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…
