I'd like you to meet Nicholas Eppley, professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago.

That's not as arcane as it sounds.

I'm in the Booth School of Business.

Now, one of the things that we all love about academia is how incredibly down to Earth it is,

and how rooted it is in empirically.

So what exactly is Eppley's specialty?

I study mind reading.

From WNYC, this is Freakinomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything.

Here's your host, Stephen Dupner.

So why is a business school professor studying mind reading?

As Nicholas Eppley explains, it's because being in business means constantly dealing with other people,

and it's really helpful to understand what you can know and what you can't know about how other people think,

whether they're a rival, partner, whatever.

Eppley has written a book called Mindwise.

How we understand what others think, believe, feel, and want.

Okay, so I'm an experimental psychologist, and what that means is that we put people in experiments

to watch how they behave under certain conditions.

So what we do in our research is we put people in experiments that put their mind reading capacities to the test.

So for instance, we might bring in married couples and ask them to predict what their spouses' attitudes are,

along a series of 20 different questions, say, we ask one person to predict how the other person will respond to these,

and then we look at how the other person actually responds, and we compare the two.

We look to see if they're correlated with each other, and if so, how much so.

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