How To Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen

by David Brooks

A hill on campus might actually have a 5 percent grade, but a typical participant would estimate that it had a 20 percent grade. One day Proffitt took a look at the most recent batch of experimental data and was stunned to find that suddenly the students had gotten much better at estimating the grade of a particular hill. Proffitt and his team delved into the mystery and discovered that the latest batch of questionnaires had been filled out by members of UVA’s women’s varsity soccer team. The hills didn’t look so steep because these were extremely fit Division 1 athletes who would have relatively little trouble walking up them. How you see a situation depends on what you are capable of doing in a situation. Since Proffitt first discovered5 this phenomenon, he and other researchers have found it again and again. People with heavy backpacks see steeper hills than people without backpacks, because it is harder for people with backpacks to walk up them. People who have just consumed energy drinks see less steep hills than people who have not. People who have listened to sad music (Mahler’s Adagietto) see steeper hills than people who have listened to happy music. Overweight people see distances as longer than people who are not overweight. Baseball players on a hot streak see bigger balls coming at them than they do when they’re in a slump. When tennis players are playing well, their opponents’ serves seem significantly slower. “We project our individual mental experience into...