Outline
- Misreading Minds
- Over confidence in mind reading
- Your own Mind
- Seeing and not seeing minds
- Dehumanizing - not seeing a mind when there is one there
- Anthropomorphizing - seeing a mind when there is not one
- Predictable Mistakes in Reading Minds
- Egocentrism
- Stereotypes
- Actions misleading mind reading
- How to and not to be a better mind reader
Misreading Minds
Like atoms before electro microscopes, minds are inferred rather than observed.
Mind reading is one of our most important social tools, it allows us to communicate at scale
We form impressions very quickly, within milliseconds, and that impression is very over confident.
Over confidence in mind reading
Most people want to know what others think of them. They have a pretty good sense of what everyone thinks of them in general. You will know how much a group likes you on average. You are not very good at telling how individuals in the group like you.
People are very bad lie detectors. When evaluating people that indicated that they were HIV positive, people thought they would be right 70% of the time, they were actually right 52% of the time. The longer the evaluation was (the more information they had) the more confident they were, but not more accurate.
You are a little better at reading the mind of close friends and loved ones, but not by that much. (20% -> 35%) You are grossly overconfident in reading the minds of close friends and loved ones. As the amount of time you spend with someone goes up, your confidence in mind reading goes up, but your ability does not.
Sometimes it is easy to mind read and sometimes is is hard. But it is hard for us to know when we are right or wrong. Our confidence does not indicate our ability.
Your own mind
There is a significant disconnect between what people think about themselves and how they actually behave.
In between the two world wars, the US was very racist agains the Chinese. A psychologist took a Chinese couple to hotels and restaurants and called ahead to see if they would accept Chinese customers. Of the 251 establishments, 92% said that they would not accept any Chinese, but only 1 actually refused service.
Planning Fallacy - things always take longer than you think. Only 45% of projects are done by the worst case scenario date (99% confidence)
Your mind is like a house. You know what your house looks like, but you do not know how it was constructed. You only see the final products that your brain makes, you are unaware of the process it took to construct the conclusions. Therefore you are unable to recognize the mistakes. Introspection is blind to construction and your brain is always constructing without your conscious knowledge. We are left with an illusion that we know more about our own minds then we actually do.
When you try and think, you are missing the contextual triggers and unconscious association that are actually responsible for your actions.
The image you carry of yourself in your mind’s eye is a function of associations you have formed about yourself rather than simple of the impact that appears in the mirror. When peoples faces are blended together into unattractive to attractive variations - people tend to select the more attractive ones.
Shoppers were shown pairs of socks that were identical. People choose the ones on the right because they were the last to be evaluated. But when asked, they would make up a story why they liked them more than the others.
Naive Realism - the intuitive sense that we see the world out there as it actual is, rather than as it appears from our own perspective.
There are no villains
Hostile Media Bias - the right and left tend to see the moderate media as biased against there own position simply because moderate opinions differ from more extreme ones.
Seeing and not seeing minds
Dehumanizing
Dehumanizing is failing to recognize a mind when there is one there.
138 years ago in 1879, Standing Bear went to court to prove that he was a person and not a mindless savage.
We see primitive cultures in one of two ways. Lacking self control/emotion (animal) or lacking reason/intellect (child)
Distance (physical space or how connected you feel with someone) can affect your ability to see a mind. If you are far away from another person and therefore not able to trigger your physical senses and your cognitive inferences, you are less likely to be triggered into identifying a mind.
Soldiers are less likely to shoot someone when they are close to them
Trigger 1 - sensing others minds
You are good at sensing minds under certain circumstances, like when someone has just cut their hand.
1 - Share the same attention
2 - Imitating action or sharing the same face and body posture. The way your body is positioned affects how you think. Moms watching soccer will do “empathy kicks”
3 - imitating creating the experience - minds merge
Trigger 2 - MPFC
MPFC is the part of the brain that is engaged when thinking about a mind. It is separate from empathy. This part of your brain is activated more when distance decreases. For example when Republicans are thinking about Democrats, they are using their MPFC a little less and vis versa. Homeless people trigger MPFC very little. They are seen as mindless objects instead of people.
We have a universal tendency to assume that others’ minds are less sophisticated and more super facial than one’s own.
Ubuntu - A person is a person through other persons. Your humanity comes from the way you treat others.
Example 1 - War
Suicide bombers do not come from exceptionally poor backgrounds. Most act out of parochial altruism, the strong commitment to benefit one’s own group or cause without regard for the consequences for oneself.
