person sitting next to them, or (c) do “whatever you normally do.” In direct contrast to what people predicted, those who were asked to talk to the person sitting next to them actually reported having the most pleasant commute, whereas those who “enjoyed their solitude” reported having the least pleasant commute.
This means that there are actually three triggers here that can lead you to recognize humanlike minds in nonhuman agents: it looks like a mind, can be explained with a mind, or is closely connected your own mind. That is, minds can be triggered by your perceptions, by your need for an explanation, and by your social connections.
Actually, it looks like they do mean it. To find this out, the researchers took advantage of a very reliable scientific result. It’s called the mere-presence effect. If you are doing something simple, such as easy math problems, you’re likely to perform better if you have a real person watching you than if you’re alone. But if you’re doing something difficult, such as very difficult math problems, you are likely to perform worse when you have another person watching you. This same effect emerged when research volunteers had a picture of their favorite TV character in front of them, as if it were a real person. They did not, however, show this mere-presence effect when sitting in front of a picture of their least favorite character from the same TV show. Only pictures of people’s most loved characters produced the same effect that another real, live, mindful human being would. The Skin Horse may be wise after all.38 How this happens is not particularly mysterious. Think about how you try to relate to another person. To make it easy, let’s imagine a fledgling romance. On your first date, you are extremely sensitive to how you are coming across to the other person. You carefully track the other person’s likes and dislikes, doing your best to keep him or her suitably impressed. It is often a guessing game, but you spend a lot of time and effort trying to intuit the other person’s emotions and thoughts and feelings. Forming a connection requires you to consider another person’s mind, to adopt his or her perspective, to do your best to get into his or her head. Trying to connect with another person requires engaging your sixth sense. This is true with nonhumans as well. Musicians, for instance, often speak this way about the kind of connection they form to an instrument they’re playing, a connection that also likely explains why they so often end up humanizing their instruments. Stevie Ray Vaughan played Lenny, Eric Clapton played Blackie, and B. B. King played Lucille. Willie Nelson says, “I don’t know what I’d do without Trigger,” the love-worn and bodyguarded guitar he’s played for his entire career.
The isolation need not be so extreme. In one series of experiments, my colleagues and I found that those who felt chronically lonely, and therefore more interested in connecting with others, were more likely than those who are not lonely to rate easily anthropomorphized gadgets like Clocky as having a mind, more likely to see a sense of purpose or intentions in the universe, and more likely to rate their pets as mindful (such as thoughtful and considerate).40 Making people feel lonely in experiments also at least momentarily increased their belief in God—a mind watching us from above.41 It is surely no accident that many deeply religious people, from Francis of Assisi to Buddhist monks, go into extreme isolation in order to connect with the mind of an invisible God. Nor is it an accident that people report feeling a closer connection to God when they pray alone than when they pray in a group of people.
Our ability to read the minds of others is one of our brain’s greatest tools, absolutely essential for navigating our complicated social lives. The mistakes we can make engaging this ability are of two different kinds: failing to recognize a mind in something that actually has one, such as a human, or recognizing a mind in something that is actually mindless, such as a hurricane or a computer or random evolutionary processes in nature. These mistakes come from failing to engage our sixth sense in some cases and from failing to disengage it in others.
This produces one consistent mistake: overestimating the extent to which others will see, think, and feel the same way you do.
The second variety of mistakes we make in trying to understand the minds of others are mistakes of inference. When we’re seeking to understand another’s mind, we rely on at least three strategies. We project from our own mind, use stereotypes, and infer a mind from a person’s actions. Each strategy provides insight but can also lead to predictable mistakes.
You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do. —DAVID FOSTER WALLACE, Infinite Jest
When Piaget would sit young children on one side of a model composed of three mountains and ask what a doll sitting on the other side could see, he found that most children said the doll could see exactly what they
When Piaget would sit young children on one side of a model composed of three mountains and ask what a doll sitting on the other side could see, he found that most children said the doll could see exactly what they could see. I’m afraid my own children are no different.
His favorite way to hide was sitting on the couch with a pillow over his face. He couldn’t see me, and therefore he assumed I also couldn’t see him.
brain that makes inferences about the minds of others based on its own viewpoint and only later reassembles them to match another person’s perspective, in contrast, works better than a self-centered carpenter as long as its egocentric default is generally accurate and its corrections are well-timed and sufficient. The problem is that corrections are routinely poorly timed and insufficient, meaning that our default tendencies leave traces in our final judgments and decisions.
The good news from these findings is that our minds remain, at least in this respect, forever young. The bad news is that childish mistakes can linger well into adulthood.5 In fact, they linger in two subtle forms, and you can understand each by thinking carefully about the ways in which your own perspective differs systematically from others’ perspectives. First, you and another person may be paying attention to different things.
The good news from these findings is that our minds remain, at least in this respect, forever young. The bad news is that childish mistakes can linger well into adulthood.5 In fact, they linger in two subtle forms, and you can understand each by thinking carefully about the ways in which your own perspective differs systematically from others’ perspectives. First, you and another person may be paying attention to different things. You may look at, think about, or reflect upon different information than others do because you’re focusing on different aspects than they are. When I lecture to students, for instance, I am very sensitive to my mistakes, wishing I could get a second chance at every flubbed joke or poorly answered question. If my students aren’t as sensitive to those mistakes as I am, then I wind up thinking I’ll be judged more harshly than I actually am because I’m more focused on my flaws than my students are.
Second, you and another person may be attending to the same thing but evaluating it very differently. An Al Qaeda member looking at the burning World Trade Center towers will evaluate that event in a completely different way than an American citizen will. Your self not only provides a unique vantage point on the world; it also provides a lens made up of beliefs, attitudes, emotions, and knowledge that you interpret the world through. Your interpretive lens may differ from others’, causing you to look at the same object or event and interpret it very differently.
You are well aware of your own emotions and less aware of others’ emotions. That doesn’t make you more emotional than others; it makes your sense a prime example of the neck problem.
One consequence of being at the center of your own universe is that it’s easy to overestimate your importance in it, both for better and for worse. Consider a classic psychology experiment that asked
As you can see on the right side of the figure below, spouses tended to assume that their partner would vainly accept credit for all of the desirable activities in their marriage but deflect blame for the undesirable activities. In fact, partners were again egocentric, tending to claim more responsibility than is logically possible for all activities, positive as well as negative.
We asked some of these MBA students to report what percentage of the group’s total work they personally contributed. We found that the amount of overclaiming increased as the size of the group increased. Groups of four or less look relatively reasonable, claiming more responsibility than is logically possible but at least being in the vicinity of 100 percent. As the number of group members increases, however, their judgments get increasingly unhinged from reality. By the time you get to groups of eight, these MBAs were claiming nearly 140 percent productivity! This brings new meaning to overachieving. The important point is to relax a bit when others don’t seem to appreciate you as much as you think they should. The mistake may be a product of egocentrism in your own head rather than others’ indifference.
While you are outside the room, the experimenter asks the other people sitting in the room to identify who was on your shirt. Those wearing the shirt estimated that nearly 50 percent would notice their Manilow shirt when, in fact, only 23 percent actually did. Even in small groups, the social spotlight does not shine on us nearly as brightly as we think.15 The point here
While you are outside the room, the experimenter asks the other people sitting in the room to identify who was on your shirt. Those wearing the shirt estimated that nearly 50 percent would notice their Manilow shirt when, in fact, only 23 percent actually did. Even in small groups, the social spotlight does not shine on us nearly as brightly as we think.15 The point here is that few of us are quite the celebrity that our own experience suggests we might be; nor are we under as much careful scrutiny from others as we might expect.
“You despise me, don’t you?” Bogart replies, “If I gave you any thought, I probably would.” I think we would all benefit from having our own
Not only are others noticing you, your self-centered senses tell you, but they’re judging you as harshly as you fear as well.
In all of the cases we ever studied, those in the throes of an embarrassing moment consistently overestimated how harshly others were evaluating them. Even once the social spotlight was on them, it did not burn as hot as those in its glare expected it to. I think Peter Lorre’s Casablanca moment was actually too extreme. Others may not give us much thought, but when they do, they generally cut us more slack than we’d imagine, because they’re not ruminating on our mistakes as much as we are ourselves. As a bit of folk wisdom goes, “Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.”16 Indeed. Piaget argued that becoming aware of your own perspective liberates you from it.
