Mindwise

Superb at diagnosing why we misread other minds and unexpectedly short on remedies once the diagnosis is finished.

Mindwise, Nicholas Epley, 2014.

Epley is superb at diagnosing why we misread other minds and unexpectedly short on remedies once he is finished diagnosing it. The fix, most of the time, turns out to be ask them directly, which is correct and also a fix that only works where asking is actually possible.

Epley argues that the brain’s model of other minds is not a weak version of perception but a separate, error prone inference process, and that our confidence in it tracks almost nothing about its accuracy. Perspective taking, guessing from the inside, reliably makes the guess worse rather than better, because it substitutes imagination for information. The corrective he proposes, asking a direct question and then verifying you understood the answer, is unglamorous and, he shows convincingly, actually works. He is less convincing when he extends the same fix to gaps created by power rather than information; an employee guessing at a boss’s mood cannot always just ask.

Two things kept. The lens problem, the assumption that what is obvious to me from the inside must be obvious to you from the outside, is not a flaw specific to experts explaining their work; it runs through anyone who has spent longer thinking about something than the person listening. And accuracy about another mind is not won by imagining harder. It is won by asking a direct question and repeating the answer back until the other person agrees you got it right.

I run four one on one meetings a week with the engineers I manage, and for the last two months I have opened each one with a direct question, what is actually slowing you down right now, then repeated the answer back before responding to it. Fourteen meetings in, the repeat back step has caught a wrong guess on my part five times, twice about workload and three times about which project someone actually cared about most. It has not touched the harder case Epley’s own fix does not cover well: a contractor who reports to me but is paid by another company has given the same polished non answer to the direct question four weeks running, and asking more directly has only made the answers shorter.