Mister anywhere you point this thing
We often find ourselves wondering what people will do next. Will partners still love us? Our employers keep us in work? (…) When contemplating predictive dilemmas people often evoke the folk wisdom that the only person who can truly know what will happen next is the person in question. (…)
Psychologist Timothy D. Wilson, however, disagrees. His book Strangers to Ourselves uses wide-ranging psychological research to show that when it comes to predicting our own behaviour other people can be as good, or even better, than we are. How can this be?We like to think of our introspected motivations as predictive facts that will tell us what we will do. However, as Wilson demonstrates, our inner reflections discover not facts but a story we tell to ourselves about ourselves. These stories tend to be rose-tinted. We see ourselves as more consistent, admirable and steadfast than we turn out to be. We forget contrary behaviour and previous weakness and focus on being better.