Although I still get nervous before speaking, it is no longer debilitating.17 I know that almost nobody in the audience is thinking the worst thing I can imagine, that they’re probably ruminating over dozens of other issues in their own life even while I’m right in front of them, and that almost no matter what happens the audience will forget about it far more quickly than I will. Before giving the commencement address at my high school some years ago, I found it reassuring that I could not recall anything my own high school commencement speaker said, even if someone offered me a million dollars to do so. In fact, I can’t even recall if the speaker was a man or a woman. Think of classes you’ve taken, speeches you’ve watched, and commencement presentations you’ve endured. What percentage of the content do you remember? If the actual percentage is higher than your odds of being struck by lightning, I’ll be shocked. Becoming aware of the power of your own perspective is the very thing that enables a broader perspective. Relax. Others likely won’t notice, and if they do, they likely won’t mind.18
In one experiment, equally human volunteers were randomly assigned to argue a hypothetical court case, either for the prosecution or for the defense. Despite being randomly assigned to these roles only moments before, volunteers quickly came to believe that their own side’s case was stronger than the other side’s case. More important, this wasn’t just posturing; they seemed to really believe it, and they also thought the judge would rule in their own side’s favor.19 The problem with a lens is that you look through it rather than at it, and so your own perspective doesn’t seem unique until someone else informs you otherwise. “I think in pictures,” writes Temple Grandin, describing
Looking through a lens also means that it is difficult to tell when your own view is being distorted by it. A friend of mine once confided to feeling horribly embarrassed for a speaker whose slides were being presented (unknowingly) out of focus. The speaker went on and on and on, showing blurry graph after blurry graph, one fuzzy slide of notes after another. Worst of all, my friend believed that nobody else in the audience said anything because of their exceptional politeness, obviously not wanting to embarrass the speaker. It was only after the presentation that my friend realized that the lens of the projector was working just fine; the problem was with the lenses in his own eyes. The blurry slides were his first indication that he needed glasses.
Distortions like this are easy to find. Ever notice that “the media” are consistently accused of being biased but never found to favor those making the accusations? When your own views are one-sided, a balanced account will necessarily differ from your own perspective, and the errors in reporting will therefore seem to exist in them rather than in you.20 Like the seemingly broken projector seen through the eyes of someone who needs glasses, viewers see bias out there in the media when the distortions exist inside their own minds. Parents do something similar. Many parents will report that the world seems to have gotten more dangerous over the years. Ask those parents to name when the world got more dangerous, and they will tend to give you a date very close to the birth of their first child.21 The world has remained the same (if anything, it has gotten markedly less dangerous22), but having a child changes the lens through which you view it. Parents see the same events as more threatening than they once did, but they don’t recognize that the change is in the lens through which they view the world rather than in the world itself. The most natural consequence of the lens problem is assuming that others will interpret the world as you do, because you can’t identify exactly how your own interpretation is being influenced by the lens you view it through. You can observe this consequence by simply asking people to report what other people believe, think, feel, or know, on topics ranging from the trivial to the critical. What percentage of other people like brown bread versus white bread? What percentage are likely to get excited about your new business model, love your artwork, or appreciate your self-published novel? How many Americans support financial regulation, are in favor of welfare, or will foreclose on their mortgage? When people are asked these questions, survey after survey finds that most people tend to exaggerate the extent to which others think, believe, and feel as they do.23 Brown bread lovers think they are larger in number than white bread lovers.24 Conservatives tend to believe that the average person is more conservative than liberals do.25 Voters on both sides of an issue tend to believe that those who didn’t vote in an election would have voted for their side, if they had chosen to vote.26 And when it comes to morality, even those who are clearly in the minority nevertheless tend to believe that they are in the moral majority.
Every year I demonstrate this to my MBA students by asking them to consider a series of questionably unethical practices.28 These practices include dubious activities like covering meals for a friend while traveling for business and submitting the receipts for reimbursement, or taking home office supplies from work. For each practice, students report whether they think it is unethical (yes or no) and then estimate the percentage of others in the class who will agree with them. The table below shows my most recent year’s results. In the first row, you see that 86 percent think it’s unethical to have your company reimburse you for a friend’s meal while traveling, whereas 14 percent think it’s acceptable. There’s a considerable range of opinion across the other practices. The far right column shows the subjects’ estimates of others’ beliefs. Here you see very little range of opinion. In fact, none of the average estimates in that column fall below 50 percent. Even those in the moral minority believe they are part of the moral majority.
This example illustrates what psychologists refer to as the curse of knowledge, another textbook example of the lens problem. Knowledge is a curse because once you have it, you can’t imagine what it’s like not to possess it. You’ve seen other people cursed many times. For instance, while on vacation, have you ever tried to get driving directions from a local? Or talked to an IT person who can’t explain how to operate your computer without using impenetrable computer science jargon? In one experiment, expert cell phone users predicted it would take a novice, on average, only thirteen minutes to learn how to use a new cell phone. It actually took novices, on average, thirty-two minutes.32 The lens of expertise works like a microscope, allowing you to notice subtle details that a novice might not catch but also sharpening your focus in a way that can allow you to miss the bigger picture and make it difficult to understand a novice’s perspective.
Trying to correct this lens first requires becoming aware of its influence. The problem is that it’s hard to know when you are being affected by your own expertise and when you are not. Consider what is probably the most famous (as yet unpublished) dissertation experiment in the history of psychology: Elizabeth Newton’s “tapping study.”34 In this experiment, carried out with pairs of subjects, one volunteer in each pair was randomly assigned to be the “tapper” and the other the listener. Tappers received a list of twenty-five songs well known to them, including “America the Beautiful” and “Rock Around the Clock.” Tappers were asked to pick out three songs and then tap out each one for the listener, while they sat back-to-back. Tappers then estimated the likelihood that listeners would identify each tune correctly, and listeners tried to identify each one. The results were striking. Tappers estimated that listeners would identify the song correctly, on average, 50 percent of the time. In fact, listeners guessed correctly only 2.5 percent of the time.
It’s not impossible to know what others think of you, but it does require using the same lens to evaluate yourself that others use. Other people generally know less about you than you know about yourself, and to understand what others think of you requires stepping back from the microscopic lens through which you view yourself. You have to think about how this person would evaluate you compared to others in general and overall, not how this person would evaluate you compared to your past or based on your fine-grained features. In this experiment, we also asked one group of people to think about themselves in these general terms by instructing them to consider how they would be judged by someone looking at their photograph way off in the future, three months from the day of the experiment. From abysmal accuracy rates that were no better than chance, these participants became quite accurate (the accuracy correlation was .55). Our volunteers did not become perfectly accurate, but they became about as accurate as any mind reader could reasonably expect to be. Knowing how you are seen through the eyes of others requires looking at yourself though the same lens that others do.
It’s not impossible to know what others think of you, but it does require using the same lens to evaluate yourself that others use. Other people generally know less about you than you know about yourself, and to understand what others think of you requires stepping back from the microscopic lens through which you view yourself. You have to think about how this person would evaluate you compared to others in general and overall, not how this person would evaluate you compared to your past or based on your fine-grained features. In this experiment, we also asked one group of people to think about themselves in these general terms by instructing them to consider how they would be judged by someone looking at their photograph way off in the future, three months from the day of the experiment. From abysmal accuracy rates that were no better than chance, these participants became quite accurate (the accuracy correlation was .55). Our volunteers did not become perfectly accurate, but they became about as accurate as any mind reader could reasonably expect to be. Knowing how you are seen through the eyes of others requires looking at yourself though the same lens that others do.
