Mind Reading 2.0: How others see you

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Many of us spend enormous amounts of time asking ourselves what other people think of us. Do they notice our flaws? Are they mocking us behind our backs? Do they think we're boring? It turns out that the way we imagine we're being seen is often spectacularly wrong. In our episode last week, we looked at how we spend a lot of time trying to read other people's minds and how we often misinterpret their intentions. Today, we continue our series, Mind Reading 2.0. We explore how social illusions shape our relationships at home and in the workplace.

There's just so many things that we— mistakes that we fall into, these sort of social traps that lead us to be a lot more pessimistic about our social lives than kind of reality warrants.

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Thanks for having me.

I'd like to take you back to the start of your interest in this topic, Erika. You were in grad school and sitting at a cafe with a friend. And you'd also planned to meet a potential collaborator at the cafe. She showed up. And you went over and started Chatting. What happened next?

Yeah, so I was at a cafe just down the street from my apartment called Cafe Romeo, and I worked there a lot with my partner, who's also a psychologist. And I went and left him, went to a couple tables down where I was talking to this person who I thought we might launch a collaboration. And I really got the sense from our conversation that she was a very interesting person and had a lot of interesting ideas, but As I was talking to my partner and debriefing him on how it had gone, I said I really doubted that she would want to work with me because our conversation hadn't really gone all that well. I'd expected her to ask me about kind of one stream of research. She instead took the conversation in a totally different direction, and I was unprepared. And then my partner got kind of a sheepish look on his face, and he admitted that he'd actually been eavesdropping a little. But the good news was, is that he thought we had really hit it off and that I'd come off really well in the conversation. And so we had these wildly different perspectives on what had happened. So, as psychologists, this got us thinking, like, who was right in this case, right? Who had a better read on the situation?

Erica asked herself whether the incident revealed something not just about her, but something about people in general.

It was very curious that there was this kind of wide gap, it seemed, between what my partner had observed from the outside and what I had felt as someone on the inside of the conversation. And it got us thinking, there must be some interesting psychology here.

To test this, Erika teamed up with some researchers from the United Kingdom who were organizing personal development workshops where lots of strangers meet one another.

And what we like is that this was outside of the lab, which is where we normally run studies, and so we could see how this kind of happens in the real world. And we found that people believed their conversation partners were more interesting than they thought their conversation partners found them.

Which is, of course, exactly what you had felt in the café, which is that you thought the conversation went well, but you believed that your potential collaborator would not have found it as interesting.

Exactly. In the case of, you know, the work when I was in Café Romeo having this conversation, we didn't know exactly what that other person, the potential collaborator, thought of me. We just knew what my partner had observed. And so what's interesting is that, you know, as we continue to pursue this and bringing this into experimental paradigms, we could really test people's perceptions against reality.

The experiment that you conducted with the volunteers who thought they were part of a personal development workshop, it revealed to you in some ways that the experience that you had was not unique, and it wasn't just that one person thinks that they enjoyed the conversation, but the other person did not, but that both people enjoyed the conversation, but both believed that the other would be less into the conversation. You came up with a term for this phenomenon. What was that term, Erica?

That's the liking gap. And the liking gap is the phenomenon— most commonly, this happens among people who are getting acquainted for the first time. And so when you're meeting someone new, you're having that initial conversation, Afterward, you reflect on how it went. And most often, people actually enjoy these initial conversations and like the other person quite a bit, but they tend to underestimate how much the other person likes them and enjoyed their conversation.

You ran a similar experiment with first-year college students who were getting to know one another as potential dormmates. What happened in that experiment?

So in that case, we were actually curious to see whether we would see a liking gap as people increasingly get to know each other over time. And so we recruited college roommates who had just landed at school for the first time in September, and they get thrown into a room with someone they've never met before. And a huge question for them is whether the other person is going to like them, and that really matters to them. And so we tracked these new roommates at 5 different time points. Between September and May, we asked them how much they liked their roommates and how much they thought their roommates liked them. And what we found there was that people actually underestimated how much their roommate liked them for several months, like through the fall into the spring. And finally, by the end of the year, we did see that the liking gap went away.

But you also took this idea and built on it to suggest that it might be that this is not the only place in which we misjudge how other people think of us and how the interaction is going. Talk about how and when you decided that this was not just about the liking gap, but about a much larger set of phenomena that you eventually came to describe as social illusions.

Yeah, so we're constantly trying to figure out what other people think of us. And I have sort of taken this puzzle and zoomed in on several different facets of it. There's just so many things that we— mistakes that we fall into, these sort of social traps that lead us to be a lot more pessimistic about our social lives than kind of reality warrants.

I want to talk later in the episode about ways we can get past some of these distortions in our perceptions of our social relationships. But I want to look at how common these distortions are. I'm thinking about the movie When Harry Met Sally. There's this classic scene when Harry and Sally finally get together and then have separate Conversations with friends about how it went.

