Rate this book

Mindwise: Why We Misunderstand What Others Think, Believe, Feel, And Want (2014)

by Nicholas Epley(Favorite Author)

3.67 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

0307595919 (ISBN13: 9780307595911)

languge

English

genre

Nonfiction

publisher

Knopf

review 1: First off, I have to say how much I appreciate Epley's writing style. This book is PACKED with information, but it was effortless to read because he is such a clear and focused writer. In every chapter, he outlines what he's going to say, then he says it, and then he summarizes what he said and explains how it relates to his next point. Another writer may have let his reader feel bogged down and overwhelmed by so much information, but Epley is really a wonderful guide.And, most importantly, this book was fascinating! I learned so much about how the mind works, how we try to guess what people think and feel, how forming these guesses is such an important skill, but not one that we are necessarily very good at executing accurately all the time--and we are not nearly as accur... moreate as we think we are. There were a lot of tidbits of information that I found intriguing, but here are some that really stood out to me:*** Botox makes you less empathetic.*** Racists may not be as racist as they think they are, especially when face-to-face with the person they supposedly hate.*** It's a lot harder to shoot someone, even an "enemy," if you can see that person's face.*** We are wired to see differences and form stereotypes, but we tend to exaggerate the degree of our differences.*** We may know our spouses or good friends reasonably well, but we think we know them much better than we actually do.Ultimately, my take-away from this book is that our minds are impressive, powerful data-computing machines capable of inferring a lot from just a little. Unfortunately, though, our minds don't always have or use the most accurate information to make assumptions about what others are thinking, and so we are wrong about the intentions, feelings, and thoughts of other people more times than we think. As Epley describes it, our confidence far outstrips our ability. His solution? Recognize your limitations when it comes to guessing what others are thinking. Be more open to sharing what's on your mind, and, most importantly, LISTEN when other people tell you what they are thinking, feeling, or wanting.Overall, this was a great book--very well-written and incredibly engaging.
review 2: Nicholas Epley wants to tell us about mind-reading and, in particular, why we're so damn bad at it. It's not that we're no good at all at reading the minds of others. Our guesses about how others collectively view us -- as funny, attractive, intelligent and so on -- are correlated with reality much better than chance guesses. But our ability to know what any single individual thinks of us is much worse, and not much better than chance. Also, we vastly overestimate the accuracy of our ability to know what others think of us. In fact, there's a greater difference between what people actually think of us and what they really think of us than there is between their actual views and a random guess.We can understand others only because we have such similar mental machinery, and in fact rely on mirror neurons to understand a great deal of what we know about what others are feeling physically. Yet we consistently attribute more sordid motives to others than we do to ourselves. We believe that we are primarily altruistic, but others are primarily materialistic. Managers think they themselves are motivated by higher motives, but that their subordinates are mercenary; subordinates return the favor. "Egocentrism is a great place to start when reasoning about the minds of others, but it is a terrible place to stop." As a result of these misunderstandings in the work place, compensation and bonus schemes are most often disconnected from the intrinsic motives -- challenge, autonomy, the ability to make a difference -- that really drive people. It's a waste of money, waste of talent, and waste of lives. There is a great case study about how the NUMMI car factory in California went from the worst GM plant in North America to the very best, after Toyota came in as a joint venture partner and started using non-adversarial management model based on teams and empowering production line workers. Not only do we fail to understand others, but we often fail to understand ourselves as well. For example, our stated prejudices and our actual behavior are often quite different. People who claim to hate Asians will in fact treat them quite civilly on an individual basis. There was a famous experiment in the late 1920's and early 1930's by a white researcher who traveled around the US with an Asian couple, going to restaurants and checking into hotels. Only once were they refused service, even though when the researcher wrote these businesses to inquire about whether they would serve Asians they said they would not. When the social context drives people to behave in a socially appropriate way -- e.g. a well-dressed and polite couple presents themselves and asks to rent a room for the night -- then they do. But similarly, the wrong context, such as a drunken mob, can lead to race riots.There are countless other examples of our difficulties with knowing ourselves, such as the one that leads to the "planning fallacy". When students were asked to come up with a best case, most likely case and worst case for how long it will take them to complete