Friday, January 1, 2016

Understanding Others

We commonly believe that we understand others better than they understand us.

The rationale for this stems from our external, objective viewpoint and the assumption that the other person has a significant blind-self, while our own blind-self is small.

There is also asymmetry in the reverse situation -- we believe we understand ourselves better than others understand us and may feel insulted if they try to show they understand us more than we do.

The same effect happens for groups, where the in-group believes they understand out-groups better than out-groups understand them.

Overall, this is a position where we generally assume we know more than others, perhaps because we know more about what we know.

TJ

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