The problem of expertise is one of many examples of mistakes that come from projecting our own minds onto others: assuming that others know, think, believe, or feel as we do ourselves. Of course, we do not project ourselves onto others completely. We do so in some situations more than in others, and we project more onto some minds than others. The less we know about the mind of another, the more we use our own to fill in the blanks. Conservatives and liberals don’t know what the “average” person thinks, or how people who didn’t vote would have voted, and so they rely more on what they think themselves. Ask conservatives and liberals what their neighbor thinks, what their parent thinks, or what their spouse thinks and you are likely to see much less egocentrism. The lens problem therefore becomes larger as other minds become more unknown.37 Understanding this allows you to explain, simultaneously, the problem with e-mail and the problem with God.
our senders predicted that they could communicate just as well via e-mail as they could over the phone (roughly 80 percent accuracy in both cases). Those actually receiving the messages, however, could understand the speaker’s intention only when the communication was clear (that is, when the speaker was on the phone). With e-mail, they were no more accurate than you’d expect from a coin flip. The problem for our volunteers was that they knew whether their message was meant to be sincere or sarcastic. So when they said, “Blues Brothers 2000—now, there’s a sequel,” they could hear the sarcasm dripping from their voice regardless of whether they were actually using their voice or typing with their fingers. Those receiving the message, of course, could hear the sarcasm only through the speaker’s
our senders predicted that they could communicate just as well via e-mail as they could over the phone (roughly 80 percent accuracy in both cases). Those actually receiving the messages, however, could understand the speaker’s intention only when the communication was clear (that is, when the speaker was on the phone). With e-mail, they were no more accurate than you’d expect from a coin flip. The problem for our volunteers was that they knew whether their message was meant to be sincere or sarcastic. So when they said, “Blues Brothers 2000—now, there’s a sequel,” they could hear the sarcasm dripping from their voice regardless of whether they were actually using their voice or typing with their fingers. Those receiving the message, of course, could hear the sarcasm only through the speaker’s
our senders predicted that they could communicate just as well via e-mail as they could over the phone (roughly 80 percent accuracy in both cases). Those actually receiving the messages, however, could understand the speaker’s intention only when the communication was clear (that is, when the speaker was on the phone). With e-mail, they were no more accurate than you’d expect from a coin flip. The problem for our volunteers was that they knew whether their message was meant to be sincere or sarcastic. So when they said, “Blues Brothers 2000—now, there’s a sequel,” they could hear the sarcasm dripping from their voice regardless of whether they were actually using their voice or typing with their fingers. Those receiving the message, of course, could hear the sarcasm only through the speaker’s voice and heard nothing from the speaker’s fingers.
Not only was the ambiguity in the text unclear to the senders, it was unclear to the receivers as well. At the end of the experiment, we asked the receivers to guess how many of the items they had interpreted correctly. They thought they had done a superb job, interpreting nine out of ten of the sentences correctly, regardless of whether the communication had been over the phone or by e-mail. Here you can see why ambiguous mediums like e-mail and texting and Twitter are such fertile ground for misunderstanding. People using ambiguous mediums think they are communicating clearly because they know what they mean to say, receivers are unable to get this meaning accurately but are certain that they have interpreted the message accurately, and both are amazed that the other side can be so stupid. Senders delivered sincere and sarcastic messages to receivers either by e-mail or by phone.
Not only was the ambiguity in the text unclear to the senders, it was unclear to the receivers as well. At the end of the experiment, we asked the receivers to guess how many of the items they had interpreted correctly. They thought they had done a superb job, interpreting nine out of ten of the sentences correctly, regardless of whether the communication had been over the phone or by e-mail. Here you can see why ambiguous mediums like e-mail and texting and Twitter are such fertile ground for misunderstanding. People using ambiguous mediums think they are communicating clearly because they know what they mean to say, receivers are unable to get this meaning accurately but are certain that they have interpreted the message accurately, and both are amazed that the other side can be so stupid. Senders delivered sincere and sarcastic messages to receivers either by e-mail or by phone. Receivers were able to distinguish sarcasm from sincerity better over the phone than with e-mail, but senders predicted that they communicated equally well over both mediums. Receivers, likewise, thought that they interpreted the messages equally well over both mediums. With the ambiguous medium of e-mail in particular, both senders and receivers thought they understood each other far better than they actually did.
As the context in which you’re trying to understand another mind becomes more ambiguous, the influence of your own perspective increases. If you really want to understand your coworker or competitor or children, don’t rely on modern mediums of communication that give you only a modern Rorschach test about the mind of another person. Twitter does not allow others to understand your deep thoughts and broad perspective. It only allows others to confirm how stupid they already think you are.
But the less willing or able others are to give you a piece of their minds, the more their minds become a blank slate onto which you project your own. Enter God. Believers consult few figures more often than God when it comes to weighty measures, from moral issues such as gay marriage, abortion, and martyrdom to personal issues such as career planning or dating choices. The problem is that God doesn’t answer opinion polls, and the books that supposedly report God’s beliefs are notoriously open to interpretation. Many of the world’s wars are still fought over what God apparently does or does not want, fueled by the sense of having God on one’s own side. “Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God,” Lincoln noted during his second inaugural address, at the height of the Civil War, “and each invokes his aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, lest we be not judged.”
The most compelling evidence, however, comes from experiments in which we manipulated people’s own beliefs and measured how it affected what people think God and others believe. In one, we showed volunteers persuasive arguments either in favor of or opposed to affirmative action. The arguments worked: those who read the pro–affirmative action information became more in favor, whereas those who read the anti–affirmative action arguments became more opposed. More important, our manipulation moved our volunteers’ estimates of God’s beliefs in lockstep with their own, whereas estimates of other people’s beliefs were unaffected by the arguments the volunteers read. Creating God in one’s own image, indeed. If God is a moral compass, then the compass seems prone to pointing believers in whatever direction they are already facing.45 There’s nothing magical about God in this regard, just something ambiguous.
When others’ minds are unknown, the mind you imagine is based heavily on your own.
In other cases the need to correct one’s own viewpoint is obvious but the ability to do so depends on the source of the problem. I have described two different versions of egocentric biases, one produced by differences in attention (the neck problem) and the other produced by differences in interpretation (the lens problem). Of these two, I believe the existing evidence suggests that the neck
In other cases the need to correct one’s own viewpoint is obvious but the ability to do so depends on the source of the problem. I have described two different versions of egocentric biases, one produced by differences in attention (the neck problem) and the other produced by differences in interpretation (the lens problem). Of these two, I believe the existing evidence suggests that the neck problem is easier to overcome than the lens problem.
Think back to the earlier studies that showed “overclaiming.” In these versions of the neck problem, you might claim more responsibility for group activity simply because you are more aware of your own contributions than you are of others’ contributions. This kind of problem is relatively easy to solve. All you need to do is shift your attention to other people—in this case, to think about what others in your group contributed. Recall the Harvard MBA study groups whose members claimed more responsibility as the size of the group increased. We had another condition in that experiment, one in which the MBAs wrote down what each other member of the group contributed to the overall effort before they wrote down how much they personally contributed. This brought evaluations much closer to a realistic baseline. Ashley Todd wouldn’t have drawn the B on her cheek backward if she had paused for a moment and considered an onlooker’s visual perspective. The Vasa wouldn’t have sunk if the carpenters had paused to look at each other’s rulers. And you can reduce the anxiety that comes from believing that you are in the center of the social spotlight if you just pause for a moment and consider everything others are likely to be thinking about in their lives (almost none of it having anything to do with you).47
You don’t overcome the lens problem by trying harder to imagine another person’s perspective. You overcome it by actually being in that perspective, or hearing directly from some who has been in
You don’t overcome the lens problem by trying harder to imagine another person’s perspective. You overcome it by actually being in that perspective, or hearing directly from some who has been in
You don’t overcome the lens problem by trying harder to imagine another person’s perspective. You overcome it by actually being in that perspective, or hearing directly from some who has been in
You don’t overcome the lens problem by trying harder to imagine another person’s perspective. You overcome it by actually being in that perspective, or hearing directly from some who has been in it. Judges
Other minds can be blank slates onto which we project our own, but other minds come into sharper focus as we learn more about them. Other people are professors or priests or politicians. They are liberal or conservative, rich or poor, black or white, men or women. These visible identities tell you something about a person’s invisible mind. Their identities may match your own, suggesting that they have a mind like your own. But others may have an identity that differs from your own, suggesting a mind that also differs from your own. As you know more about another person, the tools you use to understand them changes. Liberals might use their own beliefs to understand what other liberals think, but they will use what they know about conservatives to predict what a conservative would think. Atheists might use their own beliefs to understand what other atheists think, but they will use what they know about Islam to predict what a Muslim thinks.
