Nicholas Epley
speaker
161 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Oct 2024
last heard Oct 2024
Nicholas Epley’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
It's just hard to know what somebody else is thinking and there's not much we can do to it.
That doesn't seem to be quite true though, but some strategies work better than others it turns out.
Data suggests that reading people's body language, not as helpful as we might imagine it is because body language can often mislead.
Often we try to take people's perspectives.
I try to put myself in your shoes, Mike, and think what you might be thinking in this situation.
We find with our married couples that that doesn't work at all when they put themselves in their spouse's shoes to try to really think carefully about what they're thinking.
They don't do better.
They do worse.
The only thing that makes us better at this is stopping guessing and just asking what's on the mind of another person.
So if I actually ask you what you think, how often do you feel like we're actually too much in debt these days?
Then I'll find out what you're actually thinking because you will say it.
That doesn't seem like rocket science.
That seems totally obvious, except that for our participants in these experiments, when they were actually using that strategy, when we actually gave them the chance to ask their partner how they felt about these things before going off and predicting how they would respond on the survey, they didn't think they did any better
than the people who are using the far less effective strategies of just guessing or considering somebody else's perspective.
So the strategy that seems obviously effective doesn't seem to be one we use as often as we should or think that it's as effective when we actually use it as it is.
when we asked our married couples to predict how many they thought they actually got right how many they thought they got exactly correct they wildly overestimated how many they actually got correct they were actually barely better than chance but they thought so they were getting a little over four correct they thought on average they were getting 12 out of 20 exactly correct and
And even in the condition where they ask their spouse these questions and actually heard their response,
They were then doing much better.
They were getting more like 10 out of 20 exactly correct.
They still thought they were only at about 12.
Showing 101–120 of 161 · page 6 of 9
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