Before you start

This is a short book and you can read it in two or three sittings. It's about one habit, and the habit is a sentence. Somebody does something clumsy, a message goes unanswered, a colleague talks over you, a friend forgets a birthday, an email lands with no greeting, a car cuts in, and before you've had time to think, a sentence has formed about why. They're ignoring me. They think they're more important. They don't rate me. They did it on purpose. The sentence arrives fast, it feels like knowing something, and it's usually wrong.

I'm going to argue three things. The first is that the habit makes sense from the inside. Guessing at motives is what minds do, the guess protects you from being caught out, and now and then it's right. The second is that the guess has a known lean, and the lean has been studied for sixty years. People explain other people's behaviour by their character and their own by their circumstances, they overrate how clear their own tone is and so assume other people's tone was deliberate, and the guess feeds back into how they treat the person, which produces the behaviour they suspected. The third is practical. Before you settle on a motive that needs malice, name three that don't. If the act matters, ask one plain question. And when you object, object to the act and not to the motive you assigned it. Chapters 17 to 20 cover how.

This book doesn't ask you to think well of everyone. Some people do mean it, and chapter 21 is about them. It asks you to stop deciding before you've looked.

Two cautions.

If the person whose motives you're reading belittles you, controls your money, keeps you from friends or family, checks where you are, or frightens you, the charitable reading this book describes isn't the right tool, and chapter 21 says where to go instead.

And if you find that you distrust most people most of the time, that the suspicion is there before anyone has done anything, and it's making you miserable or costing you relationships, that's worth talking to a GP about, because it can be part of anxiety or low mood and there's help for both.

The notes at the back give my sources and their limits. Where I'm giving my own reasoning and not a finding, I'll say so.