Quickie: How Well Do We Understand Our Partners?

Not as well as we think, research finds

Do you understand your partner well?

“Of course I do!” you’re probably thinking. However, according to research in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, you may overestimate how well you understand your significant other — and how well you communicate with them. In fact, chances are couples actually don’t communicate with each other any better than they do with a complete stranger.

“People commonly believe that they communicate better with close friends than with strangers,” said researcher Boaz Keysar. “That closeness can lead people to overestimate how well they communicate, a phenomenon we term the ‘closeness-communication bias.’”

Along with colleague Kenneth Savitsky, Keysar studied a group of married couples who were tasked with trying to decipher the ambiguous phrases that their partners used in a conversation. It turned out that many participants overestimated how much they understood what their spouses were communicating to them, and additionally, participants tended to understand strangers in the study as much as they did their own partners.

“Getting close to someone appears to create the illusion of understanding more than actual understanding.” — Nicholas Epley

“A wife who says to her husband, ‘it’s getting hot in here,’ as a hint for her husband to turn up the air conditioning a notch, may be surprised when he interprets her statement as a coy, amorous advance instead,” said Savitsky. “Although speakers expected their spouse to understand them better than strangers, accuracy rates for spouses and strangers were statistically identical. This result is striking because speakers were more confident that they were understood by their spouse.”

This occurs because when we are close to someone, like a romantic partner or a good friend, there is an “illusion of insight” created — meaning we assume certain information about someone because of our relationship to them.

“Getting close to someone appears to create the illusion of understanding more than actual understanding,” said study co-author Nicholas Epley. “The understanding, ‘What I know is different from what you know’ is essential for effective communication to occur. It is necessary for giving directions, for teaching a class, or just for having an ordinary conversation. But that insight can be elusive when the ‘you’ in question is a close friend or spouse.”

More from Kiki Wellington:

Source:

Couples sometimes communicate no better than strangers, study finds. The University of Chicago. https://news.uchicago.edu/story/couples-sometimes-communicate-no-better-strangers-study-finds