In 1891 Wilhelm von Osten realized his horse, Hans, was a genius. Okay, okay, not Albert-Einstein-genius but genius for a horse. Hans would become one of the most famous horses ever and be responsible for a tremendous advancement in the history of science . . . but, um, not in the way von Osten expected or desired.
Von Osten deeply believed the intelligence of animals had been underestimated. He was so serious about this that he began teaching math to his horse, Hans, using sugar lumps and carrots as rewards for correct answers. He would do this every day . . . for the next four years. (And you think you have crazy neighbors.) But could a horse really learn like a person? Or was this all as ridiculous as it sounds?
Well, after four long years of training, von Osten held his first public exhibition of Hans’s skill. A crowd was gathered in front of the stage. Von Osten turned to Hans and said, “What’s two plus one?” Hans stomped his foot three times. Smiles of amusement throughout the crowd. “What’s the square root of sixteen?” Hans stomped four times. The smiles were replaced by surprise. “What day of the month will this Wednesday be?” Hans stomped nine times. Gasps from the crowd.
And then they did fractions. Hans told the time. He counted the audience members. He even counted the number of audience members wearing glasses. Some would later estimate that Hans had the math skills of a fourteen-year-old human. And he didn’t merely respond to verbal commands. Von Osten wrote the number “3” on a blackboard, and stomp-stomp-stomp was the reply.
By coding the alphabet to numbers (A = 1, B = 2, etc.), Hans was able to spell words and answer questions. He could identify colors, playing cards, and people in the crowd. Play a song and he could name the composer. Show him a painting and he named the painter. Hans wasn’t perfect, but he was correct roughly nine times out of ten.
It didn’t take long for word to spread about the horse dubbed “Clever Hans.” Von Osten took him on tour, and soon he was stomping for bigger and bigger crowds every week. Hans became a sensation. And people far beyond Germany’s borders started to take notice. But there were skeptics, of course. Was von Osten giving him the answers? Was the whole thing rigged? Finally, Hans became so famous that the government stepped in to test the miracle horse.
In 1904 Germany’s Board of Education formed the Hans Commission. And, as the New York Times would report, the commission found no fraud. What was most convincing to all was that Hans displayed his amazing abilities when von Osten was not present. After this, the Hans legend exploded. Some now believed that the horse might be able to read minds.
But not everyone was so sure. Oskar Pfungst, a young scientist and member of the Hans Commission, wanted to do further testing. He asked a wider range of questions and tested far more variables than the previous study had. Hans still performed with flying colors, but Pfungst noticed two irregularities that made him curious.
First, while the commission had done an excellent job of controlling distractions for Hans, no one had considered what the horse paid attention to during the study. Pfungst made a note that Hans “never looked at the persons or the objects which he was to count, or at the words which he was to read, yet he nevertheless gave the proper responses.”
Second, nobody ever focused on the wrong answers that Hans gave. Yes, he was correct the vast majority of the time, but when he was incorrect, his answers were so off base, it implied he really didn’t “understand” the question. His wrong answers were the wrong kind of wrong.
So Pfungst decided to try something new: he put blinders on Hans so that the horse would be unable to see the questioner. Whammo. For the first time, Hans became aggressive. He forcefully resisted, straining to see the questioner. Finally, they managed to get him to complete the test with blinders on. His accuracy rate plummeted from 89 percent to 6 percent.
Pfungst was still confused—but he knew he was getting closer. This time he took the blinders off so Hans could see the questioner, but Pfungst made sure that the questioner didn’t actually know the answer himself. Again, Hans’s performance was terrible, going from 90 percent to only 10 percent accurate. If Hans couldn’t see the questioner or if the questioner didn’t know the answer, the horse’s IQ suddenly plummeted.
Pfungst finally understood. Hans wasn’t a genius. What Hans could do was read people extremely well. Research shows that horses are able to detect head movements in humans as small as one-fifth of a millimeter. Sufficiently motivated by a tasty lump of sugar, Hans was picking up on unconscious cues that questioners would make when he performed the correct number of stomps. Hans was just a regular horse, motivated by food, responding to stimuli. When he got startled, he didn’t stomp out, “Wow, that sure was surprising, huh?” No, he would whinny and bite someone nearby, like horses always have. After Pfungst released his results, von Osten did the rational, objective, scientific thing: he got totally pissed off, refused further testing, took his horse, and went home.
