How to mind read, if you absolutely must…
September 30, 2023.
What we common folk call “mind reading”, psychologists call mentalizing. Here’s the problem.
Organizational psychologists love mentalizing, they see it as a superhighway to relational intelligence. They research it heavily, and laud it as a virtue in business settings.
But those of you who know me, understand that I don’t give a rat’s ass about business settings, except to not allow them to emotionally corrupt you with boundary-crossing relationships.
I care about the health of committed relationships/marriages, children, and families. Period.
So Industrial Psychologists love to research mentalizing, because they believe it improves social skills, cooperation, and teamwork. These are the outcomes that entice research dollars.
The reason a couples therapist, like me, might disparage mind-reading, is that mentalizing is often a half-assed effort at deducing and detecting what other humans are thinking or feeling from granular clues in their behavior, or word use.
In contrast, an empathetic approach focuses on achieving clarity in not only detecting, but also understanding the emotions of others.
So, who has the natural ability to mentalize?
As I mentioned in my previous post, most humans suck at mind reading, or what we call ‘mentalizing.’ Even with intimate partners, humans can be remarkably obtuse.
For example, research indicates that when humans are asked to rate how attractive they appear to others… they they rarely get it right.
Is being good at mind reading a teachable skill? Why are some humans better at mind reading than others?
4 indications that you might be better at mind reading than most humans…
Humans who are better than most at mentalizing tend to strongly affirm the following 3 statements:
“I find it easy to put myself in somebody’s else’s shoes.”
“I sometimes try to understand my friends better by imagining how things look from their perspective.”
“I can usually understand another person’s viewpoint, even if it differs from my own.”
Humans who are skilled at mentalizing disagree strongly with this statement:
“I sometimes find it difficult to see things from other people’s point of view.”
People whom are neurodiverse, in particular, are poor at mind reading. Theory of mind is an anticipated aspect of human nature. Understanding is the fruit of noticing.
While there has been a vigorous debate on this issue, current wisdom indicates that neurodiversity is about four times more prevalent in men, who reliably suck at mind reading.
Dr. Punit Shah, study co-author, said:
“We will all undoubtedly have had experiences where we have felt we have not connected with other people we are talking to, where we’ve perceived that they have failed to understand us, or where things we’ve said have been taken the wrong way.
Much of how we communicate relies on our understanding of what others are thinking, yet this is a surprisingly complex process that not everyone can do.”
Does your ego block your ability to mind read?
Dr Nicholas Epley of the University of Chicago in Social and Personality Psychology Compass, argues that the most stubborn obstacle to mind reading, and understanding how we are viewed by others, is that we live in solipsistic age.
Most humans are trapped in their own narratives and stories. This is the neurotypical’s lament.
This solipcism distorts how we imagine we are seen by other humans, but the truth is, we can’t help but be biased by the way in which we perceive ourselves.
If we are ever to achieve skill in the dubious past time of reading our partner’s mind, we had better learn to read our own minds, first.
Unfortunately, it turns out that we often don’t see ourselves as other people see us.
The bulk of humanity experiences a cognitive drag. Here are the two major reasons why:
Attentional bias: We assume others are paying much more attention to us than they really are. People usually don’t notice the details we think they do. We don’t capture anywhere near the scrutiny we think.
Construal bias: We see everything filtered through our own beliefs, values, narratives, and intentions, especially when situations are ambiguous or when our own beliefs, attitudes, and intentions are very different from our counter-part human whose mind we are attempting to read.
How to improve mind reading… if you must…
Any one who has been in couples therapy understands the old chestnut of “perspective taking.”
This habitual approach to mind reading often includes finding out what our partner think of us, and attempt to consider their perspective. Neurodiverse partners can benefit from understanding a few basic ideas, rather than being overwhelmed by the intricacies of a street-level view.
In a series of unpublished studies, Eyal and Epley discovered that this perspective taking approach, while warm and fuzzy, also sucked.
Geez… perspective taking is being taught to couples every day in therapy.
What’s better than perspective taking?
What to do instead…
The 3 experiments on mind reading they conducted suggest the answer is to hold an idea of yourself from a more essentialist perspective.
Let me make that more concrete. Study subjects were asked to focus on central and defining features of the self, rather than the lower, street-level details.
Once they focused on the central and defining features, (I wonder, does this correspond to an ideal self?), they were then able to judge what others thought of them more accurately.
Dr. Epley explains:
“You can look at yourself from the street level or you can look at yourself from the satellite level.
Other people see you from the satellite level, so if you think of yourself from that big picture perspective, you’ll tend to be more accurate.
While we live our own lives under a microscope and we are present all the time when we do things, other people are not there with us.
