“Can I be sure that the job candidate will be as industrious as her reference letters suggest?”  “Is my daughter’s new boyfriend as earnest as he seems?” “Can I believe someone when he says he is divorced, or tested negative for HIV?”

Having confidence in our ability to “know” others is critical to normal social interactions, but there is disturbing evidence we actually don’t know the people we are intimate with nearly as well as we think we do.

Confidence Unfounded

A new study shows that our confidence about how well we know someone comes from the vividness of our impression of them — but that’s not the same as accuracy.

Rich impressions make us more confident that we know our long term partner but the research shows our beliefs might not be any more accurate than those of people who have dated briefly.

The University of Texas research on dating partners and a longitudinal study of college roommates reveals if you’ve been sexually involved with someone for a reasonable period, your confidence that you know them increases.

Familiarity Establishes Trust

Confident you may be, but accurate in your knowledge of their sexual history and preferences – well not so much.

As a result, people in long-term, committed relationships may be quite bullish about the accuracy of beliefs that are no more accurate than the beliefs of people who have just initiated their relationships.

Meet up with an unmitigated liar and you can be in serious trouble if you base your assessment on his trustworthiness on “non-diagnostic cues” like familiarity.

‘Truth’ Gap Causes Conflict

We’ve all read the extreme cases – like the notorious Malcolm Webster, who rigged car accidents to murder his first wife and attempt to murder his second, before bigamously marrying a third.

The second wife, New Zealander Felicity Drumm, naturally felt she’d never really known the man she married when she discovered he’d not only tried to kill her, but had killed his first wife for an insurance pay out.

The gap between confidence you know someone and the likelihood you don’t, is not usually life threatening, but can causes all sorts of disharmony say the researchers

Take the scenario where a wife is highly confident that her husband is unsociable when in reality he suffers from performance anxiety.

Similarly, a man’s lack of confidence in his partner’s professional aptitude could convince him to refrain from providing her with the encouragement that would inspire her to excel.

What About You?

So how can we really ‘know someone?  We’d love to hear your views on how you can know someone well without feeling like you are putting them through an inquisition? Do you trust your own intuition?  Rely on your friends warnings? Let us know your views, we’d love to hear them.

• Source: “Confidence and Accuracy in Person Perception: Do We Know What We Think We Know About Our Relationship Partners?” from Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 73, No. 4, 747-757

Image taken from: catania.theoffside.com

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About the author

Jenny W