Say What You Mean, Mean What You Say
We all have heard the adage “Say what you mean, and mean what you say.” And that advice usually strikes us as being sound. Why say something that you don’t mean?’ You know potential answers to that question. Some obvious ones that readily come to mind, for instance, are that we fear hurting someone’s feelings and/or of diminishing our standing in their eyes. There are a thousand “good” reasons not to truly say what we mean or truly mean what we say. What do all the potential reasons have in common? They all depend on what psychologists call “mindreading.” When we consider what to say to someone we must explicitly or implicitly “decide” what to say. Another way to frame the issue is to consider whether mindreading is distinctly separate from or merely a sub-part of metacognition (thinking about thinking, in general). That is, when you try to guess what another person thinks or will think, is that process different from how...