Are you suffering with asymmetric insights?
Why is it that people think they are smart enough to read between the lines and you are not. There is a cognitive bias at play, but what is it?
There is a tendency to slap 'misinformation' on anything we don't like being said. While many of us want data and are willing to assess it, others worry that we will draw the wrong conclusions. The NY Times recently noted that the C.D.C. would not publish large amounts of its COVID data because people might take it and use it for misinformation.
A cynic might say the C.D.C. doesn't want to publish data that shows it has been lying for months or, more generously, been telling noble lies. You can decide that for yourself - I trust you to use your judgment. Yet there is another thing at play here, and you can see it every day on social media.
The subtext for this can be summarized as "I am smart enough to read the data and understand the nuances, but everyone else is not as smart as me, and they must be protected." This is a cognitive bias known as asymmetric insight, and it's something we all suffer with.
A smarter than average person
According to two nationally representative surveys, 65% of Americans believe they are above average in intelligence. While 50% may be correct, 15% are statistically incorrect. When I compiled episodes of The 3 Minute Mentor into a book, I surveyed 1000 employees who work in medium or large companies, and they thought something similar about honesty.
I asked if they believed they operated with Honesty, Integrity, and Transparency, and 99% said they did. Then I wondered about others; did they perform using the same standards? The same people said that around 70% of the people they worked with also lived up to those standards. So are the 29% another statistical anomaly, or is something else going on?
Both of these are examples of Illusion of asymmetric insight.
Think of asymmetric insight as a cognitive bias whereby people perceive their knowledge of others to surpass other people's knowledge of them. We have just met, and while you can't know me yet, I am sure I understand everything about you. This video may help explain it more.
Malcolm Gladwell also talked about this in his latest book, "Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don't Know" and he had a great quote:
"The conviction that we know others better than they know us—and that we may have insights about them they lack (but not vice versa)—leads us to talk when we would do well to listen and to be less patient than we ought to be when others express the conviction that they are the ones who are being misunderstood or judged unfairly."
Check your egos at the door
There is a story that when Band-Aid recorded their hit single, Do They Know It's Christmas, as the artists began to gather, they found a sign on the studio door that read, "Check your egos at the door." Bob Geldof used the sign-up part as a joke but partly to remind people that they were gathering for a bigger purpose.
It is always worth us following Geldof's advice when we enter a room. When we actively listen to understand and not just reply, we learn a lot about the people we talk to. More importantly, it is always worth wondering if they know more about the subject than we do before we assume the opposite.
Likewise, it is valuable to assume that everyone else's ability to understand a subject is just as good as yours, at least until they have proved to you otherwise. A great way to do this is not to overly simply everyone into collective terms like 'all' and 'every.' I have written about this, and no one likes their nuances obliterated by generalizations, so don't do it to others.
Of course, some people like to think they are better than others, but that’s just a story they are telling themselves.