Dr. Yael Schonbrun | The Science of Misunderstanding

So one of those first points that you made around overconfidence I thought was really interesting and is so real once you look at things through that lens, and if you have some humility [laughs] to own it.

Yeah, and it seems, maybe you could explain that, what that means a little bit more.

And also a takeaway was our overconfidence in understanding seems to go up the closer we are to somebody, and I thought that was really interesting.

Even in relationships after knowing someone for a long time, we seem to make a lot more assumptions and be way more confident in our understanding.

And then even clinically, I was thinking about it through that lens too.

When you first start working with a client and you have such a clean beginner's mind on what you know about this person and building the map, and how over time you can...

It's easy for that to atrophy or to lose that stance.

And so it's maybe we could talk about that a little bit too, but let's showing up for you around building some texture around this overconfidence issue.

Yeah.

There's a whole lot of really cool research.

So just most fundamentally, like we do have more confidence in understanding than accuracy.

That's just like a, a basic truth.

And when researchers have participants make ambiguous statements, they feel more certain that the listener will understand, and the listener feels more certain that they understood than they actually do.

So on both sides there's an overconfidence.

And a pocket of research that you're referencing is research out of Nick Epley at the University of Chicago's [laughs] lab, which I just think is so cool.

He studies something called the closeness communication bias, and that's this idea that, as you're saying, like the more we know people, the more confident we get that we understand them.

And what's important to note is in a sense we're right.

You know your partner well.

I know my partner well.

I know my kids super well.

I made them.

[laughs] I've seen them grow up.

I know them really well.

The problem isn't that we aren't knowing them better over time.

The problem is that our confidence gets ahead of our accuracy.