We All Need to Stop Mind Reading
Mind reading kills our intellectual humility and makes us more afraid of the world
Edited March 4, 2024 to change “Many Democrats assume that Republicans want to take us back to the 1950s, Jim Crow, and a time when women were rarely allowed outside of the house. Many Republicans assume that Democrats want a totalitarian government and a cradle-to-grave safety net to keep everyone dependent” to “Some Democrats assume….” and “Some Republicans assume….” On reflection, I think some is more accurate.
Edited March 4, 2024 to change “I actually had a progressive friend who did just that” to “I actually had a progressive friend who thought just that.” The former phrasing wasn’t as clear as I’d like.
A little while ago, I was writing an article critical of Dr. Ibram X. Kendi. I asked a casual progressive friend who I knew admired him if she could discuss some of my objections to his work and steelman his ideas. She promptly flipped out. She told me the world doesn't need another angry, self-righteous white person whining about "reverse racism" and that I had a moral obligation to shut up.
What was most interesting about our conversation was that I didn't actually want to write about reverse racism. I wanted to ask her about what I saw as Kendi's support for black-only affinity spaces (ex. college graduations segregated by skin color) and if she saw that as helping or hindering the goal of racial integration pushed by civil rights activists in the 1950s and 1960s. But she had an idea in her head about what I wanted to say, and she didn't want to hear anything else.
The entire episode got me thinking about the dangers of mind reading.
Mind reading is what psychologists call a cognitive distortion; it's a mental heuristic that we use, but one that impairs our understanding of the world rather than enhancing it. Here's how social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) Greg Lukianoff define it in their book The Coddling of the American Mind: "Assuming that you know what people think without having sufficient evidence of their thoughts."
I think one of our biggest problems in society is that we spend too much time mind reading.
One example of this is how we talk about "microaggressions." The term "microaggression" comes from Columbia University professor Derald Wing Sue. In a 2007 paper, Sue and his co-authors defined microaggressions this way: “brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial slights and insults toward people of color.”
The thing about microaggressions is that they're often ambiguous. They could be intended to insult someone. Or they could come from a more benign place. Examples of common microaggressions include:
"When I look at you, I don't see color."
"My best friend is black."
"Men and women have equal opportunities for achievement."
"Where are you from?"
"America is a melting pot."
"There is only one race, the human race."
"Everyone can succeed in this society, if they work hard enough."
Other microaggressions can come across as more insulting. Examples include: "A White person waits to ride the next elevator when a person of color is on it," a "Person of color [being] mistaken for a service worker" and "A store owner following a customer of color around the store."
All of these microaggressions (especially the latter set) could be malicious. But they could also be benign. A white man who chooses not to ride the elevator with a person of color might be exhibiting racial animus. Or he might just be having a hard day and want to be alone. Without asking him, it's impossible to know.
Unfortunately, influential institutions are encouraging people to mind read bad intent onto ambiguous actions. The National Education Association, the nation's largest teachers' union, warns that the "message" behind the statement "When I look at you, I don't see color" is: "Denies a person of color's racial/ethnic experiences." Similarly, the secret "message" behind the innocuous-sounding "Men and women have equal opportunities for achievement" is actually sexism: "The playing field is even so if women cannot make it, the problem is with them." The University of Minnesota School of Public Health employs a similar structure. When someone asks "Where are you from?", the school warns, the hidden message is, "You are not American." If "A White person waits to ride the next elevator when a person of color is on it,", the hidden message to the person of color is "You do not belong / You are dangerous."
We're being encouraged to find hidden and malicious meanings behind everyday questions or ambiguous choices. Rather than asking someone what they mean, we're being told to assume that we know what they mean and that it's bad.
This tendency to assume we know what another person is thinking (and that it's bad) shows up in other areas too. In an increasingly polarized society, we're often tempted to mind read terrible intentions onto our political opponents. Some Democrats assume that Republicans want to take us back to the 1950s, Jim Crow, and a time when women were rarely allowed outside of the house. Some Republicans assume that Democrats want a totalitarian government and a cradle-to-grave safety net to keep everyone dependent. Pro-DEI and anti-DEI folks both accuse each other of being secret racists.
One particularly common example of mind reading our political opponents is what I call the "If you really believed XYZ, you would…." fallacy. It runs like this:
"Jesus was a socialist. If you were really a Christian, you wouldn't want to cut the social safety net."
"If you really cared about the poor, you would support occupational licensing reform."
"If you really cared about improving race relations in the US, you would oppose DEI."