That’s a problem for intuiting other people’s thoughts because we tend to evaluate ourselves in much finer detail.
We look at ourselves from the street view, whereas other people are looking at us from space.”
Fu*king pay attention…
One of the most obvious keys to mind reading is to pay attention to your partner’s body language, and facial animation, when endeavoring to read their mind.
Most humans think they are better at this than they really are. I can help with that.
Research clearly shows us that the young and the old particularly suck at mind reading (De Lillo et al., 2021).
The researchers’ explanation is that that both older and adolescent humans pay less attention to body language than humans who are developmentally between those life stages.
Because they often ignore facial expressions, body language, and tones of voice, both young and older humans acquire less information about their counterpart’s state of mind.
Obviously, this results in difficulty in reading other human’s emotions, intentions, and attitudes.
And because their is no detection, there can be no “perspective taking”, and thus, a failure to empathize.
Both empathy, and a drone’s-eye view on perspective-taking, are vital to successful human intimacy. Focus on essential noticing, however.
I also suspect that adolescents and older folk, might also tend to be more self-absorbed than the human cohort in the age range that straddles the middle of those two extremes.
Professor Heather Ferguson, study co-author, explained:
“Focusing less on people and their faces means that adolescents and older adults miss important cues, and this could lead to larger impairments in social interaction, or less opportunities to engage in social interaction with others.
During adolescence, 10-19-year-olds are still learning and developing peer relationships, so they are experiencing a rapid change in their social experiences and preferences.
For older adults, a substantial decline in social participation can lead to isolation, loneliness and poor health.
Both groups can therefore be significantly impacted by a lack of social engagement.”
How the study was conducted
The study, which included teens, young adults and older humans, used novel eye tracking technology.
I love when hard science offers direct data. The research clearly showed that both adolescent and older humans spent less time looking at the face of their counterparts.
For example, the researchers also noticed that when the young and old were navigating in a social space, they both looked less at other faces as they moved through the space.
The researchers also mused about the cognitive overload from the extra processing required to navigate a complex social situation with many options.
How motivated are you to notice?
Of course, how good we are at mind reading, like success in couples therapy, is highly contingent on our motivation.
Researchers have identified that if you are high in ‘mind reading motivation,’ you will accrue a plethora of social benefits and advantages. (Carpenter et al., 2016).
Humans who are high in mind reading motivation, unlike the fuzzy noticings of most humans, train their minds to notice and observe small pieces of social information.
Dr. Melanie Green, a study author, elaborated on this point:
“We’re not talking about the psychic phenomenon or anything like that, but simply using cues from other people’s behavior, their non-verbal signals, to try to figure out what they’re thinking.”
Humans high in mind reading motivation actually take delight in uncovering what others are feeling or thinking.
Because these advantages include being a better team player, they enjoy an inherent capitalist utility, mindreading will always remain highly prized in the workplace, and disparaged in couples therapy, unless it also includes a dimension of compassionate understanding, as opposed to merely detecting and labeling behaviors.
These humans with high mind reading motivation also seem to garner a more subtle understanding of proxemic humans. Dr. Green explained the motivation and outcome of highly motivated mind readers:
“Those high in mind reading motivation seem to develop richer psychological portraits of those around them.
It’s the difference between saying ‘this person strives for success, but is afraid of achieving it’ as opposed to ‘this person is a great cook.'”
Final thoughts on mind reading
Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom: and with all thy getting, get understanding. Proverbs 4:7
Mind reading starts with noticing. But because the first thing most of us notice is our own story, we rarely pace ourselves through our predictable defenses and narratives to gently uncover our beloved’s perspective.
Noticing then leads to interpreting. Interpreting leads to even more stories.
While successful mind-reading efforts are often the outcome of teachable skills on perspective -taking, they may get wicked overused by intimate partners. That’s the issue. Understanding is the precursor of empathy. Sometimes, in order to de-escalate, we have to be concrete AF.
In other words, sometimes a direct line of inquiry is best.
Better, in all of our clever and subtle noticing, to sometimes simply ask our partner.. “what are you feeling?” … and listen.
…and perhaps even take notes.
Be well, stay kind, and Godspeed.
RESEARCH:
Carpenter, J.M., Green, M.C. & Vacharkulksemsuk, T. Beyond perspective-taking: Mind-reading motivation. Motiv Emot 40, 358–374 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-016-9544-z
De Lillo, M., Foley, R., Fysh, M.C. et al. Tracking developmental differences in real-world social attention across adolescence, young adulthood and older adulthood. Nat Hum Behav 5, 1381–1390 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-021-01113-9
Epley, N. (2008), Solving the (Real) Other Minds Problem. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 2: 1455-1474. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1751-9004.2008.00115.x
