This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta.

If you were to paint a portrait of the inner workings of your mind, what would it look like?

Maybe you would use bright splashes of color to represent your most intense emotions,

shades of grey to reflect the complexity and nuance of your thoughts.

Swirls and spirals to express the moments when you are lost in rumination.

No one else could paint this picture.

You know yourself better than anyone else, and you are the one most attuned to your inner rhythms,

your fears and insecurities, your hopes and dreams.

Yet, even though we may feel we are acutely aware of every corner of our mental landscapes,

it turns out many aspects of our minds are hidden from us.

It's almost like if you imagine a fork in the road and it just goes two different ways,

there are just two different paths here.

There's the path that we use for self-judgment, and there's the path that we use for judging others.

And in my view, the path that we use for judging others is we look at their actions.

The path that we use for judging ourselves is we look inwards.

This week on Hidden Brain, we bring you the third installment of our Mind Reading 2.0 series.

In previous episodes, we explored how we read other people's intentions and the social illusions

that pervade everyday interpersonal relationships.

Today, in a favorite episode from 2020, we look at one of the most bewildering aspects of how we read minds.

In this case, our own.

On a daily basis, all of us evaluate others.

We think about the claims of people who want to sell us something,

...