“What was she thinking?”

“I think he thinks that you…”

“You know, I think I’ve finally figured him out.”

I am convinced that we spend much of our time and speculative energy imagining the contents of other people’s minds. After all, we are relatively familiar to ourselves, but the other half of an interactive exchange feels foreign to us and therefore fascinating. The question of how we understand unknown minds seems to be such a strong preoccupation that it affects not only our personal deliberations, but also many academic fields, at least peripherally. Art and literature try to express it, neuroscience tries to explain it through investigating consciousness and the mind-body conundrum, computer science tries to imitate it, philosophy tries to apply it to issues of ethics and subjective experience.

Yet, if we are so interested in understanding other people’s minds, why aren’t we better at it? Even at a place like Stanford, with the aforementioned areas of study as well as student groups dedicated to championing alternative worldviews, any curiosity we have about other people still comes into tension with our tendency toward self-preoccupation. Over the last few weeks, I’ve had several experiences that have emphasized to me how surprisingly different two individuals’ appraisals of the same event can be. It’s not that one of those accounts is truer than the other, not exactly. It’s that neither of these individuals has access to any personal lens besides his own. I keep being reminded of the old adage that there are two sides to every story. This is one of those head-nodding, yes-I-know truths that each of us has likely heard from a young age, but that doesn’t make it any less easy to forget.

Stanford students are exemplary for their concern about a variety of worldviews, and it seems that part of receiving a liberal arts education is learning to think about different issues from multiple perspectives. But in the sphere of our social lives, we sometimes struggle to embrace this paradigm of mental flexibility. In a way, our college environment encourages a self-preoccupied, Kurtz-like mentality: my problem set, my paper, my athletic activity, my resume, my future career. The real world is little different, and so we could all very well keep living our lives in reaction to our own subjective experience. We are curious about others, yes, but at the same time very self-interested, especially in situations of high personal investment or emotional pressure.

So, fair enough. In a social context, the emotions of the moment can make us blind to anything outside ourselves. This statement strikes me as oversimplified. Emotional systems, in themselves, contribute to essential components of social understanding, such as empathy. There’s a reason why “I know how you feel” can be such a powerful contributor to building rapport in a relationship. And there’s a reason why public messages frequently use emotional appeals to change our perceptions. Emotions can provide a framework for understanding someone else in a way that rational facts cannot.

Maybe it isn’t only our emotions that block us from understanding the other side of the story. Maybe it’s simply that we don’t know the whole story, and that if we did, we wouldn’t be as likely to jump to conclusions. When we lack knowledge, all we can do is project ourselves onto others. This problem seems to be particularly relevant in our age of 24/7 information access, when we assume that knowledge is at our fingertips and feel anxious when it isn’t. As a simple example, I think of something that I have done a ridiculous number of times: text a friend and start to worry when he or she doesn’t reply right away. Am I that low of a priority? I ask myself. By the time we next meet in person, I’m feeling unsettled about our entire relationship, only to find a simple explanation for the miscommunication: forgetfulness, phone died, a personal crisis. I have taken my slice of the world too seriously, and only this infusion of rational fact allows me to relax.

But wait a minute — do we really want to know the whole story? It seems to me that we are often only interested in understanding others in the same terms as we understand ourselves. When we meet new people, this is frequently what piques our interest in them: we identify with some aspect of their lives that applies to us. When people are too different from us, we might be rationally able to understand them, but we still fail in integrating their subjective experience into our perception of the world. Differences in personality might provide spice to a relationship, but the fundamental ingredients are often based on similarities.

Interested in what your neighbor thinks? I’m almost inclined to say that the best intentions, or the best education, might not be enough to truly “get it.” Only time and well-aimed conversation can do that.

Rachel is trying to figure out what’s going on in your mind. Tell her at [email protected].