“I know him. I know how he is going to react.”
The phrase is familiar. It appears in our personal relationships as much as our professional ones, often after enough time spent with someone to have learned to recognize their reactions, their sensitivities, their ways of communicating and the behaviors that seem to return when certain situations arise. It can even reflect genuine attention paid to another person, the kind of knowledge that builds slowly and makes it possible to perceive nuances that still escape someone who barely knows them.
Every relationship thus has a memory. We learn from what we live through together, recognize certain continuities and gradually develop a finer understanding of the other person. This experience allows us to anticipate needs, adjust the way we communicate and navigate the complexity of the relationship with more discernment. It also spares us from starting over at every interaction, as though what came before had taught us nothing.
As this knowledge deepens, a more discreet phenomenon can nonetheless set in. Certain impressions are checked less often. Certain questions seem less necessary. We anticipate more easily what the other person thinks, what they feel, what they will understand and how they will react. This evolution passes easily unnoticed, since it resembles one of the natural consequences of closeness: we have accumulated enough experience to believe that we know.
This is where the paradox of relational knowledge appears: the knowledge that allows us to understand someone better can gradually reduce the curiosity that still allows us to discover them.
At what moment does what we know about a person begin to determine what we are still able to see of them?
The question deserves its full nuance. Relational experience contains genuine information. Some behaviors repeat often enough to become patterns. Some reactions become reasonably predictable. The history of a relationship can also teach us that a limit must be set, that a decision must be made, or that distance becomes necessary. Everything we have lived through legitimately contributes to our discernment.
The issue lies elsewhere, in far less visible territory: do we remain capable of distinguishing what we know from what we have stopped verifying?
What we know of the other person
We build our knowledge of others from a considerable quantity of information. Their words, their decisions, their behaviors, the commitments they keep, their reactions when things become difficult and the experiences we go through together continually enrich our understanding. The longer a relationship lasts, the denser that memory becomes and the more reference points we have for interpreting what happens within it.
This familiarity can genuinely improve our understanding of certain dimensions of the other person. It gives us access to more information, allows us to observe them in different contexts and refines some of our judgments. It also carries a fundamental limitation: part of human experience remains interior. Intentions, emotions, the reasoning that precedes certain decisions, or the experiences that have recently transformed a perspective are never entirely accessible to us. Even in the deepest relationships, our understanding remains partial.
This limitation becomes harder to perceive when experience has proved us right on several occasions. An anticipation borne out strengthens our confidence in our ability to predict the next one. A reaction that matches what we expected enriches the representation already built. As these experiences accumulate, the boundary between what we have actually observed and what we now believe we can anticipate grows thinner.
“She has reacted that way before” can gradually become “she always reacts that way,” then “I know how she is going to react.”
Experience has produced knowledge. That knowledge now shapes our reading of what has not yet happened.
Our knowledge of the other person also bears our imprint
The behaviors we observe are real. So are the words spoken, and the consequences of certain decisions. They are the raw material from which we develop our understanding of the other person. That material nonetheless takes on its meaning through a deeply human operation: we interpret it.
A silence can suggest disinterest. A hesitation can be understood as a lack of courage. A question can be perceived as a challenge. An emotional reaction can be associated with a difficulty in receiving feedback. A step back can be experienced as rejection. Each of these interpretations may correspond to what is really happening, and each may equally represent only part of it.
Our reading is built from the context, from our history with this person and from everything we have already learned about the relationship. It also carries our own history: our expectations, our values, our emotions, our earlier experiences and the protective mechanisms we have developed over time. Our view of the other person therefore inevitably contains part of ourselves.
Two people can thus go through the same interaction and come away with profoundly different understandings of it. Each has access to real behaviors, words and events. Each meets them from a position that is their own and gives them meaning from that position.
Research on interpersonal perception invites us to hold precisely this complexity: our perceptions of others can contain accuracy and bias at the same time. We may have developed a particularly accurate knowledge of certain behaviors of a person and continue to interpret other information through the representations we had already built.
Recognizing this limitation does not weaken the value of our experience. It rather allows us to situate our knowledge for what it is: an understanding of the other person that is sometimes highly informed, built from a point of observation that remains our own.
When the past begins to interpret the present
Relational memory allows us to recognize patterns and learn from experience. This capacity is essential to discernment. It can also gradually become the filter through which new information acquires its meaning.
Confirmation bias describes, in particular, our tendency to favor information compatible with what we already believe. Within a relationship this dynamic has a particular force, since every interaction takes place within a history already charged with experiences, emotions and meanings.
If I believe a person is defensive, their defensive reactions will easily find their place in the understanding I have built of them. The moments when they welcome a difficult conversation with openness can also be observed, while carrying less weight in the general representation that has consolidated over time. New information never arrives in an empty space: it meets everything we already believe we know.
The past can thus continue to illuminate the present while gradually narrowing the possibilities through which we are willing to interpret it.