But Hans would have an enormous impact on not only psychology but science in general. Textbooks today still refer to “the Clever Hans effect,” which is also known as “the observer effect.”
If you’ve ever heard the term double-blind study, you can thank Hans. He led to its creation, which had a profound impact on how research is done. Normally medical studies give half the participants the active drug and half a placebo. But let’s say that as the experimenter, I know which one is the placebo, and whenever I give it to someone I snicker and roll my eyes. Just like with Hans, the experimenter knowing “the answer” can consciously or unconsciously inform the patient and reduce the objectivity of the experiment. So studies are done “double blind”—neither the patient nor the experimenter knows which is the placebo. Like putting blinders on Hans.
Hans wasn’t a genius—but he could read people. And if a horse can learn to read what’s on someone’s mind, certainly we can too . . . right?
* * *
Would you like to be able to read the minds of others? To know what those around you think and feel? Of course you would. We’re not crazy for wanting this ability. Research shows even a slight edge here is quite powerful. “Accurate person perception” has a conga line of personal and interpersonal benefits. Studies show that those who possess it are happier, less shy, better with people, have closer relationships, get bigger raises, and receive better performance reviews. When we look more specifically at those who are better interpreters of body language and nonverbal communication, we see similar positive effects.
Wow. Sign me up. Right? Only one problem: on average, the vast majority of us are absolutely horrible at these skills. I mean, comically bad. University of Chicago professor Nicholas Epley has found that when you’re dealing with strangers, you correctly detect their thoughts and feelings only 20 percent of the time. (Random chance accuracy is 5 percent.) Now, of course, you’re better when dealing with people you know . . . but not by much. With close friends you hit 30 percent, and married couples peak at 35 percent. In school that’s an F. Actually, it’s probably closer to a G. Whatever you think is going on in your spouse’s head, two-thirds of the time, you’re wrong.
Yet here’s the truly funny part: we think we’re awesome at reading others. Again, that pesky brain is telling us flattering stories. Ask people to rate their partner’s self-esteem, and they get it right 44 percent of the time. But they’re confident about their guesses 82 percent of the time. And the longer you’ve been together, the more your confidence goes up. Accuracy? No, that doesn’t improve. But you sure do get more confident.
How can we be so off base? And yet so confident in our inaccuracy? The technical term is egocentric anchoring. Epley says we’re too caught in our own perspective: “Survey after survey finds that most people tend to exaggerate the extent to which others think, believe, and feel as they do.” As with profiling, we’re too trapped inside our own heads and stories. Even when we try to take the perspective of others, studies show our accuracy doesn’t improve. Yeah, it reduces egocentric bias, but what we replace it with isn’t any better. When we ask others questions, our accuracy goes up, but we don’t do that enough. Usually, we just play in our own heads with our own stories and replace bad assumptions with different bad assumptions.
So who is notably better at passively reading the thoughts and feelings of others? If I was forced to give an answer in one word, I’d say nobody. That’s not true, strictly speaking. Obviously, some folks eke out an edge. But there seems to be a hard ceiling—and a rather low one at that. Mental health issues can confer superpowers in one area but are often balanced out by deficiencies in another. We’re all just pretty bad at this—while remaining blissfully unaware of our poor showing.
I know what some people are thinking: “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Aren’t women more accurate people readers than men?” Oh boy. Time to play hopscotch on the third rail. Political agendas and gender debates aside, in your heart of hearts, do you think there’s a difference between males and females when it comes to reading people? And what do you think a dump truck full of scientific studies says? (Drum roll, please.)
Yes, women are better. Female superiority in detecting nonverbal communication is well documented. It’s only about a 2 percent edge, but it’s very consistent across ages, testing methods, and cultures. That said, it’s not uniform. Women are no better at lie detection than men. The advantages are more pronounced in detecting facial expressions and in emotion recognition.
So why do you think women are better at this than men? Turns out it’s not the direct result of biology. It’s actually due to one of the things that can make all of us better mind readers: motivation.
When studies dig deep to look for the underlying cause, what many find is that women, on average, are more motivated to read people accurately than men are. They are simply more interested and try harder. A 2008 study by Geoff Thomas and Gregory Maio really drives the point home. What happens when researchers inform guys that being empathic will make women more interested in them? Bingo. Male motivation increased as did men’s ability to accurately perceive thoughts and feelings. Just like Hans wanting those carrots. Of course, there’s a flip side to this: when motivation drops, so does accuracy. Husbands in unhappy marriages can read random women’s nonverbals better than those of their wives. Oof.
