Adjust for your egocentric starting point

Actively consider how your message looks from a perspective that does not share your context.

Why it works

Keysar’s work shows that communication starts from an egocentric anchor — our own perspective — and that adjustment toward the listener’s perspective is effortful and often incomplete. The correction is not to become more sensitive in general but to actively take the listener’s starting state as a concrete reference point before sending a message. This requires treating the other person’s context as genuinely unknown rather than as a variation on your own.

How to do it

1. Before starting an important conversation, ask: "What does my partner know and not know going into this?"
2. Ask: "What is my partner probably focused on right now — what is their context, not mine?"
3. Draft your message, then re-read it as if you had not lived the day you just lived.
4. If you can’t confidently predict how it will land, ask before assuming.

Evidence

Keysar’s egocentric communication research consistently finds that people use their own knowledge as a starting point and adjust insufficiently for the listener’s different perspective, even when explicitly motivated to communicate accurately. (rct)

This research is primarily from referential communication tasks; whether the same mechanism drives misunderstanding in emotionally charged relationship conversations is plausible but less directly tested.

Sources

• Keysar, Lin & Barr (2003), limits on theory of mind use in adults, Cognition

Common mistake

Asking "Did that make sense?" at the end of the conversation rather than checking the partner’s starting context before it — by then the misunderstanding is already embedded.