The illusion of knowing the other well
The longer a relationship lasts, the more we believe we can guess what the other is thinking. Confidence in that reading increases; its accuracy does not.
A measured effect
Several social psychology studies have compared, among long-term couples and among strangers, two distinct quantities: the accuracy with which each guesses the other's preferences or intentions, and the confidence they place in their own reading.
The result is consistent. Confidence rises markedly with the duration of the relationship; accuracy much less, and sometimes not at all. The gap between the two is called a closeness bias, and it is stronger the longer people have known each other.
Why closeness misleads
Two mechanisms combine. The first is the accumulation of information: after ten years, one has so many elements that it becomes easy to produce a coherent explanation for any behaviour, including a false one. Coherence is not accuracy.
The second is the decline in checking. Faced with a stranger, one asks. Faced with someone one knows, one assumes, and the chance of being corrected disappears along with the question that was not asked.
The illusion of transparency
A neighbouring phenomenon works in the opposite direction. We regularly overestimate the extent to which our own internal states are perceptible to others: what seems obvious from the inside often remains invisible from the outside.
The two biases reinforce each other. One believes they signalled their state, the other believes they understood it, and nobody checks. The reproach that follows, you could have noticed, rests exactly on this double error.
What this changes in practice
The most direct consequence concerns conclusions drawn from a silence, a tone or an absence of reaction. These readings are no more reliable after fifteen years, they are merely held to be more reliable, which makes them less verifiable.
The remedy is banal and unpopular: asking a question whose answer you think you know. It seems superfluous; it is precisely what familiarity has removed.
The limits of the result
This work bears on laboratory tasks, guessing preferences, interpreting an ambiguous sentence, and not on the overall understanding of a person. It would be excessive to conclude that knowledge of the other does not progress with time.
What it establishes is narrower and sufficiently useful: confidence in our readings progresses faster than their accuracy, and that gap is not perceptible from the inside.
Key points
With the duration of a relationship, confidence in our readings of the other rises markedly more than their accuracy.
We also overestimate the visibility of our own states: the two biases combine into a misunderstanding nobody checks.
Asking a question whose answer you think you know is the remedy, and familiarity is precisely what removed it.
This article describes documented mechanisms and disagreements. It recommends no position, no party and no vote, and commits to no reading other than that of the work it cites.
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