Authentic Conversation – Does It Matter?

People often share things authentically – what they’re really thinking, feeling, and planning.  But we also can and do speak in ways that are not quite completely accurate representations of what’s going on inside our heads.  For example, we sometimes:

• Modify our expressed thoughts and feelings to make them “socially appropriate”
• Repeat things we’ve heard others say, without really thinking about them
• Tell stories we don’t actually think are interesting, just to have something to say
• Tell outright lies

It seems like it would be adaptively useful to know what others are thinking and feeling as accurately as possible, to accurately predict their behavior.  It would therefore be helpful to be able to distinguish between all of these things — to be able to get some sense of whether someone is expressing a heartfelt thought or emotion, or repeating things they’ve heard, or trying to be socially appropriate, or even blatantly lying.

Since making these distinctions is so important, it seems very likely that mechanisms for doing just that have evolved.  I suspect that we have largely unconscious mechanisms which evaluate what people are saying in this way, and which result in “feelings” that we get when talking to someone.  In other words, distinguishing whether someone is just “being social” and expressing thoughts and feelings that are “socially appropriate”, or expressing more genuine thoughts and feelings, may be important.  And I’m betting we have mechanisms specifically dedicated to figuring this out.