EI International / Reading Other People, Carefully

You are inferring from very little, and you should say so

The evidence available about another person's inner state is thin, and confidence in it is misplaced.

Consider what you actually have when you decide a colleague is upset with you: a shorter reply than usual, no greeting, a meeting they did not speak in. That is three data points, all of which have dozens of ordinary explanations, most of which have nothing to do with you. Against that you have a rich, detailed story about what they think, built almost entirely out of your own material. The story feels like perception because it arrives complete and unbidden, but it is a construction. The strength of the feeling is not evidence about the world, it is evidence about how quickly you build stories.

Popular accounts that treat expression and posture as a readable language make this worse. The same neutral face means concentration, fatigue, mild irritation, a difficult morning at home, or nothing whatsoever, and the same crossed arms mean a cold room at least as often as they mean anything about you. Reading these as reliable signals produces confident errors, and confident errors are worse than uncertainty, because uncertainty at least leaves room for a question. Where a signal genuinely carries information it is usually the content and the context, not the posture, and even then it narrows the possibilities rather than settling them.

The honest position is that you can often tell that something is going on, and rarely tell what. That distinction is the whole practical content of this section. Noticing a change is a real perception: this person is not as they usually are with me. Deciding what the change means is inference on thin evidence, and the correct confidence is low. Holding those two apart, out loud where possible, prevents most of the damage. It also spares you a great deal of private misery, since a large share of the interpretations people never check turn out to have been about something else entirely.