No, seriously. Every single day, dozens of times a day, you look at another human being and make a guess about what’s going on inside their head. You do it when your partner says “I’m fine.” You do it when your boss sends a one-line email with no greeting. You do it when the barista gives you a look that might be judgmental or might just be Tuesday.
If you think carefully, most conflicts don’t start with bad intentions. They start with different interpretations of the same words. Psychologist George Kelly noticed this decades ago: people don’t passively receive reality — they actively construct it through personal lenses shaped by their entire life history (Kelly, 1955). Two people can witness the exact same event and walk away with completely different stories about what happened.