That famous line from Burns’ “To a Louse”…….Oh wad some power the giftie gie us, to see oursels as ithers see us – lovely sentiment, but just not possible! I was reminded of it as I read two related articles by Emily Pronin recently (published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin,Vol. 28 No. 3, March 2002 369-381 and the 30 MAY 2008 VOL 320 of SCIENCE Magazine)
Do you ever think why am I only person to see something rationally and reasonably, and everyone else seems biased?
Well, that’s a common experience. It’s also common to wonder why nobody really understands you, and to always fail to completely understand another person.
Why is that?
The practice of medicine is based on understanding……trying to understand what another person is experiencing in order to try and identify whether or not they are ill, and what kind of help they might need. Sounds simple, but it’s far from it.
I recently read two related articles which explain these difficulties very clearly. As with most insights, what they have to say seems clear and obvious once you read it. Both articles deal with the differences between self-knowledge and the knowledge of others.
In essence they show that for self-knowledge we have continuous access to our inner subjective experience of reality, including the full range of sensory inputs, our emotions, and our thought processes. However, when we try to have knowledge of another person we have no direct access at all to any of these phenomena. How exactly does another person perceive and experience a particular colour, or sound, or smell? What emotional experience are they having? And what are they actually thinking? We don’t know. We can’t know. We have to listen to what they have to say and watch how they behave then make our assumptions. Our assumptions, of course, are based on our perspective, not on theirs.
So it isn’t possible to know another person the way can know ourselves. On top of that, our subjective experience conveys a degree of authenticity to our sense of self, which can never be matched when interpreting the language or behaviour of another.
It’s just how things are. We function in a way which gives great weight to our subjective experience…..even our opinions and assumptions about others gain, for us, this high degree of authenticity. We have a tendency to think we can understand another person better than they can understand themselves. The reality, however, is just the reverse, and we should always doubt our understanding and judgement of others more than we do. That’s why true empathy requires a high level of humility.
Heroes Not Zombies 
The issue of our own inner conceptions biasing our ability to judge external issues ‘rationally’ seems to be popping up for me quite a bit lately, often in the context of business decisions – which is a bit off topic from where yo were going here but I’m hoping is a bit relevant. I first became really interested in the conflict when studying journalism and the concept of objectivity. The idea of different weights making it impossible for you to fully understand another individual is good warning that your ‘simple solution’ to another’s issue can simply be a gross underestimate of what is at hand. On the other hand, understanding that another’s view is not burdened with your own internal biases might be a good indicator to give their views higher weight when facing issues of personal importance. Humility does sound like the right tool for the job here.