Nurture Your Inner Psychic - No Paranormal Powers Required!

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 July 2001 Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Epley found that when people do something embarrassing, they feel much more chagrined than they should, because they “overestimate how harshly they’re going to be judged by other people.” Our brains want to help us avoid social shame. Unfortunately, they do so by wildly exaggerating our beliefs about how much we have lost face in the eyes of others. Knowing this can help to ease the pain of public disgrace. And since, as Epley notes, “one of the leading causes of suicide among teenagers is the belief that they have embarrassed themselves beyond repair,” it might even be something we’d want to teach in high school biology classes.

Epley’s research lends itself to other such practical applications. In one ongoing project, the results of which are slated to be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, he’s trying to improve people’s ability to accurately assess how attractive others will find them—what he likes to refer to as the “Am I hot or not?” question. It’s an issue of burning relevance to his subjects, many of whom are university students.

To have even a hope of getting this question right, Epley says, we must first let go of the mountain of information we know about ourselves. “I know, for instance, that my hair looks worse today than it did yesterday, or that my morning lecture went so much better than my afternoon lecture. You don’t know any of this.” Not surprisingly, people become distracted by this plethora of minutia and can’t develop a big picture perspective on the kind of person they are. As a result, they’re not able to assess their own qualities objectively.

But we can trick the mind into ignoring these extraneous details. To do this, Epley has his subjects predict how a stranger will rate them, not now, but at some later point—say, three months in the future. At first the correlation between the subjects’ predicted attractiveness ratings and the true ratings they received was barely existent. But with the future tense clause in place, subjects’ guesses shot much closer to their raters’ true perceptions.

There are a variety of other tools and tricks that you can use to combat errors in mind reading. For example, in order to step out of the egocentric bias that causes you to use yourself as the only model for how the human mind works, Epley suggests that you actively and openly seek the perspectives of others. And when you’re imagining the beliefs of another person, he says, pay attention to the fact that you’re constructing your imaginings. Don’t think that your perceptions of people’s behavior are anywhere near as concrete as your perceptions of sights, sounds, tastes, and smells—even though it may feel that way.

Epley says he doesn’t have a magic pill that’s going to suddenly make people’s thoughts an open book. But the tools he lays out do have the advantage of being both simple and, at least according to preliminary research, rather effective. Unlike magicians, psychics, and phrenologists, most people read minds “automatically, reflexively, and spontaneously,” explains Epley. They’re barely conscious of what they’re doing or how they’re doing it. Simply changing that basic fact—becoming aware of how your own expectations color your guesses about the mental and emotional states of others—can improve mind reading accuracy by leaps and bounds.

Go ahead. Try it. And if you figure out a way to get especially good at it, you might want to pay Epley a visit in his office. There’s a good chance you’ll find something interesting on his mind.