In the war in Iraq, we thought that our opponents were mindless savages, so we tried to scare them with “shock and awe”. But this tactic inspired and untied them. It also drove moderate and uncommitted civilians to anti americanism. We should have been weakening boundaries between in-groups and out-groups, between us and them.
Example 2 - Leadership
What do my employees want?
Leaders assume that their people are motivated by extrinsic incentives. Most people are driven by intrinsic motivation. The same leaders think that they themselves are driven by intrinsic incentives. “I care about doing something worthwhile, but others are mainly in it for the money”. People think that their interest in pride, self respect and doing something worthwhile is relatively unique.
You should 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.
Example 3 - Friends
People predicted that they would hate talking to people on the subway, but people had the best time when they engaged with those around them on their commutes.
Your ability to engage with the minds of others is one of your brain’s greatest abilities. You will be happier if you use it. Your life will be much happier if you routinely engage those around you.
Anthropomorphizing
People see intention in random events. When there is a hurricane - god is mad at america.
We see minds when they look and act like us, need to be explained by us or are in some way connected to us.
Gray minds - when there is a debate about whether there is a mind (in a fetus or a chimp), usually there is not objective answer anyone can give, which is why people argue endlessly and convince nobody.
Dogs can look like they are guilty after they have done something wrong. In actuality they look guilty in reaction to their owners expression, not knowing what action they did.
On a cold morning you might plead with your car to start. You may not consciously believe that your car has a mind in the same way you believe a child does, but your subtle inferences may lead you to treat it like one anyway.
Fake eyes will always trick us into seeing a mind. For example insects or car headlights. People will pay for honesty markets more often when pictures of eyes are around.
The speed of the motion of the object influences if we see a mind. We see a mind when it moves closest to human speed.
Failure and inconsistency makes machines appear more likely to contain minds. The more unreliable a car is the more people reported that is appeared to have a mind. Unpredictable objects get a mind because a mind makes sense of action. When something needs to be explained, mind reading is engaged.
Mentalistic language - We explain and describe most things through desire and intention. It is hard to describe intimate objects without mindful words. Especially when there is start/stops, direction and strength to movement.
1 - We use mentalistic language, when objects has some explaining to do.
2 - or when we attempt to explain phenomenon with on obvious explanation
People who reason by relying on intuition tend to believe in god more often then people who reason more deliberately.
Minds can emerge through our explanations.
Mere presence effect - for simple problems, you perform better with people around. for complex problems, you perform worse with people around.
The lonely you are, the more likely you are to anthropomorphize (like Cast Away)
Predictable Mistakes in Reading Minds
Egocentrism
"How do I get to the other side of the river?" "You are on the other side!"
Children think that other people view the world exactly as they see it. Durning hide and seek the will cover their face with a pillow. Childhood instincts are not outgrown so much as they are overcome by more careful and reflective thinking. Adults will initially think egocentrically, but then adjust (moving the truck experiment)
Reasons for egocentrism - the neck problem and the lens problem
Neck Problem - looking at different information than the other person
When researchers ask people to compare themselves to others, the answers they get seem to be based more heavily on themselves than on others.
Example - compared to others, are you:
- more or less likely to live past fifty
- more or less likely to live past one hundred
Most people say they are more likely to experience common events (living past 50) and less likely to experience rarer events (living past 100). obviously, you cannot be more likely than others to live past 50 and less likely than others to live past 100.
Project groups are more likely to report that they did a higher percentage of work when the size of the group increases.
People act like they’re always being watched. Even their house is a performance.
“You despise me don’t you?” “If I gave you any thought, I probably would” — Casablanca
Others do not think about us as much as we think, but when they do they cut us more slack and forgive our mistakes much more than we do.
Lens Problem - looking at the same information with a different viewpoint.
Assuming that others will interpret the world as you do, because you can’t identify exactly how your won interpretation is being influenced by the lens yo view it through.
Most parents will report that the world has gotten more dangerous over the years. When asked when, most will give a date close to the birth of their first child.
Most people tend to exaggerate the extent to which others think, believe and feel as they do.
Curse of knowledge - once you know something, you cannot imagine what it’s like not to possess it.
A boss who understands a proposal inside and out will be bad at conveying ideas to new clients.
Nobody in the world knows as much about you as you do. This fact helps to explain why you may have such surprising difficult understanding what others think of you.
The lens problem becomes larger as other minds become more unknown.
When communicating serious and sarcastic messages on email and phone, the senders and the receivers think that they will be fairly accurate in telling the difference (80-90%). But in actuality they are not very good (56% for email and 73% for phone)
God is another example of the lens problem, created in one’s own image. Believers are even more egocentric when reasoning about God’s beliefs than when reasoning about other people’s beliefs. Other people agree with me, but God is really on my side. The opposite is true too, people come to believe what they think their God believes.
