Think Fast Talk Smart: Communication Techniques - 188. Mind Reading 101: To Know What Your Audience Thinks, Just Ask

Episode Date: February 25, 2025

How to really know what your audience is thinking.To be a great communicator, you have to get out of your own head. But that’s not all, says Matt Lieberman. According to him, you also have to get into the head of someone else.“Mind-reading is this remarkable ability that humans have,” explains Lieberman, a professor of psychology, director of UCLA’s Social Cognitive Neuroscience Lab, and author of Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect. But even as we engage in perspective-taking, Lieberman says our attempts to mind-read often miss the mark. Instead, he advocates for “perspective-getting” — where we don’t just intuit what others think, we ask them directly. “That is where more productive conversation comes from,” he says.In this episode of Think Fast, Talk Smart, Lieberman and host Matt Abrahams explore insights from social neuroscience that can help us communicate more effectively. From understanding how our brains process social interactions to recognizing our own assumptions, he reveals why successful communication requires both humility and genuine curiosity about how others see the world.Episode Reference Links:Matt Lieberman Matt’s Book: Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to ConnectEp.24 Feelings First: How Emotion Shapes Our Communication, Decisions, and ExperiencesEp.39 Brains Love Stories: How Leveraging Neuroscience Can Capture People's Emotions Connect:Premium Signup >>>> Think Fast Talk Smart PremiumEmail Questions & Feedback >>> [e-mail] Transcripts >>> Think Fast Talk Smart WebsiteNewsletter Signup + English Language Learning >>> FasterSmarter.ioThink Fast Talk Smart >>> LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTubeMatt Abrahams >>> LinkedInChapters:(00:00) - Introduction (02:37) - The Social Brain (05:38) - Neuroscience in Business (07:37) - The Science of Persuasion (12:09) - Social Pain & Connection (15:27) - Tackling Loneliness (18:19) - The Final Three Questions (25:38) - Conclusion ********Thank you to our sponsors.  These partnerships support the ongoing production of the podcast, allowing us to bring it to you at no cost.Strawberry.me. Get 50% off your first coaching session today at Strawberry.me/smartJoin our Think Fast Talk Smart Learning Community and become the communicator you want to be. 

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Welcome to Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast. Today I look forward to speaking with Matt Lieberman. Matt is a professor in the Department of Psychology at UCLA, where he focuses on social cognitive neuroscience. He is a pioneer in the study of how the human brain processes social information, particularly in understanding how people think about others and themselves. Matt is also the author of Social, Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect. Matt, thanks for joining me.

Oh, it's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me on. Excellent. Shall we get started? Sure. In your work, you assert that our brains are fundamentally social. You've studied how our brains engage in mind reading or understanding. understanding others' thoughts and feelings. How can we leverage this ability to enhance our communication, particularly in difficult situations? Yeah, so mind reading is this remarkable ability that humans have.

We can think about and ponder what is going on in the mind of someone else based on what they say, where their attention goes, the actions they engage in. It allows us to enjoy things like playing poker, but it also allows us to care for other people and do all sorts of things that make us the successful social creatures that we are. The thing that this brings up for me is that someone might listen to this and say, oh, so I should appreciate the other person's perspective, engage in what we call perspective taking, and that's going to help me understand what they were really trying to communicate.

And it turns out perspective taking is pretty good at getting us to care about another person, but it's terrible at getting us to understand another person. because when we engage in perspective taking, a lot of what we do is just project from ourselves or we project from what we think the reasonable person would say or do. And secretly, the reasonable person is just us. Nick Epley, who's at the University of Chicago, he does this amazing work. You know, we use lots of jargon in our world. And he said, instead of perspective taking, we should all engage in perspective getting.

I've never heard that term. What's perspective getting? Perspective getting is asking, if I'm, a speaker, I can ask you what you're getting from what I'm saying. And if I'm a listener, I definitely should be asking how to sort of interpret something that for me makes me think, oh, does this person mean to say this thing that seems like a pretty bad thing to be saying? And almost always, if you actually engage in the conversation that way, they'll say, that's not what I meant. What I'm trying to convey is this. And then they have a second shot

at the Apple. I think that is where more productive conversation comes from. So while it's innate to being human the ability to actually take somebody else's perspective. We actually have to really work to make sure that we're doing that and we have to ask questions and interact. Mind reading doesn't guarantee accuracy. It guarantees that I feel like I'm getting inside your head. Sometimes I'm really good at that. There are scenarios where we really can figure that out. But there are a lot of scenarios, especially when we get into more abstract things like politics, ideology, religion, things like that, where we really don't know what's going on in another person's mind. We often think things are far more black and white for them than they are.

