Typical Minds Aren’t

We all know the typical mind fallacy—the bias where we assume that other people’s minds are much like our own. It happens because most of our evidence for what minds are like comes from experiencing what our own mind is like, and thus we infer from that evidence that the minds of others are not so different from ours.The typical mind fallacy is deep-rooted and hard to change, since it’s difficult to get good evidence about what it’s really like inside other people’s heads. Even when we try, we inevitably parse the evidence through the lens of our mind’s understanding, and so may easily misunderstand when we think we’re really getting it. We can’t easily escape the “bias” that is the entirety of our lived experience, and so though we may learn theories about how other minds work, our understanding of them remains grounded in intuitions gleaned from observing just our own.If you study the psychology of personality, it can feel like you understand that other minds are different. You learn that some people are introverted while others are extraverted. Some are more conscientious or neurotic or judgemental or open to new experiences while others are just the opposite. But in many ways, these are surface level traits of minds because many of them are surprisingly mutable. We can apply interventions like psychedelics to increase openness, meditation to decrease neuroticism, and cognitive behavioral therapy to increase extraversion.The theory of personality traits makes it seem like people are different, but not fundamentally different. In effect it says minds are like ice cream, and personality traits are flavors. Some people are vanilla or chocolate or strawberry, others are rocky road or Cherry Garcia, but in the end they’re all ice cream, and not really that different when you get past whatever has been mixed into them.And to be fair, minds are not totally different. There are large commonalities among the minds of all humans, mammals, and even all chordates. And yet, a