Secrets of our Mental State.
Most people hate public speaking. The very idea starts
the palms sweating and the stomach churning.
Other people can't read your mental state as well as you think.
Do you know whatever you may think in your mind other
people won’t expect what actually you’re thinking until we expression our
emotions.
It makes sense: with everyone's eyes on you, the
potential for embarrassment is huge. Crowds, we are told, can sense our nerves.
Or can they? We may feel terribly nervous here on the
inside, but what can other people read from our facial expressions, speech
patterns and general demeanour?
When this is tested experimentally we find an interesting
thing.
In one study in which people gave extemporaneous
speeches, participants were asked to rate their own nervousness (Savitsky &
Gilovich, 2003). This was then compared with audience ratings.
The results showed that people tended to over-estimate
just how nervous they appeared to others. And this is a consistent finding. We
think others can read more from our expressions than they really can.
In other studies people have been tested trying to hide
the lies they are telling, as well as their disgust at a foul-tasting drink and
even their concern at a staged emergency. In every case people think their
emotions are more obvious to others than they actually are (Gilovich &
Savitsky, 1999).
Sometimes simply knowing this can help. In a follow-up to
the public speaking study, some participants were told that they didn't look as
nervous as they felt. These people went on to deliver better speeches as their
nerves didn't get to them so badly.
Tap
out a song
Psychologists call this the 'illusion of transparency'.
It's the idea that we feel our emotions are transparent to others when in fact
they are not, or at least not as much as we think.
You can test this illusion by tapping out the rhythm to a
song and getting a friend to try and guess what it is.
When this study was carried out, people guessed that
those listening would get it about 50% of the time (Newton, 1990; PhD
dissertation). In fact it's incredibly hard to guess. Listeners in this study
got it right less than 3% of the time.
This was true even though the songs were incredibly
well-known—in this case it was "Happy Birthday To You" and "The
Star-Spangled Banner".
When you do this with a friend, you find yourself staring
in amazement at them because it seems so obvious. You can hear the chords
thundering away in your head as you tap, but you forget that they can't.
Just the same is true of written communication. When you
write an email it seems perfectly obvious to you what you meant but language is
open to interpretation and sometimes the meaning gets twisted or lost in the
journey from one mind to the next.
None of this means, of course, that our thoughts and
feelings are totally impenetrable to others. Nevertheless the illusion of
transparency is worth bearing in mind as it affects so much of our everyday
life and helps explain arguments that begin with: "But I thought it was
obvious how I felt..."
Image source:
Psychtronics.com gives the only interesting topics of
psychology and you need not to be a professional to understand the articles in
the psychtronics. They are easy to understand to every one and it is mainly for
the college students and Psychiatrists.
Like us in FB to get Updates:
www.facebook.com/psychtronics
Follow us in twitter: www.twitter.com/psychtronics
Post a Comment