Nick Epley may teach mind-reading, but his office at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business is devoid of crystal balls and Zener cards, used to test for extra-sensory perception.
Instead, the 33-year-old assistant professor of behavioural science analyses what he says is an everyday activity. “By mind-reading, I mean how we reason about other people’s thoughts,” he says. “Mind-reading is basic to how we think about other people – whether you’re talking to your spouse, your kids, your parents, your boss, your employee – the same psychological processes go on at all those different times.”
For an up-and-coming academic at a top US business school, Prof Epley does not come across as a young man in a hurry. He is tall and laid-back, reflecting a background as the son of an Iowa farmer, and speaks in soothing tones with his feet up on his desk.
His research looks at how people intuit others’ thoughts, how good they are at it and the consequences of what he calls “mind-reading mistakes”. The findings are revealing: first, people generally know less about others’ views than they think they do. “For example, in experiments where people are asked which of their co-workers like them, their accuracy is barely better than if they picked them at random,” he says.
But does being liked at work matter? Prof Epley cites an example he knows well: the fate of Lawrence Summers, who resigned as president of Harvard sometime after Prof Epley had left his job as an assistant professor there to move to Chicago. “When I was there, he wasn’t well liked by the faculty. If the faculty had been willing to play nice, things might have gone fine.” (By contrast, Prof Epley was voted one of Harvard’s “favourite professors” three years in a row.)
If you are not popular among your employees, it helps to know. “You can’t lead employees or mobilise people effectively if you don’t know what they really think of you,” he says. “You don’t have to be liked, but if you don’t know that they think you’re a jerk you won’t be as effective. You don’t have to cave in to other people’s opinion, but it helps to know when you’re going against the grain so you can respond appropriately.”
One counter-intuitive finding from his research is that knowing people longer does not necessarily mean knowing them better. “We tend to see each other in one context – such as work – and we’re not exposed to the variability others exhibit in their everyday lives. So when I’m trying to intuit your preferences, I’m likely to overestimate dramatically how much I know about you.”
A serious consequence of mistaken mind-reading is “reactive egoism” – overestimating how self-interested other people are. “We tend to think that people only care about their own personal outcomes – that turns out not to be true,” he says. “People care about fairness, they care about others’ preferences more than we often think. When we go to a negotiation, if we focus on those cynical motivations, that can create more conflict – I might become more selfish in order to counteract the other side’s selfishness.”
Similar assumptions can damage relations within a company. “We tend to assume others are motivated by ‘extrinsic’ incentives – money, profit-sharing, status – rather than, for example, pride or the feeling that we’ve done something meaningful or interesting. That has implications for the kind of incentives programmes we design. We may be rewarding people with things they ultimately don’t value as much.”
He says our views about what other people think are distorted both by the assumption that they are like us and by oversimplified or mistaken beliefs about them. Recognising these obstacles diminishes our confidence in our beliefs and raises the possibility that our assumptions about others may be wrong.
One easy way to find out what others are thinking is to ask them. “Think about how you try to motivate your employees. First you’d think: ‘What do they care about?’ You might come up with the answer: ‘More money and benefits’ and then think about how to deliver them. What you don’t do is line up all the different options that might be available and ask your employees to tell you their preferences. You might find they value having a meaningful job or learning new skills more highly than you would’ve thought.”
At the same time, Prof Epley is scathing about one of the most common tools companies use to communicate with their employees: performance appraisal. “People go in with very different beliefs about how they’ve been doing and although they try to uncover the other side’s story, they tend not to do so sufficiently and they’re biased by their own appreciation of the situation,” he says.
“It’s uncomfortable to give other people negative performance feedback, so difficult conversations that need to be had often aren’t. Employees usually think they’re doing the right things – if the boss thinks the employee is doing something useless, there’s likely to be a gap there. So people go in with positive evaluations of themselves, hoping to hear the best and when they’re told the best – because the boss has a hard time having the difficult discussion – they come out thinking they got valid feedback.” Prof Epley says the other party should summarise what has been said. He also says companies should collect more data. “They should act like a scientist would and run some experiments. Lots of big organisations could do that really easily.” Finally, he says, if you want to avoid ambiguity, never depend on e-mail.
