"I can tell what they're thinking"

The reading comes with a picture of the other person's mind. Your manager is thinking the report was weak. Your partner is thinking about the bins. You don't just know it's about you. You know what they're thinking about you, and that feels like a skill.

Nicholas Epley and colleagues, in 2004, ran five studies on how people work out what someone else perceives. The finding was that we start from our own view and adjust from it. We don't build a picture of another mind from scratch. We take our own and move it a bit. People were slower to say that another person's view would differ from their own than to say it would be similar. Under time pressure, their estimates got more like their own view, not less. When offered a reward for accuracy, they adjusted further. And the adjustments tended to stop early, at the first plausible answer, rather than continuing to where the other person actually was.

Apply that to the quiet dinner. You're anxious about the plan you changed. You look at your partner's silence and ask what's in their mind. The research says you start from what's in yours, which is the plan, adjust a little, and stop at the first plausible answer, which is that they're thinking about the plan. The reading isn't a reading of them. It's your own state, moved a little, and the moving stopped early. That's why the reading always seems to know what they're thinking, and why what they're thinking always turns out to be the thing you were already thinking about.

There's an older finding, used in several earlier books in this series, that people overestimate how visible their own inner states are to others. Thomas Gilovich and colleagues called it the illusion of transparency. I mention it because it's the same error from the other side. You think your state shows, and you think their state is legible, and both come from the same place, which is that your own state is so vivid to you that it colours everything, including your picture of what's in someone else's head.

So the belief in this chapter is half right. You can tell what someone's thinking, in the sense that you can produce a confident picture of it in under a second. What the research says is where the picture comes from, and it comes from you.