Nicholas Epley

Nicholas Epley studies how thinking people think about each other, and is mostly interested in how otherwise smart people so frequently misunderstand each other. Got it?

The John T. Keller Professor of Behavioral Science at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, Nicholas was named a ‘professor to watch’ by the Financial Times, was the winner of the 2008 Theoretical Innovation Prize from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, and was awarded the 2011 Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution to Psychology from the American Psychological Association. He has written for The New York Times and authored over 50 articles in two dozen journals in his field.

His recent book, Mindwise: How you understand what others think, feel, believe and want, reveals what scientists have learned about our abilities to understand the most complicated puzzle on the planet—other people—and the surprising mistakes we routinely make. With the potential to inform the design of environments that enable better social understanding (and as a side benefit, make people act more humanely as well) the implications of these studies range from personal relationships, to organizational design, to government public policy, to foreign relations.