At times, the size of the gap between what we think we know about others and what we actually know can be shocking.
Seeing someone for only fifty milliseconds, faster than the blink of an eye, gives us enough time to form an impression of their competence.2 These snap judgments matter. In one experiment, politicians who looked more competent than their rivals after a fleeting glance were significantly more likely to win their election (about 70 percent of the time), suggesting that those snap judgments put people into our most powerful positions.3 Your sixth sense works quickly and is not prone to second-guessing.
First, the good news. These experiments suggested that people are pretty good, overall, at guessing how a group of others would evaluate them, on average. The overall correlation in these experiments between predicted impressions and the average actual impression of the group was quite high (.55, if you are quantitatively inclined). To put that in perspective, this is roughly the same magnitude as the correlation between the heights of fathers and the heights of sons (around .5). It is not perfect insight, but it is also very far from being clueless. In other words, you probably have a decent sense of what others generally think of you, on average.
These experiments also assessed how well people could predict the impression of any single individual within a given group. You may know, for instance, that your coworkers in general think you are rather smart, but those coworkers also vary in their impression of you. Some think you are as sharp as a knife. Others think you are as sharp as a spoon. Do you know the difference? Evidently, no. The accuracy rate across these experiments was barely better than random guessing (an overall correlation of .13 between predicted and actual evaluations, only slightly higher than no relationship whatsoever). Although you might have some sense of how smart your coworkers think you are, you appear to have no clue about which coworkers in particular find you smart and which do not.
These studies found that people are only slightly better than chance at guessing who in a group likes them and who does not (the average correlation here was a meager .18).
The same barely-better-than-guessing accuracy is also found in experiments investigating how well speed daters can assess who wants to date them and who does not, how well job candidates can judge which interviewers were impressed by them and which were not, and even how well teachers can predict their course evaluations.
When one group of researchers evaluated decades of studies and hundreds of experiments that measured how well people could distinguish truths from lies, they found that people’s ability to spot deception was only a few percentage points better than a random coin flip: people were 54 percent accurate overall, when random guessing would make you accurate 50 percent of the time.7
“strangers read each other with an average accuracy rate of 20 percent” when videotaped and later asked to report their moment-by-moment thoughts and feelings.9 “Close friends and married couples,” he reports, “nudge that up to 35 percent.” So yes, you do know what your spouse or a close friend likes and dislikes more than a random stranger would, but the gain may be surprisingly modest. The second part of this answer, however, is that the confidence you have in knowing the mind of a close friend or romantic partner far outstrips your actual accuracy. Getting to know someone, even over a lifetime of marriage, creates an illusion of insight that far surpasses actual insight.10
One member of a romantic couple predicted how the other would rate him or her on a series of different measures, including feelings of self-worth, self-rated abilities, and activity preferences. The lines across the bars show the accuracy rates one would expect by chance alone. The white bars show the percentage that the partners, on average, actually predicted correctly. The gray bars show the percentage that the partners predicted they answered correctly. Dating partners were more accurate than would be expected by chance alone but nowhere near as accurate as they thought they were. This figure illustrates the main goal of this book: to reduce the gap between the gray bars and the white bars in your own life, both by instilling a sense of one’s limitations to reduce the height of the gray bars and by
One member of a romantic couple predicted how the other would rate him or her on a series of different measures, including feelings of self-worth, self-rated abilities, and activity preferences. The lines across the bars show the accuracy rates one would expect by chance alone. The white bars show the percentage that the partners, on average, actually predicted correctly. The gray bars show the percentage that the partners predicted they answered correctly. Dating partners were more accurate than would be expected by chance alone but nowhere near as accurate as they thought they were. This figure illustrates the main goal of this book: to reduce the gap between the gray bars and the white bars in your own life, both by instilling a sense of one’s limitations to reduce the height of the gray bars and by offering suggestions for how you can better understand others and thus increase the height of the white bars.
One member of a romantic couple predicted how the other would rate him or her on a series of different measures, including feelings of self-worth, self-rated abilities, and activity preferences. The lines across the bars show the accuracy rates one would expect by chance alone. The white bars show the percentage that the partners, on average, actually predicted correctly. The gray bars show the percentage that the partners predicted they answered correctly. Dating partners were more accurate than would be expected by chance alone but nowhere near as accurate as they thought they were. This figure illustrates the main goal of this book: to reduce the gap between the gray bars and the white bars in your own life, both by instilling a sense of one’s limitations to reduce the height of the gray bars and by offering suggestions for how you can better understand others and thus increase the height of the white bars.
In fact, they did no better than what would be expected by chance alone, correctly identifying truths and lies only 52 percent of the time (when chance is 50 percent). As people gained more information about the person in the video, they became more confident but did not become any more
In fact, they did no better than what would be expected by chance alone, correctly identifying truths and lies only 52 percent of the time (when chance is 50 percent). As people gained more information about the person in the video, they became more confident but did not become any more
In fact, they did no better than what would be expected by chance alone, correctly identifying truths and lies only 52 percent of the time (when chance is 50 percent). As people gained more information about the person in the video, they became more confident but did not become any more
In fact, they did no better than what would be expected by chance alone, correctly identifying truths and lies only 52 percent of the time (when chance is 50 percent). As people gained more information about the person in the video, they became more confident but did not become any more accurate. When,
People so habitually underestimate how long it will take to get tasks done that psychologists have come up with a name for it: the planning fallacy.
But we can only guess at what’s going on inside our heads to construct those conscious experiences. We can report feeling happy but are only guessing when explaining why. We can report loving our spouse but are guessing when explaining why. And we can feel ourselves thinking through important decisions that lead to an important choice but are again guessing when trying to explain why we chose option A rather than
This does not mean that our introspective guesses are never accurate, just as you might guess the correct answer to a multiple choice question. It means that you should be skeptical about their accuracy.
If your upper lip is now curled ever so slightly into an expression of disgust without any actual barf or snot in front of you, then you get the point. Thoughts can activate the behavioral responses commonly associated with them, like an expression of disgust to go along with the feeling triggered by these words. Once thoughts of gross bodily fluids are activated, the associated behaviors they elicit follow naturally, without any conscious intervention on your part. Psychologists know that consciousness is not required to guide behavior because you get the very same reactions even if those words are flashed in front of you so quickly that you can’t recognize that you have seen any words at all.10
One of the primary determinants of attractiveness is a signal that has proven useful over millennia for finding healthy and fit partners to have babies with. Do you know what it is? Big muscles? Big smiles? Big breasts? Yes, for some, but there’s one that’s far more consistent around the globe: bilateral symmetry. That is, the degree to which the left and right sides of your body are identical.12 I know: it sounds hot, doesn’t it? It doesn’t get much conscious attention because your brain is so good at assessing symmetry that it constructs your feeling of attraction almost instantaneously.
You can see the importance of this request-plus-reason association by considering an experiment in which people waiting in line to use a copy machine were given a request by an experimenter. In particular, the experimenter asked if she could budge ahead in line by requesting, “Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine because I’m in a rush?” That script follows the routine and, sure enough, 94 percent of people granted the favor and let the experimenter budge ahead in line. In a second condition, the reason was dropped: “Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine?” Hmm … that breaks the normal routine because there’s no reason. As expected, far fewer—only 60 percent of people—granted the favor. The third condition is the most interesting one, the request-plus-dumb-reason condition. Here, the experimenter asks, “Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine, because I need to make some copies?” That’s right, because I need to make some copies. This follows the standard script but includes a nonsensical reason. Of course you have to make copies. What else are you going to do with the copy machine, make sandwiches? But because the request follows the well-learned routine, it automatically triggers compliance. So sure enough, a full 93 percent of people granted the favor, statistically identical to the good-reason condition.
We then showed people all eleven versions of their own faces—their actual face, the five blended with the highly attractive face, and the five blended with the highly unattractive face—in a randomly ordered lineup and asked them to identify which face was their own. We found that people tended to select attractively enhanced images of themselves, thinking
We then showed people all eleven versions of their own faces—their actual face, the five blended with the highly attractive face, and the five blended with the highly unattractive face—in a randomly ordered lineup and asked them to identify which face was their own. We found that people tended to select attractively enhanced images of themselves, thinking they were more attractive than they actually were.15 The image you carry of yourself in your mind’s eye is a function, at least in part, of the associations you have formed about yourself rather than simply of the image that appears in the mirror. Now you know why most of the pictures taken of you seem to look so bad.
