Okay overall. Our guessing is pretty bad, asking is better than guessing, Ekman's science is thin, 'male brains' and 'female brains' are mostly nonsense. Citing Stephen Jay Gould was jarring, apparently some people still respect Gould. ( )

Mindwise by Nicholas Epley is a clear, thorough, accessible book about how we try to "read" others' minds - that is, find out what other people actually think. It's a well-written and useful addition to the many books out there about cognition, and actually adds something new to the conversation.

Basically, Epley says, we human beings just don't know as much as we think we do. We can guess how others think, but some things we just can't know, and some of the mistakes we make about the way other people think cause real damage, as recent events in the news have been making clear.

Human beings, he says, are surprisingly bad at knowing what is going through other people's minds. We treat people like things (or like children, or like animals), and treat things like people (that is, assume that things have a mind of their own). We rely on egocentric assumptions and stereotypes. We think that people's actions match what's going on their minds. Much of the time, we don't even know what we ourselves are thinking, and must mind-read ourselves.

Epley gives many convincing examples, stories, and summaries of research to back up his assertions, and many of them are powerful. He is a professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago, but he doesn't let academic writing infect his prose too much. He does a good job of treading the line between mass-market popular science and scholarly discourse, generally staying well on the side of readability while providing sound evidence. There are end-notes, but even they are often interesting to read, and you get the feeling that Epley could have written a book twice as long as this one and kept his reader's interest.

The author finishes by saying that we should not be guessing or assuming we know what people think. Instead, we need to actually find out what they think by asking them and listening to them. It's a common-sense conclusion that makes even more sense if you have read the book. After reading it, I have been tempted a few times in conversations about politics to hand people a piece of paper with the title of the book and the suggestion that they get it. You will be glad to know I have restrained myself so far.
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I love this book. I regret not having read this sooner but it is amazing. The author here argues that as humans we carry an additional “six sense” (Spoiler alert: it’s not seeing dead people); but basically the ability to perceive the minds of others. Our survival depends largely on how others perceive us. The problem, however, is that our minds are filled by our own beliefs and biases that usually distort how we see the world and how we understand others. This is explained throughout the book as Epley relies on research and experiments in psychology to explain how we tend to misunderstand what others think. It explains, for example, how we tend to anthropomorphize–put a mind to a mindless thing or object (think tamagotchi)–and dehumanization–see a mindful thing as mindless–which leads to stereotypes. Fascinating topic and I intend to reread this book again in the near future. ( )

I love this book. I regret not having read this sooner but it is amazing. The author here argues that as humans we carry an additional “six sense” (Spoiler alert: it’s not seeing dead people); but basically the ability to perceive the minds of others. Our survival depends largely on how others perceive us. The problem, however, is that our minds are filled by our own beliefs and biases that usually distort how we see the world and how we understand others. This is explained throughout the book as Epley relies on research and experiments in psychology to explain how we tend to misunderstand what others think. It explains, for example, how we tend to anthropomorphize–put a mind to a mindless thing or object (think tamagotchi)–and dehumanization–see a mindful thing as mindless–which leads to stereotypes. Fascinating topic and I intend to reread this book again in the near future. ( )

Author Nicholas Epley argues that we have a sixth sense, the ability to see into other people’s minds. Authors of fiction employ that sense imaginatively to see into their character’s minds, and readers of fiction get to see the results. But in real life, we’re not very mindwise, not even when it comes to seeing into our own minds, the ones closest to us. That tension between what we can and can’t do might call into the question the whole concept of a sixth sense. But Nicholas Epley’s Mindwise is still an intriguing read, filled with experimental results, anecdotes and argument.

Some of the experiments described in this book might appear over-simplistic, their results possibly skewed to fit an argument when many other factors, especially social niceties and personal insecurities, might have come into play. But all the examples presented by the author provide food for thought; some of the statistics, in particular, are startling and truly disturbing.

Most interesting to me were cases where social niceties (such as “though shalt not kill”) might be deliberately eliminated, in the training of soldiers for example. The author shows how “mischaracterizing the minds of terrorists can lead to faulty strategies,” and later how our inability to read minds produces very strange results from, for example, the TSA.

Mindwise is a slow read, with lots of arguments, facts and examples. But it’s a fascinating read from a social as well as a scientific point of view. Sometimes annoying, sometimes deeply intriguing, it’s well worth the effort and rewards the reader with lots to think about.

Disclosure: I bought it in a deal and I offer my honest review. ( )