Q&A

You believe that the ability to ‘read other people’ is the human brain’s greatest asset. Please explain.

This ability — which I also call our social sense or sixth sense — enables us to achieve life’s most important goal: connecting with other human beings. It allows us to cooperate with those we should trust and avoid those we shouldn’t. At its best, it enables understanding between friends, empathy between strangers, forgiveness among enemies and cooperation between people, co-workers — even countries.

Psychologists have been studying this ability for some time now, and we have found that people use three intuitive tools to make inferences about what is going on in another person’s mind. The first one is no surprise: Given that we are egocentric, we use our own thinking as a guide to what others are thinking. So, if I think onion ice cream sounds terrible, it is reasonable for me to assume that you will agree.

Secondly, we make regular