Or as Kayla Chadwick put it in one of the Huffington Post's most-shared articles of all time: "I Don't Know How To Explain To You That You Should Care About Other People." The entire article is a lecture about how people who don't support more government spending must be sociopathic.
I call "If you really believed XYZ, you would…" a fallacy because it's a non-sequitur. "If you really cared about XYZ, you would agree with me about how to fix XYZ" isn't a logically valid statement. It leaves out the possibility that someone could care about XYZ but support other solutions to the problem (for instance, they might give to charity rather than vote for an expanded social safety net).
Or as Frédéric Bastiat put it in The Law:
"Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all. We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain.”
We can't always infer someone's intentions just because we know what policies they support. For instance, Republicans give more to charity on average than Democrats do, even adjusted for income. That doesn't paint the picture of a political party that hates the poor. Perhaps Republicans care about ending poverty as much as Democrats do, but simply channel their caring in different directions.
This is a primary problem with mind reading: it gives us confidence that we know our political opponents, but that confidence can be misplaced. In fact, mind reading can even give us wrong information about them. According to a 2020 study in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Democrats and Republicans are terrible at judging how the other side thinks about them. We think that our opponents dislike and dehumanize us about twice as much as they actually do. And, the more partisan we are, the more likely we are to exaggerate this dislike.
When we don't take the time to ask people questions about themselves, our imaginations fill in the gaps with caricatures and mistaken assumptions. As Mónica Guzmán (a senior fellow at Braver Angels, a nonprofit dedicated to reducing affective polarization) puts it in her TED Talk "How Curiosity Will Save Us," "whoever is underrepresented in your life will be overrepresented in your imagination."
A related problem is that when we mind read, we lose our own intellectual humility. Humans are complex. When it comes to microaggressions, for instance, there are a thousand different ways that we could mean any one statement. If someone asks you where you're from, they might be subtly signaling that they don't think of you as a "real" American. Or they might just be being friendly. Or they might be hitting on you. Or they might have social anxiety, and a therapist gave them a challenge of striking up a conversation with one stranger per day. Or or or….
When it comes to why we support or oppose ABC policy designed to fix XYZ, things get even more complex. We don't all think or reason the same way. In order to develop an opinion on ABC policy, we have to take whatever pieces of knowledge we've picked up about XYZ and then filter those pieces through our worldviews and personal histories. There's no direct line between caring about XYZ issue and thinking that ABC policy is the only way to address it.
There are two ways to deal with this complexity. One way is to get curious: "If you truly care about XYZ, why don't you support ABC? What convinced you that ABC wouldn't address the problem, or might even make it worse? What experiences have you had related to XYZ that inform your position, and how can I better understand those experiences? Will you share them with me, and maybe I'll walk away from this conversation knowing something about the world or even just about you that I didn't know before?"
Or, with microaggressions: "I'm curious, why did you say that / ask me that / do that?" A simple question might clear up any misconceptions and also help us to learn more about the person we're talking to.
The other option is to mind read. It's to tell ourselves that we already know everything we need to know about not only XYZ and ABC but also the other person. It's to shut off our curiosity and walk around the world in a state of hubris.
Take it from someone who did this for many years: it's not very much fun.
But there's another reason that mind reading is bad, besides just making us less curious: it can make us think that the world is a scarier place than it really is. Imagine if every person who asked you where you're from really was trying to tell you that you're not a real American. Imagine if every person who ever didn't want to ride the elevator with you actually thought that your skin color made you dangerous. That would be terrifying! (Of course, maybe some of them do think that. That's awful. My point isn't to deny that racism exists, or that minorities deal with a lot of questions and assumptions in the US that can get tiring over time. My point is that mind-reading the worst interpretation onto ambiguous events is rarely helpful).
Or: 43 percent of Americans are Republican or lean Republican. Imagine if every single one of them was the sociopathic monster that Chadwick assumes they are. That would be terrifying. Imagine living in a country where a third of your countrymen genuinely didn't possess empathy.
I actually had a progressive friend who thought just that. During one of our calls, she broke down crying because she couldn't understand how Republicans could be such awful human beings. When you mind read bad motives onto everyone who disagrees with you, the world can start to feel like too much to cope with.
Maybe that's part of why, according to a 2016 Pew poll, 60-70% of highly engaged partisans across the political spectrum felt "afraid" of the other party.
So what's the solution—if mind reading is so bad, how do we stop it? I think the answer is to get curious. Next time someone says something and you're tempted to assume their intention, get curious instead. Ask them why they said that? Or why they support (or don't support) XYZ policy?
You might be surprised at what you learn.
And then let us know how it went.
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