"It's obvious how I feel"

On Sunday you felt as though your state was written all over you. You were quiet at lunch. Your shoulders were up. Your "fine" had an edge on it that you could hear yourself. It seems impossible that someone who's lived with you for eleven years could look at all that and see nothing.

Thomas Gilovich, Kenneth Savitsky and Victoria Husted Medvec have a name for this impression. They call it the illusion of transparency, and they define it as a tendency for people to overestimate how far others can make out their internal states. In their experiments, people who were lying thought their lies were easier to spot than they were. People who were tasting something foul while keeping a straight face thought their disgust showed more than it did. In each case the feeling was strong inside the person, and it seemed to them that it must be leaking out. Observers saw much less.

Their explanation is worth having. When you try to judge how you look to someone else, you start from how you feel and adjust from there. You know you feel dreadful, so you start from there. But you don't adjust far enough, because your own feelings are so vivid to you. The other person has no access to that starting point. All they have is your face and your voice, and those show much less of your feelings than you'd think.

Set that beside what your partner actually had on Sunday. They saw a person who was a bit quiet at lunch. People are quiet at lunch for many reasons, including tiredness, a headache, thinking about work, or nothing at all. They heard "fine". They saw you clean the kitchen, which you do most Sundays. From inside, you were sending a signal at full volume. From outside, it was a fairly ordinary Sunday with a slightly subdued spouse.

There's a related finding about people who fear rejection, and it applies to anyone who finds asking hard. Jacquie Vorauer and colleagues studied people making overtures of romantic interest. People who were anxious about being rejected believed their cautious overtures conveyed much more interest than they did. The researchers called it a signal amplification bias. The person knew how much it had cost them to make even a small move. They assumed the other person would take that into account and read the small move as a large one. The other person couldn't know about the cost, and saw only the small move.

I think the same thing happens with signals of need. You know what it cost you to let your voice drop on the word "fine". To you, that was nearly a confession. To the person who heard it, it was the word "fine".