Nick Southgate on Predicting Behaviour

We often find ourselves wondering what people will do next. Will partners still love us? Our employers keep us in work? Will that old lady jump the bus queue? Or, even, who will form the next government with whom? Elections turn prediction into a national obsession and the coalition may make that state permanent.

 

When contemplating predictive dilemmas people often evoke the folk wisdom that the only person who can truly know what will happen next is the person in question. Thoughts and motivations are private affairs to which introspection gives privileged and unique access only to ourselves. The potential revelations promised by glancing, if only for a moment, into the minds of our loved ones and leaders are almost intoxicating. Unable to do this, however, we concur with the folk wisdom that each of us knows ourselves best.

 

Psychologist Timothy D. Wilson, however, disagrees. His book Strangers to Ourselves uses wide-ranging psychological research to show that when it comes to predicting our own behaviour other people can be as good, or even better, than we are. How can this be?

 

We like to think of our introspected motivations as predictive facts that will tell us what we will do. However, as Wilson demonstrates, our inner reflections discover not facts but a story we tell to ourselves about ourselves. These stories tend to be rose-tinted. We see ourselves as more consistent, admirable and steadfast than we turn out to be. We forget contrary behaviour and previous weakness and focus on being better.

 

In contrast, other people can only base their predictions on behaviour they have observed. This gives them a factual edge. They know you are always late, don’t stick to diets, drive too fast and tend to forget birthdays. Their judgement is not clouded by resolutions to reform oneself and the self-preserving instinct to not dwell on past misdemeanours.

 

Consequently, if we want to know what you will do next, it is often better to ask others than it is to ask yourself. Friends and family can know you better than you know yourself. Even strangers, who can see a situation more clearly than you, can make better predictions. Which also means that, despite our wish to be flies-on-the-wall as negotiations unfold, and our urge to see inside the minds of the protagonists, it turns out we may well know what our leaders will do next better than they do.

 

Nick Southgate is a faculty member of The School Of Life. He will be hosting our evening class on 'How To Be Cool' on Tuesday 22 june. For more details click here.

Comments

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