This creates what psychologists refer to as naïve realism: the intuitive sense that we see the world out there as it actually is, rather than as it appears from our own perspective.
Now again, how many times do you think the Asian couple was actually refused service? Ninety percent of the time? Ninety-two percent? No, not even close. LaPiere and his friends were refused service only once, “in a rather inferior auto-camp into which we drove in a very dilapidated car.” Only once! Over 90 percent of people at the establishments contacted in this experiment believed they would act like bigots, but less than half of 1 percent actually did. UNKNOWING THYSELF This experiment has its flaws, but it inspired decades of research that revealed a startling message—that there can be a significant disconnect between what people think about themselves and how they actually behave.
Unconscious processes seem largely responsible for much of what we do habitually in daily life, and conscious processes seem largely responsible for making sense of what we do so that we can explain it to ourselves and others.
You can see the importance of this request-plus-reason association by considering an experiment in which people waiting in line to use a copy machine were given a request by an experimenter. In particular, the experimenter asked if she could budge ahead in line by requesting, “Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine because I’m in a rush?” That script follows the routine and, sure enough, 94 percent of people granted the favor and let the experimenter budge ahead in line. In a second condition, the reason was dropped: “Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine?” Hmm … that breaks the normal routine because there’s no reason. As expected, far fewer—only 60 percent of people—granted the favor. The third condition is the most interesting one, the request-plus-dumb-reason condition. Here, the experimenter asks, “Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine, because I need to make some copies?” That’s right, because I need to make some copies. This follows the standard script but includes a nonsensical reason. Of course you have to make copies. What else are you going to do with the copy machine, make sandwiches? But because the request follows the well-learned routine, it automatically triggers compliance. So sure enough, a full 93 percent of people granted the favor, statistically identical to the good-reason condition.
Finally, once eyes and bodies are merged, our minds tend to merge as well. Thoughts and feelings come from what we’re looking at and how our bodies are reacting to it, so when two people are watching something and reacting similarly, they are likely to be feeling and thinking similarly as well. Adam Smith thought imitation reflected your understanding of another person’s experience—your body shows what you think another person feels. In fact, the reverse is also true: you feel what your body shows. When you see a pained expression on a friend’s face, your face may also contort into a pained expression, thereby making you feel a touch of pain yourself.6 Sit up straight and you’ll feel more proud of your accomplishments.7 Smile and you will feel happier.8 Even furrowing your brow, as if you are thinking harder, can lead you to actually think harder.9 This link from imitating another person’s actions to experiencing the other person’s emotions is a critical link for understanding the minds of others. If a researcher disables your ability to imitate another’s facial expression, such as by asking you to hold a pen pursed between your lips10 or by injecting your face with Botox,11 your ability to understand what another person is feeling drops significantly. Botox dulls your social senses right along with your wrinkles. Buyer beware.
You can see this distinction between senses and inferences working clearly in the minds of doctors. Over time, doctors naturally become desensitized to the distress and pain of their patients, just as you habituate to any repeated experience, yet doctors retain the ability to know when their patients are in pain and when they are not. Far from being a bad thing, dulling their empathic sense is essential to the practice of medicine. You and I would be physically crippled trying to give another person an injection.14 A doctor may not feel it when another person is in pain, but can infer that the other person is in pain without any difficulty. There seem to be two different routes to understanding the mind of another person. In fact, scientists can now pinpoint these different routes in the brain. In one experiment, physicians who practiced acupuncture lay on their backs in an fMRI machine and watched videos of people being poked with needles. Some videos showed people getting poked in the foot, others in the hand, and others in the lips. These are painful to watch, I promise, at least if you’re not a physician. Nonphysicians who watched these videos had the same reaction I do, with the neural regions that are active when actually experiencing physical pain firsthand also being active when watching other people experiencing pain. It quite literally hurts to watch someone else being hurt. The physicians, however, showed virtually no response in these physical pain regions at all. Instead, the physicians showed activity in a very different part of the brain, most notably a relatively small spot in their medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC). This spot is located about one inch above and behind the inside part of your eyebrows, on each side of your brain. For the good of your social life, try not to get injured there.15 More important for you than its location is the MPFC’s function: it is involved in making inferences about the minds of others.16 When you wonder, “What on earth are they thinking?,” your MPFC is engaged. When you are mulling over what your mom wants for her birthday, you’re using your MPFC. And when you are calmly noting, “That person is in pain,” your MPFC is engaged. When the physicians in this experiment saw someone getting poked in the face with a needle, they did not feel the person’s pain. Instead, their engaged MPFC indicated that they calmly inferred the other person’s pain. Most of us might wish that our doctors were more sensitive, perhaps better able to feel our pain, but what we really want is for them to know of our pain. We do not want a doctor’s empathy; we want a doctor’s MPFC.
Free will also requires being able to choose between different options—“life is what you make it,” as the saying goes. In another experiment, employees at two different restaurants were given a list of things they might be doing over the next ten years, from where they could be living (for example, the East Coast, the West Coast, the Midwest, an apartment in the same town) to where they could be working (in the same job, in an exciting job, in a boring job, having no job) to what their lives would be like (same lifestyle as now, more family-focused lifestyle, more carefree lifestyle). They circled all the possibilities that seemed likely, then did the same for a coworker they knew well. At the end, the researchers counted the number of genuine possibilities people had circled, and there were markedly more circles for one’s own future life than for the well-known coworker’s life. Having free will allows you to make wonderful choices, but it also allows you to make terrible choices. If you ask people to chart out their futures compared to others’, they don’t simply report having more freedom to end up with good options, such as owning a great house or having an exciting job. They also report having more freedom to end up with terrible options, such as owning a crappy house or having no job at all.
It’s not only free will that other minds might seem to lack. This lesser minds effect has many manifestations, including what appears to be a universal tendency to assume that others’ minds are less sophisticated and more superficial than one’s own.
The violent actors are overwhelmed by empathy for their own group, which all too often naturally leads to disdain for competing groups. They act out of parochial altruism, a strong commitment to benefit one’s own group or cause
The violent actors are overwhelmed by empathy for their own group, which all too often naturally leads to disdain for competing groups. They act out of parochial altruism, a strong commitment to benefit one’s own group or cause
The violent actors are overwhelmed by empathy for their own group, which all too often naturally leads to disdain for competing groups. They act out of parochial altruism, a strong commitment to benefit one’s own group or cause without regard for the consequences for oneself.27
Leaders have two kinds of incentives at their disposal: intrinsic and extrinsic. Intrinsic incentives are any inherent to the job itself, such as the pleasure of accomplishing something worthwhile, learning new things, developing skills, or feeling proud about your work. Extrinsic incentives are outcomes that are separable from the job itself, such as getting paid, earning fringe benefits, getting a bonus, or having job security. Notice that the effect of extrinsic incentives on other people can be observed directly because it involves an obvious exchange of goods for services, whereas the impact of intrinsic incentives can really only be felt and experienced on the inside. You can see that both you and others work harder when money is at stake, but the metrics of pride and meaning and a sense of self-worth are emotional states that you feel rather than see. As a result, you can recognize intrinsic motivations more easily in yourself than in others.
The turnaround was incredible. In just one year, the plant went from having the most defects in the GM system to having nearly perfect ratings. Estimates were that it would take roughly 50 percent more manpower at a typical GM plant in Fremont, California, to produce the same number of cars as NUMMI. The worst plant had become arguably the best, using nearly all of the very same employees. What was the secret? According to industry analyst Maryann Keller, it was “no secret at all, and it was as old as history: Treat both white- and blue-collar workers with respect, encourage them to think independently, allow them to make decisions, and make them feel connected to an important effort.”32 That is, treat employees like mindful human beings who care about doing a good job instead of like mindless idiots who care only about making money.
We know this because we actually conducted another experiment on the very same train line with the very same population of commuters. In this experiment, we asked people from the same group of train commuters, based on random assignment, to either (a) sit alone and “enjoy their solitude,” (b) talk to the person sitting next to them, or (c) do “whatever you normally do.” In direct contrast to what people predicted, those who were asked to talk to the person sitting next to them actually reported having the most pleasant commute, whereas those who “enjoyed their solitude” reported having the least pleasant commute.
