common assumption: other people think like you

I don't remember exactly which words he used, but the thought they said was:

A common mistake: assuming that other people think like you

I know that I have often made such mistakes.

Thinking about it further,
I realized that much of the way I thought of other people is out of a belief that the way others think is not so different from the way I think. It's a plank I often walk out on and usually find that it connects somewhere. I like believing that everyone makes sense to themselves and using that as a premise to work from when trying to understand. But, in retrospect, I think that perhaps a lot of what I took to be similarities were not so much ways of thinking, but content of thinking, or an ability to follow rather than produce an explanation when presented in the right way.

For example, there are some things that I think almost everyone has in common. Most people like to be thought well of, to feel understood, to feel secure, unalone, to have a sense of purpose, to feel able to express themselves . . . and so most people appreciate being encouraged or enabled to achieve these things.

However, these are things that can be thought of and felt, rather than ways of coming to or experiencing these thoughts and feelings.

For someone as process-oriented as myself, I'm a little surprised that this seems to be a new distinction. Even though I can recall people telling me here and there that they thought that the way I thought about things was different.

I had assumed that everyone thought about situations by imagining many possible outcomes and choosing one until a friend of mine commented that I seemed to think this way as if it was different than how she thought. (I am impressed that she saw this if it wasn't the way that she already thought)

I have been a little surprised by the number of friends I feel I know fairly well who have expressed to me a thought that I think similarly to the way they do and that they feel I understand them in a way many other people don't, and even choosing to ask me my opinion of if other people thought like them. I still don't have a good answer because I don't know how to assess whether a person thinks like another person. However, I am not sure if these friends would necessarily understand each other.

So far, this suggests that mutual understanding is not a transitive property.

I don't know where else to go with it yet.