Why We Get People Wrong

it's so hard to figure people out and not just because they're hard to figure out it's also because of us as a result of a number of what we call cognitive biases we can misinterpret other people's behavior in very profound and Powerful ways today on the change of Minds podcast I'm going to explain to you why is it that we get people wrong from our point of view what are the mistakes we make in our brain that cause us to make erroneous conclusions about what the person is saying what they mean or even who they

are we're going to walk through ideas like social comparison bias we're going to talk about ingroup bias we're going to look at The False Consensus Effect and lots lots more to understand exactly why we make mistakes when we try to read other people this is going to be so helpful and so useful in all areas of life from business to your relationships I'm telling you this is one to check out see you inside hello and welcome to another episode of the change Minds podcast I'm Owen Fitzpatrick and today we're going to be talking about why

we're so bad at reading other people now on a previous episode how to read anyone I walk you through some of the most important strategies that you can use to be a lot better at reading people and those skills still will work for you they'll really really help you so make sure you check that episode out but in this particular episode I want to walk through what we call cognitive biases again and cognitive biases are a deviation that we make from rational judgment based upon some habitual heuristic shortcuts that we have in our mind that

allow us to be able to reach conclusions more quickly so a number of biases can sometimes help us but more often than not can lead us down the wrong sort of path when we're trying to understand what's going on in previous episodes we've talked about how these affect our decisions how they affect our memories or even how they affect how we perceive the world works well today we're going to be SP bending all our time focusing exclusively on how it affects the way in which we interpret other people's behavior and how we read other people

and why we make the mistakes that we make so I'm going to walk you through a number of these different biases give you examples so that when you're speaking to people regardless of the situation you find yourself in you know what to look out for and you're able to make it so that you're using the skills we talked about on the other episode how to read anyone better and you're able to use them without allowing the biases to infect or affect how you interpret for what's going on this is going to be really really useful

and we're going to start with what we call social comparison bias and social comparison bias is the tendency to evaluate one's abilities achievements and attributes by comparing oneself to others this is popularized and studied by Leon festinger in the 1950s he's a well-known psychologist and he proposed that people have an inherent drive to evaluate themselves and most of the time we do this by comparing ourselves with other people as as well so so often you can be doing a fitness program for example and you can immedately see other people are killing it and doing so

much better than you and immediately you don't feel nearly as good as a result I'm currently training for the marathon and as I trained for the marathon I'm like oh I feel so good and then all of a sudden you go running in Central Park and I'm telling you if you ever try to run in Central Park and a Saturday or Sunday morning the amount of people that are running there and they all look insane fit a lot of the guys have like you know they no t-shirt on and they're going and there's like a

a 12pack and they've got like huge shoulders and they're running at like a million miles an hour and they've got like perfect chisel features and all the women there perfect bodies as well I mean it's just you're running along uh doing circles around Central Park and you're being like outrun by everyone and they're younger and you know it just can't help but make you feel like what am I doing you know is anyway that's an example of the social comparison bias and why we often times allow that to negatively impact the way in which we

perceive it because we're looking at everyone else and we're comparing ourselves to them but more often than not they're comparing themselves to us as well so as I'm running probably other people are running past me going oh look at him he looks like he's running right and look at him he looks Irish which I would love to be Irish oh I don't feel so good because I'm not Irish and and whatever else that they'd be jealous of I'm sure there's lots that they'd be jealous we also might feel for example demotivated about our diet because

other people seem to achieve results faster someone else is losing weight faster than you once again that can demotivate us we need to recognize when that's happening and nip it in the bud because that's not accurate it's not useful different people have different metabolisms some people lose weight really quickly but then struggle after a while to keep losing it other people take forever to lose it but once they do they tend to be good different horses for different courses and when we stop comparing oursel to other people we become a lot better at making more

sound judgments about it in terms of relationship sometimes we can feel envious uh because we compare our relationship with someone else so you look on social media and you see these people oh we're so happy we love each other so much oh we're the best friends we're this we're that we like it's the perfect Lord I love you more no I love you more no I love and I'm Valentine's Day and around and there's always like the sick of over the top like and you know you might be looking at yourself going oh why does

me and my partner ever say that to now you probably know you might have the relationship with your partner that if you ever did start to go I love you so much you're the greatest thing in the they go are you okay like what's wrong with you why are you talking like this this is I'm starting to get scared do you need medication so different relationships are different and different people show love in different ways so if we try to compare ourselves with the Instagram we're on now you know it's very possible those two people

