ABSTRACT
Reading this book may tempt one to compare psychologists who discuss interpersonal sensitivity to the six blind men, each of whom described an elephant while examining different parts of the animal’s anatomy.1 One, feeling the tusk, likened the elephant to a spear. Another, holding the trunk, said the elephant was like a snake. Still another, seizing the tail, was sure the elephant was like a rope, and so on. Like the blind men, each psychologist who studies interpersonal sensitivity tends to explore only one of the many possible aspects of this elephant. In the chapters of this book, interpersonal sensitivity is variously conceptualized as accurately inferring others’ thoughts and feelings, feeling another person’s emotions, reading emotions, judging personality traits,
predicting people’s social outcomes, identifying social contexts and social relationships, perceiving what another feels about him or herself and you, and detecting deception. Like the views of the blind men, each of these views is surely “partly in the right.” But none of them captures the entire beast of interpersonal sensitivity. And like the blind men, who lacked an overarching theory of elephantness and could not find it through local observations, psychologists lack an overarching theory of interpersonal sensitivity and will not find it through their local observations.
