← all facts
social
You believe your thoughts are more transparent to others than they really are.
The illusion of transparency leads you to overestimate how well others can read your emotional state.
Participants were asked to lie or express emotions while knowing others were watching them. They consistently believed their internal state was obvious to observers, even though the observers could rarely tell what they were feeling.
You feel exposed because you have access to your thoughts, but others only see the surface.
Where this comes from
- Study
- Gilovich, Savitsky, and Medvec, 1998, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
- What the check found
- The 1998 Gilovich, Savitsky, and Medvec study is the seminal work on this topic. The claim accurately represents the bias as defined in psychological literature.
- Confidence
- Well replicated
Related
One of these every day, and every one names the study it came from. When a finding is contested, it says so.