Your brain treats your current state as its reference point
This blind spot has a name: the hot-cold empathy gap. Economist George Loewenstein introduced the term in the nineties; since then, the effect has been tested with hunger, pain, fatigue, and fear. The mechanism is simple: when imagining yourself in another state, your brain doesn't start from scratch. It takes what it feels now and adjusts it slightly - and
It works both ways. When you're full and rested, you believe you'll have enough willpower by evening: imagined hunger is paler than hunger in your body. But when you're in a hot state, it feels permanent, and you make decisions as if your calm self doesn't exist.
It's not that you don't know yourself well. You know yourself only as well as you can see yourself from your current vantage point. The size of the gap varies between people and situations, but the direction is consistent: from a cold state, people almost always underestimate the force of a hot one.
It's most noticeable in plans. You write your weekly schedule when you're rested and divide things evenly among the days - as if you'll have as much energy on Thursday as you do on Monday.
A diagram, not a measurement: the plan is spread evenly, but your energy reserves don't work that way.
The same blind spot becomes "you don't understand me"
When two people are in different states, each imagines the other from her own perspective. You're calm, so her anxiety about tomorrow's call gets the adjustment, "it's no big deal." She's inside her anxiety, so your calm reads as indifference.
You can see this in experiments: people were surveyed before and after physical exertion, and those who were warmed up were more likely to think that people lost in the woods would find thirst the hardest thing to endure. Your own state seeps into your assessment of someone else's, even when they're strangers.
That's where "if he really loved me, he'd understand how bad I feel" comes from. Understanding someone else's state is a forecast from your current point: a calm person underestimates the force of someone else's pain, even when she sincerely wants to help. That's why "just feel what it's like for me" works poorly - there's nothing to feel. Description works.
- Ask for specifics: what feels hardest right now, and what would help.
- Trust her description more than the guess, "if I were in her place, I'd..."
- Measure someone else's state by your current one - that's the source of the blind spot.
- Expect a loved one to figure it out on their own: your state isn't visible from calm.
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Sources
- Loewenstein G. Hot-cold empathy gaps and medical decision making. Health Psychology, 2005
- Van Boven L., Loewenstein G. Social projection of transient drive states. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2003