could be online they could be like I love you so much and offline they could be I hate you so much you're the most annoying person as soon as the camera turns on they're like love of my life so it's very possible that that is true so we need to recognize that or we might think to ourselves oh mik is such a social life he's always out he's always raving he's always like going to all these extreme parties why am I not I have no social life well in that case probably more true not not

about Mike I'm sure Mike's not doing it are you Mike 50/50 50/50 okay but he's not going to 100% of parties uh and the fact that I'm not going to a party it's probably because I'm not a big fan of parties my point is that often times we think to ourselves the grass is greener on the other side of the fence right the reality is we shouldn't be looking at that grass we should be just focusing do not coverage your neighbor's grass we should just focus on our own grass and I'm not talking that's not

a euphemism for drugs um another example of social comparison Theory would be feeling that Successful by comparing your career progress to that of your colleagues or peers again depends there a lot of factors in there that are explain why we're at the stage we're at and it's not helpful for us to just feel bad if we're going to compare ourselves and it actually motivates us to want to do better great but so often it can just make us feel bad or if we can't afford for example luxury brands that some other people that we've seen

wear uh then we feel we're not good enough as a result all of those are mistakes so we need to not immediately see other people and immediately think to ourselves oh um I'm not good enough because they have this and I don't right that's what I call the snapshat effect as well I say it's like you're just seeing the snapshot of what they want you to see and then you're making all these ridiculous conclusions as a result of it which just isn't helpful the next type of effect is what we call the forer effect also

known as the Barnum effect and the forer effect is our tendency to believe vague General statements is being specifically applic to oneself in many ways politicians are great at this some self-help gurus or spiritual gurus can be quite good at this as like saying these like high level you know terms if you understand who you are you will live as to who you can be oh my goodness that's so true that's so amazing that speaks to me no it doesn't it's just a vague statement it's just a oneliner clever little aphorism designed to be able

to make you think that it's smart but he demonstrated forer it's name after for because he did a classic experiment in 1948 where he explained how people accept broad General statements as you know something really really meaningful and no doubt we could still do that today some examples of this would be we might believe in General Health advice from horoscopes so now this is true if you're a cancerian like I am apparently cancerians are really smart good-look kind uh wonderful funny U amazing extremely attractive um the best and I think that proves that some horoscopes

are based on fact and very realistic and legitimate but then there's got an awful lot of other horoscopees such as you know pretty much anything else positive about any other horoscope wouldn't believe it at all very high level very sort of vague you know anyone could say yeah that applies to me so I think with the exception of the cancerian stuff that I mentioned which is obviously very spoton I think all the rest of it is is is rubbish but sometimes we'll believe it and we'll go oh um I should do this because my horoscope

told me to or my psychic told me to um probably not the best way to live your life accepting vague Wellness statements from a generic health article which you think it's relevant to your condition so if you just you know breathe then that's going to solve all your problems now breathing techniques can really help but if you just breathe and relax and don't even think about it then it's going to go away might not go away might not go away relationships might be you again use a psychic to get relationship advice I know a lot

of people have had relationships negatively impacted as a result of advice they got from a psychic and the psychic said oh they're no good for you and you make bad decisions if you believe in it too much once again it's a little bit generalized this advice or even from a business perspective this can happen we make broad business predictions from a generic report and we accept vague motivational statements as personal guidance for business success and this is one I do want to touch on because so often you can go online and let's say on LinkedIn

and someone posts something like you know the key to success is to work hard or something along the lines of communicating with empathy is the secret to Great relationships now maybe people need to hear that maybe that's not as vague but like let's say communicating nicely with people leads to better relationships no one's looking at going oh my goodness I need to understand this what do they by like it's it's one of those grandio of course and whenever you see one of those statements online and you go of course of course of course that's necessarily

not adding a lot of signal if we talk about the the the metaphor and again I've touched on this in the mental models episode one of the mental models previous episode of the change of Minds podcast but sometimes we give all these vague statements in NLP sometimes we call them artfully vague that you can interpret in different ways but once again this slow automatically becomes people's Mantra and they live by it even though doesn't really mean anything uh and that's the problem the next particular bias is what is known as the semil wise reflex and

this is the tendency we have to reject new evidence or knowledge because it contradicts established Norms or beliefs so it's almost like the traditionalist bias and this is named after Dr ignas seawise who discovered the importance of handwashing but face rejection from the medical community the semil wise reflex highlights resistance to new ideas now SE must have been having a laugh I I think he's probably dead I don't know I think he must be dead cuz he discovered the importance of hand washing so I'm guessing hoping that wasn't like less than a 100 years ago

