Emily Long, Caroline Catmur, Stephen Fleming & Geoff Bird (2025)

Summary by Josh

doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2024.106042

Have you ever confidently guessed what someone else was thinking or feeling only to find out you were completely wrong? Or perhaps made a snap judgement about someone’s personality and later realised you had them mistaken? This type of social misfire happens all the time, but why?

Geoff and colleagues set out to explore how metacognition (our ability to reflect on our own thinking) plays a role in how we understand what others are thinking or feeling, known as Theory of Mind (ToM). They looked at how metacognition fits into the Mind-space model (you can read more about that in our other blogs). This model suggests that when we try to guess someone’s thoughts, we first estimate their personality traits (like how confident, honest, or agreeable they are) and use those estimates to infer their mental states. It’s like using a ‘GPS’ to locate a person’s ‘mind’ on a map of different personality types.

That’s where metacognition comes in. Metacognition helps us judge how much to trust our own confidence in those personality impressions. We don’t rely equally on every trait we notice – we tend to lean more on the traits we feel confident with.

For example, imagine a new colleague, you’re quite confident she’s very agreeable, and you also think she might be introverted, but you’re not as sure. Your manager asks, “Who would like to present to the group?” You guess she’ll volunteer because your brain is placing more weight on the trait you’re confident about: her agreeableness.

This metacognitive sensitivity is how good you are at matching your confidence to your accuracy:

If you’re confident and right → great!

·If you’re unsure and wrong → also fine.

But if you’re confident and wrong (or unsure and right), your system is a little off.

The researchers predicted that people with higher metacognitive sensitivity would make better personality judgments- and therefore better guesses about others’ mental states. But the results showed it’s not quite that simple…

They found that our confidence in a judgment is shaped by how similar we think the other person is to ourselves… and how well we actually know ourselves. So the idea that, “I know what he’s thinking, he’s just like me!” can be misleading if my self-perception is inaccurate. In that case, I might feel very confident in a personality judgment that’s actually wrong and therefore misread the person’s thoughts or feelings. In other words, self-knowledge isn’t just about understanding yourself, it also affects how well you understand others.

So next time you catch yourself saying ‘I know just what they’re thinking’ it might be worth questioning how you’ve come to that judgement and why you might be so confident. Perhaps the real skill isn’t always knowing what others are thinking but being open to the idea that we might be wrong and being willing to listen anyway.