QUESTIONS FOR
A leading behavioural scientist describes the ability that helps us achieve life’s most important goal: connecting with others.
You believe that the ability to ‘read other people’ is the human brain’s greatest asset. Please explain.
This ability — which I also call our social sense or sixth sense — enables us to achieve life’s most important goal: connecting with other human beings. It allows us to cooperate with those we should trust and avoid those we shouldn’t. At its best, it enables understanding between friends, empathy between strangers, forgiveness among enemies and cooperation between people, co-workers — even countries.
Psychologists have been studying this ability for some time now, and we have found that people use three intuitive tools to make inferences about what is going on in another person’s mind. The first one is no surprise: Given that we are egocentric, we use our own thinking as a guide to what others are thinking. So, if I think onion ice cream sounds terrible, it is reasonable for me to assume that you will agree.
Secondly, we make regular use of stereotypes about other people and the groups and categories we feel they belong to. So, if I find out that you’re a member of a liberal
party, I will make certain inferences about your policy preferences — and maybe even some of your life choices — based on that knowledge. The third approach is to focus on other peoples’ behaviour: By watching what you do and how you act, I obtain a source of information about what is going on in your mind. So, if I see you eating onion ice cream every day, I will assume that you love it.
We don’t think about these tools much, but they are extraordinarily helpful in guiding us in our daily lives. Without realizing it, we use them in just about every social interaction we ever have. The problem is, they also have a dark side: Egocentrism can lead us to believe others see the world more like we do than is actually the case; using stereotypes leads us to assume that others are more different from us than they actually are; and focusing on behaviour as a direct guide to peoples’ thoughts overlooks the power of situational influences — which play a significant role in guiding human behaviour.
Most people like to believe that they are independent thinkers with kind hearts; what is the harder truth?
In general, people have good intentions, but we are also heavily influenced by situational influences and forces that we are not necessarily aware of — and that often leads us to behave in ways that are inconsistent with our vision of ourselves.
Imagine that you’re thinking about whether to cheat in some situation. Most people use their good intentions as a guide to how they ‘should’ behave; but when they are actually in the situation, their behaviour is influenced by forces that they underestimate. In particular, we underappreciate the power that other people have over us. Humans are very social beings, so when we are around other people, we are influenced by their attitudes and behaviour.
If a person thinks she sees the world as it actually is, what happens when she meets someone who sees the world quite differently?
Stanford Psychologist Lee Ross has argued that we are all ‘naive realists’ in that we naively presume that we see the world as it is. The inability to introspect on why we’re thinking or feeling as we are, means that our thoughts and feelings seem like accurate reflections of the world. I like you because you are a likeable person; that’s not something about me, that’s something about you. I look at a table and it’s brown; I can see it right there in front of me — it’s brown: These don’t seem like constructions in my brain — they seem like facts about the world.
What this means is, when somebody else looks at the very same thing and sees something else — for instance, if two people look at the same political candidate and you think ‘she is fantastic’ but the other person thinks ‘that candidate is awful’ — you will think that anyone who disagrees with you is mistaken in some way. ‘I see the world as it is, so they are the ones who are biased or mistaken in their thinking’. This leads us to denigrate the minds of others, and to think of other people as being less intelligent and reasonable than we are.
Egocentrism leads us to believe that others see the world more like we do than is actually the case.
At the far end of this spectrum, you have found that we can actually dehumanize people. Tell us how that happens.
Dehumanization is a scary term, but psychologically speaking, it’s a simple concept: When you dehumanize someone, you attribute less fundamental human capacities to them. So, I might assume that somebody is not quite as intelligent or rational as I am, or that they can’t feel in quite the same sophisticated ways that I can. We see this showing up in political discourse all the time: People think the other side is irrational or unreasonable, and this is a dehumanizing perception.
The best way to overcome this is to actually seek out other people’s perspectives. That is, listen to somebody from the other side explaining their thoughts and feelings; have them reveal their thoughts to you directly, through conversation and interaction.
On that note, you’ve been quoted as saying that texting is not the best way to connect with people. What is a better choice?
The human voice contains a lot of additional information that is lacking in text: Intonation, pace and pitch — all of which can convey your thinking process while you’re speaking. As a result, texting can be dehumanizing.
In our research, people seemed less capable of thinking and less human when people read what they had to say, rather than listening to their voice. I should note that this happens in cases where people are interacting with folks they don’t know very well; if you already have a strong impression of someone, presumably, the medium will not have as big an effect on your impression. But if you don’t know anything about the other person, you want to be connecting in an information-rich environment where you can get good access to that person’s mind — and the best context for that is one that involves a person’s voice.
If the goal is to understand somebody, talking can work just as well as sitting down with them face to face. If, however, you are interested in other things — like persuading someone to do something or befriending them — those are different outcomes. In such cases, being face to face will certainly help.
You have said that being self-aware demands a recognition that our judgment is wrong more often than we think. Please discuss the importance of this.
Our confidence in our judgment is typically far greater than the accuracy of our judgment — which is why the key requirement for improving in almost every domain of life is the recognition that you might have something to learn. Recognizing that we make mistakes is a critical requirement for adopting strategies that allow us to understand other people. The humility that comes with this is a key requirement for continuous improvement. Overconfidence can be a major impediment to learning.
It is widely believed that we use only about 10 per cent of our brain. Do you agree?
That is a widely-quoted myth, but rest assured, there are very few spare neurons in your brain. We use our whole brain in every waking — and sleeping — moment of our life. Having said that, only certain parts of our mental experience are accessible to us consciously, and most of that has to do with the ‘end-products’ of our thinking and feeling—things like experiences of pain or pleasure, feelings of control and strongly held beliefs. What remains invisible to us are the processes by which these mental ‘products’ come to us.
How can we get started on improving our understanding of others?
You can start by attempting to take the perspective of another person and imagining how you would see the world if you
Our confidence in our judgment is typically far greater than the accuracy of our judgment.
were in their circumstances. How would I feel if I were living in poverty? Would I understand this presentation if I were one of our clients?
The weakness of this approach is that its effectiveness relies on our ability to imagine another person’s perspective accurately. If your belief about the other side’s perspective is mistaken, carefully considering that perspective will only magnify the mistake’s consequences. This is particularly likely in conflict, where members of opposing sides tend to have inaccurate views about each other. Across many studies, my colleagues and I have found no clear evidence that perspective taking helps.
We have found that a much better approach is perspective getting, which means putting the other person in a position where they can tell you what they think, openly and honestly. Companies understand their customers better when they get their perspective directly through conversation, surveys or face-to-face interaction — not when executives make guesses from the boardroom. And spouses understand each other when they are willing to share their thoughts openly and verify that they’ve heard correctly — not when they walk past each other in silence, thinking they already understand their spouse perfectly.
In the end, other peoples’ minds will never be an open book. But in a world of seven billion people — where both your happiness and your economic success depend on your relationships with others — it is hard to imagine a more useful ability to work on than understanding people.
Nicholas Epley is the John Templeton Keller Professor of Behavioural Science at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. He is the author of Mindwise: How We Understand What Others Think, Believe, Feel and Want (Borzoi/alfred A. Knopf, 2014).