Improved Mind Reading Through Matching Construal Levels

One of the more memorable souvenirs I've ever brought back from a vacation trip was from my recent trip to the Caribbean. What was it? A terrible hair-cut! Indeed the cut was so bad, that I was positively ashamed to leave the house for days following it (until I decided to just cut off all my hair and go with the Michael Jordan look instead). As I later discussed with friends, it wasn't the mere aesthetics (or lack thereof) of the hair cut that bothered me, but something else. I did not mind that much that I looked  less attractive and even rather ridiculous (matter of fact, I am very ridiculous, so that wasn't new). But what I did mind - what made me so upset to go outside - was that people would think of me as the type of person who would choose(!) such a hair-cut.

You see, the hair-cut was an accident, but people who saw me would not know that. They'd just look at me and ask themselves "Who does that? What type of guy is this?", and then they'd come up with an elaborate personality assessment for me in which my true personality would be totally misconstrued...or at least that's how the film unfolded in my mind's eye...

The truth is of course, that - although I got my share of stupid commentary - even some of my close friends didn't really notice the hair debacle until I pointed it out to them, and certainly it wasn't important enough to random strangers to even begin thinking what kind of person I am behind the hair-cut. The only reason I bring this up then (besides the assurance of a good friend that he would instantly(!) subscribe to my blog, if I wrote about my hair-cut), is that it's a nice example of how important "mind reading" is to us in everyday life...and how we can become better at it:

Thinking about what's going on in other people's heads, is something we do practically all the time. Did your boss like your presentation? Why did the gorgeous woman on the bus smile at you? Why do so many people click on the "gorgeous woman link", but hardly anybody will read about this ground breacking research?

Although, this type of mind reading is so ubiquitous in everyday life, there is ample empirical evidence showing that most people's accuracy at mind reading is barely above the level of chance.

One of the reasons for our poor performance at mind reading, as I've written about before, is that we confuse private knowledge with what's available to other people when they assess and judge us. This means that we somehow ignore that other people simply do not possess as much information about us as we do ourselves. Ignoring this, we suddenly assume that this information will enter how other people rate us.

Another reason for performing poorly on mindreading tasks is that we tend to view ourselves at a lower construal level than we view others (and others view us). This means that we focus on a lot of details when thinking about ourselves, but focus on the general picture when thinking about others. By extension, when we think about what others think of us we put too much emphasis on tiny details (which others will likely ignore), and when trying to figure out what others think of themselves, we place too little emphasis on details.
Focusing on this second reason for lackluster mind-reading, researchers Tal Eyal and Nicholas Epley last month published a study in the journal Psychological Science which investigates whether mind-reading accuracy can be improved by correspondingly adjusting people's construal levels.

What does this mean? Well, while folk wisdom tells us that the key to understanding other people is to "picture yourself in their shoes, and view things from their perspective", Eyal and Epley point out that this strategy helps only in very few restrictive cases (namely,

"where the main barrier to understanding another mind is [...] attention to very different stimuli").

The more common problem in our lack of mind-reading accuracy, however, - as pointed out- is our tendency to view ourselves in too high a resolution (low level of construal) when trying to figure out what others are thinking about us. In the other direction, we tend to view other people in too low a resolution when trying to figure out what they might be thinking about themselves. Encouraging ourselves to adjust the level of resolution might significantly improve our mind reading capacity in these cases.
Among the studies conducted to investigate this, one particular study invited participants to the University of Chicago, where participants were photographed or interviewed about numerous topics. Participants were then told that their pictures (or recording) would be rated by a stranger on a number of criteria (e.g. attractiveness) and were asked to intuit this assessment.
To manipulate the construal level that people used when anticipating other peoples judgment, the researchers made use of the fact that

"People think about themselves at a higher level of construal,focusing on more general features, when they think about themselves from a temporally distant perspective (e.g., the distant future) than when they think about themselves from a temporally near perspective (e.g., the near future)."

The resulting hypothesis was therefore that

"people will be more accurate intuiting how [others will judge them] in the distant future than in the near future."

To test this, one half of the participants was told that they would be judged later that day, while the other half was told judgment would follow only after some extended time period (several months from the experiment day). Looking at participant's accuracy in anticipating a stranger's judgment, and also taking into account the amount of contextual information that participant's used in formulating this anticipation, the results were as follows:

Participants were more accurate at intuiting judgment when they expected judgment to occur in a more distant future, than when thinking about judgment in the near future. This effect seemed to be mediated by the amount of contextual details that participants used in formulating their intuition; thus supporting the hypothesis that construal levels account for the inaccuracy in mind-reading.

Looking at additional experimental results the researchers conclude that

"Participants accurately intuited how they were evaluated by others when they took a big-picture look at themselves, considering more general features that match an observer's level of construal. Participants accurately intuited how others evaluated themselves, however, when they used a more microscopic lens and considered the low-level and contextual details that people consider when evaluating themselves"

Putting their research into perspective, the authors conclude that

"Identifying a barrier to accuracy not only identifies strategies for improvement, but also identifies when particular strategies are likely to be helpful and when they are not. A difference in construal level between oneself and another person arises when the self or the other person is the target of judgment, and this difference is likely to be especially large when the difference between the self and the other is also especially large (e.g., in the case of two strangers)".

Abstroose Goose, of course, agrees.

Main Reference:

Tal Eyal, Nicholas Epley (2010). How to Seem Telepathic : Enabling Mind Reading by Matching Construal Psychological Science : 10.1177/0956797610367754