The worst.

How'd he get out of there?

He just disappeared.

I feel so bad.

I'm so embarrassed. I don't blame you. That's horrible.

I think I'm coming down with something.

I think I'm catching a cold.

Look, look, it would have been great if it worked out, but it didn't. I'll call you later, okay? Okay, bye. Bye. Bye.

Bye.

So, you know, when I hear that clip after reading your work, Erica, I'm struck by how much time and effort we put into trying to understand these social interactions and how often we get things wrong.

I love that. It's a great example of how we don't tell each other the things that we're thinking and that we feel. We express them instead oftentimes to other people, right? And this helps keep these illusions alive.

Yeah. Is it possible that some of these social illusions in fact are amplified during, you know, high-pressure, high-stakes situations like dating? I mean, can these romantic situations, for example, put the liking gap on steroids?

Yeah, I mean, I think any time where we really, really care about what someone else thinks of us, we're going to put extra pressure on ourselves to perform at the highest level. And so in those moments, we're going to be hyper-aware of the ways that we're falling short of the way that we wish we behaved, or the things we wish we'd said or hadn't said. And so those are going to be extra salient to us to the extent that we care a lot about how we're coming off.

So we've looked at one important dimension of social illusions. Let's look at another. And again, let's go back to your time in graduate school. At one point, you were really self-conscious about appearing smart enough and good enough to be in grad school. And one time, you were talking with some friends at a bar, and the conversation turned to the TV shows that people were watching.

Right. Everyone was still kind of in the early stages getting to know one another. And to this day, I still don't know why this was my response, but for whatever reason, I said I watched The Bachelor. Bring on the women! Clayton was like the whole As conversations do, it kind of just drifted to another topic pretty quickly after that. But later that night, I kept kind of coming back to that moment and just replaying it in my head. Bring on the women! Because I just couldn't believe that that was the show that I came up with when I was with a bunch of people that I really wanted to impress. Get over here, big boy!

And I feel like something like this happens to us all the time, that, you know, trivial things happen, we say or do things, and then we perseverate on this for hours or sometimes for weeks afterwards, you know, wondering what people thought of us and eating ourselves up on the inside.

Exactly. Our thoughts basically just run wild. Like, what if I hadn't done that? What if I had talked about the National Geographic show I watched instead? Like, why did I say that?

You should have talked about the Ken Burns documentaries that you're a big fan of.

Exactly. And then we think, you know, like, oh God, they're just judging me for that, right? I said the wrong thing.

And what happened in this case?

Did you ever discover whether your friends in graduate school thought less of you because you watched the So yeah, a few days later, I actually ran into someone who was at that conversation, and she asked me if I wanted to join her and some of her friends who watch The Bachelor together every week. The Bachelor's back. So clearly I wasn't as alone as I thought.

We've talked a bit about how some of the social illusions that you study arise in interactions with people who are strangers or acquaintances, or even people who are starting to get to know one another. But social illusions can also affect longstanding relationships. I want to play you a clip from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Will Smith's character is worried that his uncle, who has been taking care of him for the past several years, thinks poorly of him. I just don't want you to think that I'm that same stupid kid I was when I first moved out here. How could you possibly believe that that's what I'd be thinking? Look at you. You're moving out on your own. You're going to finish college in a year. You're becoming a man. A man I'm damn proud of. I just didn't want your last memory of me to be no better than the first one. You have no idea what my first memory of you is. A kid loaded with all the potential in the world. And now I see a person on the verge of realizing their potential. Can you talk about this a moment, Erika? Familiarity with someone doesn't automatically mean that these social illusions disappear.

Right. I think they are more extreme for people we do not know, you know, in large part just because we don't know how they think or what kinds of things they judge people for. But even as we get closer to people, it's just— it's not a guarantee because we don't have access to every single thing that those people think. And so we do— there is kind of a gap there still, even as you get closer to someone.

So the consequences of some of these social illusions are not always serious. Sometimes they can be funny. Adam Mastriani and his colleagues recently published a study looking at when people want conversations to end. And they found that conversations almost never end when person A wants them to end, and they don't end when person B wants them to end either. Conversations sometimes run shorter than either party wants, and sometimes they run much longer than either party wants. And I feel like this speaks to the gap between how we think a conversation is going and what we think the other person thinks about the conversation.

Yeah, exactly. I love that work. And I think it's, again, because we aren't explicit with each other about what we want. We rely on a lot of implicit cues, and that's how a lot of social life and a lot of conversation operates. So I think that we tend to just sort of hope that we're able to understand what the other person wants and when they might want to get out of the conversation, and then we gently let them go.

Right.

But we often get that wrong.