This means that there are actually three triggers here that can lead you to recognize humanlike minds in nonhuman agents: it looks like a mind, can be explained with a mind, or is closely connected your own mind. That is, minds can be triggered by your perceptions, by your need for an explanation, and by your social connections.
Actually, it looks like they do mean it. To find this out, the researchers took advantage of a very reliable scientific result. It’s called the mere-presence effect. If you are doing something simple, such as easy math problems, you’re likely to perform better if you have a real person watching you than if you’re alone. But if you’re doing something difficult, such as very difficult math problems, you are likely to perform worse when you have another person watching you. This same effect emerged when research volunteers had a picture of their favorite TV character in front of them, as if it were a real person. They did not, however, show this mere-presence effect when sitting in front of a picture of their least favorite character from the same TV show. Only pictures of people’s most loved characters produced the same effect that another real, live, mindful human being would. The Skin Horse may be wise after all.38 How this happens is not particularly mysterious. Think about how you try to relate to another person. To make it easy, let’s imagine a fledgling romance. On your first date, you are extremely sensitive to how you are coming across to the other person. You carefully track the other person’s likes and dislikes, doing your best to keep him or her suitably impressed. It is often a guessing game, but you spend a lot of time and effort trying to intuit the other person’s emotions and thoughts and feelings. Forming a connection requires you to consider another person’s mind, to adopt his or her perspective, to do your best to get into his or her head. Trying to connect with another person requires engaging your sixth sense. This is true with nonhumans as well. Musicians, for instance, often speak this way about the kind of connection they form to an instrument they’re playing, a connection that also likely explains why they so often end up humanizing their instruments. Stevie Ray Vaughan played Lenny, Eric Clapton played Blackie, and B. B. King played Lucille. Willie Nelson says, “I don’t know what I’d do without Trigger,” the love-worn and bodyguarded guitar he’s played for his entire career.
The isolation need not be so extreme. In one series of experiments, my colleagues and I found that those who felt chronically lonely, and therefore more interested in connecting with others, were more likely than those who are not lonely to rate easily anthropomorphized gadgets like Clocky as having a mind, more likely to see a sense of purpose or intentions in the universe, and more likely to rate their pets as mindful (such as thoughtful and considerate).40 Making people feel lonely in experiments also at least momentarily increased their belief in God—a mind watching us from above.41 It is surely no accident that many deeply religious people, from Francis of Assisi to Buddhist monks, go into extreme isolation in order to connect with the mind of an invisible God. Nor is it an accident that people report feeling a closer connection to God when they pray alone than when they pray in a group of people.
Our ability to read the minds of others is one of our brain’s greatest tools, absolutely essential for navigating our complicated social lives. The mistakes we can make engaging this ability are of two different kinds: failing to recognize a mind in something that actually has one, such as a human, or recognizing a mind in something that is actually mindless, such as a hurricane or a computer or random evolutionary processes in nature. These mistakes come from failing to engage our sixth sense in some cases and from failing to disengage it in others.
This produces one consistent mistake: overestimating the extent to which others will see, think, and feel the same way you do.
The second variety of mistakes we make in trying to understand the minds of others are mistakes of inference. When we’re seeking to understand another’s mind, we rely on at least three strategies. We project from our own mind, use stereotypes, and infer a mind from a person’s actions. Each strategy provides insight but can also lead to predictable mistakes.
You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do. —DAVID FOSTER WALLACE, Infinite Jest
When Piaget would sit young children on one side of a model composed of three mountains and ask what a doll sitting on the other side could see, he found that most children said the doll could see exactly what they
When Piaget would sit young children on one side of a model composed of three mountains and ask what a doll sitting on the other side could see, he found that most children said the doll could see exactly what they could see. I’m afraid my own children are no different.
His favorite way to hide was sitting on the couch with a pillow over his face. He couldn’t see me, and therefore he assumed I also couldn’t see him.
brain that makes inferences about the minds of others based on its own viewpoint and only later reassembles them to match another person’s perspective, in contrast, works better than a self-centered carpenter as long as its egocentric default is generally accurate and its corrections are well-timed and sufficient. The problem is that corrections are routinely poorly timed and insufficient, meaning that our default tendencies leave traces in our final judgments and decisions.
The good news from these findings is that our minds remain, at least in this respect, forever young. The bad news is that childish mistakes can linger well into adulthood.5 In fact, they linger in two subtle forms, and you can understand each by thinking carefully about the ways in which your own perspective differs systematically from others’ perspectives. First, you and another person may be paying attention to different things.
The good news from these findings is that our minds remain, at least in this respect, forever young. The bad news is that childish mistakes can linger well into adulthood.5 In fact, they linger in two subtle forms, and you can understand each by thinking carefully about the ways in which your own perspective differs systematically from others’ perspectives. First, you and another person may be paying attention to different things. You may look at, think about, or reflect upon different information than others do because you’re focusing on different aspects than they are. When I lecture to students, for instance, I am very sensitive to my mistakes, wishing I could get a second chance at every flubbed joke or poorly answered question. If my students aren’t as sensitive to those mistakes as I am, then I wind up thinking I’ll be judged more harshly than I actually am because I’m more focused on my flaws than my students are.
Second, you and another person may be attending to the same thing but evaluating it very differently. An Al Qaeda member looking at the burning World Trade Center towers will evaluate that event in a completely different way than an American citizen will. Your self not only provides a unique vantage point on the world; it also provides a lens made up of beliefs, attitudes, emotions, and knowledge that you interpret the world through. Your interpretive lens may differ from others’, causing you to look at the same object or event and interpret it very differently.
You are well aware of your own emotions and less aware of others’ emotions. That doesn’t make you more emotional than others; it makes your sense a prime example of the neck problem.
One consequence of being at the center of your own universe is that it’s easy to overestimate your importance in it, both for better and for worse. Consider a classic psychology experiment that asked
As you can see on the right side of the figure below, spouses tended to assume that their partner would vainly accept credit for all of the desirable activities in their marriage but deflect blame for the undesirable activities. In fact, partners were again egocentric, tending to claim more responsibility than is logically possible for all activities, positive as well as negative.
We asked some of these MBA students to report what percentage of the group’s total work they personally contributed. We found that the amount of overclaiming increased as the size of the group increased. Groups of four or less look relatively reasonable, claiming more responsibility than is logically possible but at least being in the vicinity of 100 percent. As the number of group members increases, however, their judgments get increasingly unhinged from reality. By the time you get to groups of eight, these MBAs were claiming nearly 140 percent productivity! This brings new meaning to overachieving. The important point is to relax a bit when others don’t seem to appreciate you as much as you think they should. The mistake may be a product of egocentrism in your own head rather than others’ indifference.
While you are outside the room, the experimenter asks the other people sitting in the room to identify who was on your shirt. Those wearing the shirt estimated that nearly 50 percent would notice their Manilow shirt when, in fact, only 23 percent actually did. Even in small groups, the social spotlight does not shine on us nearly as brightly as we think.15 The point here
While you are outside the room, the experimenter asks the other people sitting in the room to identify who was on your shirt. Those wearing the shirt estimated that nearly 50 percent would notice their Manilow shirt when, in fact, only 23 percent actually did. Even in small groups, the social spotlight does not shine on us nearly as brightly as we think.15 The point here is that few of us are quite the celebrity that our own experience suggests we might be; nor are we under as much careful scrutiny from others as we might expect.
“You despise me, don’t you?” Bogart replies, “If I gave you any thought, I probably would.” I think we would all benefit from having our own
Not only are others noticing you, your self-centered senses tell you, but they’re judging you as harshly as you fear as well.
In all of the cases we ever studied, those in the throes of an embarrassing moment consistently overestimated how harshly others were evaluating them. Even once the social spotlight was on them, it did not burn as hot as those in its glare expected it to. I think Peter Lorre’s Casablanca moment was actually too extreme. Others may not give us much thought, but when they do, they generally cut us more slack than we’d imagine, because they’re not ruminating on our mistakes as much as we are ourselves. As a bit of folk wisdom goes, “Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.”16 Indeed. Piaget argued that becoming aware of your own perspective liberates you from it.
