Why our unique experience matters
Your prior exposure to other people affects how you think about others
WHAT WE KNOW
As you move through the world interacting with other people, you will build up a representation of what they are like. For example, what sort of personality traits they have, how having one trait makes it more or less likely they will also have another, and how all of this relates to their behaviour.
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Of course, everyone is unique in their experience of which other people they've met and what they are like. Over time, you will have built up a unique map of these people that is representative of your experience. Our research shows that we each have our own idiosyncratic map and we use this when trying to understand someone else's emotions or intentions.
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For instance, when you see someone's facial expression and you try to work out what emotion they are feeling, you use what information you know about that person's personality traits, as well as how having those traits is related to experiencing different emotions, to figure it out.​​
WHY YOUR EXPERIENCE MATTERS
Your unique experience matters because the people you have come across will be the people that have informed your map of how everyone's mind works. If you've only experience of a narrow set of people, or a lot of people that are all very similar, your map will reflect that. This makes it likely that you will be very good at understanding people who have minds which are similar to what you experienced before - those that are represented well by your map - but much less able to understand people who have minds which deviate from what you're used to.
SIMILARITY HELPS
Our research shows that when we perceive someone to have similar traits to ourself, we are more likely to make accurate judgements about their other mental states, like what thoughts, feelings, and beliefs they have. This is because we can use ourselves as a basis to understand what the other person is like, i.e. If i know me, I know you. If I think someone is an anxious person, and I am too, then I'm more likely to be able to guess correctly what they are thinking in a certain situation compared to if I wasn't an anxious person. However, this only works if the similarity I perceive between myself and the other person is accurate.
THE EFFECT OF SIMILARITY AND FAMILIARITY
Your idiosyncratic map will be built up from exposure to the people you have come across and it will be most detailed for the people you have the most experience with. For instance, you probably know your family and friends better than you know your work colleagues or neighbours, and you know those people better than celebrities you've only read about in a magazine or people from other countries you've heard about on the news. The more experience you have of them, the more rich your representation of them will be, and this increases how accurate your judgements about them are. This is partly because you've had more information to build up that representation, but also because you've had time to adjust your map if your initial expectations about them were wrong. We can't do this with people we are less familiar with.
A LACK OF SIMILARITY IS DIFFICULT
For instance, children who have experienced abuse or neglect may be more likely to represent other people's minds as ‘nasty’. That is, they may overestimate the likelihood that others are aggressive, deceitful, and lacking in empathy because of their prior experience. Therefore, our previous experience we have of others may reduce our ability to understand people who have minds that deviate from what we're used to.
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This also means that we are more likely to misjudge the minds of people we disagree with politically, because it's more likely that they hold views that deviate from what we're used to. You can read more about that here.