Yeah. In that paper, the researchers write that humans are often unable to solve these problems because solving these problems requires people to share information that they normally keep from each other. So the problem is not just that we're not perceiving things, but we're actively hiding the information that would allow the other person, in fact, to draw the right conclusions.

Right. That's a problem. I mean, I think thinking about these things a lot does make me aware that it would help if we could be more explicit about some things. I know that we don't always want to play our hand fully, but maybe if these college roommates that I studied, for example, had played their hands just a little sooner, a few months before, maybe things would have been a little bit clearer to people. But I think we're very guarded in a lot of ways. We're very risk-averse when it comes to getting rejected or the possibility of rejection. And what it really shows us is the power of our attention and what we're focused on. And we— if we are focused on the negative thoughts about ourselves that we're projecting onto other people, that looms really large and it tends to obscure other things that might actually also be true.

Even before the COVID pandemic, Social scientists were warning about a global epidemic of loneliness. Social isolation contributes to depression, anxiety, and drug abuse. Chronic loneliness increases the risk of heart disease and other illnesses. Is one solution to see that many of us actually have more friends than we realize? When we come back, the mechanisms in the mind that make it difficult for us to see our social interactions clearly and how we can do better. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Principal, the perpetual pen tapper, the arbitrary fridge reorganizer, the holiday party planner that starts in May. Principal knows your star employees have their work quirks. Principal also knows how much those employees mean to your business. You need them. They need benefits. Work with Principal so they can help you help your team with a retirement and benefits plan that's right for them. Principal Life Insurance Company, Des Moines, Iowa. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Progressive. Whoever says saving money is hard doesn't know that new customers who bundle and save with Progressive save hundreds. Because switching your home and auto insurance is better than cutting down on those iced lattes you love. Switch to Progressive and see if you could save. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company, affiliates, and other insurers. Not available in all states. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Many of us spend sleepless nights worrying about what others think of us. But the reflections we see of ourselves in the eyes of others are often distorted. We misread interactions, overthink our own insecurities. We fail to notice what other people actually notice about us. Erica Boothby and her colleagues study the psychological mechanisms behind these social illusions. Erica, you lived in Italy as a high school exchange student. Did you speak Italian?

So I didn't speak Italian Really before I got there. I had taken just a quick kind of crash course in Italian, which was for traveling essentially, so I learned things like how to count to 10, and I could say my name is Erica, I'm American, maybe a couple other things, but that was kind of the extent of it. And it was full immersion, so I was living with an Italian family, and I was going to Italian high school. And I felt pretty awkward because I couldn't really engage in conversations with people. So even, you know, at home with the host family sitting around the dinner table, they would want to know about my day. I'd want to be able to tell them, but we just, like, couldn't get there. And it was really challenging. And I found the same thing, you know, at school with my classmates. They'd all stand around and chat during the breaks, and I would kind of stand there awkwardly. Mm-hmm. Trying to figure out how I could jump into the conversation or say something, but I— my Italian was just so impoverished at the time, it was really hard to partake in social life. But as I kind of got to know people and my language skills improved, they improved a lot over the course of the year that I was there, I started to realize that people didn't have as many critical thoughts about me as I had about myself. I'd been projecting a lot of that and getting really down on myself, But those weren't really the thoughts they were having at all.

Yeah. So, it's totally understandable as a high school student in a situation like this why you would be focused on your insecurities or the mistakes that you're making as you are trying to learn and speak Italian. But, of course, the people who are around you are probably thinking, you know, here's this, you know, bright young girl from the United States who's taking the time and trouble to learn our language, you know, and they're probably filled with admiration for you even as you might be filled with insecurity.

Yeah, I wish I'd realized that at the time. But instead, yeah, I was very insecure, and I, and I felt awkward that I couldn't really engage in these conversations. But I do think also that this experience doesn't just apply to people in a foreign country, because in general, our conversation partners are pretty charitable. People don't really care if you mess up or if you don't say everything perfectly. That's kind of just how conversation works, and people expect it.

You currently teach a negotiations course at Wharton, and you have 2 90-minute sections back to back. So you're giving the same lecture twice with very little time in between. What is the social illusion that goes through your head as you do this, Erika?

One thing that tends to happen in social interactions is that we often feel like our internal states— that's our emotions, our thoughts, are kind of on display for everyone to see, and we think that people are using that information when they're forming their evaluations of us. And this is something that is often called the illusion of transparency. And so, yeah, I teach this course, 2 sections back-to-back, and in the first section, I am full of energy, but by the second lecture, I know that I'm starting to get a little depleted. And so I feel like my second class is never as good as the first class because I'm comparing it to the first class, and I had more energy then. And so at the end of the semester, I'm always surprised when I looked at my ratings, you know, for the 2 classes, and they are identical. And so this just goes to show, from the inside, when I'm trying to imagine how other people are evaluating me, I'm using all these comparisons that they're not using, right? I'm tired, I wasn't as witty the second time, but of course my second class wasn't at my first class, and so to them, my lecture seems perfect. And so I think we do the same exact thing in conversation. So when we tell people a story or we give people a summary of a project we're working on at work, you know, we know all the little flaws and the things we say or the things that we said better last time we described them, but our conversation partners don't have as much to compare to as we do, and so they're seeing it totally differently.

