What if many of the things we call lazy, brilliant, difficult, thoughtful, careless, creative, or stubborn are not really traits we’re observing—but interpretations we’re making when we don’t understand how someone else is thinking?
Not what they think, but how they are building the thought in the first place.
Most of us don’t pause at that level. We judge outcomes, tone, speed, clarity, confidence. We assume that if someone understood something differently, it must be because they are less careful, less competent, or less engaged; or, more generously, more creative or insightful.
But there’s a quieter possibility:
We are often not seeing differences in what people know.
We are seeing differences in how people process what they know.
And we are not trained to notice that distinction.
You’ve probably been in this situation:
A conversation where you are explaining something you think is straightforward, and you can feel it not landing.
No one is obviously irrational. No one is clearly acting in bad faith. But somehow, you are not even in the same mental space.
You slow down. They want more detail. You give examples. They want principles. You go step-by-step. They jump ahead. You jump ahead. They get lost. Everyone gets slightly - or very ! - irritated, and nobody can point to a single clear mistake.
And usually we end up thinking something like:
“They’re not getting it.”
“I’m not being clear enough.”
“They’re missing something obvious.”
But those explanations stay at the surface.
They assume the breakdown is in communication.
When it may actually be in cognitive processing itself.
I want to propose a simple lens.
Let’s call it the Inferential Gap.
It is the distance between:
how another person is actually constructing meaning in real time
andthe simplified model of that process we assume they are using
Most of the time, we don’t explicitly model the first part at all.
We assume similarity.
We assume people think roughly the way we think, reason the way we reason, and structure problems the way we structure them.
When they don’t, we don’t usually interpret that as a difference in cognitive processing.
We interpret it as something about them.
If you start paying attention, a lot of these breakdowns seem to come from a small number of differences in cognitive processing:
Some people (me!) move quickly from input to inference. Others need more time to build structure before anything feels stable. Neither is inherently better, but it can look like intelligence, effort, or engagement.
Some people need many steps before a point feels complete. Others (me!) naturally compress. This often creates mismatches where one person sounds “overly detailed” and the other sounds “insufficient.”
People tend to enter problems differently—through principles, examples, analogies, narratives, edge cases, or pattern recognition. These are different entry points into reasoning, not different levels of ability.
This is the dimension we actually notice most. It includes not only training and expertise, but also social positioning and lived context. We unconsciously use cues like professional role, education, cultural background, and even demographic similarity or difference (“Are we both women?”, “Are we from similar backgrounds?”, “Do we share a cultural frame?”) as heuristics for predicting how someone will think. This overlaps with what organizational and DEI research describes as identity-based categorization, where perceived group membership shapes interpretation under uncertainty (Ely & Thomas, 2001; Nishii, 2013). In practice, this makes “experience” do more work than it should, because it becomes a proxy not only for knowledge, but for assumed interpretive style.
We do try to understand other minds.
But mostly through experience.
We ask:
Are they an expert or a novice?
Have they done this before?
What role do they occupy?
Do they seem like “someone like me”?
That last question is rarely stated explicitly, but it matters. Research on social cognition shows that perceived similarity—demographic, cultural, or identity-based—can strongly shape how we attribute intent and interpret behavior (Epley & Gilovich, 2004). This is one reason DEI efforts often emphasize exposure to difference: not just for fairness, but because interpretation itself changes depending on who we think we are dealing with.
But “experience,” broadly defined this way, is still only one dimension.
The others (speed, detail, orientation) are largely invisible unless you actively look for them.
So we end up doing something subtle:
We treat experience as a stand-in for cognition.
And we assume that covers everything else.
Here’s where things shift.
When someone’s thinking doesn’t match our expectations, we don’t usually leave it as a neutral difference.
We interpret it. And we pass judgment on it. And this is where cognitive difference quietly becomes moral judgment:
Fast thinking becomes smart or reckless.
Slow thinking becomes careful or dull.
High detail becomes thorough or obsessive.
Low detail becomes efficient or careless.