but he is probably laughing wherever he is now whenever Co happened cuz all of a sudden everyone's like look we don't know what to do we're not even sure about masks or whatever we're all over the shop the one thing we know is wash your hands as like collectively everyone in the world's like oh we have to wash our hands after we go to the toilet really no don't like that scenario let me go and get the toilet paper sorry that's a call back to another episode the last episode that we had on the podcast

so hopefully you you've got that joke but uh a few different examples is when we resist all Traditions rejecting new health research because it contradicts long hell beliefs that we have or dismissing alternative Medical Treatments despite evidence of their effect just because we want to stick to traditional or we might ignore new relationship advice because it contradicts what our views have always been about the right way to do things or same what goes with parenting or in business we might dismiss an innovative business strategy again because it conflicts with the established practices or you might

reject new Innovations in a product because it differs from traditional models once again the importance is to overcome this by being able to be open to new ideas and open to New Perspectives as well the next bias is what we call the projection bias this is our tendency to assume that others share your current emotional state thoughts and preferences and really this is something that's been studied quite extensively in Psychology it's been looking at how people project their own feelings and thoughts and attitudes on other people most of the time this is inaccurate and so

for example we might assume that other people are equally motivated to exercise just cuz you are or everyone enjoys the same health benefits from Foods as you do the amount of times people will say you know what I think even though they're not qualified and they'll just give you their point of view their perspective they'll share with you what their experience has been and it might not be in any way relevant to you or helpful to you or useful to you but they'll share it and that's because from their point of view if it helped

me it can help you too you might think in business for example that your team members are excited about as project as you are certainly this happens in startups right startup founder we need to remember if you're a startup founder you need to remember that it's very likely that people that you hire as your first sales team are not going to be as motivated about the product as you are they're not going to be as excited they haven't been eating sleeping drinking this particular product for the last year two years five years so we need

to recognize that and uh be aware of it also examples might be we might believe that a person another person will find a product as useful as you will so you tell them how amazing it is when other people give us this advice we need to recognize that just because it works for them doesn't guarantee it doesn't mean it won't work for us but it doesn't mean that it will and that's something that we need to recognize from that point of view the next one the next bias is a concept called reactance and this is

the the tendency we have to resist or oppose what someone is trying to get us to do and this is something that happens very early on when we're babies when we're toddlers we kind of often times the first word that we say is usually no right and that's because we're exerting our independence when toddlers figure out that they have a sense of locus of control they have the ability to be independent often times they'll push back whenever someone is trying to get them to do something and it's important for us to recognize that this tendency

that we have to resist what a person is trying to get us to do happens because we perceive that there's a lack of choice in the matter so we feel that a person's trying to impede on our own freedom of choice and as a result of that we automatically try to respond negatively to it this is something that was developed by Jack brem in the 1960s reactant theories is know and it's really really important in understanding why we struggle to be able to persuade other people it's not just because they might disagree with us it's

because they're already primed to disagree with us because they feel that they're trying to be manipulated by you and so examples of this might be we might resist dietary advice because it restricts a diet if someone turns around to me and says hey Owen I know you want to lose weight therefore I'm going to recommend you don't eat vanilla ice cream you don't eat BFI and you do not under any circumstances eat caramel cho cho I'm probably not going to be a very receptive audience I'm not going to turn around and go no more caramel

cho cho all right that's fine I trust you I'm not going to trust you you are the devil you are Satan and you were trying to uh let me fall into this horrible life where I don't get to eat my caramel choo choo you might also ignore medical advice because it like hassles your lifestyle you might do the opposite of what a partner suggests because you want to be able to show you're not going to tell me what to do you might reject a company policy because again you feel that the company is trying to

dictate everything and you disagree with it or they limit your autonomy in some way or you might avoid a product because the marketing tactics are quite aggressive although I'd argue that's kind of rational if someone's like really aggressive in marketing to you it's probably a good idea to uh reject doing business with them because if you even give them a a sniff that you're interested if you even respond to an email often times they'll like retarget you in all sorts of crazy ways bush you get the point sometimes we tend to react negatively even though

necessarily the decision might be better and it's the way in which we misinterpret the person we immediately start to have a negative reaction to them that then causes us to sometimes make a mistake the next bias is what we call the illusion of transparency and this is the tendency we have to overestimate how well others can understand our emotional internal States thoughts and the way in which we feel and so the illusion of trans transparency was something described by psychologists gilovich zitz and medvik and it demonstrates how so often we can misunderstand other people by

