Do you think you already know your family, friends, neighbors, colleagues?
Actually not.
We cannot see the hearts of others because we cannot overcome ourselves. You can't get rid of your own experience, beliefs, attitudes, emotions, and knowledge to know the world. We always look at the world through our own eyes.
The biggest obstacle to understanding others is excessive self-centeredness.
Copernicus may make the earth no longer the center of the universe,
But everyone on the planet is still in the center of his own universe.
Overestimate your importance: "I am the Sun of the Milky Way"
One consequence of becoming the center of our universe is that it is easy for us to overestimate our importance, both in good and bad things.
A classic psychological experiment requires married couples to report how much they are responsible for their family activities. These family activities include positive behaviors such as cleaning the room, making breakfast and resolving conflicts, but also including negative behaviors such as messing up the room, angering the other half, and causing controversy.
The researchers separated the husband and wife and asked them to indicate the percentage of their personal responsibility in each activity. The researchers then simply added the estimates from both sides.
Logically, the sum of the estimated values of the two parties cannot exceed 100%.
That is to say, if the husband claims that 80% of his family's breakfast is made by him, and the wife claims that 60% of the breakfast at home is made by himself, then their child should have eaten 140% of the breakfast. How is this possible?
But the experimental results are exactly the same, and the reports of the husband and wife add up to more than 100%.
This is often the case in life. When the family was eating barbecue, the wife went to buy the ingredients, washed the vegetables, cut the tomatoes, onions, marinated the meat, and wiped the table after the meal, washed the bowl, but flipped the skewers before the grill. The husband thought that he "made dinner."
The really interesting result is that researchers find that even when reporting negative behavior, people overestimate their responsibilities. People will feel that they are the ones who often provoke disputes.
Because self-centered means more aware of your own mistakes, and pay more attention to the day when you accidentally broke the bowl.
In addition, self-centered thinking can lead to paranoia.
We sometimes believe that others are thinking about you, talking about you, and paying attention to you, but they don't. It sounds crazy, but each of us will become crazy in certain situations.
“People have a crazy self-awareness,”
In an interview with The New York Times, Elaine Miller, author of the famous interior decoration blog Decorno, said. Miller said that celebrities will care if their interiors match their image in the public.
“It’s like every move will be seen by others, even their house is part of the show.”
Barry Manilow experiment
"Not so many people are watching you."
Imagine such a scene:
Go to a psychology experiment. When you arrive at the lab, the researchers lead you into a small room asking you to wear a T-shirt and tell you that this is part of the experiment.
A huge star avatar is printed on the T-shirt (you can temporarily assume that Justin Bieber or Song Xiaobao is printed...).
You may be his fan, but most people are not. In fact, even fans may not want to wear their love beans on their bodies...
Even if you are reluctant, you still wear a T-shirt and follow the researchers into another big room. You see that the room is full of other people who come to the experiment (of course, no one else wears a strange T-shirt with a big head).
The researchers said that you are coming a bit late, but you can still participate in this experiment and let you sit down. So you can quickly sit in front of the people and sit in your seat.
At this time, the researchers suddenly apologized to you and told you that you came too late, and need to participate in the next round of experiments. Then the researchers took you out of the room.
Next is the most important part.
The researchers told you that the experiment is now over and asks you to estimate how many people in the room noticed the big picture on your T-shirt.
At the same time, the researchers also asked other people sitting in the room to see the pattern on your T-shirt.
How many people do you think have noticed your T-shirt?
The above experiment is the famous Barry Manilow experiment in the psychology field.
People wearing T-shirts estimate that nearly 50% of people will notice their T-shirts but in fact only 23%.
It seems that the social spotlight is not shining on us as we imagined.
We are not as concerned by others as we have imagined, nor are we scrutinized by others as we expected.
Casablanca moment
We can only look at others through our own eyes. The beliefs and knowledge that are already in the brain are like a microscope head. Through this lens, we will notice the details that others can't capture, but it will also close the focal length, which will make you miss the complete picture, which makes us unable to understand. The views of others.
The way to correct this error is to realize the impact of egocentricity on us. But the difficulty is that we don't know when we are affected and when we don't.
However, you can remind yourself that you should never think that you already know others.
It is precisely because we cannot fully understand what other people think and think, so we often distorted the information that others passed to us according to our own understanding. For example, in life, if a person first feels that others are hostile to himself, then this presupposition will make him interpret the hostile language and behavior of others as hostile.
In the movie "Casablanca", Peter said to Bogart: "You look down on me, are you?" Bogart replied: "If I look at you, I might look down on you."
In fact, most of the "deep meaning" behind the so-called statements is our own imagination. When we are like Peter in Casablanca, we understand that others have not given extra attention to ourselves, and we may live more easily.