“Ever since I was a child, I have dreamed of understanding the human mind.”
Every fall, my inbox fills up with emails from people who want to do a PhD in my lab. You wouldn’t believe how many of these folks open with some version of this sentence. Some of them might as well say “Ever since I was a baby, I dreamed of being a social psychologist.”
I don’t want to be too mean about these emails, because they are all nice (except one from a dude from Rice that I remember very well…), and they come from smart, motivated people. They are doing exactly what their college essays trained them to do—write about their hopes and dreams.
But I want to explain why these applications don’t work. The reason is something I have spent much of my career studying, and once you understand it, you can write a much better application — for grad school, for a job, or for a grant. The short version is that your hopes and dreams are intensely real to you and totally irrelevant to most other people — especially because that person is more concerned with their own hopes and dreams.
The problem of other minds
The gap between my mind and yours is what philosophers call the problem of other minds. I know what it’s like to be me from the inside, but I have no direct access to what it’s like to be you. The bridge between my experiences and yours has to be built out of inference and guesswork.
The thing is, we’re really bad at bridging this gap, especially when other people’s experiences and desires are different from our own. Psychologists call this egocentrism (being centered on our ego), and researchers from Jean Piaget to my colleague Nick Epley have studied it.
The classic study of egocentrism is Piaget’s three mountain task. You sit a kid down in front of a model of three mountains, each with a different landmark on top (a little house, a cross, a cap of snow). Then you put a doll on the other side of the table and ask the kid to pick the picture that shows what the doll can see. Kids under about seven pick the picture of their own view, as if the doll were sitting in their lap (reason #58 why small children are monsters).
Adults are better than kids at the three mountain task, but Epley’s work shows that it still takes effort. (The study is very complicated but if you’re interested you can see it here.) The punchline—adults automatically anchor their own feelings and point of view, and only take other people’s perspective with effort. That is, it’s hard to see the world from someone else’s perspective.
Egocentrism is especially powerful when we really want something. If you’re fixated on getting into your dream lab, it’s natural to focus on that desire and emphasize our hopes when writing an application. It makes sense that you’d want to apply from your point of view–say, “your lab will help me achieve my goals!”
But while you’re focusing on your aspirations, professors are doing just the same—focusing on their goals. Maybe they want to apply for a certain grant, take their research in a new direction, or just vanquish their nemeses.
As an applicant, it can be difficult to take the perspective of a professor (you’ve never been one) or to simulate the various worries professors might have. And although professors have once been applicants to grad school, their aged-ravaged brains have been so decayed by anxiety and unpaid reviewing that they surely forget what it’s like to be a young aspirant. If professors experience hope and excitement at all, it is faint, like the smell of mint on a piece of gum stuck under a table.
Because of that gap between applicant and professor, your application must bridge the gap between your minds. You must tell professors how your desire and enthusiasm has translated into specific skills and experiences. And MOST IMPORTANTLY you must think about what those skills and experiences mean for your professor’s research, for their hopes and their dreams. Of course, you don’t have to tell them explicitly something like “Because I learned R, you can finally get a paper in a fancy journal, then tenure, and then maybe a retention offer from your condescending chair, thereby allowing you to wear an expensive pair of shoes at the next conference and make your ex jealous.”
Just being aware of what a professor might want—or even that they have the capacity to want anything at all—will put you miles ahead of other egocentric candidates.
Everyone is special (so no one is)
Egocentrism is not only innate, but we seem to actively train it into our kids, especially in our modern era. We tell them they’re special, we tell them to believe in themselves and follow their dreams, and we try to give them what they want. (There is a whole Bluey episode about this, where Muffin’s dad tells her she’s special, so she doesn’t think social rules apply to her. She comes to find she’s special to her family, but not to anyone else).
The problem is not that you’re not special. It’s that everyone is special, everyone has a perspective, and everyone has hopes and dreams. All academics have a “research journey” involving a long string of failures and the occasional triumph, so saying that you want to join a lab to continue that journey doesn’t distinguish you from other applicants.
So if everyone is special then the question is: What makes you uniquely special (especially special) for this position?
That specialness can definitely involve your passion and mental dedication (hidden within your mind) but for someone else to see that requires you providing evidence of tangible successes and qualifications. What can you bring to a job or a grad school position? If a professor—with hopes and dreams—can only hire ONE person, why should you be that one person, especially when your internal feelings cannot be quantified, and therefore cannot be compared against other applicants?