thinking that they get us they understand us better than they actually do and so sometimes we think that people will be able to tell when we're in pain or discomfort even though we're not showing any outside signs or when we're in a bad mood we think that people will immediately read that or we think to ourselves that our partner can read our emotions and know you know this makes me feel well if you haven't articulated it how do they know they can't read your mind you know I just know that you know I don't know

what I'm putting on this voice thinking salespeople are not interested in a product without you saying so so think to yourself oh they should get it I'm you know I'm not biting it out of their hands therefore they should get the message if you've ever heard yourself say did they not get the memo then that's an example of you falling prey to this sort of Illusion of transparency you think you're giving signals but you're actually not sometimes in trainings for example I'll say you know can you give me more of a response and people will

go from you know I'll say does this make sense for them to shake their head and they'll go from this to this and then when I say does it and they go yeah as if I could notice this like imperceptible like bare nod that gave me the information because again we do that or sometimes they'll say you know could you speak up and people will speak the exact same volume but they'll think that um you can hear them more clearly so more often than not we tend to misperceive how other people are able to perceive

us and this is again the illusion of transparency we think we're more transparent than we actually are it's not as easy to read us the next one is The False Consensus Effect is a tendency to overestimate how much other people share our beliefs or attitudes and behaviors I'm sure they believe the same thing as me this is not a Million Miles Away uh from one that we talked about earlier this projection bias whereas projection bias is a little bit more like our tendency to share that other people are feeling the same state as us with

the false consents effect it's more about our beliefs and attitudes what they think in this situation this is something that was described by Lee Ross David green and Pamela house and it really highlights how we think our opinions are held by more people than they actually are so we might think that most people are following the same diet advice or exercise advice is us that might think that our views of relationship roles and Dynamics are more prevalent than they are we might assume that our colleagues agree with our business decisions or they might think that

our reasons for making purchases are shared by most other people as well so we assume look this is the norm and it's not the norm right might be very different to the norm but you go everybody knows you ever heard yourself say oh everybody knows that this is true well maybe they don't maybe it's just you maybe you don't even know you just think it's all possible next ingroup bias and the ingroup bias the tendency we have to favor members of One's Own group over those in other groups and this is one of the most

critically important of all the biases when it comes to explaining why we're so polarized this has been extensively studied in social psychology we tend to have more empathy with the people that are inside our group and we tend to be a lot closer which makes us further away from people in what we call the outg group which is in any other group but our own and so we tend to trust people more in our in group we tend to trust Health advice for example from people who share a cultural background we tend to believe that

friends or Partners who belong to our social group were more like to see them as smarter and more successful and more persuasive as a result we tend to trust and value their opinions if they're in the same group as us we tend to prefer to work with colleagues from our own department or division than inverted com as Outsiders or we tend to choose brands or products that tend to be popular with our social groups so we make a lot of decisions based upon this notion that we're in the same group as all these other people

so if they're in the same group as us we're more likely to be influenced by what they do and vice versa and so it's important to recognize this ingroup bias but there's also the outgroup homogenity bias and this is the tendency we have to see members of other groups as more similar to each other than members of One's Own group and so often times we might think to ourselves that I'm in this group but other people that are in a different group to know so let's talk politics for a second if you're a republican you

might see all Democrats a lot more similar than they actually are or if you're a Democrat you might see Republicans as more similar than they actually are and that's a perfect example of this particular bias in relationships we might think to ourselves that people from different Social Circles all behave differently in relationships for example oh I'm sure that they all cheat on their Partners or we might assume that employees from a different department all have the same work habits and attitudes oh they're from risk oh my goodness you know what they're like or we might

assume that all customers from a different demographic have the same product preferences oh I'm sure they all eat that type of food in that particular area these are kind of examples of sort of stereotypes that we have but we assume that they have a lot more in common in health for example we might assume that members of a different cultural group have all the same practices and helps oh they're from this country they must believe in this so we might instantly start to create more connections and more assumptions about how similar they are to each

other as a result of wherever they're from or some other uh variable that makes them part of the out group and that's another example of this particular bias the next one is known as the pigmillion effect this is the phenomenon whereby higher expectations leads to an increase in performance this was based on a very famous study by Robert rosenal and Lor Jacobson in the 1960s it's obviously named after pigmillion which is the Greek myth of the person the dude that was a sculpted and he fell in love with his own statue imagine fall in love

