William Ickes, a leading scholar on how accurate people are at perceiving what other people are thinking, finds that strangers who are in the midst of their first conversation read each other accurately only about 20 percent of the time and close friends and family members do so only 35 percent of the time. Ickes rates his research subjects on a scale of “empathic accuracy” from 0 to 100 percent and finds great variation from person to person. Some people get a zero rating. When they are in conversation with someone they’ve just met, they have no clue what the other person is actually
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