We Are Strangers To Ourselves

The language of intentions and motives and other mental states avoids this complication altogether by using the same set of concepts to explain all actions. We use the idea of consciousness and intent and prescribe it to everything.

This mentalistic language is both imprecise and inaccurat...

Getting to know someone, even over a lifetime of marriage, creates an illusion of insight that far surpasses actual insight.

The violent actors are overwhelmed by empathy for their own group, which all too often naturally leads to disdain for competing groups.

• Naïve realism: the intuitive sense that we see the world out there as it actually is, rather than as it appears from our own perspective. 
• When other people don’t share your views, the all-too-common sentiment that comes straight from naïve realism is “I’m right and you’re ...

Religious beliefs are intuitively compelling because minds—in this case, the mind of a god—are intuitive explanations for the behavior of almost anything.

Two very important things about when minds emerge in both humans and nonhumans.  

• First, they tend to emerge when someone has...

You define yourself not by the attributes that make you the same as everyone else—has two arms, two legs, breathes air—but, rather, by the attributes that make you different from everyone else—spent

A group defined by its similarity to others is, by definition, no group at all. Your socia...

Childhood instincts are not outgrown so much as they are overcome by more careful and reflective thinking.

As we grow up we learn nuances of a situation. Even in small groups, the social spotlight does not shine on us nearly as brightly as we think.

Becoming aware of the power of y...

We then developed a household policy of complete immunity as long as you tell the truth. This combination of delay and immunity has worked wonders for us. 

• When the employee fears retribution and the boss isn’t open to hearing the truth, nobody speaks their mind and the event becomes p...

• Human beings are more likely to do things that are easy rather than hard. They don’t have some deep desire to litter; they’re just more likely to do whatever is going on around them.
• And so you do what social animals do when they’re unsure: you look to other people for information...

• What you pay attention to
• Your interpretation of what you are paying attention to

The two different versions of egocentric biases, are produced by differences in attention (the neck problem) and the differences in interpretation (the lens problem).  

• We give things a mind when we can’t truly understand why something has happened.
• Studies reveal that people report that unpredictable gadgets seemed more mindful than predictable gadgets.
• When geometrical figures assume personal characteristics, a unified structure emerges. U...

By remaining disengaged from other minds in this way, we neglect a chief source of human happiness: engaging relationally with other people. 

• The relatively slow work of getting a person’s perspective is the way you understand them accurately, and the way you solve their problems most effectively. 
• The main barrier to getting perspective is that others won’t tell you what you’d like to know. They lie, mislead, misdirect, a...

• Distortions like this are easy to find. When your own views are one-sided, a balanced account will necessarily differ from your own perspective, and the errors in reporting will therefore seem to exist in them rather than in you. 
• The problem of expertise is one of many examples of m...

As a member of one of the planet’s most social species, you are hypersensitive to eyes because they offer a window into another person’s mind.

Given the obvious benefits of attending to others’ eyes, it makes good sense that we would be hypersensitive to anything that even vaguely resembl...

Your sixth sense functions only when you engage it. When you do not, you may fail to recognize a fully human mind that is right before your eyes. Said differently, sometimes we are triggered to engage with the mind of another and other times we are not. 

When you can’t see a human in front ...

The basic principles of perception described here are simple, based almost entirely on similarity: “if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, then it must be a duck.” 

• Anyone who’s ever spoken in front of a large audience or walked down a crowded city sidewalk can confirm this. Individuals within large groups are almost invisible. 
• What your brain extracts automatically from a group is an overall assessment, not its distinct individuals. 
• O...

By thinking that their employees have simplistic motives, bosses overlook the actual depth of their employees’ minds and therefore fail to offer their workers what really motivates them. 

Nature is filled with fakes. Lithops are deliciously succulent plants that look like completely inedible rocks. The praying mantis is a perfectly deadly predator that can look like a completely harmless plant. You don’t need a PhD in evolutionary biology to understand fakery. 

When a man looks into the camera and renounces his citizenship, you have every reason to assume that he means what he says. When that camera zooms out to show a jihadist holding a gun to the man’s head in one hand and a script in the other, you know his words are misleading. 

The problem is...

When others’ minds are unknown, the mind you imagine is based heavily on your own. So, it is heavily distorted by your reality. 

Neural regions that are active when actually experiencing physical pain firsthand also being active when watching other people experiencing pain.

As Galileo knew, to see the world accurately, you need to look in the right place and then view it through the right lens. These are two pieces of wisdom that you and I can easily forget. 

A man on one side of a river shouts to a man standing on the other side, “Hey, how do I get to th...

Much more effective for changing behaviour is targeting the broader context rather than individual minds, making it easier for people to do the things they already want to do. 

Statistics (the numbers) doesn’t reveal the context. Therefore the fundamental problem that plagues all statistics...

Stereotypes routinely stray beyond observation and into explanation. When groups differ, the easy answer is that the differences are due to something essential, internal, or stable about the group members, rather than to something external and therefore unstable, such as social norms and hair dye...

When we’re seeking to understand another’s mind, we rely on at least three strategies.  

1. We project from our own mind. 

2. Use stereotypes.  

3. Infer a mind from a person’s actions.