Nonlinear thinking becomes creative or confusing.
Linear thinking becomes organized or rigid.
What started as differences in cognitive processing becomes evaluations of character.
And once it becomes character, it becomes moral.
If my little idea holds any water with you (aka, you’re still reading), then it can be said that the pattern looks something like this:
People construct meaning through different cognitive processes.
↓
We are not taught to explicitly model those differences, so we assume others think like us (or think differently from us based on our perception of their “experience.”)
↓
Others deviate from those expectations.
↓
We experience confusion or frustration.
↓
We infer competence, motivation, or character.
↓
Those inferences become moral judgments.
This progression overlaps with classic attribution research showing our tendency to default to dispositional explanations for behavior (Ross, 1977), even when process-based explanations may be more accurate.
It also connects to work on the “curse of knowledge,” where knowing something makes it difficult to imagine not knowing it (Camerer, Loewenstein, & Weber, 1989), and the “expert blind spot,” where experts struggle to reconstruct novice reasoning (Hinds, 1999).
In classrooms, it looks like “some students just get it” versus “some students aren’t trying.”
In workplaces, it looks like “strategic thinkers” versus “people who can’t follow direction.”
In DEI contexts, it often shows up as something more subtle: people attributing difference in interpretation to difference in competence or intent, rather than difference in cognitive processing or interpretive frame. This is one reason inclusion work increasingly emphasizes not just representation, but how interpretation itself shifts in diverse groups (Ely & Thomas, 2001).
But none of this requires bad intent or low intelligence.
It requires something simpler:
Different cognitive processing styles, interacting without an explicit model of each other’s structure.
If I had to compress it:
We are not just bad at understanding what other people think.
We are often not modeling how they are thinking at all, because no one ever told us it was worth modeling in the first place.
That missing step is what I’m calling the Inferential Gap. And I make no claims to be immune from this - I wrote all of this after reflecting on some professional experiences where I was flabbergasted by peoples’ decision-making, when alternatives seemed so obvious to me. I got annoyed, I called friends to complain, I told my wife (who, accurately, reminded me that I had a therapist for such things), and most of all, I judged.
None of us are immune to these human failings. But maybe we can communicate, collaborate, and co-exist more effectively if we consider cognition the way I’m proposing.
Most frameworks for communication emphasize empathy, clarity, bias, or intelligence.
Those matter.
But there may be a more basic layer underneath them:
We rarely treat another person’s meaning-making process as something structured, variable, and worth modeling in real time.
And when that layer is missing, everything else gets translated into something simpler.
Usually something about why the person in front of us is wrong, lacking in worth, or bad. And yes, sometimes people really are harmful or malicious in clear ways. But more often, we are trying to interpret cognitive difference through a moral lens because we don’t yet have a shared language for describing it. My argument is simple: we need a clearer way to see how thinking itself differs between people before we turn those differences into judgments about who people are.
If you think this is worth discussing, please get in touch with me through various social means (or through this newsletter). In the future, I would obviously like to expand this - always thinking of what book #4 is going to be - and even do IRB-approved experiments on training people to close this gap.
But for now, I hope you found the return of Full Nerd Dr. JPB to have been worth you time.
(And hey, subscribe to the newsletter if you are able to. It’s going to be an extremely nerdy summer.)
Camerer, C., Loewenstein, G., & Weber, M. (1989). The curse of knowledge in economic settings. Journal of Political Economy. https://doi.org/10.1086/261651
Ely, R. J., & Thomas, D. A. (2001). Cultural diversity at work: The effects of diversity perspectives on work group processes and outcomes. Administrative Science Quarterly. https://doi.org/10.2307/3094842
Epley, N., & Gilovich, T. (2004). Are adjustments insufficient? Psychological Science. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0956-7976.2004.00775.x
Hinds, P. J. (1999). The curse of expertise and the expert blind spot in knowledge transfer. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.12.3.327.10098
Ross, L. (1977). The intuitive psychologist and his shortcomings: Distortions in the attribution process. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.34.10.554
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