People have uncertainty. They have nuance. We should, you know, appreciate that. It's all about what I like to jokingly refer to the F word of communication, which is not the naughty one, but it's about fidelity. We're seeking accuracy and clarity, and the only way to do that is to ask and engage rather than just assume. There's often more of a reward for scoring points than there.

is for having kind of a good conversation. What are some practical ways that business leaders and communicators can imply the insights from social neuroscience to improve things like team dynamics, decision making, and foster better communication in general in organizations? Social psychology and social neuroscience, a big part of what they do is empirically test the way the mind actually works in social situations when we're making sense. of others and when others are trying to make sense of us, what are the right conclusions to draw? One example is when we think about using logic to make sense of things. We have this sense, and psychologists believe this as well for a long time, that we have this general purpose

system for doing logical abstract thinking. You use the same processes for playing chess, for doing math, for figuring out how like a plot in a story should be play. laid out, and it turns out that we have, at a minimum, two separate systems for doing logic. And the one kind does cover things like chess and math, but it doesn't cover thinking about other people, narrative and stories. That's a separate system, and they're a bit like a seesaw. If you are engaging one of those thinking systems, you're likely to be turning off the other. If you're running a boardroom and you bring everyone in and there's 20 people sitting around the table and you are promoting norms of having your best analytical thinking hat on, you are

simultaneously without saying so, basically saying, become a little socially dumber because you're telling them to turn off the system that would allow them to pick up on social cues that are really important for a lot of the coalition building we do. So there's a variety of ways in which learning about social psychology and social neuroscience is going to teach you some of the, best practices and best understandings about the nature of things. So the way in which our brain functions in some cases can be the opposite of what the intuitive theories that we present to ourselves and observe and others. Many of our listeners are really interested in the ideas of negotiation and persuasion. Are there specific neuroscience, social neuroscience findings

that could help people be better at their persuasion and influence in the way? negotiation. Are there things they could do, should do, should stop doing that you are aware of? Yeah. So I'll give you a little neuroscience and a little psychology. One of the things that we saw, and I think it was a little surprising, is that when we looked at where persuasion effects consistently happened in the brain, they weren't really where a lot of folks would have expected. The way our studies worked, and I think one of the things that made them successful is that we didn't just show people messages and then say, how persuaded are you by that message? Instead, we would bring people in with messages about changing some behavior. We would measure the behavior the week before the

scan and the week after the scan in ways that didn't make it obvious that we were doing that. So people weren't trying to manipulate their behavior to look a certain way and so on. And what we found, and we've now seen this across 15 different FMRI studies, a very consistent effect, that when people see messages that are associated with them really going on to change their behavior in kind of message consistent ways, you'll see increased activity between the eyebrows in the middle of the forehead, a region called medial prefrontal cortex. It's where the two hemispheres of the brain meet kind of at the most front point in the brains that is consistently associated with reflecting on your own identity. Thinking about yourself and the

characteristics that make you you. And that's been shown since 2002. It's a funny thing because you think of yourself and your identity is the thing that would help protect you from persuasion. But what it suggests to me is that part of what is happening when someone is delivering a persuasive message is that at some level you're trying on a new identity. You can either choose to adopt that identity because you're like, I'd like to be that person. I'd like to be the person who smokes less, who gets more steps in every day. Like, that's an identity I would like to embrace, or it's an identity where, like, yeah, I can't see that being me.

And then that's part of rejecting things. And so I think part of what our self exists for is to allow for the influence of the social world around us. In the West, we tend to think our identity keeps the world from getting in and making us do things we don't want to do. But I think it's a conduit for getting the world's sense. norms into your head when you're young and then occasionally updating those when you're like, that's an identity I could try on. When I think about persuasion more generally, and this informs

some of our neuroimaging work, don't tell people what to believe. Doesn't really work. We have this phenomenon in psychology called reactants. Humans are built not to have their sense of freedom challenged. When you tell someone to believe, you're challenging their autonomy and saying, you believe the wrong thing, here's what you need to believe. And so I think you're far better off engaging in some kind of storytelling. And that story can be about yourself, a third party, and never specifically bring up the ultimate claim that you want the other person to adopt. In the literature, this is called narrative, persuasion, as opposed to rhetorical persuasion. And I think about this from the perspective of trying to be like a really good film director. A film director, a film director,

doesn't say, this is the scene in which you learn that Tommy is bad. I don't want to watch that movie. I want to watch the scene and it's, you know, it's one of these show don't tell type of situations. And a great director knows exactly what reaction you're going to have. They've set up the shot. They've set up the script to do exactly what they want to lead you to that conclusion that you will draw yourself and take ownership of. When you're trying to persuade what you really want is for the other person to feel like they've self-persuaded rather than you persuading them. It'll stick a lot more if they think they came to that conclusion themselves. When we go to persuade, we can make that easier for people to do.

