Narrator: In 2001, President George W. Bush met Russian President Vladimir Putin for the first time. After the meeting, Bush famously declared, "I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy… I was able to get a sense of his soul." History, of course, would prove this initial assessment to be profoundly flawed. This wasn't a unique failure of a political leader; it was a dramatic example of a mistake we all make. We are constantly trying to understand what others think, feel, and want, and we are often supremely confident in our conclusions. But how accurate are we, really?

In his book Mindwise, social psychologist Nicholas Epley reveals that this "sixth sense" for reading minds, while fundamental to our social lives, is far more error-prone than we believe. He dismantles the myths around our intuitive abilities and provides a scientific roadmap to understanding why we so often get others wrong, and how we can start to get them right.

Narrator: We navigate our social world with the baseline assumption that we have a decent grasp of what’s going on in other people’s heads. Yet, research shows this confidence is largely an illusion. Epley points to studies revealing that when it comes to guessing what a specific person thinks of us, our accuracy is barely better than chance. For example, in experiments where people guess who in a group likes them, the correlation between their predictions and reality is astonishingly low.

This illusion of insight only grows stronger with people we know well. In one study resembling the TV show The Newlywed Game, romantic partners were asked to predict each other's attitudes and preferences. They were correct only 44 percent of the time, yet they believed they were correct a staggering 82 percent of the time. This gap between confidence and accuracy is where misunderstanding thrives.

The consequences of this overconfidence can be catastrophic. In 1938, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain met with Adolf Hitler. Despite noting the "hardness and ruthlessness" in Hitler's face, Chamberlain came away convinced he was "a man who could be relied upon when he had given his word." This profound misjudgment, rooted in a misplaced confidence in his ability to read another man, helped pave the way for World War II. It’s a stark reminder that our intuitive sense of others is not a superpower, but a flawed tool we rely on far too heavily.

Narrator: Epley argues that one of our most fundamental errors in social judgment is a mistake of engagement. We either fail to recognize a mind where one exists, or we attribute a mind to something that has none. The first error, dehumanization, is often misunderstood. It’s not always about active hatred; more often, it’s about simple indifference.

This is powerfully illustrated by the story of Standing Bear, a chief of the Ponca tribe. In the 1870s, the U.S. government forcibly relocated his people, leading to immense suffering. When Standing Bear’s son died, the chief journeyed hundreds of miles to bury him in their ancestral land, only to be arrested. The government’s legal case rested on the argument that a Native American was not a "person" under the law and therefore had no rights. In court, Standing Bear held up his hand and said, "This hand is not the color of yours. But if I pierce it, I shall feel pain. If you pierce your hand, you also feel pain... I am a man." By closing the psychological distance and forcing the judge to see his mind and his humanity, he won his case. Indifference and distance had allowed the system to treat him as mindless; connection forced it to see him as a person.

Narrator: One of the biggest obstacles to understanding others is our own mind. This isn't just about selfishness; it's a cognitive bias called egocentrism. We are the center of our own universe, and we struggle to escape our own perspective. Epley identifies two key forms of this bias. The "neck problem" is our failure to realize that others may be paying attention to completely different things. The "lens problem" is our failure to realize that even when we see the same thing, we interpret it through the unique lens of our own beliefs, feelings, and experiences.

A classic experiment demonstrates this perfectly. Researchers had college students wear an embarrassing t-shirt featuring the singer Barry Manilow into a room of their peers. The students wearing the shirt predicted that nearly 50 percent of the people in the room would notice it. In reality, only 23 percent did. This is the "spotlight effect"—we vastly overestimate how much others are paying attention to us. We are so caught up in our own experience of embarrassment that we fail to realize that most people are too busy being the main character in their own movie to notice our supporting role.

Narrator: When we don't have direct information about a person, our brains use a shortcut: stereotypes. Epley explains that stereotypes aren't necessarily born of malice; they are our brain's attempt to find an average or a "gist" for a group. They can be directionally correct, but they are often wildly inaccurate in magnitude, leading us to exaggerate differences and ignore vast areas of common ground.

Consider a study on wealth inequality. Researchers asked Americans to choose their ideal society from diagrams showing different levels of wealth distribution. The stereotype holds that liberals want equality and conservatives want a merit-based hierarchy. The study found this was directionally true—Democrats preferred a slightly more equal distribution than Republicans. However, the difference in their preferences was a mere 3.5 percent. Both groups overwhelmingly rejected extreme inequality and preferred a system far more equal than the one in the United States. The stereotype created a chasm of perceived difference where, in reality, there was a massive, shared consensus.

Narrator: We have a powerful tendency to believe that what people do is a direct reflection of who they are. Psychologists call this the "correspondence bias." We see an action and immediately infer a corresponding personality trait, often ignoring the powerful influence of the situation.

The classic "Quiz Bowl" experiment shows this in action. In the experiment, one person is randomly assigned to be the "questioner" and another the "contestant." The questioner is told to write ten challenging questions from their own sphere of knowledge. Unsurprisingly, the contestant struggles, and the questioner appears brilliant. When observers are asked to rate their intelligence, they consistently rate the questioner as significantly smarter, completely ignoring the massive situational advantage they held. They mistook performance, which was shaped by the context, for innate ability. This same bias leads us to judge those who didn't evacuate during Hurricane Katrina as "irresponsible," ignoring the context of poverty and lack of transportation that constrained their actions.

Narrator: So how do we get better at this? The common advice is to try harder—to read body language or to engage in "perspective-taking" by imagining ourselves in someone else's shoes. Epley argues this advice is mostly wrong. Trying to decode body language is notoriously unreliable, and studies show that actively trying to take someone's perspective can actually decrease accuracy, as we often just project our own biases onto them.

The most effective tool is far simpler: perspective-getting. Instead of guessing what's on someone's mind, we should ask them. In 2010, when the Pentagon was considering repealing the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy, senior officials predicted chaos and disruption. But instead of relying on these secondhand guesses, the military did something radical: they asked the soldiers. They surveyed over 115,000 active-duty personnel. The results showed that most soldiers didn't care and didn't anticipate problems. The repeal went through and was later described as a "non-event." Getting perspective, rather than taking it, led to an accurate understanding and a successful policy change.

Narrator: The single most important lesson from Mindwise is that the greatest tool for understanding others is not our intuition, but our ears. We spend so much time trying to cleverly infer, deduce, and read the minds of others from subtle clues, when the most reliable information is often waiting to be shared. The surest way to know what someone is thinking is to create a space where they feel safe enough to tell you, and then to simply listen.

This insight was never more critical than during the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the world stood on the brink of nuclear war fueled by mutual misunderstanding. The crisis was only averted when John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev abandoned distorted official channels and began communicating directly, sharing their perspectives and constraints. They learned that the surest way to avoid a catastrophic misjudgment is not to assume you can read another's mind, but to have the humility to ask and the wisdom to listen.