Erika has conducted experiments that reveal exactly how much people notice about one another. In one study, she had volunteers put on a shirt and go to meet another person. The catch? The shirt had a photo in the front of Pablo Escobar, the infamous Colombian drug lord responsible for dozens of murders.

We brought people in, we treated the lab like a waiting room, we basically converted it, and we had 2 participants come in at a time. They sat across from one another at this This large table, and one person had on this Pablo Escobar shirt, and the other person was just— without them knowing it, they were assigned to be our observer.

Uh-huh.

Then afterward, we measured how much that observer had been noticing and thinking about the other person, what they looked like, anything about them.

Uh-huh.

We asked the person wearing the Pablo Escobar shirt how much attention they thought the other person was paying to them.

I'm imagining that most of them would believe that the other person is keenly aware that they're wearing a photo of a drug kingpin. Was that in fact what happened?

No, the person wearing the shirt's very self-conscious, but from the other person's perspective, that was just whatever they happened to be wearing. And so people who were wearing the Pablo Escobar shirt overestimated how much attention was on their shirt because that was the thing that they were hyperfocused on. People were paying attention to all kinds of other things about the person, like what they were doing. Did they go on their phone? Did they look like they just came from the gym? I don't know, whatever the thoughts were, but they were not paying attention to the shirt specifically.

So when we think about the interactions that we have with other people, Erica, we're often focused on the very minute things about ourselves, how our hair looks or the clothes we are wearing or the picture on our shirt, and other people, in fact, are not taking us in at this micro level. Can you talk about some of the illusions that you study coming about because people are not evaluating us with the granularity with which we're evaluating ourselves?

Whenever we're paying attention to something and we're concerned about it, like you said, I got a new haircut. Now that's what I'm paying attention to. My hair feels so short. obvious to other people, but in reality, people aren't noticing that specific thing about us, the thing that we happen to be focused on or self-conscious about. But that doesn't mean that people aren't paying attention to us in other ways or having other thoughts about us.

I suspect this is true of us in terms of our evaluations of others. When we're evaluating someone we meet for the first time, we are really trying to get a global impression of who they are. Will I be able to get along with this person? We're not looking at them with great granularity.

Exactly. I think that really captures a really deep truth. And so we're trying to just figure out friend or foe, right? We're at a high level. We're like, are they gonna hurt us or are they gonna be our friend? Do they seem like a nice enough person? Maybe could I trust them? Whereas when we're worried about being judged or when we're on the other side, we're thinking at the micro level in terms of, did we say something wrong? And that's really not what we're being judged on.

Right. You know, I'm reminded of this incident a few years ago. The BBC was doing a live interview about South Korean politics with an American professor. I don't know if you've seen this, Erica, but the professor was looking very serious and explaining why the impeachment of the South Korean president was a good thing. I'm actually quite proud of the Koreans. I don't mean to sound condescending, but I actually, I've been living here for 10 years. This is probably the best day I've actually lived here. I'm actually quite impressed at how they've done this. And then he was, as he was talking, his young daughter with pigtails bounces into his office and the professor tries to maintain his composure and push her away. I would be surprised They do. The— pardon me. And then a baby paddles in on one of those baby walkers, followed by a woman who's crawling on all fours trying to drag both kids out of the room. And the professor keeps going on with his analysis.

My apologies. North—

Now his kids are wailing in the background. In the airport in Malaysia. And I feel like all of us have been there in one form or another during the pandemic where our Our real lives, in some ways, have intruded on the impression that we're trying to create on others. But I feel it reveals the lengths we go to present a certain impression of ourselves and, in some ways, our fears of what would happen if other people could simply see us as we are.

Yeah, that's a great example. I think it's so true. We're all very concerned about impression management. We want people to see us in a certain light. And in some ways, it doesn't matter all that much because I think people are much more charitable toward us than we expect. They kind of explain away those things. They make us relatable. And so I think we can be worried because we have some vision of how we want to come off to other people, but in reality, we could probably stand to be a little bit more just ourselves.

So we've looked at different ways people overestimate how others will judge them and judge them Harshly. I want to play you a movie clip about a slightly different idea. This is from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. Harry and his best friend Ron are opening Christmas presents at Hogwarts School, and Harry finds he has received a mysterious gift.

What is it? Some kind of cloak. Well, let's see then. Put it on. Whoa! My body's gone! I know what that is. That's an invisibility cloak. I'm invisible?