And we can actually imagine what it would be like if, what if you could. So the language becomes a way of expediting that, which is really interesting. Asking them questions, I think, are ways that work with the way persuasion works rather than working against. I really appreciate that. I have to say that one of the areas of your research that I really found interesting is that social pain parallels physical pain in the brain. I first learned of this when I was writing my first book on managing speaking anxiety. Can you talk a little bit about that and what does this suggest for us?

This is more my wife's work than mine. We did it together back in the early 2000s. We showed that if you look in the brain as a person experiences some kind of rejection, which we were nice enough to deliver to people while they're laying in an MRI scanner, if you have them experience in real time some kind of genuine rejection, the responses in the brain, where they show responses, and the way those responses work with each other, looks very similar to what happens when you feel physical pain.

So social and physical pain seem to have this kind of overlap. And then there was this follow-up study showing that if you take Tylenol over a period of days, You'll actually report less social pain in your daily life and show a blunted response to social rejection. And I will add the caveat that this was done under very controlled circumstances. Nobody should be taking Tylenol at home to dull their social pain. Over 500 people a year die from Tylenol overdoses. So anytime I talk about this, I always tell people, do not do this at home. That's not the way to think about this.

some people say social pain is just so different from physical pain. And it is. No one is going to feel rejected and say, geez, I don't know if I have a broken heart or a broken arm, but I can have a broken arm, a headache and arthritis. And all of those are equally distinguishable forms of pain. So pain is a broad category. And I think social pain warrants membership in that pain club. There's another important point in terms of how people think about this. the real world. I think that we have reached a point in our society where there's a lot of folks who will take this kind of evidence to suggest this is why I am allowed to censor or not expose myself to anything that might be socially painful for me. And I think that that's a big mistake for people who do this. And I think that it's important to remember that pain is two things at once. It's an alarm signal that tells you something's wrong. You better change something you're doing. And so that's consistent with if what you are going to say is going to make me feel bad, I'm going to shut the door to that. Just like I'm going to pull my hand off of the stove if I'm burning it.

But the other important thing to know about pain is that it teaches us lessons. We learn from pain. We learn about the world from pain. I think that if you're not exposed to things that could be socially painful, you're really sort of shutting off your ability to learn a lot of things about the way the world works. and maybe some of the assumptions you have about the world, not matching everything that's going on in the world. When I was thinking about what you were saying, it was really hitting me that there are times where I will say something that could be hurtful to somebody.

It could cause some pain. But in my mind, it's not that significant. And yet, based on what you're saying, this could have quite a significant reaction in the way the body and brain respond to it. You have a venture going on that I find really interesting. Can you tell us about that new vent? about how you're using technology to help solve an important social connection issue that many of us face.

There are a lot of people who are struggling with social connection. In almost every walk of life these days, there's what's considered a loneliness crisis. You know, our surgeon general, whose job it is to focus on the physical health of the nation, said that one of his fundamental priorities last year was helping people become less lonely, more socially connected. And, you know, he interviewed us for that work when he wrote about it. So I was persuaded to start a company that uses ideas about how we see and experience the world. When you think about finding people to be connected to, we often think about it in terms of shared interests and hobbies. We think about it in terms of personality. And it turns out that if you try to predict who's likely

to get along and be compatible from those things, you'll get nowhere. You can use the most advanced AI you want. There's several published failed attempts at predicting those things. But there was work going on in neuroimaging showing that if we watch a movie while we're in the MRI scanner, and you look at certain parts of the brain, and we look at the responses that we both have while we watch stupid cat videos, some people playing basketball, maybe a political speech, number of just random slice of life things that you might see flipping the channels on the TV, the more similar our responses are in that region over time, whether your increases go up with my increases and your activity in that brain region go down with mine, the more likely it is

that we're likely to get along and be friends in real life. What that's reflecting is our tendency to see and experience the world in more similar ways. We don't all see the same thing, even when we're looking at the same thing. We have those assumptions in our heads that cause us to see things certain ways. And it's just easier to get along with someone else if they have some of those same assumptions. You're going to laugh at the same things and find the same things distasteful or highly moral or whatever those things are. We tried to figure out if we could measure this. And it turns out we could. And then it also turned out that we could take strangers and predict which of them would get along, which of them would connect in real life when they

met. I think it's amazing that you're targeting a really significant problem of loneliness and feeling disconnected. And the ability to apply insights from neuroscience to solve those problems are fascinating. We'll be right back to finish our conversation. But first, a quick word from one of our sponsors. Their support allows us to bring you this show free of charge. If you've ever felt like you're trying to do everything yourself, especially when the stakes are high, you're not alone. One of the biggest shifts I see in effective leaders growing their organizations comes from focusing on the right things. But that's hard to do when you're stretched thin. You need to be able to delegate some tasks to competent professionals. That's where Upwork can really help. Upwork is a

