We All Think We Know The People We Love. We’re All Deluded

Couples-Therapy-Burlingame

The average human brain contains roughly 100 billion neurons, each of which is attached to thousands of other neurons, meaning that another person’s brain is likely to be the most complicated thing you will ever think about. And yet, despite this dizzying complexity, you and I routinely guess what’s going on in the mind of other people almost as easily as we breathe.

It takes only a split second to form an impression about another person’s intelligence or intentions, guess what our spouse or a homeless person is feeling, and predict what a political opponent is thinking. You can even leap quickly to conclusions about people in situations you’ve never experienced before, from what’s going on in the mind of our president to the mind of a homeless person begging for food. Making judgments about another person’s mind is easy. Making judgments accurately, however, is hard. In fact, our research indicates that it is surprisingly hard.

Consider, for instance, an experiment that Tal Eyal, Mary Steffel and I conducted that put people’s beliefs about their mind reading abilities to the test. We recruited people who we thought would know something about each other, namely romantic couples. These couples had been together for an average of 10 years. Fifty-eight percent were married.

One person in each couple played the role of Responder, reading 20 statements and reporting how much he or she agreed with each one on a scale ranging from minus 3 (strongly disagree) to 3 (strongly agree). These statements included, “I would like to spend a year in London or Paris,” “I would rather spend a quiet evening at home rather than go out to a party,” and “Our family is too heavily in debt today.”

The other member of each couple played the role of Predictor, guessing how his or her partner would respond to each statement, and also predicting how many of the statements he or she guessed correctly. Think of this as something like The Newlywed Game for science.

Our Predictors believed they guessed an average of 13 items out of 20 exactly correctly. In truth, the task was much harder than our predictors expected. They actually guessed only five, on average, correctly. To read more from NICHOLAS EPLEY, click here.