To neuroscientists, all of this is totally unsurprising. They know just how lazy our brains are most of the time. Motivation is almost a neuroscientific panacea. Giving a crap makes our brains better at almost everything because our default is barely paying attention to anything. Michael Esterman, a professor at Boston University and cofounder of its Attention and Learning Lab, says, “The science shows that when people are motivated, either intrinsically, i.e., they love it; or extrinsically, i.e., they will get a prize, they are better able to maintain consistent brain activity, and maintain readiness for the unexpected.”
When people are judging romantic partners, accuracy goes up. And by the same token, when a study had anxiously attached women eavesdrop on their boyfriends talking to beautiful female researchers, guess what happened? Yup, their ability to correctly predict his answers to questions increased. But when there’s no loss or gain, our brains just idle along.
In this kind of book I’m supposed to coin catchy names for core principles, aren’t I? You know, like “The Five Second Rule” and all that. Wouldn’t want the genre police coming after me. I hereby dub this The Lazy Brain Axiom™.
So the first step to being better at reading people is to be curious. Even better is to provide yourself with some sort of external gain or loss that motivates you.
Problem is, even when sufficiently motivated, we can improve our skills only so much. We’re just naturally not that good at reading people. Motivation improves accuracy, but only with people who are sufficiently expressive and readable. If you’re dealing with someone who has a Botox-level poker face, motivation won’t help much. This leads to our second big insight: readability is more important than reading skills. People-reading skills aren’t that variable, but how readable people are ranges widely. Most of the reason we’re able to read people isn’t that we’re skilled; it’s that they’re expressive.
So as far as reading people’s thoughts and feelings goes, if “judging a book by its cover” means only passively evaluating people, then the myth is already pretty close to busted. We’ll give the maxim a fighting chance and assume that’s not what it means. But it still seems like we’re stuck. Should we just accept that we’re going to routinely misinterpret others and there’s not much we can do about it? Nope. To graduate first in my class, I can either improve my grades or make everyone else do worse. We’re going to focus on the latter, just like I did in school. So we’ll call this The Eric in High School Theorem™.
Since we can’t improve our people-reading skills that much, we have to focus our efforts on making others more readable.
Instead of passively analyzing them like Sherlock Holmes does on TV, we need to actively elicit stronger signals to get more telling reactions. The first and easiest method is to manipulate context. Would you learn more about someone over a cup of tea or by playing football with them? The first might get you more information (if you can trust what they say), but the latter would organically show you how they make decisions and strategize, and whether they bend the rules. The wider the variety of stimuli you expose them to, the more facets of who they are will become clear.
Bringing other people into the mix is powerful too. Having third parties present can show different sides of someone. (If you only dealt with someone in the presence of their boss, would you think you were seeing the full them?) And don’t talk about the weather. Emotional reactions are more honest, and “safe” conversation topics turn people into politicians, conveying little of substance. When researchers had people on first dates talk about STDs, abortion, and other taboo topics, they not only learned more about the other person, they reported enjoying the conversation more.
And as we’ve established, our own brains are often the problem here. We have a tendency to pay attention to the wrong signals. Which brings us to the issue of body language. And everybody just loves body language. But the literature is consistent—the value of consciously analyzing body language is grossly overrated. There’s a reason nobody has ever created a “Body Language Rosetta Stone.” Nonverbal cues are complex, context dependent, and idiosyncratic. We can never be certain what is causing what. Yes, they’re shivering, but you can’t be sure if that’s because they’re nervous or because they’re cold. And this point is critical: body language is utterly useless without a baseline. Some people always fidget, and it means nothing. Other people rarely fidget, and it’s very telling. But if you don’t know their default, you’re just letting your brain spin fanciful stories again.
Truth be told, if you wanted to focus on something, skip body language and laser focus on their speech. When we can hear someone but not see them, empathic ability declines only about 4 percent. When we can see someone but not hear them, the drop-off is a whopping 54 percent. Pay less attention to whether they cross their legs and more attention to when their voice changes.
So the science says reading the minds of those around us isn’t something we’re naturally good at, but it does give us some tips on how we can be better. But what about when we meet someone new?
Ready to learn the real deal about how first impressions work—and how we can get better at them? (Stomp your hoof once for yes or twice for no, Hans.) First impressions are a critical part of “reading a book by its cover.” But to really get at the core problem we have with them, we need to take a quick detour through the world of memory . . .