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Reading Minds

Whether we know it or not … we all think we can read our boyfriend’s … girlfriend’s, our partner’s, spouses’ … minds. We’re all a bunch of street corner psychics – in our own minds. Maybe it’s just a moment … when we’re peering into our boss’ eyes … looking for a sign … hmm … am I really getting that raise? Or perhaps it’s a snap judgment … we watch our best girlfriend as she focuses in on the purple alligator handbag we just bought, does she like it…or is she just jealous?

The point is: we’re constantly drawing on our powers of observation, our database of experience, and the morass of scar tissue and hope we call emotion to help us decipher what the people around us are thinking and feeling. Dr. Daniel Siegel, a psychiatrist from UCLA and the author of The Mindful Brain puts it quite simply: “we’re creating a map of another person’s internal state.” The good news it’s healthy to not be so self-centered. The bad news is we’re not half as good at what is now popularly being termed as “Mindsight” … as we think we are!

In the most recent issue of Psychology Today, the cover story, brilliantly written by Annie Murphy Hall, explores this issue in great detail. Murphy Hall concludes that mind reading of this sort is a critical human skill … it’s the way we make sense of other people’s behavior and decide our next moves. Mindsight, also known as empathetic accuracy, allows us to cooperate and compete … to differentiate between manipulation or seduction. For instance, if someone finds our jokes hysterical or if he or she is humoring us and secretly wants us to shut up and go away. Apparently mind reading is the most important element of what sociologists and call social intelligence.

OK. Pause. This piece comes with a warning label, as I alluded to before, if we do this “mind reading” thing poorly … it can lead to disastrous consequences. Think about the patterns of behavior that characterize abusive husbands – these violent men attribute negative thoughts to their wives – and then lash out. Poor mind reading can lead to feeling lonely in a relationship – perhaps unnecessarily.

Mixing up the message happens a lot more than we think. According to William Ickes, a psychologist at the University of Texas at Arlington and the father of empathetic accuracy, we’re not very good at reading each other’s minds at all. Strangers (who are videotaped and later report their second-by-second thoughts and feelings as well as their assessments of their counterpart’s thoughts and feelings) read each other with an average accuracy rate of 20%. Close couples nudge up to 35%. And almost no one scores over 60%.

So what does it take to actually assess another person’s thoughts and feelings? Reading body language can reveal a person’s basic emotion. Facial expressions are also cues we use to know what others are thinking – despite the 3,000 different expressions we may deploy each day – it’s the fleeting micro expressions that betray most of our feelings. But surprisingly, at least to me anyway, it is the content of speech … yes the actual words that contribute most to our success at mind reading. Yep...it’s not all touchy feely stuff! Words matter!

Finally to dispel one of the oldest wives’ tales of mind reading … no pun intended … women are not better at it than men. In Dr. Ickes’ work, he emphasizes the difference in mind reading aptitude between men and women. And I quote “It’s not an ability thing … It’s a motivational thing.” Translation: We try. Men don’t.

See pictures from the interviews!

posted by Jason Parsley @ 11:21 AM