So it turns out, Erica, it's not just wizards who own invisibility cloaks. You once ran a study where you surveyed people in a cafeteria and asked them how much they were watching other people and how much they thought other people were watching them. What did you find?

We found that people thought that they were observing others far more than they themselves were being observed.

So it's almost like people felt like they were invisible, but they could pierce the invisibility cloaks that other people were wearing.

Exactly. Exactly.

Erika mentions a real-life example of this. In 2017, 2 of President Donald Trump's lawyers were having lunch at a restaurant in downtown Washington, D.C. They were discussing serious matters of state.

This is when Ty Cobb and John Dowd met for lunch at this busy outdoor patio in downtown Washington, D.C. So Cobb, just to remind everyone, was the lawyer in charge of coordinating the White House's responses to the Mueller investigation, and they were looking into Trump's alleged entanglements with Russia. And Dowd was Trump's lead outside attorney in the investigation. And the 2 of them were discussing very sensitive information at this lunch. So they talked about the ongoing investigation, some things about Jared Kushner. And these were all things they thought that they were discussing privately, just amongst themselves.

And of course, there was a reporter from The New York Times who happened to be sitting at the next table. And as far as that reporter was concerned, the 2 men did not have an invisibility cloak around them.

That's right. They definitely did not. So this reporter actually posted a photo on Twitter of the 2 attorneys talking along with the caption, here's a photo of Ty Cobb and John Dowd casually and loudly discussing details of Russia investigation at BLT Steak DC while I sat at next table. And so I proceeded to order a few more iced teas and listen in on this very revealing conversation.

Well, why do you think this happens, Erica? And what do you think explains the fact that we have almost these dual and conflicting sort of social illusions? On the one hand, we believe that people are judging us harshly and perhaps being overly observant of our flaws. And on the other, almost simultaneously, we believe that we have a cloak around us that other people cannot see through.

Yeah, so I am very interested in the psychology of what makes us so oblivious to the fact that These guys could be sitting and talking about sensitive information, not realizing they're being observed. And not to sound conspiratorial, not like you're watched all the time, but I think the point is we can get into a mode where we are the people watchers, right? We're observing other people. We're looking around. I mean, just think about how much you do this pretty much any time you're in a public place.

Mm-hmm.

And the reality is, is that all the times that we're doing this, other people are also doing it toward us. They're watching us. And this is something that happened to me, you know, early on as I was starting to think about the invisibility cloak illusion, but just sitting in a café, and I'll be working, and then periodically I'll look up, I'll kind of gaze around the room, and everyone I see seems to be diligently also working, like they're focused on their laptop, or they're, you know, talking to someone else. But then what I know now, based on my research, is that as soon as I turn my attention back to my computer, that they're doing the same thing toward me, right? They're glancing at me. And so now I can't unknow that. This is something that I'm now much, much more aware of.

Yeah. Do I remember correctly that you once ran an experiment where you had people come and sit in a waiting room, but the waiting room in fact was not a waiting room. It was actually the scene of the study that you were running, and you were trying to measure the same exact phenomenon that we've been talking about.

Right, and what's nice is there were 2 people there, and we knew what they were doing while they were in each other's vicinity. And what we find is that people felt like they were the ones watching the other person, and they didn't feel like the other person was watching them. And it's actually just really hard to catch people watching you, which is part of the reason we have this— we see this effect. So vision scientists call this gaze deflection. When we're looking at someone and watching them, we usually try to disguise it, but that means that the people who are looking at you are also trying to hide that fact. And so it's very hard for us to gather evidence that we're being watched, but as soon as we're not watching them, they're watching us.

Yeah, so it seems to me that you're telling me that in different ways, we can both overestimate and underestimate the ways in which people notice us. Is there a tension between those 2 positions? I mean, how can those 2 illusions be happening simultaneously?

Yeah, I mean, it's a good question. I think we can get into thinking that we are the ones kind of observing other people, and this is especially when we're not interacting with them directly. In that case, we often feel like we're the ones watching other people. But then when we're interacting with people, we're talking to them, our critical voice turns on and we get more self-conscious, I think, and more concerned about the way that we're coming off to other people.

Mm-hmm.

And this can happen also, you know, kind of going back to the Pablo Escobar shirt, If people are wearing something that they are self-conscious about or feel weird about, that will also cause them to think someone is paying more attention to it.

So we've talked a lot about our social interactions, but sometimes these social interactions are also being played out in memory. So we think back to conversations, what we said, what someone else said. And one of the illusions that you've studied is that we think about other people a lot and what they said. We replay conversations in our minds. But we don't assume that other people are doing the same thing. So exactly the same way that we believe that we're observant of other people, but other people are not observing us, we also think about other people a lot more than we realize that they are thinking of us. Can you talk about that phenomenon?