Although I still get nervous before speaking, it is no longer debilitating.17 I know that almost nobody in the audience is thinking the worst thing I can imagine, that they’re probably ruminating over dozens of other issues in their own life even while I’m right in front of them, and that almost no matter what happens the audience will forget about it far more quickly than I will. Before giving the commencement address at my high school some years ago, I found it reassuring that I could not recall anything my own high school commencement speaker said, even if someone offered me a million dollars to do so. In fact, I can’t even recall if the speaker was a man or a woman. Think of classes you’ve taken, speeches you’ve watched, and commencement presentations you’ve endured. What percentage of the content do you remember? If the actual percentage is higher than your odds of being struck by lightning, I’ll be shocked. Becoming aware of the power of your own perspective is the very thing that enables a broader perspective. Relax. Others likely won’t notice, and if they do, they likely won’t mind.18
In one experiment, equally human volunteers were randomly assigned to argue a hypothetical court case, either for the prosecution or for the defense. Despite being randomly assigned to these roles only moments before, volunteers quickly came to believe that their own side’s case was stronger than the other side’s case. More important, this wasn’t just posturing; they seemed to really believe it, and they also thought the judge would rule in their own side’s favor.19 The problem with a lens is that you look through it rather than at it, and so your own perspective doesn’t seem unique until someone else informs you otherwise. “I think in pictures,” writes Temple Grandin, describing
Looking through a lens also means that it is difficult to tell when your own view is being distorted by it. A friend of mine once confided to feeling horribly embarrassed for a speaker whose slides were being presented (unknowingly) out of focus. The speaker went on and on and on, showing blurry graph after blurry graph, one fuzzy slide of notes after another. Worst of all, my friend believed that nobody else in the audience said anything because of their exceptional politeness, obviously not wanting to embarrass the speaker. It was only after the presentation that my friend realized that the lens of the projector was working just fine; the problem was with the lenses in his own eyes. The blurry slides were his first indication that he needed glasses.
Distortions like this are easy to find. Ever notice that “the media” are consistently accused of being biased but never found to favor those making the accusations? When your own views are one-sided, a balanced account will necessarily differ from your own perspective, and the errors in reporting will therefore seem to exist in them rather than in you.20 Like the seemingly broken projector seen through the eyes of someone who needs glasses, viewers see bias out there in the media when the distortions exist inside their own minds. Parents do something similar. Many parents will report that the world seems to have gotten more dangerous over the years. Ask those parents to name when the world got more dangerous, and they will tend to give you a date very close to the birth of their first child.21 The world has remained the same (if anything, it has gotten markedly less dangerous22), but having a child changes the lens through which you view it. Parents see the same events as more threatening than they once did, but they don’t recognize that the change is in the lens through which they view the world rather than in the world itself. The most natural consequence of the lens problem is assuming that others will interpret the world as you do, because you can’t identify exactly how your own interpretation is being influenced by the lens you view it through. You can observe this consequence by simply asking people to report what other people believe, think, feel, or know, on topics ranging from the trivial to the critical. What percentage of other people like brown bread versus white bread? What percentage are likely to get excited about your new business model, love your artwork, or appreciate your self-published novel? How many Americans support financial regulation, are in favor of welfare, or will foreclose on their mortgage? When people are asked these questions, survey after survey finds that most people tend to exaggerate the extent to which others think, believe, and feel as they do.23 Brown bread lovers think they are larger in number than white bread lovers.24 Conservatives tend to believe that the average person is more conservative than liberals do.25 Voters on both sides of an issue tend to believe that those who didn’t vote in an election would have voted for their side, if they had chosen to vote.26 And when it comes to morality, even those who are clearly in the minority nevertheless tend to believe that they are in the moral majority.
Every year I demonstrate this to my MBA students by asking them to consider a series of questionably unethical practices.28 These practices include dubious activities like covering meals for a friend while traveling for business and submitting the receipts for reimbursement, or taking home office supplies from work. For each practice, students report whether they think it is unethical (yes or no) and then estimate the percentage of others in the class who will agree with them. The table below shows my most recent year’s results. In the first row, you see that 86 percent think it’s unethical to have your company reimburse you for a friend’s meal while traveling, whereas 14 percent think it’s acceptable. There’s a considerable range of opinion across the other practices. The far right column shows the subjects’ estimates of others’ beliefs. Here you see very little range of opinion. In fact, none of the average estimates in that column fall below 50 percent. Even those in the moral minority believe they are part of the moral majority.
This example illustrates what psychologists refer to as the curse of knowledge, another textbook example of the lens problem. Knowledge is a curse because once you have it, you can’t imagine what it’s like not to possess it. You’ve seen other people cursed many times. For instance, while on vacation, have you ever tried to get driving directions from a local? Or talked to an IT person who can’t explain how to operate your computer without using impenetrable computer science jargon? In one experiment, expert cell phone users predicted it would take a novice, on average, only thirteen minutes to learn how to use a new cell phone. It actually took novices, on average, thirty-two minutes.32 The lens of expertise works like a microscope, allowing you to notice subtle details that a novice might not catch but also sharpening your focus in a way that can allow you to miss the bigger picture and make it difficult to understand a novice’s perspective.
Trying to correct this lens first requires becoming aware of its influence. The problem is that it’s hard to know when you are being affected by your own expertise and when you are not. Consider what is probably the most famous (as yet unpublished) dissertation experiment in the history of psychology: Elizabeth Newton’s “tapping study.”34 In this experiment, carried out with pairs of subjects, one volunteer in each pair was randomly assigned to be the “tapper” and the other the listener. Tappers received a list of twenty-five songs well known to them, including “America the Beautiful” and “Rock Around the Clock.” Tappers were asked to pick out three songs and then tap out each one for the listener, while they sat back-to-back. Tappers then estimated the likelihood that listeners would identify each tune correctly, and listeners tried to identify each one. The results were striking. Tappers estimated that listeners would identify the song correctly, on average, 50 percent of the time. In fact, listeners guessed correctly only 2.5 percent of the time.
It’s not impossible to know what others think of you, but it does require using the same lens to evaluate yourself that others use. Other people generally know less about you than you know about yourself, and to understand what others think of you requires stepping back from the microscopic lens through which you view yourself. You have to think about how this person would evaluate you compared to others in general and overall, not how this person would evaluate you compared to your past or based on your fine-grained features. In this experiment, we also asked one group of people to think about themselves in these general terms by instructing them to consider how they would be judged by someone looking at their photograph way off in the future, three months from the day of the experiment. From abysmal accuracy rates that were no better than chance, these participants became quite accurate (the accuracy correlation was .55). Our volunteers did not become perfectly accurate, but they became about as accurate as any mind reader could reasonably expect to be. Knowing how you are seen through the eyes of others requires looking at yourself though the same lens that others do.
It’s not impossible to know what others think of you, but it does require using the same lens to evaluate yourself that others use. Other people generally know less about you than you know about yourself, and to understand what others think of you requires stepping back from the microscopic lens through which you view yourself. You have to think about how this person would evaluate you compared to others in general and overall, not how this person would evaluate you compared to your past or based on your fine-grained features. In this experiment, we also asked one group of people to think about themselves in these general terms by instructing them to consider how they would be judged by someone looking at their photograph way off in the future, three months from the day of the experiment. From abysmal accuracy rates that were no better than chance, these participants became quite accurate (the accuracy correlation was .55). Our volunteers did not become perfectly accurate, but they became about as accurate as any mind reader could reasonably expect to be. Knowing how you are seen through the eyes of others requires looking at yourself though the same lens that others do.