This tension becomes particularly important when we consider that people evolve. They develop new capabilities, go through experiences that transform their perspectives, sometimes learn to regulate their reactions better, and can change behaviors that once seemed deeply established. Their history continues to be part of them without necessarily constituting a complete prediction of what they will do today.
When our representation evolves more slowly than the person it seeks to understand, a gap becomes possible. We continue to recognize the person we knew and can miss certain signs of the person they have become.
Relational knowledge meets here one of its most interesting limits: what allows us to recognize continuity in another person can also make us less available to perceive their movement.
What we anticipate enters the relationship with us
Our representations influence more than the way we think about the other person. They enter the relationship with us and shape our posture before the interaction has even begun.
When I am convinced that a person will react badly to a difficult conversation, that anticipation can change the way I address them. I may choose my words with unusual caution, hold back certain information, delay the conversation, reduce my spontaneity, or enter the exchange already prepared to have to defend my point of view. These adjustments can be conscious and sensible. Others occur far more subtly, in our tone, our availability, the tension we carry, or the confidence we grant to the very possibility of a different conversation.
The person in front of us then enters an interaction already influenced by what we anticipated of them. They respond to the subject raised, to our words, and to the whole relational posture that accompanies them. Their own perception of that posture in turn influences the way they enter the exchange.
Their reaction then becomes new information in our understanding.
“I knew he would react like that.”
Social psychology documents the possibility of such behavioral confirmation dynamics: in certain circumstances, the expectations we hold about someone can influence our behavior toward them and contribute to eliciting responses consistent with those expectations.
This possibility never transfers to one person the responsibility for another’s behavior. Each of us remains responsible for our words, our actions and our choices. It does, however, add an essential dimension to our understanding: we observe the relationship from inside the system we take part in.
As this loop repeats, each person can end up perceiving certain behaviors as entirely individual characteristics, when they also continue to express themselves within a relational dynamic that influences them.
What does our way of anticipating the other person contribute to making possible between us?
When certainty still leaves room for curiosity
Curiosity arises naturally before what we know we do not know. It becomes far more demanding when we already hold an answer that seems credible to us. The greater our experience with someone, the more information we have to support our anticipations and the more superfluous verification can seem.
Relational curiosity then takes on another depth. It rests on our capacity to keep a measure of openness within what we already know, to enter an interaction with a strong hypothesis while leaving enough room for information that might confirm it, qualify it or transform it.
I can tolerate not knowing what you think for long enough to let you teach it to me.
This posture calls for a form of humility about the limits of our own understanding. Work on intellectual humility describes precisely this metacognitive capacity to recognize that our knowledge and our beliefs have limits and may sometimes require revision.
Within a relationship, this humility becomes deeply concrete. It appears when we can ask a question whose acceptable answer we have not already determined, when we stay present long enough to hear a perspective different from our own, and when the information received genuinely has the possibility of enriching what we thought we knew.
Curiosity and openness then become interdependent. Curiosity sets us in motion toward new information. Openness allows that information to take part in our understanding. Empathy widens this space further by making us available to the existence of an experience different from our own, while keeping in mind that our access to that experience will always remain partial.
This availability sometimes comes at a cost. What we discover can unsettle a certainty that reassured us, call an old interpretation into question, or confront us with our own part in a dynamic that has become familiar.
It is at this point that courage enters the relationship.
The courage to make our certainties verifiable
Some relational certainties serve a function. They give coherence to difficult experiences, allow us to anticipate an uncomfortable situation and can protect us from the repetition of a dynamic that has already affected us. Making them verifiable sometimes requires accepting that reality may lead us somewhere other than where we had anticipated.
The other person’s response may confirm exactly what we thought. It may also reveal that part of our understanding was incomplete, that a person has evolved, or that our own posture plays a larger part than we thought in what keeps happening between us. In both cases, the discovery produces useful information.
Relational courage then shows itself in our capacity to enter a conversation whose outcome we do not fully control, to make a hypothesis available for verification, and to remain available to what that verification will teach us.
This posture does not systematically lead us to change our judgment. A conversation can confirm a perception. A new interaction can reinforce a pattern already well documented. A limit can become even more clearly necessary. Availability to new information also includes the possibility that this information consolidates what experience had taught us.
Relational maturity may lie in this capacity to let reality keep informing our discernment, including when what it reveals calls for a difficult decision.
A responsibility toward the quality of our view
We speak a great deal about responsibility in relationships: for our words, our behaviors, our decisions and their impacts. The way we build what we believe we know about another person also deserves our attention, since it influences the posture with which we enter each of our interactions.
This responsibility toward our view invites us to stay attentive to the difference between the behaviors we have observed and the intentions we have attributed to them, between the patterns documented well enough to guide our discernment and the conclusions that have become so familiar that we no longer verify them. It also requires recognizing that the conviction of being right about another person can sometimes reduce our capacity to perceive information that no longer matches what we expected.
