Mind reading for beginners
We’ve all done it, haven’t we? We type out what seems to be a reasonable request and hit Send, only to be met with the exact opposite response to the one we were hoping for.
Maybe that response is a flat rejection of an idea or a question to which we thought the answer was obvious. Or perhaps it’s a slow – or no – response to something we thought we’d made clear was urgent. Sometimes, it could be an angry (or passive-aggressive) reaction to what to us seemed a reasonable request. All-too often, it’s no reaction at all. Just digital silence.
There could be lots of reasons behind this. We are all human, and we all have busy lives. Too often, we overlook the fact that we have no idea where someone might be or what they might be doing when they receive our message. They could be in a meeting, dropping the kids off at school, stuck in a traffic jam or preoccupied with another project. Usually, we have no idea.
The reader's shoes
I’ve been advising people on how to write effectively for more than 24 years. And the piece of advice I’ve most often shared is this: put yourself in your reader’s shoes. If you want to predict how someone will react, if you want to get them to see things your way, you first have to see things their way. Far too often, though, we focus exclusively on our own point of view, blinded by our own priorities and preoccupations. And that’s usually where it all goes wrong.
That’s despite the fact that, believe it or not, each of us has a particular part of the brain that has this very task as one of its main functions. It’s called the right temporo-parietal junction – or rTPJ for short. It’s about the size of a walnut and located just behind the top of your ear. (Your right ear, as you may have guessed from the name.) Its role is to co-ordinate signals from the rest of the brain and from our external environment, and then to integrate them, so we can work out just what the heck is going on.
Crucially, it’s the rTPJ that enables you to work out what someone else is thinking and feeling, what they believe and what their current state of mind might be. It’s what enables you to gauge other people’s emotions, beliefs and level of knowledge. Collectively, psychologists call this ability building a theory of mind, and it’s in this part of the brain that this happens.
It’s not something that works from birth, though. That’s why, up until the age of four or five, we’re unable even to conceive that someone else’s preferences and thoughts might be different from our own. If we like rice cakes, we believe that everybody else likes rice cakes too. And we’re completely unable to see the world from somebody else’s point of view. It takes time for us to develop the ability to see that our view, our lives, are different from everybody else’s. It’s in our early years, between the ages of about three and seven, that we acquire this complex set of abilities.
The classic demonstration of this is known as the Sally-Anne test, which usually goes something like this. A child is shown two dolls, one called Sally and the other, Anne. The experimenter animates the dolls as if they were puppets. Sally has a basket and Anne has a box. Sally puts a marble in her basket and ‘leaves’ the room. While she’s away, Anne takes the marble and puts it in her box.
The experimenter asks the child where Sally will look for the marble when she returns. Will she look first in her basket, where she left it, or go straight to the box, where Anne has hidden it? The child, of course, knows it’s in the box. She saw Anne put it there. But here’s the thing. A three-year old will reliably say that Sally will go straight to the box and look there, even though she couldn’t possibly know it’s there. A five-year old will predict that Sally will look in the basket first (where she left it), but they may not make the leap that it’s because she doesn’t know that Anne has moved her marble. When prompted, they’re likely to offer a rather imaginative reason for why she doesn’t know it’s there. (Say, that she’s forgotten that Anne moved it.)
It’s only when the child in the experiment reaches around seven years old that they will know not only that she has no idea where it is but exactly why that’s the case – Sally didn’t see it happen. They’re also much more likely to think that Anne shouldn’t have moved it and that it’s her fault that Sally looked in the wrong place. In other words, it’s only when we reach the age of seven that we’re able to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes and work out what they might be thinking. If the test is done with the same child at, say, yearly intervals, it beautifully illustrates the development of our theory of mind in real time.
Harsh judgements
Neuroscientists, for their part, have worked on the rTPJ in adults and discovered that, when it’s not working properly, we lose our ability to empathise. Rebecca Saxe, working at MIT, found that volunteers tended to judge the actions of other people much more harshly when researchers disrupted the activity of the rTPJ by directing a strong electromagnet at it.
OK, that’s all well and good, but we’re here to talk about how our words influence decisions. What does all this tell us about that? Well, first of all, you most likely do have the ability to put yourself in the decision-maker’s shoes. (This ability may be reduced in some neurodivergent individuals, such as if you are autistic. One doesn’t necessarily follow the other, though, and the idea that all autistic people are unable to develop a theory of mind – to work out what other people are thinking and feeling – is a gross overgeneralisation.) It’s something you’ve had since you were a child and – unlike skills you have to learn, such as reading – you are hard-wired to do it. It’s a standard part of how our brains develop.
