Why Do We Think We Can Read Others Better Than They Can Read Us?

After living with a flatmate for a long time, we may feel that their habits, tone and small gestures reveal their personality quite clearly. Yet when they assess us, we may think, “They only see the surface; they do not know what I really think.” This asymmetry is called the illusion of asymmetric insight.

Across six studies published in 2001, Pronin and colleagues found that participants tended to believe their knowledge of peers exceeded their peers’ knowledge of them. Flatmates also often believed they knew the other person better than that person knew themselves. One explanation concerns how information is used. When judging others, we readily treat visible behaviour as stable and diagnostic. When judging ourselves, we also have access to hesitation, intentions, exceptions and unexpressed feelings, so one action seems inadequate to capture the “real me”. The same evidential standard is not applied symmetrically.

This does not mean that other people always know us better. Nor is it the same as the illusion of transparency, in which we overestimate how clearly others can detect states such as nervousness. The original research mostly measured beliefs about interpersonal knowledge; it did not directly establish how much either person actually knew. Samples, relationship closeness and culture may also affect the pattern.

The sound response is not to pretend that we know nothing about others, but to separate what we observed from what we inferred about its cause. If we want others to ask about our inner reasons, we should offer them the same opportunity to explain theirs.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11642351/
https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.81.4.639