Do You Expect Me to be a Mind Reader?!

Do you communicate more effectively with your spouse than with a complete stranger? If you said yes, science says you’re wrong. New research that I read about in this article, explains something they call the “closeness-communication bias”. Basically, we assume that we think like people we are close to, and therefore, communicate with them better. That assumption, it turns out, actually makes us communicate worse.

First, the researchers did an experiment to see if people communicated with their spouse better than strangers. They used ambiguous, yet common, phrases to see if people understood their meaning better from their spouses or people they had never met. They found that spouses overestimated their ability to communicate effectively with each other. One of the researchers explained, “A wife who says to her husband, 'it's getting hot in here,' as a hint for her husband to turn up the air conditioning a notch, may be surprised when he interprets her statement as a coy, amorous advance instead.”

Next they did an experiment to test the closeness bias…

"In order to test that idea, a team at Keysar's lab set up an experiment in which two students would sit across from each other, separated by a box with square compartments that contained objects. Some of the objects were not visible to one of the students. That student, the speaker, would ask the partner to move one of the objects -- but the speaker did not know that the request could be interpreted in two different ways. For example, if the speaker asked the partner to move a mouse, the partner would have two options: a computer mouse that the speaker could see, or a stuffed mouse that the speaker could not see.

The study found that when partners were asked to move an object with an ambiguous name, they would hesitate longer when the speaker was a friend. But when the speaker was a stranger, the partner would be faster to focus on the object that the speaker could see, and ignore the object that the speaker did not know about. This showed that the participants were more likely to take an egocentric position when working with a friend, neglecting to consider the possibility that the friend didn't share the same information they had."

I think it’s true that when we spend a lot of time with someone we think they know everything we know. Maybe I find it so hard to tell my wife how my day was because I assume I have given her bits and pieces of what I do in a typical day over the years and that by now she must have a pieced everything together into a clear picture of my work life. Since she, of course, already knows exactly what a typical day is like for me, “fine” should be more than enough information for her.

"The understanding, 'What I know is different from what you know' is essential for effective communication to occur," Savitsky said. "It is necessary for giving directions, for teaching a class or just for having an ordinary conversation. But that insight can be elusive when the 'you' in question is a close friend or spouse."

So, what do you do next time you find yourself face to face with a frustrated spouse who has exclaimed, “Do you expect me to be a mind reader?!” Try talking to them less like they’re your spouse, and more like they’re a stranger. A stranger that you happen to also love and what to spend all of eternity with of course. :)