Yet it is also something that is easily disrupted. Obviously we don’t tend to have to write with a large electromagnet held to our skull. But we often reduce our ability to empathise to such a degree that we unwittingly reproduce the same effect. In fact, perhaps more often than not, we write with a focus not on the decision-maker (or reader) but on ourselves. We focus on our needs, our interests. We communicate from our point of view.
We’re so buried in our own priorities that we seem to lose all ability to predict what the person we’re writing to might be thinking. We might think we’ve moved on from being unable to pass the Sally-Anne experiment. But it’s by no means a given that we would pass its grown-up, professional equivalent. When we’re fixated on our to-do list or our need to get things to go our way, we become blinded not just to the decision-maker’s point of view but to how much knowledge they have of the matter in hand. So we can easily end up crediting them with extra-sensory perception. We write not just as if they know what’s in our heads but like they are as pre-occupied with the matter in hand as we are.
The medium is a huge factor, here. It’s possible that you would not fall into the same trap if you were having a conversation with them. You’d quickly pick up on clues that hinted they might not be seeing things the way you do (it could be a frown, a raised eyebrow, a direct challenge or something much more subtle, like eye movements). But those signals are all absent when we’re sending an email, a proposal or even an instant message.
Screens make us self-focused
But there is something else at play. Writing on a screen – whether that’s a phone or a laptop – makes us more likely to focus exclusively on ourselves. Screens entrance us. When we type, it’s like we’re externalising our inner, largely self-focused monologue. We’re drawn into a world of our own. And we become so mesmerised that we lose track not just of our surroundings but that other people do not live in that world.
And, as we’ve discussed before, writing itself takes a lot of cognitive energy, and certainly more than speaking. That leaves us less capacity for other brain activities, including empathising.
There’s a flip-side to this phenomenon, too, of course, because yours is not the only brain involved. Whoever reads what you have written will be subject to the same effects as you. They’ll be drawn into their screen, narrowing their perspective. They’ll also be reading, rather than listening, which again uses more brainpower than if they were in a conversation with you. Both of these things tend to reduce their ability to empathise with you and to see things your way. They also don’t have ESP, however much we write as if they do.
So what can you do? Well, the first thing is to take positive steps to activate your theory of mind. Power up your in-built ability to see things from the decision-maker’s viewpoint. Close the document you’re writing (or the email/instant message window), and then open your favourite note-taking app. Or, even better, grab a pen and piece of paper. Then answer the following questions:
What am I writing about? (Just to get you started.)
What outcome or action do I want? (Ditto.)
How much does the decision-maker know about this already?
How important is this to them? (Answer this honestly, being careful not to project your own priorities onto them.) And if it’s not that important to them, what is? Could you link your message or document to that, in some way?
How interested in this are they? And if they’re not that interested, what are they interested in?
How much do they want to do what you’re asking them to do?
What do they really want to do? (What are their priorities?)
Don’t worry if you can’t answer all of these perfectly. Just going through them and trying to answer will be a good start, as it will shift your perspective from your viewpoint to theirs.
Finally, try to be honest about your state of mind, as well as about what they might be thinking. If you’re in a highly emotive state, stop writing altogether. Go no further if you feel desperate for a ‘yes’. Step away if you feel irritated or angry. Even being hungry can affect your ability to see things from someone else’s point of view. Close whatever app you’re using to communicate and come back to it later.
Remember, you do have this ability to see things from the other person's point of view. Your brain is wired for it. You just need to activate this superpower. And never forget that Sally still thinks the marble’s in the basket, no matter how obvious it is to you that Anne has moved it to the box.
SourcesThe term 'Theory of mind' was first coined back in the 1950s in this paper [PDF] about chimpanzees by David Premack and Guy Woodruff at the University of Pennsylvania. A quick Google search on 'Sally/Anne test' will return numerous articles on the topic.
But Rebecca Saxe explains and demonstrates the concept really well in this engaging TED talk. In it, she also recounts her experiments with using electromagnets to temporarily disrupt the right tempero-parietal junction and reduce empathy in adults.
If you'd like to dig deeper, you'll find her original paper on her discovery of the role of the rTPJ in enabling us to develop a theory of mind here [paywall].
Image credit: Rich Vintage / iStock