with your own statue mean good for you but the statue would be pretty easy to fall in love with I'm sure if you're into statues I I don't know I don't understand pigmillion I never have I don't think I ever will but anyway this particular fact uh came about a study that was done by rosenal and J Jacobson was when they kind of took some teachers and they told the teachers that these certain students were above average in terms of intelligence you know great potential or whatever and then a year later the students even though

that wasn't the case the students actually really improved their intelligence why the assumption is because they were treated as if they were smart by the teachers which in turn influenced it so some examples of this would be we might experience from a health perspective faster recovery because healthc care providers have higher expectations we might improve our behavior and commitment in a relationship because our partner expects the best for us we might exceed work performance because our boss really believes in our abilities we might feel more Saied with a product because the salesperson really believes and

expects that it's going to help us massively so in other words other people's beliefs about us about something we're doing about a result we're going to get can influence our belief in it as well and therefore as a result can affect our performance um too so a very very powerful effect there as well and then another bias is called the backfire effect this is a tendency or phenomenon where people hold on to their beliefs even more strongly when presented with contradicting evidence and so backfire effect has being challenged quite a lot over recent years so

we have to weigh up the evidence to some degree some people would still argue it tends to fit but then in other context not so much but some examples would be we might believe in a health mitt more even when we're provided with scientific evidence that debunks it so someone sort of points out this happened to me someone pointed out like I used to think like all I need to do is take vitamin C tablets and I'm like never going to get a cold and then someone showed me like well actually no it doesn't work

at all like that and I was like okay whatever it's a vitamin C tablet I'm miming here oh it doesn't work little bit of reactants there as well you don't tell me not to take Vitamin C I mean they weren't they were just telling me that the statistics or science the data doesn't show that vitamin C stops you or vitamin C stops you from having a um cold but I still believe hold on on to failing business strategy more strongly when presented with data that shows that it's not actually working or a negative Market Trend

being more convinced of it even though you can see that it's not working out or believing in a product's Effectiveness despite negative reviews all these are examples where we go against the grain we say statistics proof that this is in the way I'm not listening to statistics I'm not listening to data I'm not listening to fact don't know what why you're making that uh sound but sure look that's a possibility another bias is the group attribution error and this is our tendency to assume that the characteristics or behavior of a group reflect the characteristics and

behavior of the entire group so if you're this type of person and you act like this that must be how everyone acts and this is one of the main reasons why stereotypes are so popular and how we overgeneralize so often it's one of the things that's wrong with the world if you ask me we might assume because a person's has a certain Health out that's representative of everybody in their social group we assume that because one friend in a social group with certain relationship problems that every member does oh that's typical that's always they're all

like that the reason for this group is because you know I heard this particular example they're all the same and as soon as we hear ourselves say they're all the same that's an example of this group attribution are we attribute the same qualities to every member of the group just because one person has it you might assume from a business perspective that one customer's preference reflect the preferences of all customers that would be a big mistake cuz if you go into for example a burger place and you ask for a burger and you assume that

everybody must want cheese in their burger I don't want cheese in my burger I don't want tomato or tomato on my burger I don't want onions on my burger I just want a plain burger I do not want any of the other crap so if you went along and said oh everybody likes cheese no no group attribution bias group attribution bias playing Burger Owen you might assume that when employees work habits reflect the habits of their entire department again all of these are potential mistakes we might make when we jump to conclusions so again in

this particular episode we talked about the group attribution error we looked at the backfire effect we looked at the pigmillion effect we looked at the outgroup homogenity bias we looked at ingroup bias we looked at False Consensus Effect illusion of transparency reactance projection bias the semi wise reflex as well as the far air effect and finally the social comparison bias we covered a lot but each and every one of these biases are things that can happen to us that might lead us to misinterpret other people or in turn misinterpret how we are responding to other

people and the more that we can recognize these biases and overcome these biases the better we'll be at being able to communicate more effectively and do what we need to be able to do we'll be better at reading people and then you can use some of the great skills from the episode on how to read people how to read anyone so that you can become much better with other people regardless of what context you find yourself in I hope you found this useful if you did please share spread the word let more people know give

us a like nice little rating or review would be wonderful nice little comment would go a long way but for now take care be well check out my newsletter hp.com newsletter and check out more of the episodes there's one that's going to come up check it out it's fun we get to hang out more for now take care be well and the force has always be with you and may you use what you've learned to make even better decisions when it comes to people bye for now