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If you could choose a single skill, a single super-power, what would it be? Flying is a bit obvious.Invisibility is frankly creepy. Super strengthseems to be of limited use in a knowledge econ-omy. If asked, I expect a large number of peoplewould say: mind reading.

It would be so handy, in so many situations.Can’t work out why your husband is angry? Read his mind!Not sure whether your boss intends to give you a raise?Read her mind! Don’t know if your opponent is holding theace? Read his mind! Such a shame we can’t do it.

Or can we? The father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud,believed that we can – not by magic or psychic powers, butthrough observation: “No mortal can keep a secret. If hislips are silent he chatters with his fingertips. Betrayal oozesout of every pore.” Charles Darwin, a good shout for thegreatest scientist ever to have lived, agreed: “A man whenmoderately angry, or even when enraged, may commandthe movements of his body, but… those muscles of the facewhich are least obedient to the will, will sometimes alonebetray a slight and passing emotion.”

Things have moved on in the last century or so, but nonethe less, the belief that we can see someone’s inner soul,that we can detect the truths that they are unwilling to say,through the involuntary movements of their face or bodyremains. It’s a staple of TV magic shows, like those of Der-ren Brown – who once claimed to be able to tell presenterPhilip Schofield was thinking about his pet childhood ham-ster because of the way his pupils were dilating – and ofdrama, like the BBC’s Sherlock, in which the hero picks upsecrets about a suspect from the tiniest observations. Sportscommentators tell us what the body language of a defeated

Whether by instinct, intuition or body language, humans have an extraordinarycapacity to communicate without using words. But how to pick up on the clues?

Can anyBody Bea mind reader?

report

Words byTomChiversIllustration byNeilWebb

team tells us and “body language experts” read great mean-ing into the set of a politician’s shoulders or the firmness ofan ambassador’s handshake. One such expert, James Borg,told The Daily Telegraph a few years ago that, “Ninety percent of meaning in any interaction is derived from non-ver-bal clues – the manner in which our body ‘talks’ and theway that we say things – and a mere seven per cent from thewords that are actually spoken”.

Thatfigure is nonsense, says Paddy O’Donnell, a professorof psychology and expert in body language at the Universityof Glasgow. “Important parts of [a social interaction] arenon-verbal − but it’s things like scene-setting, emotionalcontent. If you’re discussing the finer points of car mileage,then 100 per cent of it, obviously, is verbal.”

We do have real abilities to read minds, and to detectmeaning, but they are both less spectacular and moreinteresting than a semi-mystical ability to pluck hiddenfeelings from a furrowed brow.

“To psychologists, the phrase ‘mind reading’ doesn’t havethe usual spooky connotations,” says Nicholas Epley, a pro-fessor of behavioural science at the University of Chicago,and the author of Mindwise: How We Understand What Oth-ers Think, Believe, Feel and Want. “It’s a sixth sense, really, anability to think about what other people think and want andbelieve, what motivates them, what their intentions are.”

Without any effort whatsoever, we divide the world intothings that have a mind (other people, animals) and thingsthat don’t. If someone picks up a hamburger, for example,we intuit that they are hungry. If we see a mechanical toypick up a burger, we don’t make the same assumption. It isa vastly complicated process, and allows us to predict highlycomplex actions with some accuracy.

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telegraph.co.uk | SEVEN

Evenpeoplewho thinkthey’re goodatreading facialexpressions areprobablywrongmost of the time

Brain power In the19th century, Darwin(top) suggested that youcould read emotion fromfaces; while true mindreading might be out ofour reach, Derren Brown(above left) has made acareer out of his razor-sharp observational skills;Sherlock holmes (aboveright) actually possessesthe level of intuition thatwe all think we have

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That, though, might seem like a cop-out. If someone saysthat they can read minds and, when you reach to grab yourglass of water, they say “Aha! You’re thirsty, aren’t you? See?I can read your mind,” you’d be a little disappointed. Can’twe use our mind-reading skills to do something moreimpressive, like spot the liar in the group, or the bluffer atthe table? Yes, and no, says Epley.

“Body language is certainly something we believe in verystrongly,” he says. “But the body doesn’t tell nearly as muchas we think it does about a person’s thoughts.” For example,in one experiment, one group of participants was shown aseries of highly emotive images: a hand chopped up in ameat grinder, or a gurgling baby, or the body of someoneshot in the head, or a beautiful nature scene. Another groupof participants was asked to guess what emotion the firstgroup were feeling, and given the choice: in order to do so,would you rather look at the slide the person is seeing, or avideo of the person’s face as they look at it? How good atreading emotions from someone’s face do you think youare? The majority, says Epley, chose to look at the face.