Right. So we spend a lot of time in conversations in daily life, and we also spend a lot of time thinking about our conversations after they've taken place. So we think about the advice someone gave us, or maybe a funny story they told us, and we replay those moments. We remember them. relive them. I think it's really clear to us when we're thinking about other people after we've interacted. But what we find is that people systematically underestimate how much they remain on the other people's mind after their conversation. Because they don't tell us, right? Just like we don't tell them, right?

Right.

And this sort of just perpetuates this illusion. But I think we've looked at this to see kind of what some implications are in some specific contexts. So in one, line of work, we looked at arguments. So arguments between friends or significant others, and we asked people how much they thought about the argument since it happened, and how much they had replayed parts of it in their mind, and also how much they thought their counterpart had. And again, we found people believed they were the ones thinking about the argument more. And if you're the one, you know, thinking about the argument, ruminating on it, concerned about it, but you think your partner is doing that much less, Yes, that is going to make you feel a certain way, probably not a great way. And it affects your beliefs about how likely it is that your partner wants to reconcile or make up with you.

You know, Erica, I spoke recently with the psychologist Emily Pronin. She's going to be featured in next week's Mind Reading 2.0 episode. And one of the things she studies is how when we think about our own minds, we have access to all this information. We're aware of our our thoughts, our feelings, our hopes, our intentions. But then when we talk to others, we have a much more limited understanding of what's going on inside their heads. And that's because, of course, we're not inside their minds. How does this basic gap in perception shape the social illusions that you study?

Yeah, I think it's a huge part of it, what we call the availability or accessibility of thoughts, right? And our own thoughts are hugely available and accessible to us. They're very salient. They come to mind. But we don't really have access to the inner workings of other people's people's minds. And so this is a huge problem that contributes to these illusions.

The researcher Michael Tomasello and his colleagues recreated your liking gap experiment with children between the ages of 4 and 11. The researchers paired the kids up and asked them to build a tower together, and then they asked each child, how much do you like the other boy or girl? How much would you like to be their friend? Do you remember this experiment, Erika, and what they found?

Yeah. So in this study, yeah, they looked at kids age 4 through 11. And what they've found is actually that the liking gap does not exist in 4-year-olds. And it emerges actually at this kind of critical period around age 5, which is when young children are becoming more concerned with their reputations and the impressions that they make on other people.

Mm-hmm.

And then what's interesting is it also increases all the way to age 11, which is the upper limit of the range that they were testing in this study. And so we don't actually have data on teens, but I think for teenagers, the liking gap is probably massive, and I'd be really interested in kind of seeing what happens across adulthood as people get older.

So it seems as if self-consciousness in some ways is sort of a crucial part of the liking gap and some of these social illusions. Very young children don't really care so much about what other people think of them, and so you could see why maybe they have fewer of these illusions, but if someone who is 16, 17, a high school teenager, is thinking about this a lot because their social interactions really matter and how well they fit into the group really, really matter. And you can see perhaps as we go get older, perhaps it starts to fade away again and we become more self-confident and perhaps less self-conscious. I mean, is that sort of the life cycle that you're seeing in sort of the evolution of some of these social illusions?

That is my hypothesis. I don't have the data yet to speak to this, but that is what I would predict. We are collecting some data right now from people who are having conversations across generations, so we're collecting data from 30-somethings and 70-somethings. And we're having the 30-ish-year-olds talk to each other and the 70-ish-year-olds talk to each other, and then also these cross-generational conversations between them.

Mm-hmm.

And so I think what's interesting there is we can see if there are age effects such that younger people are showing a bigger liking gap than older people, does it occur also controlling for who they're talking to, right? If they're talking to someone within their own age group or they're talking to someone of a different age group, whether that affects the liking gap as well.

Do you think there are personality characteristics that make some of these social illusions either more likely or less likely?

Yeah, so we have found that people who are more shy exhibit a larger liking gap, and I would expect that social anxiety would as well. We haven't measured a lot of personality variables. We've only tested a few kind of in the early days, but I would be interested in doing that in a larger sample to see what kinds of trends that we could find.

And in the other direction, I might imagine that some personality trait like narcissism, for example, might cause people to have the opposite conclusion. They actually believe that they're the center of everyone else's world when in fact they're not.

Right. That would be interesting to look at as well.

Do you think there's a functional reason why our brains produce some of these social illusions, Erika? Why is it, do you think, that these exist in the mind?

There definitely can be a function in terms of trying to improve for next time, especially with the liking gap. So if we're focused on our kind of self-critical thoughts, the times we fell short, the things we said that we wish we hadn't, right, thinking about those counterfactuals and how we could have done better or we could improve for next time might actually help us. It might help us make a better impression next time or become a more savvy social actor. But I think, you know, it also has some pitfalls. So I think we kind of need to find the right balance there.