In a scanner, reasoning about God’s beliefs looked the same as reasoning about ones own beliefs.
When someones viewpoint is manipulated via argument, their estimate of God’s beliefs move in lockstep with their own and estimates of other peoples beliefs were unaffected. The same can be found with “founding fathers” or “the people"
The neck problem is easier to overcome than the lens problem.
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 direct from some who has been in it.
Stereotypes
Stereotypes are a set of beliefs about the personal characteristic of a group. They represent your brain’s general attempt to extract average tendencies from a complicated world.
Your estimates of other peoples minds are bigger than your direct observations, they are influenced by the things you have read and heard from others.
Most stereotypes are useful because you can make broad inferences about how groups of people will behave. They are never accurate nor inaccurate, always shades of gray.
When looking at a group of circles, your brain is super good at extracting the overall assessment of a group of shapes, not its distinct individuals.
Wicked Environment - the world give your brilliant brain imperfect data to work with
Issues with stereotypes
- Too Little Information
- Defining Groups by their differences
- Being unable to observe true causes of group differences directly
1 - Too little information
If you look at too little data you will look dumb, like a pollster that only polls two states.
In general, stereotypes are more accurate when you’ve had direct experience with a group, know a lot about a group or are asked about clearly visible facts.
People think that women are more emotional than men, but really women just show their emotion more.
2 - Defining Groups by their definition
To our brain, similarity is boring, difference is exciting.
Gender difference - women prefer men with higher earning potential and men prefer hot women. In reality, both sexes rate kindness, intelligence and humor above these two.
Men think about sex 34 times a day, Women 19 times per day. Men think about sex more than women, but they also think about all their urges (food, sleep) more.
Stereotypes can get the direction of differences right, but the magnitude wrong.
When thinking about other groups beliefs, you tend to focus on the part of the belief that you care about the most instead of thinking of it as a stack ranking. When negotiating, understand that the other side does not have completely opposing interests.
3 - Being unable to observe true causes of group differences directly
Stereotypes are an observation, not an explanation. Even if you recognize a difference between groups perfectly, you may still misunderstand its cause completely.
Cultures that revere the elderly as sage, wise and learned do not see cognitive decline in age.
Our impressions about the minds of others seem to reflect the world world we observe.
You can drop a stereotype very quickly once you actually observe someone.
People watching a 15 second video of a person thought through ethnic stereotypes, but people watching a 12 minute video no stereotypical thinking could be found.
Actions misleading mind reading
You can run into problems when you don’t have the full context
correspondence bias - the bias that a person’s mind corresponds directly to that person’s actions.
Everyone assumed that the people that did not evacuate New Orleans did not want to or did not know. In reality, they did not have enough money to move their family. Instead of education, they needed a bus.
Coerced but competently delivered apologies create just as much forgiveness as an honest apology. Insincere flattery works nearly as well as sincere flattery.
Those who benefit from chance are viewed as talented.
It is more effective to change behavior by targeting the broader context rather than individual minds, making its easier for people to do things they already want to do.
People litter less when there are more trashcans with clear areas around them.
Kids do better at school when there is more school and smaller breaks
Poor people do better with money when they have access to banks rather than just educated about banks.
People eat less with smaller plates.
As the number of bystanders increases, the likelihood that anyone will help you decreases.
How to and not to be a better mind reader
Determining behavior by body language barely works. People that could only see a story teller are less accurate than people who could only hear the storyteller.
We are much better liars than we think we are. Your true emotions do not really leak out and when they do, they are subtle and mixed in with other expressions. Just because you can experience your thoughts and emotions so clearly, does not mean that they leak out clearly.
Perspective taking, or trying to put yourself in the other persons shoes, actually decreases you accuracy.
The best way to read someones mind is to get their perspective instead of trying to take it. Just ask for their opinion. If people are in a context to give an honest answer, free from punishment, they will.
Nearly everything you know is secondhand. One of the reasons why people are unable to tell who likes them within a group is because no one is giving honest feedback about their true feelings.
To really enable someone to understand what’s on your mind, you not only need to be clear, you need to be painfully clear. If you are getting someones perspective, you need to listen and also verify that your understanding is correct.
Talking stick - You can only talk when you have the stick, once it is passed the next person has to reiterate the last speakers position to that person’s satisfaction.
A great way to create fast friends is to have strangers disclose private thoughts or memories to each other.
People are more forgiving and understanding that you typically assume.