The answer to who gets the position is, again, usually the person who the professor (or boss, or whoever) believes can help them achieve their hopes and dreams. It’s up to you to best convince them that that person is you.
Now, I’m not saying professors are egotistical monsters (though some are). In fact, I feel weird about writing this post at all. “Here’s my advice to get what you want, everyone: think of ME!” 🙄🤮 (Dumb hot tip: pander to the whims of the capricious people in power.)
I’m not saying you should be inauthentic, nor am I not denying the inherent hierarchy—and its obvious potential for generating injustice–of academia and the workplace. But I do believe, based on many conversations with young folks, that it can be a startling revelation for students to realize that professors (or bosses) have an inner life.
It’s the same with parents. At some point you (hopefully) realized that your parents have hopes of their own, beyond just helping you thrive, and this probably was surprising. I remember seeing my dad cry for the first time and being incredulous.
Professors are kind of like parents—benevolent authority figures—who, even when young, seem old and wizened and devoid of desires. But unlike parents, you don’t have to apply to join your family. Most of us have been part of our parent’s “lab” since day zero, and (hopefully) you didn’t have to convince your mom to help you on your personal journey.
The “Trick” to Apps and Life
I hope it’s clear now the trick for successful applications is surprisingly simple in principle, even if it’s sometimes exceedingly difficult in practice. The trick: figure out the hopes of the person hiring, and then point to concrete experiences, skills and plans that reveal your ability to move toward those hopes. This means that, in your application, you should use more text to outline things you “did” and “can do” and less text outlining what you “feel” and “want,” because the former provides more tangible evidence for your abilities.
Appreciating other people’s perspective is not just a trick for getting into grad school, it’s a trick for life, for writing papers and grants and even love letters. And, in fact, it’s not a “trick” at all, but a fundamental human skill. Good perspective taking is what makes fiction writers and directors compelling, and what makes for a good relationship partner.
The opposite of habitually thinking about others and their minds is egocentrism, which has a different, less scientific name: being SELFISH (self = ego, and ish = personal tendency). Of course, you can be selfish too when you consider other minds—manipulating someone with their deepest fears—but in general, thinking about what someone else wants helps you get what you want, whether that’s a job or a grad school slot.
We are already accustomed to thinking about other people’s thoughts and emotions when it comes to relationships (i.e., empathy), but when it comes to our careers we become more self-centred, forgetting that we need other people to succeed.
And once you get to grad school, and even after you get a PhD, you still need to think about other minds. Every time I write a grant, I think about the hopes and dreams of the people evaluating it. Sure, I have hopes and desires, but so do all the other applicants, and so I need to focus on the criteria of the call for proposals, and the mission of the funders.
You would be shocked at how many applicants for anything don’t even look at the criteria for a grant and just go rogue, writing about whatever they like. Imagine you’re hungry and you ask a friend what they want or order for take out. But then they just tell you for 15 minutes about how they rebuilt the engine of their Ford Bronco. The engine might be interesting to them, but not only is it off-topic, it neglects the motivation behind the entire conversation: you’re hungry!
With applications, figure out what skills and experiences someone is hungry for and then demonstrate that you have them.
Useful Tips
Writing for someone else’s mind takes effort and practice (Piaget’s three mountains don’t get any easier just because you know about them), but there are questions you can ask yourself as you write. The goal of these questions isn’t to erase your passion or suppress your enthusiasm, but instead channel it to more tangible evidence that can be appreciated by people reading your application.
What are you hoping to achieve with this position?
How do your past work and future plans connect to those hopes? Can you be more explicit?
Past: Because I managed an Arby’s in college, I have excellent management skills, which I can use to mentor RAs, which allows me to scale up my research program, and further continue the awesomeness of your lab.
Future: Because I care so much about the mind—I have taken 14 extra courses in psychology—I am well positioned to discover new ideas. I can leverage my encyclopedic knowledge of different areas of psychology to provide new insights that will further continue the awesomeness of your lab.
When you’ve done that, ask: Are you including something because you like it or because you think it matches the criteria of the proposal? If it’s the former, cut it.
Are you still trying to prove you’re special? (You ARE! But so is everyone. Make sure you’re being especially connected to the person on the other end of the application.)