Can you talk about this idea, the enduring popularity of reading people's body language to understand what's happening in their minds and what science has found about the accuracy of this technique? There's so much intuitive appeal to, if I could just learn the behaviors, the cues, I could figure out what's going on in people's minds.
Tessa West began to think, are they tricks to getting folks to be more accurate in reading other people's minds? To listen to Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam.
Can you talk about that idea, both of what was happening at NYU that prompted that kind of interview? Well, it's a larger point of the ways in which culture influences how we're reading other people's minds.
Can you talk about the idea that besides asking questions of other people to elicit what's happening inside their minds, we should go to some lengths to become clearer in what's going on inside our minds.
But asking is really the only thing we found that truly works to improve interpersonal accuracy? So in some ways, that advice is sort of so comically obvious, but many of us don't realize it's the most effective way to understand what's happening inside other people's heads.
Tessa figured that one reason people might be bad at reading other minds is because they are not motivated to do a good job.
Tessa, during your undergraduate years, I understand you had a part-time job that turned out to be an excellent venue for reading other people's minds and intentions.
Tessa and other researchers have tested a variety of techniques to induce people to become more accurate as they read other people's minds.
He was actually engaged in the conversation, but he felt like all eyes were on him and other people were looking at him and thinking, you know, why is he talking to his colleague? Why isn't he trying to socially connect and, you know, inferring all kinds of things about him? Maybe he's antisocial or, you know, maybe he refuses to speak to anyone outside of NYU.
So many tensions and conflicts and human relationships stem from making inaccurate attributions about what is going on in other people's minds.
Another intervention has involved asking volunteers to engage in perspective taking, to imagine putting themselves in other people's shoes as a way of getting a better understanding of what's happening in the minds of other people.
Is it possible that our overconfidence in our abilities to read other people's minds is exaggerated when it comes to people who are close to us? In other words, if I know my partner, my spouse, my parents, if I know these people very well, it almost seems as if well, I should know what's happening inside their minds because I'm so familiar with them.
When you want to talk about the difference between asking global questions and specific questions because it turns out this is another arrow we make when we ask people what's going on inside their minds.
You know, I'm wondering, Tessa, that, you know, when I think about people who are on the autism spectrum, for example, these are people who sometimes have trouble reading the minds of others and have to learn with care and deliberation how to understand others intentions, how to communicate their own.
It's kind of astonishing isn't it that we still hear the admonishment to take other people's perspectives as the cure to mistreating their minds? I mean, that advice I think is still pretty widespread.
And I'm wondering during the pandemic when so many of us were wearing masks, whether it became even harder now to pick up on cues from other people and whether we needed to go to even greater lengths to actually clarify what was going on inside our heads.
If we mention several different techniques to try and get people to be more accurate, have you found anything that does help us accurately get inside the minds of other people? We have.
The fact that monetary incentives fail to improve people's accuracy in reading the minds of their romantic partners told Tessa something important.
If the advice to ask people what they are thinking instead of trying to guess what they are thinking sounds comically obvious, there are some specific techniques that Tessa and others have found that are less obvious.
If we want better communication all the way around, it's not just that we should get better at reading other people's minds.
Can you talk about how stereotypes might be a form of misattribution? Other types are one of the biggest sources of information we rely on when it comes to judging other people, especially if we don't know them personally.
I also wore some outfits that other people had told me would make me, you know, look less young, less girly, you know, all these kinds of things to kind of counter stereotypes.
And surely some of this is because we widely overestimate our ability to read other people's minds.
Navigating social life involves continually reading the minds of other people.
And I learned this one in the classroom in the pandemic that, you know, if I don't tell people exactly what I'm thinking at that moment, they're not going to know they don't have access to cues.
We should make our signals clearer so that other people can read our minds better.
They would pay attention to things like what people were wearing, how comfortable they seemed in an expensive store, what their mannerisms were, even things like how much of an hurry they came across, all these pieces of information were used to try to figure out who the optimal customer would be.
So I'm going to walk away now and go talk to other people.
So there is something unique and special about your ability to read how people are relating to one another on teams and that ability is distinctly related to your ability in your own teams to perform well and also to not have status conflict, to not be jockeying for status with another person, to know when it's time to step back and when it's time that you can take over a position of power.
What is this, Tessa? Egocentric bias is probably one of the toughest things to get people to overcome when it comes to making accurate impressions.