The problem of expertise is one of many examples of mistakes that come from projecting our own minds onto others: assuming that others know, think, believe, or feel as we do ourselves. Of course, we do not project ourselves onto others completely. We do so in some situations more than in others, and we project more onto some minds than others. The less we know about the mind of another, the more we use our own to fill in the blanks. Conservatives and liberals don’t know what the “average” person thinks, or how people who didn’t vote would have voted, and so they rely more on what they think themselves. Ask conservatives and liberals what their neighbor thinks, what their parent thinks, or what their spouse thinks and you are likely to see much less egocentrism. The lens problem therefore becomes larger as other minds become more unknown.37 Understanding this allows you to explain, simultaneously, the problem with e-mail and the problem with God.
our senders predicted that they could communicate just as well via e-mail as they could over the phone (roughly 80 percent accuracy in both cases). Those actually receiving the messages, however, could understand the speaker’s intention only when the communication was clear (that is, when the speaker was on the phone). With e-mail, they were no more accurate than you’d expect from a coin flip. The problem for our volunteers was that they knew whether their message was meant to be sincere or sarcastic. So when they said, “Blues Brothers 2000—now, there’s a sequel,” they could hear the sarcasm dripping from their voice regardless of whether they were actually using their voice or typing with their fingers. Those receiving the message, of course, could hear the sarcasm only through the speaker’s
our senders predicted that they could communicate just as well via e-mail as they could over the phone (roughly 80 percent accuracy in both cases). Those actually receiving the messages, however, could understand the speaker’s intention only when the communication was clear (that is, when the speaker was on the phone). With e-mail, they were no more accurate than you’d expect from a coin flip. The problem for our volunteers was that they knew whether their message was meant to be sincere or sarcastic. So when they said, “Blues Brothers 2000—now, there’s a sequel,” they could hear the sarcasm dripping from their voice regardless of whether they were actually using their voice or typing with their fingers. Those receiving the message, of course, could hear the sarcasm only through the speaker’s
our senders predicted that they could communicate just as well via e-mail as they could over the phone (roughly 80 percent accuracy in both cases). Those actually receiving the messages, however, could understand the speaker’s intention only when the communication was clear (that is, when the speaker was on the phone). With e-mail, they were no more accurate than you’d expect from a coin flip. The problem for our volunteers was that they knew whether their message was meant to be sincere or sarcastic. So when they said, “Blues Brothers 2000—now, there’s a sequel,” they could hear the sarcasm dripping from their voice regardless of whether they were actually using their voice or typing with their fingers. Those receiving the message, of course, could hear the sarcasm only through the speaker’s voice and heard nothing from the speaker’s fingers.
Not only was the ambiguity in the text unclear to the senders, it was unclear to the receivers as well. At the end of the experiment, we asked the receivers to guess how many of the items they had interpreted correctly. They thought they had done a superb job, interpreting nine out of ten of the sentences correctly, regardless of whether the communication had been over the phone or by e-mail. Here you can see why ambiguous mediums like e-mail and texting and Twitter are such fertile ground for misunderstanding. People using ambiguous mediums think they are communicating clearly because they know what they mean to say, receivers are unable to get this meaning accurately but are certain that they have interpreted the message accurately, and both are amazed that the other side can be so stupid. Senders delivered sincere and sarcastic messages to receivers either by e-mail or by phone.
Not only was the ambiguity in the text unclear to the senders, it was unclear to the receivers as well. At the end of the experiment, we asked the receivers to guess how many of the items they had interpreted correctly. They thought they had done a superb job, interpreting nine out of ten of the sentences correctly, regardless of whether the communication had been over the phone or by e-mail. Here you can see why ambiguous mediums like e-mail and texting and Twitter are such fertile ground for misunderstanding. People using ambiguous mediums think they are communicating clearly because they know what they mean to say, receivers are unable to get this meaning accurately but are certain that they have interpreted the message accurately, and both are amazed that the other side can be so stupid. Senders delivered sincere and sarcastic messages to receivers either by e-mail or by phone. Receivers were able to distinguish sarcasm from sincerity better over the phone than with e-mail, but senders predicted that they communicated equally well over both mediums. Receivers, likewise, thought that they interpreted the messages equally well over both mediums. With the ambiguous medium of e-mail in particular, both senders and receivers thought they understood each other far better than they actually did.
As the context in which you’re trying to understand another mind becomes more ambiguous, the influence of your own perspective increases. If you really want to understand your coworker or competitor or children, don’t rely on modern mediums of communication that give you only a modern Rorschach test about the mind of another person. Twitter does not allow others to understand your deep thoughts and broad perspective. It only allows others to confirm how stupid they already think you are.
But the less willing or able others are to give you a piece of their minds, the more their minds become a blank slate onto which you project your own. Enter God. Believers consult few figures more often than God when it comes to weighty measures, from moral issues such as gay marriage, abortion, and martyrdom to personal issues such as career planning or dating choices. The problem is that God doesn’t answer opinion polls, and the books that supposedly report God’s beliefs are notoriously open to interpretation. Many of the world’s wars are still fought over what God apparently does or does not want, fueled by the sense of having God on one’s own side. “Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God,” Lincoln noted during his second inaugural address, at the height of the Civil War, “and each invokes his aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, lest we be not judged.”
The most compelling evidence, however, comes from experiments in which we manipulated people’s own beliefs and measured how it affected what people think God and others believe. In one, we showed volunteers persuasive arguments either in favor of or opposed to affirmative action. The arguments worked: those who read the pro–affirmative action information became more in favor, whereas those who read the anti–affirmative action arguments became more opposed. More important, our manipulation moved our volunteers’ estimates of God’s beliefs in lockstep with their own, whereas estimates of other people’s beliefs were unaffected by the arguments the volunteers read. Creating God in one’s own image, indeed. If God is a moral compass, then the compass seems prone to pointing believers in whatever direction they are already facing.45 There’s nothing magical about God in this regard, just something ambiguous.
When others’ minds are unknown, the mind you imagine is based heavily on your own.
In other cases the need to correct one’s own viewpoint is obvious but the ability to do so depends on the source of the problem. I have described two different versions of egocentric biases, one produced by differences in attention (the neck problem) and the other produced by differences in interpretation (the lens problem). Of these two, I believe the existing evidence suggests that the neck
In other cases the need to correct one’s own viewpoint is obvious but the ability to do so depends on the source of the problem. I have described two different versions of egocentric biases, one produced by differences in attention (the neck problem) and the other produced by differences in interpretation (the lens problem). Of these two, I believe the existing evidence suggests that the neck problem is easier to overcome than the lens problem.
Think back to the earlier studies that showed “overclaiming.” In these versions of the neck problem, you might claim more responsibility for group activity simply because you are more aware of your own contributions than you are of others’ contributions. This kind of problem is relatively easy to solve. All you need to do is shift your attention to other people—in this case, to think about what others in your group contributed. Recall the Harvard MBA study groups whose members claimed more responsibility as the size of the group increased. We had another condition in that experiment, one in which the MBAs wrote down what each other member of the group contributed to the overall effort before they wrote down how much they personally contributed. This brought evaluations much closer to a realistic baseline. Ashley Todd wouldn’t have drawn the B on her cheek backward if she had paused for a moment and considered an onlooker’s visual perspective. The Vasa wouldn’t have sunk if the carpenters had paused to look at each other’s rulers. And you can reduce the anxiety that comes from believing that you are in the center of the social spotlight if you just pause for a moment and consider everything others are likely to be thinking about in their lives (almost none of it having anything to do with you).47
You don’t overcome the lens problem by trying harder to imagine another person’s perspective. You overcome it by actually being in that perspective, or hearing directly from some who has been in
You don’t overcome the lens problem by trying harder to imagine another person’s perspective. You overcome it by actually being in that perspective, or hearing directly from some who has been in
You don’t overcome the lens problem by trying harder to imagine another person’s perspective. You overcome it by actually being in that perspective, or hearing directly from some who has been in
You don’t overcome the lens problem by trying harder to imagine another person’s perspective. You overcome it by actually being in that perspective, or hearing directly from some who has been in it. Judges
Other minds can be blank slates onto which we project our own, but other minds come into sharper focus as we learn more about them. Other people are professors or priests or politicians. They are liberal or conservative, rich or poor, black or white, men or women. These visible identities tell you something about a person’s invisible mind. Their identities may match your own, suggesting that they have a mind like your own. But others may have an identity that differs from your own, suggesting a mind that also differs from your own. As you know more about another person, the tools you use to understand them changes. Liberals might use their own beliefs to understand what other liberals think, but they will use what they know about conservatives to predict what a conservative would think. Atheists might use their own beliefs to understand what other atheists think, but they will use what they know about Islam to predict what a Muslim thinks.