This vigilance becomes particularly important when our representation is negative. Presuming that a person will act with bad intent, that they will be incapable of hearing what we have to say, or that they will necessarily react in the worst way already influences our posture before they have had the chance to take part in the interaction. Our view then becomes itself a component of the relational system.
Recognizing this influence weakens neither our judgment nor the limits experience has taught us to set. Some relationships offer enough consistent information for a decision, a distance or an ending to be fully justified. Relational curiosity demands no permanent reopening of conclusions that are sufficiently supported.
Has what I believe I know really been observed enough to guide my discernment, or have I simply stopped questioning it?
Knowing the other person without ceasing to discover them
A living relationship necessarily accumulates knowledge. We learn from one another, gradually recognize the continuities, the strengths, the vulnerabilities and the patterns that shape the way we are together. This memory gives depth to our bonds and allows a discernment that would be impossible if every interaction existed independently of all those that came before it.
The richness of this knowledge also depends on its capacity to remain permeable to the present. A living relational representation integrates experience and continues to welcome new information. It recognizes patterns and remains capable of perceiving their evolution. It allows the past to illuminate the present and the present to keep enriching what the past had taught us.
Empathy, curiosity, openness and courage take part together in this capacity. Their interdependence allows us to go toward another person with everything we already know of them while keeping enough room for what we do not yet know, for what has changed, and for what our own view had perhaps not yet allowed us to see.
The better we know someone, the subtler this posture becomes. Relational depth is then built in our capacity to hold together knowledge and discovery, memory and movement, discernment and openness.
To know someone deeply might therefore mean having learned enough about them to recognize their continuities, while keeping enough curiosity never to confuse what we know of them with everything it is still possible to discover.
References and scientific foundations
This essay belongs to a broader reflection on interpersonal perception, social cognition, empathic accuracy, cognitive biases and intellectual humility. The following works have contributed in particular to illuminating the phenomena addressed.
Leising, D., Gallrein, A.-M. B., & Dufner, M. (2014). Judging the behavior of people we know: Objective assessment, confirmation of preexisting views, or both? Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 40(2), 153–163. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167213507287
This study explores directly the tension at the heart of this essay: when we evaluate the behaviors of people we know, our judgment can reflect both what they actually do and the representations we had already built about them.
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. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0017908
The SOKA model shows that knowledge of a person remains distributed: depending on the characteristics observed, the person themselves and those who know them may hold different and sometimes complementary perspectives.
Nickerson, R. S. (1998). Confirmation bias: A ubiquitous phenomenon in many guises. Review of General Psychology, 2(2), 175–220. https://doi.org/10.1037/1089-2680.2.2.175
This landmark review documents confirmation bias, that is, our tendency to seek out or interpret information in a way consistent with the beliefs, expectations or hypotheses we already hold.
Snyder, M., & Swann, W. B., Jr. (1978). Behavioral confirmation in social interaction: From social perception to social reality. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 14(2), 148–162. https://doi.org/10.1016/0022-1031(78)90021-5
This work shows how a person’s expectations can, in certain circumstances, influence the way they enter an interaction and contribute to eliciting behaviors in the other person consistent with those initial expectations.
Sened, H., Lavidor, M., Lazarus, G., Bar-Kalifa, E., Rafaeli, E., & Ickes, W. (2017). Empathic accuracy and relationship satisfaction: A meta-analytic review. Journal of Family Psychology, 31(6), 742–752. https://doi.org/10.1037/fam0000320
This meta-analysis concerns empathic accuracy, that is, our capacity to perceive accurately the thoughts, emotions and certain inner states of another person.
Porter, T., Elnakouri, A., Meyers, E. A., Shibayama, T., Jayawickreme, E., & Grossmann, I. (2022). Predictors and consequences of intellectual humility. Nature Reviews Psychology, 1, 524–536. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44159-022-00081-9
This review situates intellectual humility around the metacognitive capacity to recognize the limits of one’s own beliefs and knowledge.
A C+ reading
The research drawn on in this essay resonates with an architecture already present in the models and programs developed by Le Facteur C+. The ÉCHO model — Empathy, Curiosity, Openness and Heroism (courage) — treats these capabilities as interdependent and as taking part together in the quality of our presence to ourselves, to the other person and to the relationship.
In this perspective, empathy makes us available to an experience different from our own; curiosity keeps enough room to seek to understand it; openness allows what we discover to enrich our representation; and courage supports our capacity to enter that discovery and to stay present when what it reveals unsettles our certainties.
This reading is the perspective particular to C+ proposed in this essay. The research cited illuminates different mechanisms within it without seeking to establish or scientifically validate the ÉCHO model as a whole.
Next dossier — The ecosystem of human capabilities: understanding the living system that allows individuals, teams and organizations to develop their capacity to evolve.