The Mind Comes Through the Mouth

In experiments at the University of Chicago, Dr. Epley and his colleagues have found that people vastly overestimate how much mind reading they can do by looking at someone’s facial expressions.

“Reading people’s expressions can give you a little information, but you get so much more just by talking to them,” he says. “The mind comes through the mouth.”

Why do we intuitively believe we can read body language? After writing a book on the topic — “Mindwise: How We Understand What Others Think, Believe, Feel, and Want” — Dr. Epley has an explanation.

“When you’re lying or cheating, you know it and feel guilty, and it feels to you as if your emotions must be leaking out through your body language,” he says. “You have an illusion that your emotions are more transparent than they actually are, and so you assume others are more transparent than they actually are, too.”

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