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This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. We all wonder what other people think of us, and we all want to be liked, but we often walk away from conversations with friends and strangers worried that maybe we talk too much, or didn't say enough or said the wrong thing. Some of us spent sleepless nights worrying about how social interactions unfolded. Psychologist Erika Boothby studies how our perception of our social worlds are like looking into a funhouse mirror. She calls these distortions social illusions. Recognizing these illusions for what they are is an important first step to seeing things more clearly.

Yeah, being aware of it, I think, can help. And a lot of people have written me about the Liking Gap and said how much it resonates with them. I've had clinical psychologists tell me that now they tell their patients about it, and it's helped them feel better just knowing that they're not alone, that other people feel this way too. And that does seem to help.

In addition to recognizing that these illusions exist, there are other techniques that can also help us to see our interactions with other people more clearly. Erika, when you first moved to Philadelphia to begin teaching at Wharton, You didn't know many people, so you made a coffee date with a friend of a friend. This was another young academic who was also new in town, and you were thrilled that you'd made a new friend, but then you didn't hear back from her. How did your initial conversation go, and what went through your mind when you didn't hear back?

I really liked her. I could imagine becoming friends, but of course I tried to contain my excitement and play it cool. And then, you know, a few days passed, no word from her. I didn't get, you know, a text saying she enjoyed our conversation or anything following up. And so I just, I don't know, got a little worried. And I texted our mutual friend. I raved about what a great, interesting person she was. And I just said I wasn't sure, you know, how much she liked me or if she'd actually be interested in meeting up again. I felt like I'd been kind of rambling a lot in the conversation. I was nervous. The stakes felt kind of high. I didn't have any friends here. And so I— I, you know, wanted it to work out. But to my surprise, then my mutual friend wrote me back and she said, you know, that's so funny, you both texted me the same thing about each other. You should just text her. And so there I was, victim to my own effect. I, you know, studied the liking gap, and so oftentimes I do try to check my self-critical voice and override it when I can. But for some reason in this moment, I really wasn't thinking like a scientist. I was just You're just emotionally in the moment. But luckily, we, in this case, had our mutual friend to help set us straight. Otherwise, I'm just not sure we would have ever seen each other again, even though we both wanted to.

I love this story because it really shows how sometimes we need to turn to friends, to family members, to therapists to help us see reality more clearly.

Exactly. I think it really helps in these cases to get an outside perspective.

And I think intuitively, many of us understand that this is valuable. I think what I take away from your work really is that it's really important to do this systematically, not just at a point where you feel like something has gone wrong, but to systematically invite third parties in to basically say, what do you think is going on? What do you see happening here? Because it's possible that they will see things differently than you do.

Yeah, I think that's exactly right.

There's a second powerful idea in addressing these social illusions. I want to play you a clip from the TV show Ted Lasso, Erika. A woman is worried that a guy she's dating isn't as interested in her as she is in him. She thinks he might be seeing other people, and she confronts him.

So the other day when you said you were too busy to text me back—

Yeah, 'cause I was busy.

But you never told me what you were too busy with. Yeah, 'cause it was private. Are you dating other people? It's okay if you are. It's just that I want to know so that I don't look stupid.

It was yoga, okay? I do yoga with a group of women in their 60s. They have no idea who I am. It's twice a week, and it's really good for my core.

Normally, it only takes an hour, but more—

Erika, can you talk about the idea that sometimes a really effective way to find out what's happening in the minds of other people is to simply ask them?

Yeah, I think this is a great example. And it just shows what we were talking about in terms of impression management. He doesn't want to share where he really was and why he didn't text back, because that is embarrassing for him. But on the other flip side, And for her, she really needed to know. And so, yeah, I think this is a great example of how effective it can be to sometimes just ask. But there's reasons that we don't, and sometimes it's well-founded, right? On the one hand, we don't want to pry or be pushy, and we think that, you know, if someone didn't tell us something, there's a reason for it, and we should kind of let them have that space. And on the other hand, sometimes we don't ask people things directly because we're afraid of what the answer might be.

I want to talk about a third way to dismantle some of these illusions. Can you talk about the importance of trying to pay less attention to ourselves, you know, our own fears, our anxieties, our needs, and more attention to the other person, what they actually are saying and doing? How can that potentially play a role in dismantling some of these illusions?

The research on social anxiety shows that if you go into a conversation with the goal of learning as much about your partner as possible, that that shifts your attention from being focused on your own thoughts and what, you know, you might be doing wrong toward being focused on your conversation partner. And so, you know, I try doing this myself, and a lot of the thoughts that normally fuel the liking gap, you know, our concerns about what people think of us, just aren't there when I'm more focused on the other person.

So in conversations, you're actually asking yourself, stay focused on the other person, stay focused on what's happening in their mind, let me try and understand them a little better.

