Jumping to conclusions

Joel Dean
Joel Dean, Founder of Joyful

Jumping to conclusions is deciding what something means before you have the facts. It comes in two forms. Mind reading assumes you know what someone else thinks. Fortune telling assumes you know how things will turn out. Both feel like knowing, and both are guesses.

  • Also called: Arbitrary inference, Aaron Beck's original term. Its two forms are mind reading and fortune telling.
  • Listen for: "She thinks...", "They must be...", "It's going to...", "I just know...".
  • Close relative: Catastrophizing, which jumps to the worst conclusion of all.
  • One question to ask: What do I know for sure, and what am I filling in?

Two hours, no reply

  • What I know: She read my message two hours ago and hasn't replied.
  • Mind reading: She's annoyed with me about Saturday.
  • Fortune telling: This friendship is going to fade out.
  • What I don't know: Why she hasn't replied, or what she thinks.

Only the top line happened. The two middle lines are the jump, and they arrive so fast they feel like part of the same fact.

Aaron Beck called this arbitrary inference in his 1963 paper on depression: reaching a conclusion when the evidence is missing or points the other way.1 David Burns later split it in two for his list of 10 distortions, and the halves need different checks, so this page takes them one at a time.2

Mind reading: the guess about now

Mind reading is about what someone thinks or feels about you, right now. These are made up for this page:

Example

"He's quiet tonight. He's bored of me."

Example

"My sister-in-law looked at my plate. She thinks I'm eating too much."

Example

"The other parents stopped talking when I got to the gate. They were talking about me."

Mind reading can make you a close student of faces, tone and reply times. Then you act on the guess: going quiet, apologizing first, pulling back. The other person may see only the pulling back, and has no idea why.

Why the guesses run negative

After talking with a stranger, people underestimate how much the other person liked them and enjoyed their company. Erica Boothby and colleagues called it the liking gap, and found it in the lab, in a workshop, and among first-year college students and their dorm mates, where it lasted for months.3

People also think their inner states show more than they do. Thomas Gilovich and colleagues found that people overestimate how well others can read their feelings from the outside.4 If you felt awkward at the party, you may assume others saw it.

Checking a mind-reading guess

  1. Split what you saw from what you decided. Write two lines: "She looked at my plate" and "She thinks I'm eating too much." Only the first one happened.
  2. List three other explanations. She was tired. She was thinking about her own day. She was looking at the dessert.
  3. Ask, if it's safe and small. "You seem quiet. Long day?" is a small test of the guess. A behavioral experiment like this moved belief in a negative thought faster than a thought record did in one study, though both helped.5
  4. Remember the liking gap. After a conversation, people tend to be liked more than they think.3

Fortune telling: the guess about later

Fortune telling is about how things will turn out. Made-up examples again:

Example

"Physical therapy won't help. Nothing has worked so far, so this won't either."

Example

"I'll freeze at the open mic. I always do."

Example

"If I go to the party, I'll stand in the corner and nobody will talk to me."

The cost of this one is quieter. If the party will go badly, why go?

Then you never find out what would have happened, and the forecast survives untested, ready for next time, while you get the disappointment of an evening that never took place.

Checking a forecast

  1. Write the prediction and a date. "I'll freeze at the open mic on the 14th." Then check what happened.
  2. Rate how sure you are from 0 to 100 before, and compare after. Over a few weeks you'll have your own record of how often your forecasts come true.

In one study of 29 people with generalized anxiety disorder, most of the worried forecasts checked this way didn't come true; the worry time page has that study and a daily slot for running your own.6 The thought record also has a separate path for predictions, and the other nine patterns are on the cognitive distortions page.

When the guesses keep you home

If guesses about what people think keep you away from parties, classes or family events, or you spend hours replaying conversations afterward, a CBT therapist can help you test them with less at stake.

Journal prompt

Write down one conclusion you jumped to this week. On one line, write only what you saw or heard. On the next, write what you decided it meant. What else could it have meant?

Answer this with Joy

Questions people ask about jumping to conclusions

Is jumping to conclusions a cognitive distortion?

Yes. It's one of the 10 on David Burns' list, with mind reading and fortune telling as its two forms.2

What is the difference between mind reading and fortune telling?

Mind reading is about the present and other people. Fortune telling is about the future. "He's annoyed" is mind reading. "He'll break up with me" is fortune telling.

What if my guess is right?

Sometimes it will be. The checks above don't assume you're wrong; they sort the right guesses from the wrong ones, and the only way to know which you have is to ask or wait and see.

How do I stop jumping to conclusions in a relationship?

Notice the guess, write down only what happened, and then ask in a light way instead of acting on the guess. "You went quiet when I mentioned my mom. Did that land badly?" gives the other person a chance to answer for themselves.

Related

Sources

  1. Beck AT. Thinking and depression: I. Idiosyncratic content and cognitive distortions. Archives of General Psychiatry, 1963. https://doi.org/10.1001/archpsyc.1963.01720160014002
  2. Burns DD. Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy. William Morrow, 1980.
  3. Boothby EJ, Cooney G, Sandstrom GM, Clark MS. The liking gap in conversations: do people like us more than we think? Psychological Science, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797618783714
  4. Gilovich T, Savitsky K, Medvec VH. The illusion of transparency: biased assessments of others' ability to read one's emotional states. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1998. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.75.2.332
  5. McManus F, Van Doorn K, Yiend J. Examining the effects of thought records and behavioral experiments in instigating belief change. Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, 2012. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbtep.2011.07.003
  6. LaFreniere LS, Newman MG. Exposing worry's deceit: percentage of untrue worries in generalized anxiety disorder treatment. Behavior Therapy, 2020. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7233480/