How well do you know the people closest to you? Draw two to five of them the way you see them. Then sit them down at a table, guess what they'll say about themselves and find out if it's accurate.
A gameThe result is your view of your people, not their character.
- You
- Your people
- Result
You first
Build yourself the way someone who sees you for the first time would describe you. Including the face you wear walking down the street.
Confidence grows faster than accuracy
The longer people know each other, the more confident they are. William Swann and Michael Gill (1997) asked dating couples and roommates what they thought about each other and compared it with what the partner said about themselves. The longer the relationship and the more involved people were, the more confident their answers. Accuracy didn't reliably improve with it, and confidence and accuracy often came apart.
The better we know someone, the less we check whether we really know them.
That's why the app doesn't judge whether you're right. It only shows how you see your people: how many of them you drew smiling and how many with the same expression you gave yourself. People generally assume others are more like them than they really are. Psychologists call it the false consensus effect (Ross, Greene and House, 1977).
What you see and what they see
Simine Vazire (2010) summed up who knows what about whom. People know their own inner states, such as anxiousness, better themselves. Traits that are easy to see from the outside, such as sociability, their friends judge about as well. And where it's about how someone looks in others' eyes, such as intelligence, friends were even more accurate. That's why the questions in this game ask only about behaviour: what someone does when it turns out they're wrong, how they react to criticism, what they do when they're angry.
The old Johari window model (Luft and Ingham, 1955) splits what we know about a person into four parts. Open is what both you and others know. The blind spot is seen by others but not by you. Hidden is known only to you and unknown to no one. Your guesses at the table are your view of the others' open window. Only they can tell you whether it's accurate.
What an evening at the table looks like
When you set up a table, you get a link and a code to scan. Your friends build their own figure on their phones and take a seat. In every round, it's one person's turn: they answer what they're like, the others answer how they see them. Then you see whether the others see them the same way, or whether they have a blind spot. You don't have to draw beforehand: you can set up the table right away and draw people on the table screen, for example while they take their seats.
IllustrationThe characters and answers are made up. Use the arrows to switch to another question.
Example with made-up characters
What does Tom do when it turns out they're wrong? 1/4
What Tom says
I admit it right away
2 of 3 friends about him
Defends it for a while
Tom sees himself differently from how friends do. That's exactly what you find out about yourself at a table.
From four people at the table, only counts are shown; no one can tell who answered what. With two or three people that can't be hidden, so the game says up front that answers will be shown with names. Only you see your drawings and guesses. For people who sit down under the same name you drew them with, you'll see both figures side by side and, after their round, whether your guess was right.
Who to invite: people you don't have to be careful around. If one person at the table would make you guard your answers, you'd answer cautiously and the whole thing loses its point. Then it's better to set up two tables.
How it works
The mini app builds figures from parts (figure, age, skin, face, hair, beard, glasses, clothes and typical expression). The result computes only two numbers: the share of people you drew smiling and the share with the same typical expression you gave yourself. Neither says what your people are like.
Data. Until you set up a table, this browser remembers your drawings and names, and the Delete button removes them. Only what you send yourself goes to the server: the two percentages via Save result, or the whole drawing when you set up a table. The one exception is the short comment under the result: AI (Google Vertex AI in the EU) writes it from the expressions in the drawings only, with no names, and none of it is stored. Setting up a table saves the drawings, so you can get back to it from any device using its link. If you fill in an email, we send the link there too, but we don't store the email. At the table, names are stored encrypted and only the person who set it up sees the drawings and guesses. The game is for people aged 18 and over.
Sources
- Swann, W. B., Jr., & Gill, M. J. (1997). Confidence and accuracy in person perception: Do we know what we think we know about our relationship partners? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 73(4), 747–757.
- Vazire, S. (2010). Who knows what about a person? The self–other knowledge asymmetry (SOKA) model. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 98(2), 281–300.
- Vazire, S., & Mehl, M. R. (2008). Knowing me, knowing you: The accuracy and unique predictive validity of self-ratings and other-ratings of daily behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 95(5), 1202–1216.
- Ross, L., Greene, D., & House, P. (1977). The “false consensus effect”: An egocentric bias in social perception and attribution processes. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 13(3), 279–301.
- Luft, J., & Ingham, H. (1955). The Johari window, a graphic model of interpersonal awareness. Proceedings of the Western Training Laboratory in Group Development. Los Angeles: UCLA.
