Mind Reading 2.0: How others see you

It's not easy to know how we come across to others, especially when we're meeting people for the first time. Psychologist Erica Boothby says many of us underestimate how much other people actually like us. In the second installment of our Mind Reading 2.0 series, we look at how certain social illusions give us a distorted picture of ourselves.

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[Two girls on a playground, their backs turned to us, are looking at another child in the distance.]

How Others See You

By Hidden Brain Staff

/ July 4, 2023

It’s not easy to know how we come across to others, especially when we’re meeting people for the first time. Psychologist Erica Boothby says many of us underestimate how much other people actually like us. This week, we revisit one of our most popular episodes to look at how certain social illusions give us a distorted picture of ourselves.

*For more on social illusions, check out our Mind Reading 2.0 series about how we try to understand the minds of others.*

Additional Resources

Research:

The Thought Gap After Conversation: Underestimating the Frequency of Others’ Thoughts About Us, by Erica Boothy, Gus Cooney, and Mariana Lee, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 2021.

The Liking Gap in Groups and Teams, by Adam Mastroianni, Gus Cooney, and Erica Boothby, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 2021.

Why a Simple Act of Kindness is Not as Simple as It Seems: Underestimating the Positive Impact of Our Compliments on Others, by Erica Boothby and Vanessa Bohns, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2021.

The Development of the Liking Gap: Children Older Than 5 Years Think That Partners Evaluate Them Less Positively Than They Evaluate Their Partners, by Wouter Wolf, Amanda Nafe, and Michael Tomasello, Psychological Science, 2021.

Do Conversations End When People Want Them To? by Adam Mastroianni, et. al, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2021.

The Liking Gap in Conversations: Do People Like Us More Than We Think? by Erica Boothby, Gus Cooney, and Margaret Clark, Psychological Science, 2018.

The World Looks Better Together: How Close Others Enhance Our Visual Experiences, Erica Boothby, et. al, Personal Relationships, 2017.

The Invisibility Cloak Illusion: People (Incorrectly) Believe They Observe Others More Than Others Observe Them, by Erica Boothby, Margaret Clark, and John Bargh, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2017.

Psychological Distance Moderates the Amplification of Shared Experience, by Erica Boothby, et. al, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2016.

Shared Experiences are Amplified, by Erica Boothby, Margaret S. Clark, and John A. Bargh, Psychological Science, 2014.

The Spotlight Effect in Social Judgment: An Egocentric Bias in Estimates of the Salience of One’s Own Actions and Appearance, by Thomas Gilovich, Victoria Husted Medvec, and Kenneth Savitsky, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2000.

Grab Bag:

A hilarious scene from When Harry Met Sally

Children interrupt a BBC news interview

‘Isn’t that Trump Lawyer?’: A New York Times Reporter’s Accidental Scoop by Kenneth Vogel, The New York Times, 2017.

Transcript

*The transcript below may be for an earlier version of this episode.
Our transcripts are provided by various partners and may contain errors or deviate slightly from the audio.*

Shankar Vedantam:This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. Many of us spend enormous amounts of time asking ourselves what other people think of us. Do they notice our flaws? Are they mocking us behind our backs? Do they think we're boring? It turns out that the way we imagine we are being seen is often spectacularly wrong. In our episode last week, we looked at how we spend a lot of time trying to read other people's minds and how we often misinterpret their intentions. Today, we continue our series, Mind Reading 2.0. We explore how social illusions shape our relationships at home and in the workplace.Erica Boothby:There's just so many things that we, uh, mistakes that we fall into, these social traps that lead us to be a lot more pessimistic about our social lives than kind of reality warrants.Shankar Vedantam:How to see the world with greater clarity and walk with greater confidence, this week on Hidden Brain.When we talk to other people, we are often trying to figure them out, but we also try to guess what the other person thinks of us. We worry, "How am I coming across? Are my flaws on prominent display? Or does this person think I'm cool?" Most of us think we are good judges of our social interactions, that we can tell if other people like us. But new research suggests this is often not the case. Our perceptions of our social interactions are often distorted. At the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, psychologist Erica Boothby studies these distortions, and what we can do about them. Erica Boothby, welcome to Hidden Brain.Erica Boothby:Thanks for having me.Shankar Vedantam:I'd like to take you back to the start of your interest in this topic, Erica, you were in grad school and sitting at a cafe with a friend, and you'd also planned to meet a potential collaborator at the cafe. She showed up and you went over and started chatting. What happened next?Erica Boothby:Yeah. So, I was at a cafe just down the street from my apartment, called Cafe Romeo. And, I worked there a lot with my partner, who's also a psychologist. And, I went and left him, went to a couple tables down where I was talking to this person who I thought we might launch a collaboration.Shankar Vedantam:Mm-hmm (affirmative).Erica Boothby:And, I really got the sense from our conversation that she was a very interesting person and had a lot of interesting ideas. But, as I was talking to my partner and debriefing him on how it had gone, I said, I really doubted that she would want to work with me. Because our conversation hadn't really gone all that well. I'd expected her to ask me about one stream of research, she instead took the conversation in a totally different direction and I was unprepared. And then, my partner got a sheepish look on his face and he admitted that he'd actually been eavesdropping a little, but the good news was is that he thought we had really hit it off. And that I come off really well in the conversation. And so, we had these wildly different perspectives on what had happened. So, as psychologists, it got us thinking, who was right in this case, right? Who had a better read on the situation?Shankar Vedantam:Erica asked herself whether the incident revealed something not just about her, but something about people in general.Erica Boothby:It was very curious that there was this wide gap it seemed, between what my partner had observed from the outside and what I had felt as someone on the inside of the conversation. And, it got us

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