You are correct, that analytical thought is necessary to have a shot at seeing how another person is thinking... but to believe that you have seen how another person is thinking requires only intuition.
It's wrong, of course, wrong in drastic, often tragic, degrees as often as it is right (performs no better than random chance). This has been known for a long time in behavioral neuroscience. How we respond to another persons face when they are feeling different emotions is extremely inaccurate and quite useless, but we are all weak to believing that our conclusions are valid. This is why polygraphs do not work. They rely on the intuition of the examiner rather than science. So, they perform the same as random guessing. In addition to just being wrong half the time, such intuitions are easily manipulated by some people (either trained or an ability they just develop naturally).
The human mind has a great many very reliable flaws. They were probably useful for survival at some point as they seem endemic to the structure of the brain itself (and we learn more all the time about their neurophysiological origin) but almost certainly useless at best and dangerous at worst today. We certainly don't live in anything that resembles the environment our brains evolved to survive in for thousands of years. (In small extremely intimate groups on the savannah with rare intense bursts of life-or-death stress but life mostly consisting of eating, having sex, and sleeping.)
Long experienced cops believe they can tell when people are lying. When tested, they perform the same as random chance. Average people believe they can tell what someone is feeling by looking at their face. When tested, they perform the same as random chance. It's hard for many to accept that their ability to read other people is only as accurate as flipping a coin, but that's what we've got evidence for. In some ways, this is odd, since we have mirror neurons that specifically make us unconsciously mimic other people when physically close to them, and I would think this would lead to being able to understand them better, but it doesn't seem to work that way.
> How we respond to another persons face when they are feeling different emotions is extremely inaccurate and quite useless, but we are all weak to believing that our conclusions are valid.
Perhaps in experiments where one has to judge a stranger's emotions from a photo or under conditions of active deception.
I want to balance out your comment with the obvious though - that most normal people are able to tell when others are distressed, stressed, worried, happy and so on - and this requires no analytic effort whatsoever.
It's wrong, of course, wrong in drastic, often tragic, degrees as often as it is right (performs no better than random chance). This has been known for a long time in behavioral neuroscience. How we respond to another persons face when they are feeling different emotions is extremely inaccurate and quite useless, but we are all weak to believing that our conclusions are valid. This is why polygraphs do not work. They rely on the intuition of the examiner rather than science. So, they perform the same as random guessing. In addition to just being wrong half the time, such intuitions are easily manipulated by some people (either trained or an ability they just develop naturally).
The human mind has a great many very reliable flaws. They were probably useful for survival at some point as they seem endemic to the structure of the brain itself (and we learn more all the time about their neurophysiological origin) but almost certainly useless at best and dangerous at worst today. We certainly don't live in anything that resembles the environment our brains evolved to survive in for thousands of years. (In small extremely intimate groups on the savannah with rare intense bursts of life-or-death stress but life mostly consisting of eating, having sex, and sleeping.)
Long experienced cops believe they can tell when people are lying. When tested, they perform the same as random chance. Average people believe they can tell what someone is feeling by looking at their face. When tested, they perform the same as random chance. It's hard for many to accept that their ability to read other people is only as accurate as flipping a coin, but that's what we've got evidence for. In some ways, this is odd, since we have mirror neurons that specifically make us unconsciously mimic other people when physically close to them, and I would think this would lead to being able to understand them better, but it doesn't seem to work that way.