Month: April 2023

Mind reading in psychology improves social skills, cooperation and teamwork immeasurably. So, who has the natural ability and how can it be improved?

People are surprisingly poor at mind reading or what psychologists call ‘mentalising’, which is working out what other people are thinking.

For example, experiments suggest we rarely do better than chance at rating how likeable, intelligent or attractive others think we are.

So, who is naturally best at mind reading, why do some people fail so badly and what can they do about it?

4 signs you are good at mind reading

Mind-reading, or mentalising, involves understanding what other people are thinking from subtle cues in their language and behaviour.

In contrast, empathy refers to being able to read the emotions of others.

People who are good at mentalising tend to agree strongly with the following three statements:

• “I find it easy to put myself in somebody’s else’s shoes.”
• “I sometimes try to understand my friends better by imagining how things look from their perspective.”
• “I can usually understand another person’s viewpoint, even if it differs from my own.”

People good at mentalising disagree strongly with this statement:

• “I sometimes find it difficult to see things from other people’s point of view.”

People with autism, in particular, are poor at mind reading.

It is probably no surprise that autism is four times more prevalent in men, who are consistently worse at mind reading.

Dr Punit Shah, study co-author, said:

“We will all undoubtedly have had experiences where we have felt we have not connected with other people we are talking to, where we’ve perceived that they have failed to understand us, or where things we’ve said have been taken the wrong way.

Much of how we communicate relies on our understanding of what others are thinking, yet this is a surprisingly complex process that not everyone can do.”

The ego blocks mind reading

Dr Nicholas Epley of the University of Chicago in Social and Personality Psychology Compass, argues that the biggest obstacle to mind reading and understanding how we are viewed by others is our egocentric bias.

We are all stuck inside our own heads.

The egocentric bias means that when we try to imagine how we are seen by others, we can’t help but be biased by the way in which we see ourselves.

Effectively to read others’ minds, we first read our own minds.

Unfortunately, it turns out that we often don’t see ourselves as other people see us.

Here are two major reasons why:

1. Attentional bias: we assume others are paying much more attention to us than they really are. People usually don’t notice the details we think they do.
2. Construal bias: We see everything filtered through our own beliefs, attitudes and intentions, especially when situations are ambiguous or when our own beliefs, attitudes and intentions are very different from our mind-reading target.

How to improve mind reading

The time-honoured approach for mind reading, including finding out what others think of us has been to try and take their perspective.

In a series of unpublished studies, though, Tal Eyal and Nick Epley found that this was not effective in…

Keep reading here

Venting means letting off steam by talking about a distressing event afterwards — a process that is supposed to help, but does it?

After suffering a traumatic experience, ‘common sense’ has it that immediately ‘venting’ or ‘letting off steam’ by talking about the experience helps protect against future psychological problems.

But, does venting work?

That’s the question Dr Mark Seery from the University of Buffalo and colleagues ask in a study that examined how people coped with the aftermath of the ‘9/11’ terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York.

The research, published in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, suggests that talking about thoughts and feelings after a trauma, or venting, may not help (Seery et al., 2008).

Worse, it may be psychologically damaging.

Venting after a collective trauma

This study’s first set of data was collected on the day of September 11th 2001.

As people sat at home trying to digest the shocking events of the day, 36,000 people were contacted through the internet.

These people were part of a pre-selected nationally representative sample of participants who had already agreed to receive regular requests for surveys.

They were simply prompted to express whatever thoughts and emotions were currently on their minds, should they choose to do so.

Of all these people, 2,138 people were followed up over a period of two years after 9/11 to see how they coped with the collective trauma.

The aim of the researcher’s prompt was to make it similar to a psychologist asking someone to share their experience after they witness a traumatic event.

Naturally, some people choose to vent and others don’t.

In this study, 1,559 chose venting, while 579 remained silent.

The results make surprising reading.

What they found was that choosing to respond to the prompt for venting was a significant predictor of suffering post-traumatic stress (PTS).

What’s more, the longer the response and therefore the more the venting, the greater the level of subsequent PTS.

This suggests that, contrary to popular expectations, expressing thoughts and emotions soon after a traumatic event – ‘letting off steam’ or venting – might actually predict a worse psychological outcome.

Alternate explanations

Although this is a strong finding in a large nationally representative sample, some alternate explanations are possible.

Here are the main ones the authors consider:

• Did those who didn’t respond to the prompt express themselves elsewhere? Probably not: other measures suggested that those who didn’t respond naturally stayed quiet in these situations.
• Did those who did respond do so because they couldn’t talk to anyone else? Probably not: having fewer social networks was not associated with a greater chance of responding to the prompt.
• Were those who responded already more traumatised? Probably not: there was still a relationship between responding to the prompt and PTS symptoms even when lifetime trauma was taken into account.

It’s important to note that this study is not strong evidence that talking about an event actually causes a worse psychological outcome, just that remaining silent isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Junking the hydraulic metaphor

If accurate, these results stand in stark contrast to what has become the accepted wisdom.

Offering…

Keep reading here

Job satisfaction is hard to find, but pay attention to these 10 factors and you’ll be well on your way to your dream job.

If some job satisfaction surveys are to be believed then as many as a third of us are considering a change of job in search of the dream that will provide satisfaction and happiness.

Clearly many are finding it hard to get that feeling of satisfaction from work that a dream job might provide.

Job satisfaction and happiness is important not just because it boosts work performance but also because it increases our quality of life.

Many people spend so much time at work that when it becomes dissatisfying, the rest of their life soon follows.

Everyone’s dream job is different but here are 10 factors that psychologists regularly find are important in how satisfied people are with their jobs.

1. Little hassles spoil a dream job

If you ask doctors what is the worst part of their jobs, what do you think they say?

Carrying out difficult, painful procedures?

Telling people they’ve only got months to live?

No, it’s something that might seem much less stressful: administration.

When thinking about a dream job, we tend to downplay day-to-day irritations, thinking we’ve got bigger fish to fry.

But actually people’s job satisfaction in a potential dream job is surprisingly sensitive to daily hassles.

It might not seem like much but when it happens almost every day and it’s beyond our control, it hits job satisfaction and happiness hard.

This category is one of the easiest wins for boosting employee satisfaction.

Managers should find out about those little daily hassles and address them—your employees will love you for it.

2. Fair pay and job satisfaction

Whatever your dream job, for you to be satisfied the pay should be fair.

The bigger the difference between what you think you should earn and what you do earn, the less satisfied you’ll be.

The important point here is it’s all about perception.

If you perceive that other people doing a similar job get paid about the same as you then you’re more likely to be satisfied with your job than if you think they’re getting more than you.

3. Achievement and employee happiness

People feel more satisfied with their job if they’ve achieved something.

In some jobs achievements are obvious, but for others they’re not.

As smaller cogs in larger machines it may be difficult to tell what we’re contributing and hard to think of it as a dream job.

That’s why the next factor can be so important…

4. Feedback boosts employee satisfaction

There’s nothing worse than not knowing whether or not you’re doing a good job.

When it comes to job satisfaction, no news is bad news.

Getting negative feedback can be painful but at least it tells you where improvements can be made.

On the other hand, positive feedback can make all the difference to how satisfied people feel.

It can turn a routine job into a dream job.

5. A dream job has complexity and variety

People generally find jobs more satisfying if they are more complex and offer more variety.

People seem to like complex (but not impossible) jobs,…

Keep reading here