Mindhook is short, interactive sessions on whatever catches your attention. You’re in one. Back again? Your stack’s still here. Different question today.
Slide me, or pick one.Pick one, or slide me.
Say you just met someone new. How much did they like you? Say you walked into a room in an embarrassing T-shirt. How many people noticed?
It’s called the liking gap. After talking to someone new, people tend to underestimate how much the other person liked them and enjoyed their company.In a Cornell study, students wearing a Barry Manilow T-shirt guessed about half the room had noticed. About a quarter had. It’s called the spotlight effect. We’re so aware of ourselves that we assume everyone else is too.
That’s the general pattern. It can’t know how your chat went.
Boothby, Cooney, Sandstrom & Clark, Psychological Science, 2018.Gilovich, Medvec & Savitsky, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2000.
After a chat with someone new, people tend to underestimate how much the other person liked them. Researchers call it the liking gap.
One likely reason: you had a front-row seat to your own worries, and they didn’t. The researchers think we get so caught up in what we said, or should have said, that we miss the signs someone is enjoying themselves. People watching the same chats from outside picked up on those signs.
The gap showed up between strangers in a lab, new dorm mates and people at a workshop. For the dorm mates, it lasted months.
It’s a pattern, and patterns have exceptions. Some chats really are awkward. The odds are just kinder than the replay in your head.
Worth remembering
After a conversation, you’re probably liked more than you think.
Boothby, Cooney, Sandstrom & Clark, Psychological Science, 2018.
Worth trying next time a chat replays in your head: forget your lines for a moment and think about what they did. Did they laugh? Ask you something?
Want to keep this takeaway?
Entertainment that leaves you with something.
In the app, each session focuses on one situation, tip or piece of knowledge, and takes a few minutes.
What if your next scroll left you with something? This one just did.
Here’s one with a situation in it.
Relationships
A friend says, “I finally went to see my sister last weekend.”
Take a moment to think about it.
“Oh nice, I saw mine last month too.”
Very natural. You’re connecting by sharing something of your own, though the spotlight has now moved to you.
“That’s great. Anyway, how’s work?”
Sometimes you do need to move things along, and it’s still a friendly question. It does close the door on the sister, though.
“How did it go? What made you finally go?”
That’s a follow-up question. It tells them you were listening and you’d like to hear more.
In get-to-know-you chats online and at speed dates, people who asked more questions, especially follow-ups, were liked more by the person they were talking to. Most people don’t see that coming. So part of what makes someone easy to talk to is simply that they ask. It won’t fit every chat, and nobody enjoys an interview.
Huang, Yeomans, Brooks, Minson & Gino, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2017.
One interesting idea to take with you.
“Wait, what happened next?”
Want to keep this takeaway?
Follow your curiosity, not a curriculum. Pick a question. There’s a real answer inside each one.
Your brain sees it coming.
It predicts the touch from your own movement and turns the feeling down. In a 1999 study at University College London, people moved a robot arm with one hand and it touched the other. The longer the delay researchers added, the more it tickled.
Your brain predicts your own touch and turns it down.
Blakemore, Frith & Wolpert, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 1999.
Often they really do want to know.
In two studies of children aged 2 to 5, kids who got an explanation tended to agree or move on to a new question. Kids who didn’t were more likely to ask again or come up with their own explanation.
Worth trying next time: a short, real reason, even a simple one.
Frazier, Gelman & Wellman, Child Development, 2009.
Partly because we read numbers from the left.
$2.99 feels cheaper than $3.00, yet $3.59 doesn’t feel cheaper than $3.60. A one-cent drop mostly changed how big a price seemed when it also changed the first digit.
A one-cent cut feels biggest when it changes the first digit.
Thomas & Morwitz, Journal of Consumer Research, 2005.
It may come down to where music and memory meet.
Petr Janata scanned people’s brains while they listened to songs from their childhood. One area near the front of the brain followed the music as it moved, and it also responded more strongly to the songs tied to personal memories.
The same part of the brain can follow a song and the memories tied to it.
Janata, Cerebral Cortex, 2009.
We expect it to go badly.
Chicago commuters predicted a less pleasant ride if they talked to a stranger, and assumed the stranger wouldn’t want to talk. Commuters who were asked to try it reported a happier ride than those who kept to themselves.
Talking to a stranger often goes better than we expect.
Epley & Schroeder, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 2014.
A joke.
In the late 1830s, Boston newspapers had a fad for abbreviations, often misspelled on purpose. On March 23, 1839, the Boston Morning Post printed “o.k.” for “all correct”, short for the comic spelling “oll korrect”. The fad faded. The word stayed.
OK began as a joke spelling of “all correct”.
Traced by linguist Allen Walker Read, American Speech, 1963.
Nobody has settled this one, but two old ideas are worth knowing.
Paul Janet suggested in 1877 that each year is a smaller slice of your life so far. William James pointed out in 1890 that routine smooths the days out in memory, so the years look shorter when you look back.
Time full of new things can feel longer when you look back.
James, The Principles of Psychology, 1890.
“Did you take the bins out?” “I was about to.” “You said that yesterday.”
Neither of you turned it up. Both of you would swear to that.
There may be a clue in a 2003 study at University College London. Pairs took turns pressing on each other’s fingers, each trying to match the pressure they’d just felt, and it climbed with every turn. A push you make yourself feels weaker than the same push from someone else. Fingers aren’t arguments, and real disagreements are more complicated. Still, it’s a useful thing to know when you both feel you’re only responding.
“Hang on. I think that came out sharper than I meant.”
It won’t fit every argument. Worth trying in the small ones.
Shergill, Bays, Frith & Wolpert, Science, 2003.
The yellow was there all summer.
Green chlorophyll hides it. As days shorten and nights cool, trees stop replacing their chlorophyll, the green breaks down and the yellow shows through. Reds are different: many trees make those pigments fresh in late summer and autumn.
Yellow leaves were yellow all summer. The green just left.
US Forest Service.
Curious about that one? That helps. In a 2014 study, people remembered answers better when they’d been curious about the question, both right away and a day later. (Gruber, Gelman & Ranganath, Neuron, 2014.)
Neither one is better. Change your mind whenever you like.
Psychology today, relationships tomorrow, something completely different next week. Dip into whatever catches your attention and leave whenever you like. No fixed path, no pressure to commit.
Curious about a topic? Start a course whenever you’re ready to go deeper.
Example of a course you’ve started
A 28-session course in Relationships, at your own pace.
Chapter: Talking without fighting.
Session: Start soft. The first line sets the tone.
9 of 28 sessions explored
It shows where you are, not how well you’re doing.
Nothing happened. Pick up where you left off, or explore something completely different.
You don’t have to do this every day. Come back whenever you’re curious
You don’t have to finish a course. Start one if you feel like it
If you get one wrong, you get an explanation. That’s all
A session is a few minutes long
This won’t feel like school
This is different from scrolling because you leave with something you can keep
Here’s what you’re leaving with.
Your stack is where the good bits go: takeaways, tips and phrases worth coming back to.
Nothing saved just yet. Find something worth keeping and save it here. Here’s one to start with.
After a conversation, you’re probably liked more than you think.
Boothby, Cooney, Sandstrom & Clark, Psychological Science, 2018.
Saved on this device only.
You can go now, really.
Every other question on this page got an answer. This one’s yours.
There’s plenty more in the app.
Easy to start, easy to stop, easy to come back to.