I am trying to be the kind stranger I’ve always wanted to meet
We can see each other, but we can never know exactly what’s going on in the other’s head.
It’s partly why psychological science is so hard and it’s why understanding how we are viewed by others is so hard.
Research shows that we normally try to work out how others see us by thinking about how we view ourselves, then extrapolating from that. The problem with this approach is that to varying degrees we all suffer from an ‘egocentric bias’: because we’re locked inside our own heads, we find it difficult to see ourselves objectively. In some ways all the information we have clouds our judgement. (…) People trying to put themselves in the other person’s shoes were awful at the task. (…) But, when participants thought about their future selves, a technique that encourages abstract thinking, suddenly people’s accuracy shot up.