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The first one I make up for you and then the others are the same I've been asking for years. Ready for that? I'll do my best. You have spent a lot of time looking inside people's heads and seeing how that applies to our social world. What's one big takeaway you have from that that's really impacted the way you live your life? I think one of the big takeaways from neuroimaging and from other things in general is that people are more complicated and nuanced. than we give them credit for. Our brain does so many clever things behind the scenes

to give us an immediate, sensible picture of what's going on in the world, what's going on in any given moment. It is miraculous that our brain does this. And one of the things about this is that it not only delivers to us a sensible picture of the world that is absolutely not a direct representation of the world,

but it gives us a really inappropriate level of confidence in what we see. And I think from a running from the dangerous animal perspective, that's a good thing, right? You don't want to have to stop and think and be philosophical and say, how do I know this thing really wants to hurt me? We want a brain that says run away from the dangerous thing. And it's good 99% of the time, but 1% is still a good amount of the time where it gets us into lots of trouble. And I think the biggest unnoticed problem in the world is that we don't appreciate the constructive activity of our own minds and the ways in which that then leads us to make very negative attributions about other people and why they're doing the things they do. What we really should be asking is, why do you see things that way?

Is there an insight I can get from that? And also, why do I see things the way I do? What assumptions is my brain making? To do that just involves a greater level of humility. Thank you for that. I hope everybody listening takes a moment to reflect on the fact that we are often overconfident and to remind ourselves, as you have just reminded us, that we need to question why other people might think the way they do and why we think the way we do.

Let me ask you question number two. Who is a communicator that you admire and why? There's so many. I actually think some of the most effective. important communicators in the world today are comedians. They point out all the quirks of the social norms that we all adopt without stopping to think about them. And they highlight these things for us. And they're like, why do I do all these things the way I do? They tell us hard things about the world, about our political divide, about religion and other things like that. I tend to think of

comedians today performing a lot of the same role that up until maybe 19, 150, philosophers did for us. And I don't think philosophers do that so much anymore, but I do think that the comedians are the people that are out there really getting us to stop and think and laugh at the same time. I don't know who I thought you would say, but I didn't think you would name comedians, and I appreciate that. Final question. What are the first three ingredients that go into a successful communication recipe? One is the humility piece, right? Remember that you are not as clear as you think you are and that people are not hearing what you think they're hearing. When you are speaking to an audience, you don't get to do perspective getting. This is actually one of the reasons I use

humor a lot in my lecturing because it's how I know that people are listening to everything else. If they're laughing at the right time, it means they were listening the rest of the time too. But it's a really hard thing and it's different than having a one-on-one conversation where I can look at your eyes and your facial expression and get some read on what's going on. Audiences don't think they have a job other than to just enjoy, so they'll just sit, flat face, passive, no back channeling where they're giving you head nods. You've got to work really hard. So that's number one. Number two, when it comes to having conversations, and I have to give credit, this comes from David Rocky, and one of the things he said to me long ago is you've got to think differently,

separately about before, during, and after. When you're in the moment of having a conversation, don't try to do too much thinking, because you can't. You're just. You're just. just going to muck it up. It's like a baseball player thinking as they're swinging. You don't want that. You're going to choke. So do your thinking before and after, right? Before you go in an interaction, think about the things you want to say. Also think about the mindset you want to have. If you want to have that mindset of perspective getting and humility, remind yourself. And then after you want to do a postmortem and be ruthless with yourself and say, this is what didn't work. And if you got into things that you wish you hadn't said, take that time to say, I'm going to write to that person and say,

I wish I hadn't said that. And I think a lot of other things, too, that are a lot nicer than that. And then the third thing, learning the kind of communicator you are so that you can learn what your strengths and weaknesses are, compensate for the weaknesses, and play to your strengths. One of the ones I use in writing is, are you an over or under communicator? Most of us are not very good at communicating. It's why it scares us so much. Those three ingredients are critical,

and the recipe for successful communication is clear. The last point you made about really know yourself and what type of communicator you are, I want to thank you for helping us get better insight into the type of communicators we are and the type of people we are. The fact that you get to look under the hood and look in the brain and come forward with some ideas

and the guidance to be driven, driven by humility and perspective getting, I think, are critical for all of us. Thank you for your time. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you for joining us for another episode of Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast. To learn more about neuroscience and communication, please listen to episode 24 with Baba Shiv and episode 39 with David Eagleman. This episode was produced by Jenny Luna, Ryan Campos, and me, Matt Ibrahims.

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