If a baby starts to cry several hours after drinking his last bottle, his mother knows precisely what he's feeling: He's hungry. But suppose a woman's eyes brim with tears while she watches a DVD. Her husband sinks into the couch: What is she so upset about? She might tell him directly: "This movie is so tragic. It's all about a doomed romance." That may be true. But she could be thinking about how the story reminds her of her own marital troubles. Maybe she's feeling hurt because she thinks her husband should realize what's bothering her and acknowledge it. Or maybe she isn't even aware that her real-world concerns are intensifying her reaction to the fictional couple.
Quickly and unknowingly, he scours his mental files—on his wife's relationship history, on her reaction to the fight they had that morning, on the way she typically reacts to similar movies. He notes the particular quiver to her voice, observes the way she's curled up on the couch, watches the expressions flickering across her face. He takes in information from all of these channels, filters it through his own wishes and biases… until finally it hits him: She knows about his mistress!
Every day, whether we're pushing for a raise, wrestling with the kids over homework, or judging whether a friend really likes our latest redecorating spree, we're reading each other's minds. Drawing on our observations, our databank of memories, our powers of reason, and our wellsprings of emotion, we constantly make educated guesses about what another person is thinking and feeling. Throughout the most heated argument or the most lighthearted chat, we're intently collecting clues to what's on the other person's mind at the moment. "It's a perceptual ability I call mindsight," says Daniel Siegel, UCLA psychiatrist and author of The Mindful Brain. "It allows your brain to create a map of another person's internal state."
Mind reading of this sort—not to be confused with the infallible superhero kind of telepathy—is a critical human skill. It's the way we make sense of other people's behavior and decide on our own next moves. Mind reading enables us to negotiate, compete, cooperate, and achieve emotional closeness with others. It lets us figure out when we're being manipulated or seduced. It's how we know when someone finds our jokes hilarious or is humoring us out of politeness. Mind-reading ability is perhaps the most urgent element of social intelligence.
Do it poorly and the consequences are serious: It can lead to conflict born of misunderstanding. It can make us feel lonely within a relationship. It can even incite violence: Abusive husbands typically—and inaccurately—attribute critical thoughts to their wives; that's why they lash out. Difficulty divining others' thoughts and feelings—"mindblindness"— characterizes autism and is what makes the condition so socially debilitating.
Decades of research on mind reading (or, as psychologists call it, empathic accuracy) now reveal how it works, who's especially good at it, and how we can improve our ability to divine others' thoughts—even when our conversation partners may not know their own minds. The thoughts and feelings of others, including those closest to us, are far from transparent; that makes mind reading the only way to know someone beyond the mere surface. It's the only way to achieve true intimacy. And the only way to love someone for who he or she really is.
The Great Trade-Off
It's astonishing that we can peer into each other's minds at all—but in truth we generally don't do it all that well. Strangers (who are videotaped and later report their second-by-second thoughts and feelings, as well as their assessments of their counterpart's thoughts and feelings) read each other with an average accuracy rate of 20 percent. Close friends and married couples nudge that up to 35 percent. And "almost no one ever scores higher than 60 percent," reports psychologist William Ickes, the father of empathic accuracy, who is based at the University of Texas at Arlington.
Our (limited) ability to mind read has ancient roots, says Ross Buck, a professor of communication sciences at the University of Connecticut. Over thousands of years of evolution, humans' systems of communication grew more sophisticated, as living and working arrangements became more complex. Mind reading became a tool with which to "create and maintain the social order," as Buck puts it. It helped to know when to affirm a commitment to a mate or defuse a dispute with a neighbor.
Of course, in order to advance our own interests, we still needed to conceal feelings from others at times, and even to lie. "We didn't always want to show exactly what we were thinking, because others could use that to gain the upper hand," says Buck. Our merely adequate mindsight, then, can be thought of as the product of a tug-of-war between the need to show and the need to hide our true selves.
This delicate balance between perceiving and concealing has served humans well over our long history, but Siegel worries that mind-reading ability is now on the decline in our culture. Today's obsessed-with-success parents spend so much time stimulating their children with structured activities, noisy toys, and Baby Einstein DVDs, they are not sitting still and being "present" with their kids. As a result, they deny children the opportunity to learn how to get in tune with another person, physically and emotionally—that is, to develop mindsight. A reasonable degree of mindsight is required, he says, for a civil society in which adults are kind to one another.
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