Why we misread the people we know best

“You know what I mean.” It is one of the most common things we say to the people closest to us. It is said with confidence, often with a smile, and it is supposed to save time. According to a body of research in social psychology, it is also one of the least reliable sentences we use.

The experiment

In 2011, the psychologists Kenneth Savitsky, Boaz Keysar, Nicholas Epley, Travis Carter and Ashley Swanson published a study with a deceptively simple design. Pairs of people took part: sometimes married couples or close friends, sometimes strangers who had just met.

One person in each pair, the speaker, read out short ambiguous phrases — sentences that could mean quite different things depending on the tone of voice. The other person, the listener, had to pick which of several possible meanings was intended. Before the listener answered, the speaker predicted how often they would be understood.

Speakers expected to be understood much better by their spouses and friends than by strangers. In practice, the close listeners did no better than the strangers. Closeness had raised the expectation of being understood without raising the accuracy.

The researchers called it the closeness-communication bias. Feeling close makes us feel understood, so we stop checking whether we actually are.

Tapping out a song

The study belongs to a longer line of research on how poorly we judge what is going on in other people’s heads. One of the most memorable examples comes from a 1990 Stanford PhD study by Elizabeth Newton.

Newton asked one group of people to tap out the rhythm of well-known songs, such as “Happy Birthday”, on a table. Listeners had to guess the song from the taps alone. Before they started, the tappers predicted that listeners would get about half of the songs right. Across 120 songs, listeners recognised just three.

To the tappers, the melody was playing in their heads as they tapped. It felt obvious. To the listeners, it was a series of knocks. The psychologists Chip and Dan Heath later popularised this as the “curse of knowledge”: once you know something, it is very hard to imagine not knowing it.

The illusion of transparency

A related effect works in the other direction. In 1998, Thomas Gilovich, Kenneth Savitsky and Victoria Husted Medvec described the “illusion of transparency”: our tendency to overestimate how much of our inner state — nervousness, irritation, boredom, affection — is visible to others.

In one of their studies, people tried to lie about whether a drink tasted pleasant or unpleasant while observers watched. The liars thought their faces gave them away far more often than they actually did. We feel like an open book. To others, we are often a closed one.

Why it happens with the people we love

With a stranger, we work hard to be understood. We slow down, explain our terms, watch their face for confusion and repair misunderstandings quickly. With someone close, we skip those steps. We assume our shared history will fill the gaps — and they assume the same about us.

• We use shorthand that made sense in our own head.
• We read a partner’s silence as agreement, when it may be distraction or doubt.
• We hear a familiar tone and stop listening to the actual words.
• We expect them to notice how we feel, without saying it.

None of this means that close relationships are full of misunderstanding. Long-term partners and old friends often do share a remarkable amount of context. The point of the research is narrower: closeness gives us a feeling of being understood that runs ahead of the reality.

The trouble with email

Written messages make the problem worse, because they strip away tone of voice entirely. In a 2005 study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Justin Kruger, Nicholas Epley, Jason Parker and Zhi-Wen Ng asked people to send short email messages that were either serious or sarcastic, and to predict whether the recipient would be able to tell which.

Senders were confident: they expected their tone to be read correctly most of the time, around 78 per cent. Recipients actually got it right only about 56 per cent of the time — barely better than a coin toss. When the same messages were spoken aloud, the gap shrank. In our heads, the sarcastic voice is obvious. On the screen, it is not there at all.

Asking beats imagining

The common advice for understanding others is to “put yourself in their shoes”. A 2018 set of experiments by Tal Eyal, Mary Steffel and Nicholas Epley, also in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, tested whether it actually helps. Across many tasks — predicting a partner’s opinions, preferences or emotions — imagining the other person’s perspective made people feel more confident, but not more accurate.

What did improve accuracy was simply asking. The researchers called it perspective-getting rather than perspective-taking. It sounds almost too obvious to need a study, but it runs against a deep habit: with the people we love most, we tend to assume we already know the answer, so the question never gets asked.

A small habit worth trying

The good news is that the fix is cheap. The same tools we naturally use with strangers work with the people we love, if we remember to use them.

Saying “here is what I mean” before something important takes a few seconds. So does asking, gently, “what did you hear?” after a tense conversation, or naming a feeling out loud instead of hoping it shows. These are not signs that something is wrong in a relationship. They are signs that it matters enough to get right.

The closer someone is, the more tempting it is to rely on “you know what I mean”. The research suggests that is exactly when it is worth checking.