“But in fact, and this is the biggest effect I’ve ever seen inan experiment, every participant is more accurate whenthey look at the slide than when they look at the face.” Infact, when participants looked at the face, their guesseswere just barely above what you’d expect from someoneguessing at random.

What’s going on? We know that we can read emotionfrom faces: a century and more of research, going back toDarwin’s 1872 book The Expression of the Emotions in Manand Animals, has shown that emotions, “happy faces”, “sadfaces”, “disgusted faces” and so on, are recognisable acrosscultures: an angry man from the Congo pulls a similarexpression to an angry man fromthe Wirral. So how can it be thatwe’re no good at reading thoseemotions, which we’re surroundedby all the time?

“Every stage actor on the planetknows why,” says Epley. “If youtake a stage-acting class, you learnthat you have to exaggerate youremotions wildly in front of anaudience, otherwise they won’t seethem.” If you see a disgustingimage on the television, you mightfeel disgusted, but will you pull a full tongue-out yuck-face?Probably not. You might show a faint wrinkle of distaste, butnothing more than that. In psychological experiments intothe recognition of emotions, ironically enough, researchershave to use “almost comically” exaggerated expressions,according to Epley. Even people who think they’re good atdetecting emotions in others’ facial expressions are proba-bly drawing the wrong conclusions most of the time.

When people try to hide their true feelings, it gets evenharder. Some claim that, as Darwin and Freud believed,brief flickers of emotion give us away. This is the theory of“microexpressions”, which has gained a certain amount ofattention in recent years. “The claim is that our true beliefsleak out in very subtle emotional displays on our face, whichare incongruent with what we are actually saying. And that’show you can detect a liar,” says Epley. But the first experi-ment into the subject has suggested that there isn’t much toit. Researchers at the University of British Columbia lookedat 700 expressions of people who were either trying to hideor reveal their true emotions, and only 14 microexpressionswere found – and seven of them were from people trying toreveal their true emotion, but somehow getting it wrong.

“Lying is tricky,” says Prof O’Donnell. “There are somesubtle clues. For instance, we tend to hold eye contact more,not less, when we’re lying. But you can’t tell that, unless you

know how much the person you’re talking to holds eye con-tact on average.” He thinks a more fruitful area of researchare so-called “mirror neurons”, which are involved in simu-lating other people’s behaviour. “We have a tendency toalign our behaviour with the person we’re speaking to – ifthey smile, we smile, if they frown, we frown – and thatinforms our own mental state. So if we feel anxious, it mightbe because we’re mirroring someone who themselves feelsanxious.” So far there’s not much evidence that we can useit to detect lies, says O’Donnell, but it’s an area of interest.“The trouble is,” he says, “that while people are anxiouswhen they’re lying, they also might be anxious for lots ofother reasons, so you get an awful lot of false positives.”

This is not to say that we are useless at reading minds.There is, after all, a burgeoning market for books that tell ushow fantastic our intuition is – Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink,for instance, which urged us to put more faith in our gutinstincts. They can’t be completely wrong, can they?

No, they’re not wrong, says Epley. What they are doing,though, is comparing our intuitions to pure chance. “Weran an experiment with married couples, where we gaveeach partner 20 questions and got them to predict how theirother half would answer,” he says. Each question had sevenpossible answers, so if they were just guessing, you’d expectthem to get an average of a bit fewer than three right. Thecouples did better than that: nearly twice as well. They gotan average of five. “It turns out your intuitions are not totallyclueless,” says Epley. But what’s interesting is how well thepartners thought they did. On average, they scored five – but

on average, they thought they scored 12. And it’s that gap,between five and 12, which is more interesting. Our intui-tion, our mind reading, is indeed good – but it’s not as goodas we think it is.

What about women’s intuition? We’ve all grown up know-ing that women are more empathetic than men, better atunderstanding what other people really think or need. Andit has some basis in science. “We measure the size of theseeffects on a scale between 0 and 1,” says Epley. “And womenare better than men by 0.2. It’s not huge, but it’s there.”When asked to estimate how much better at these taskswomen are, however, people – men and women – tend toguess the effect is about three times as big as it actually is.We often make mistakes of this kind: our stereotypes aboutdifferent groups tend to guess right about the ways in whichgroups are different – conservatives tend to be more infavour of capital punishment than liberals, say – but wehugely overestimate the size of the effect.

Epley is keen to emphasise that we really are a species ofmind readers – incomparably better at simulating otherminds in our own than any other species that we are awareof. But we are also nowhere near as good at it as we thinkwe are. “My one take-home message would be humility,”he says. “And that the best way of finding out what someoneis thinking is to ask them.”

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