a given task -- such as completing an undergraduate thesis -- the average time to actually complete it was consistently worse than the worst case. Even writing Mindwise took the author one year longer than its worst case.Our ego-centrism failings are particularly obvious when applied to moral and ethical issues. One experiment involved a series of questions posed to MBA students re the ethics of: buying a meal for a friend and charging it to company, saying you'll do something when you have no intention to do so, lying to a prospective employer about how much you made at the last job, and so on. Those who held the minority view (vs. their fellow students) consistently over-estimated by a factor of two or more how large a percentage of others thought the same way they did. The smaller the minority, the more off-base their guesses were about others sharing the same views. My guess is that Tea Partiers tend to think their views are much more widely shared than they are and that that is one of the reasons why they think the media shows consistent bias in reporting otherwise.Ego-centrism also impairs our ability to gauge whether the recipients of emails will be as good as recipients of phone calls in correctly gauging the sender / caller's intent. Can they tell the difference between a sarcastic comment and a serious one? The caller/sender thinks there will be little difference in accuracy between email and phoning. In fact, listeners over the phone are 20 percentage points more accurate than those who get an email. Email is missing the critical clue of tone of voice, therefore the quality of communications suffers greatly. Remember this when you have a choice between emailing / texting someone vs. giving them a call / actually going to see them.The best chapter in the book is the one on stereotypes. In judging others, we are much more accurate when we deal personally with individuals than when we judge them as a group based on stereotypes. (This is the opposite of the finding with respect to guessing how others judge us: we have a much better idea of the general verdict than that of any individual.)An extreme form of stereotyping involves actually dehumanizing other groups, based on race, language, religion, sexual orientation and so on. Paradoxically, we also have an ability to humanize (anthropomorphize) the non-human that is very puzzling. In the very same election, California voters voted to strip gays of the right to marry (Prop 8) and at the same time prohibit the mistreatment of pigs in factory farms! The power of stereotypes, even over those who are themselves the victims of those stereotypes, is so great that merely having African-Americans identify themselves by their race on a demographics form on an SAT test causes them to perform much worse than if they are not asked for this data. Similarly, if old people are primed with words associated with positive views of old age (wise, experienced, sage) rather than negative ones (feeble, slow, senile), they do much better on cognitive tests. Also, the cognitive decline of the elderly is greatly controlled by the stereotyped views of their culture. Thus, in China old people are more likely to be valued than in the US, and age-related cognitive decline is much less.Even where a stereotype has some truth -- e.g. that women have higher social sensitivity than men -- the strength of the association is greatly overestimated. For this trait, the correlation is 0.2 (very weak) but people think it is 3.5 times as strong, at 0.7. In fact, the differences among men and women are much stronger than the differences between the genders.How to overcome these vexing problems of doing such a poor job of reading the minds of others? Traditionally, the recommendation is to put yourself in the shoes of the other. It turns out that adopting the perspective of the other does NOT work and may make matters even worse, because you simply bring your stereotypes and prejudices with you, and reinforce them. Similarly, trying to read body language turns out to be just as likely to mislead as to correctly inform. Micro-expressions don't work either. But if you're going to use bodily clues, voice cues are more reliable than visual clues. It is far better to listen to someone attentively than to watch them. When we watch, we far too often misinterpret e.g. we read shyness as arrogance.The best approach to understanding our fellow human beings turns out to be the simplest: ask the other person what they are thinking, and repeat it back to them to make sure you've understood!!! A good complement to direct questioning and attentive listening is to be more expressive yourself. The more you show what you feel and say what you feel, the more likely you are to be understood, to have better social relationships and to be happy. The author cites a great anecdote about University of Michigan Hospitals which changed their malpractice approach in 2001. Instead of the usual legal adversarial approach, they instead had doctors meet with the unhappy patients, admit what had gone wrong, apologize for it, explain how it happened, and offer fair compensation. Lawsuits dropped by more than half, time to resolution dropped by about a third, while costs went way down.Summary: We think we know what others are thinking, but we usually don't know. Worse, we think we're much better mind readers than we actually are. So, ask questions and listen well. less

Download links for: Mindwise: Why We Misunderstand What Others Think, Believe, Feel, and Want

Advertising