# It’s impossible to know what’s going on inside someone else’s head It’s common and easy to assign a specific thought or motivation to someone else - “he thinks that restaurant is bad,” “You’re angry,” “they hate me because I broke their toy.” While there might be tons of evidence that these things may be the case, there are several reasons to take an ignorant stance on what is going on inside people’s heads. [[People are both more similar to you and more different from you than you think]] so behaviors that might mean that *you* were thinking or feeling a certain thing might indicate something different in someone else; people’s minds change; and it is painfully easy to misinterpret words or actions (especially on the internet.) Dealing with what’s going on inside someone else is a case where phrasing actually matters. “He thinks X” vs. “He has said that he thinks X” are very different assertions about the world. This difference is important both externally and internally. Externally, people will respond very differently to “I suspect you don’t like X” than to “you don’t like X” one is an assertion about yourself and one is an assertion about them that puts a burden on them to either accept it or start an argument. Internally, if you say “Alice doesn’t like cheese” that becomes one of your beliefs (albeit a small one.) So even if Alice would say that she doesn’t like cheese now, she might develop a taste for a mild cheddar she will taste in the future. If you believe that Alice doesn’t like cheese, her taste for mild cheddar will introduce cognitive dissonance, however small. This example is trivial, but in other cases, the cognitive dissonance can have a big effect. If instead you say “Alice has told me that she doesn’t like cheese,” none of your beliefs are challenged by Alice’s taste for mild cheddar. [[Scott Adams]] suggests that this leads to a heuristic that you should pay less attention to people who make statements about what you or other people are thinking. ### Related * [[Life Style Guide]] [Web URL for this note](http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/It’s+impossible+to+know+what’s+going+on+inside+someone+else’s+head) [Comment on this note](http://via.hypothes.is/http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/It’s+impossible+to+know+what’s+going+on+inside+someone+else’s+head)