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Humans generally are not very good at knowing what other people think, even when we think we do. We make all kinds of assumptions about others’ behavior, motivations, and beliefs that are often wildly misplaced. This is especially so when those other people are on the opposite side of the political aisle.
So says a recent study by researchers from the University of Oxford and King’s College London recently published in Scientific Reports. The researchers recruited 256 participants born and residing in the United States for an online survey. The survey measured how well they were able to predict the political beliefs of individuals defined as from their “in-group” or “out-group.”
“We wanted to see whether people were worse at understanding people that they politically disagreed with, and whether they knew about it,” says Bryony Payne, a cognitive psychologist from King’s College London and lead author of the work. No previous studies had taken a reliable measure of differences in how well a person might understand person A versus person B, she says, and also whether any differences in understanding are related to ability or to motivation.
People really aren’t aware that they’re bad at this.
To sort participants into in-group and out-group buckets, the researchers presented them with one of 24 starting statements, which touched on religious, family, and economic values, and asked them whether they agreed or disagreed. For example: Poor people are poor because of bad attitudes; The marriage between a man and a woman is sacred and holy; I favor human rather than religious values; or We should ensure that no one is denied a job due to prejudice.
The participants were then presented with a response to this same statement from an anonymous individual. If the two shared a similar view, they were deemed “in-group” to one another. If they differed, they were considered “out-group.” Next, participants were asked to predict the views of this person on further statements and to state their confidence in their answers. They repeated the exercise for 24 different people.
The study found that, on average, participants predicted the views of their in-group just over half of the time, whereas that accuracy dropped to 39 percent for their out-group. Participants were only slightly less confident about their abilities to predict responses for people with whom they disagreed, giving themselves odds of 74 percent to guess the response of their in-group correctly, compared to 72 percent for their out-group. “People really aren’t aware that they’re bad at this,” Payne says.
The work builds on what is already a worrying foundation. “Quite a lot of previous research suggests that when we’re thinking about an out-group member—whether because they’re different in race, political beliefs, gender, or country—we think that they have relatively simple minds,” Payne says. When we think someone is different, we fall back on stereotypes to infer their principles and values.
It’s not that we can’t be bothered to think about the minds of our out-group—even when we try, we can’t do it.
“Part of what motivated our work was that we didn’t know whether people were genuinely worse at understanding the minds of people they disagree with,” or if they just couldn’t be bothered to really think carefully about it, Payne says. So as part of the new study, the researchers offered their participants the opportunity to seek five additional pieces of information about the people they were asked to characterize through the survey, in the form of their responses to other statements. Correct answers resulted in a higher pay-off at the end of the study, but each piece of information sought also came with a penalty, incentivizing them to seek only as much additional information as they felt they needed to make an accurate assessment and no more.
“We showed that [participants] seek as much if not more information when they disagree with someone, which suggests that they kind of know that they don’t have all the information,” Payne says. But even with additional information and presumably insight, participants still misjudged the out-group individuals. “I think that was one of the most surprising things because it showed for the first time that it’s not that we can’t be bothered to think about the minds of our out-group, it’s that even when we try, we can’t do it.”
This may be partly a result of societal polarization itself, the study authors say. Polarization leads to fewer interactions with out-group members, and therefore less experience modeling out-group minds and a poorer understanding of how they might vary.
Payne and her colleagues are working on designing further studies that probe into the roots of these blind spots. Should we blame the way the media portrays political opposition for our apparent inability to grasp the minds of those with whom we disagree? Or something else, more innate?
“I think if people are more aware that there are certain people in the world that you’re not going to understand as well as you think, over time it could mean that they ask more information of them—or find out more information before they jump to conclusions,” says Payne. “And that might help people understand each other better in the long run.” 
Lead image: Lightspring / Shutterstock
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