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Nurture Your Inner Psychic - No Paranormal Powers Required!
How everyday mind reading skills help us navigate - or get lost in - the stormy landscape of human interactions
by, Meera Lee Sethi
17 May 2008

Nicholas Epley believes you’re a mind reader. No, he doesn’t think you know a magic trick that will allow you to divine other people’s thoughts at a cocktail party. He’s not suggesting that you’ve developed intuitive “psychic connections” with your loved ones. And he hasn’t confused you for someone who’s dug out an old phrenology manual and started laying hands on other people’s heads, examining the bumps and lumps on their skulls for clues about their natural proclivities.

Epley is a thoroughly pragmatic social psychologist whose major scientific interest is a much more everyday kind of mind reading. What he studies is how, and how accurately, people intuit each other’s thoughts. Based at the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business, Epley’s research explores how we figure out the answers to questions such as these: How well does my boss think I’m doing on this project? Will my friend forgive me for getting drunk and insulting her dress? Was that thing someone just said to me meant to be aggressive, or was it a joke? Does this person think I’m smart? Do they think I’m interesting? And, perhaps most fundamentally of all, Do they think I’m hot or not?

The answers to these questions are particularly useful to us humans; we are a highly social species, and being obtuse about what others are thinking and feeling can lead to misfortune. An employee who values terse efficiency may be passed over for promotion if she doesn’t realize that her boss prefers a little small talk before meetings. A prospective suitor who can’t read the subtle moods of his love-interest may be driven away in frustration.

Still, cultural convention and personal reticence combine to make interrogating others about their private thoughts a less than practical solution. What most of us do instead is seek approximate answers to these queries based on information we already have about other people and ourselves. We do our best, in other words, to read minds.

The problem, says Epley, is that we’re not actually very good at it.

During a recent lecture in Chicago, part of an MBA course in organizational management he is teaching this quarter, Epley delighted in presenting his students with examples of exactly how dreadful most people are at sussing out other people’s thoughts. For instance, he described a series of informal experiments he’d conducted at the beginning of the quarter in which he asked business school students to predict how their peers would judge them. What did they think others would say about “how nice they were, how outgoing they were, how assertive they were,” Epley asked? Participants’ predictions turned out to be no better than random guesses.

Other behavioral scientists have researched how accurately couples in long-term relationships reported their partners’ beliefs. And in a variety of other studies, people have been asked to intuit others’ moods based on their faces, tones of voice, or the wording of their statements. In every case, whether participants are trying to make judgments about the thoughts and feelings of strangers, spouses, or best friends, people’s ability to accurately read minds is—as Epley puts it—“stunningly unimpressive.”

Epley, a tall and energetic man, describes these results with a showman’s timing, a storyteller’s feel for drama, and a scientist’s sense of intellectual mischief. It’s clear that he takes pleasure in using the tools of his profession to test the logic of our most basic social intuitions. His research, Epley says, is essentially “the scientific study of everyday life. We take your everyday experience and bring it into the laboratory and try to understand why you think as you do, why you believe what you do, act as you do.”

In a series of recent studies, for instance, he looked at anthropomorphism, the belief that a nonhuman thing like a car or a pet possesses human-like emotions and thoughts. On the one hand, you might see this phenomenon as a classic mind-reading “mistake”—when we anthropomorphize, what we’re essentially doing is trying to read the mind of something that arguably doesn’t have a mind at all. Yet Epley’s work shows that this kind of “creative” mind reading has a purpose: we do it more often when we’re lonely, as a way of providing ourselves with much-needed social connection. The study was published in the February 2008 issue of Psychological Science.

In another study, published in the

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