Yeah, and I think even thinking about it not as trying to stay focused on them, but if you actually think about it as trying to be curious about them and interested in them, that is actually a better mental strategy. And it just gives you a different mindset altogether in the conversation if you can kind of maintain your curiosity, ask them Ask them questions about themselves, ask them follow-up questions. That's really where you want to be, and that will help you get more immersed in the conversation and less focused on yourself.

I remember reading a research study maybe about a year or so ago which talked about how much people underestimate the power of asking questions in conversations and how much they believe that a conversation is about making statements and offering their opinions, and how much more they're in fact liked when in fact they ask questions of the other person, which speaks exactly to what you're just saying, Erica.

Exactly. I mean, it's a win-win because on the one hand, you're getting outside of your own head and your own self-critical thoughts, but also focusing on them, asking them questions, learning about them makes them like you more.

I want to talk about one other idea, Erica, and this is not so much about removing the social illusions as much as it's about preventing the social illusions from harming our relationships. You grew up near the ocean in Santa Cruz, California, and recently you've gone back to surf there. Can you tell me the story of the King of 38th Street and what the story taught you about the power of compliments?

Yeah. So I got really addicted to surfing a couple of years ago, and I go to this spot at 38th. It's just a great beginner wave, and I spent a lot of time there, especially early on, just trying to figure out how to ride waves, how to pop up, which is just getting from laying down on the board to standing up. And there was this guy, he's an amazing surfer, he's always out there, and he was always in exactly the right spot catching all the best waves. And my friends and I privately call him the King of 38th. And he has no idea about that, of course. But I always keep an eye on him when I'm out there because he's so good, he's so fun to watch, and I can really learn a lot from him. And so one morning I was out in the water, it was me, the King, and just a handful of other people. And I was having one of the best days I'd ever had, catching just about every wave I paddled for, getting these really long rides. And all of a sudden, I saw the King of 38th himself paddling up to me. And I thought, oh no, for sure he's gonna tell me that I had done something wrong. So the cardinal sin in surfing is dropping in on someone, which just means paddling into a wave when someone else is already on it. And I thought for sure, you know, I did something really dumb. I hadn't noticed. And he was about to lecture me. But instead, he actually smiled at me. He told me that my positioning was perfect, and he'd noticed I just had a really nice, natural style. And I was totally floored. I mean, this made my week, absolutely, because the king himself had, A, noticed me, B, he had seen that I was having a great day out there, and C, he bothered to come over and tell me about it. I mean, it was an amazing feeling. And what's interesting is that there's a million times I've noticed people doing things that I really liked, but I usually kept those thoughts to myself. But after I got this compliment from the King of 38th, and knowing what I do now about compliments from my own research, I really try to make it a point to give people more compliments on the water instead of just keeping those thoughts to myself and not telling anyone. And I've noticed that that makes a huge difference. I mean, people are always surprised when I compliment them when we're surfing because, you know, these compliments are kind of rare. Even though we're all sitting there thinking plenty of nice things about each other, no one actually says what they're thinking.

I'm wondering if one of the advantages of offering compliments is, in fact, people are often worried that other people don't like them. In fact, their self-concept is that other people don't like me as much as I like them. And when people give us compliments, in some ways, they are helping us to dismantle the liking gap. So we see that someone actually is like— does actually like us, is coming up to say something nice to us. It helps to compensate for So there's bias that we're carrying around inside our own heads.

I definitely think that's true, and I also think that's why it's so surprising to us when we receive these compliments, because we don't expect it, right? We kind of expect the worst from people in a sense. We don't realize how charitable they are socially or, you know, how positively they already think about us. So when they do give us these compliments, it's kind of a window into what they're actually thinking.

Erica Boothby is a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton Erica, thank you for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

Thank you so much for having me.

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Thank you.

Next week in our Mind Reading 2.0 series, We look at a blind spot in the way we judge what's happening in other people's heads.

There's the path that we use for self-judgment, and there's the path that we use for judging others. And in my view, the path that we use for judging others is we look at their actions. The path that we use for judging ourselves is we look inwards.

If you liked today's show, please be sure to share it with a couple of friends. While you're at it, pay those friends a compliment that you've always thought but never said out loud. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon. Having lots of choices sounds like it would be great. Who doesn't want more flavors of ice cream? It turns out the answer is us. Too many choices can make us anxious, overwhelmed. I'm Shankar Vedantam, host of the Hidden Brain podcast and YouTube channel. Each week, Hidden Brain brings you fascinating, science-backed insights about human behavior. So the next time you have to choose, choose Hidden Brain on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or hiddenbrain.org. Hi, it's me, your gutters. I want to start by saying I'm fine. Everything is totally fine. There's just— there's a lot of debris up here, and I've been managing it mostly on my own for about 8 months now. It's been months now, and I just thought maybe you could find someone on Angie to clean me up? You don't have to make it a whole thing. It doesn't need to be a whole thing. I just— I could really use your help.

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