Do you infer and classify people's intentions?

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When you hear someone say something, do you have a tendency to infer the intention behind their message? Like, I can usually tell when people are...

Trying to encourage me.
Trying to insult me.
Trying to gain my favor.
Trying to make me angry.
Trying to cheer me up.
Trying to tell me to go away.
Trying to help me.
And so on.

When you look at what people write or what they have to say, do you similarly tend to automatically classify their basic intentions or is it all just a bunch of words with a meaning that needs to processed?

No. Almost never



Words to be processed.

More Theory of Mind stuff. I never seem to understand intentions.

you are trying to sway me.

Most people talk for a reason. That purpose usually serves the speaker.

It's more like when I talk to certain people, I have certain judgements.

Like when Joe's talking to me, he is buttering me up.

When Laura's talking to me, she's killing time and so on.

It takes me a while to process people's intentions. Sometimes hours later it will occur to me what they were trying to get at.

Wow. Not me at all. Someone was talking to me today about her kid's wrestling team and I actually asked myself "Why is she telling me this?" I really had no clue. Maybe there is no why.

I'm good with telling other people's intentions.

Maybe. I will wonder if they are making fun of someone or trying to be insulting or do a comeback. This is something new for me after I have been at Babycenter too much. I also wonder why do they post pictures in the thread with words? What is the whole meaning of it and how is it supposed to be insulting? I find it all annoying and I wish I can block images but maybe that is their intent. To annoy the OP to scare them out of their own thread because it be filled with spam, no serious responses.

At work I have been wondering why has this guy been talking to me. Maybe he likes me and he knows I am married. He can't possibly be hitting on me just because he is a guy. It's absurd to think that talking to someone who is the opposite gender always means hitting on them. I can't tell the difference.

I also think people tell you things like about their kid's wrestling team because they just want to talk and they have found something to talk about. People will talk about things to have a conversation. It's like why do you tell people about your obsessions or things you find interesting? Well same reason why people tell you about their kid's wrestling team.


I speculate after wards why people post things online. I think concrete first and then in abstract terms since I think a lot and analyze situations.

I don't really have any clue what people's intentions are. I tend to be able to judge only by their actions. That gives me both an advantage and a disadvantage--I can't be deceived by the way people talk, because I don't get the subtext; but I have to wait until they show their nature in the way they act before I can figure them out at all.

It makes me incredibly naive, at least at first; but later on I tend to surprise people because they can't disguise their actions, and I can see those just fine.

I don't think about their intentions unless they're doing something that worries me, in which case I'm not hearing their words. For example, this guy I barely knew came running over to me when I got to a party at his house and for some reason I was wary, and I was so busy trying to figure out what set me off he'd basically done this magic trick before I even noticed it -- and when I did notice it, I also noticed how he'd done it (even though I'd never seen the trick before). I assume I saw what he was doing because I was ignoring the misdirecting "patter," so I wasn't misdirected. But at least then I knew why he'd set off the warning bells; he really was trying to deceive me, just not for a particularly unnerving reason.

But if I'm actually listening to them, then processing the words is taking all my energies. I don't worry about intentions until later, if ever. And then only if they got annoyed with me or ended up attacking me in some way, when I'm trying to figure out what set them off.




I think there is no why. I sometimes catch myself rambling on about whatever and wonder "can they possibly be interested in this?" and as long as it's about my everyday life or the life of someone close to me no one seems to care as long as there's conversation. But talk about ideas and stuff that really *interests me* and people get bored. I had one friend who finally said, "Well, that was a nice long letter, but please tell me what you've been doing next time."




Yes. There's a particularly charismatic kind of bully that I can peg pretty rapidly, and it always astonishes me how many people just don't seem to notice what vicious things they're doing. To the point where you can say, "What would you think about a guy who does [stuff they know this Guy has done]?" And they're all, "what a creep!" but if you say, "Well, how is that different from what Guy did?" they're all, "Well, it's different, that's all. Guy's a good guy" kind of stuff. Apparently, if someone's "a good guy," then the things they do can't be that bad. Even if they've done something cruel and harmful.

Yes, it is a subconscious act to be inclined to do so. We are conditioned from our first day, and you really get a taste of 'people' at the entering of school. It is a subtle and progressive process as we build ToM.

It's NT.

I do have a tendency to jump to conclusions, but turns out that most of the times I'm wrong. I can almost never guess the right intention. And sometimes it gets very very awkward Any suggestions?

Oh yesssssss, even though inferring another people's intention might be an "NT" thing to do, I think it'd be more accurate to say that the accuracy in said inferences would probably more directly be a measure of "being NT".

I seem to have a pretty large negative bias in inferring other people's intentions, like I assume something was meant negatively more often than not when it wasn't meant as such. I kind of wonder if such a "negative perception" might be tied to experience where one lacks accuracy in inferring other people's intentions in the past, and then there's overwhelmingly a large amount of unexpected negative feedback because you're dislikable (Because you're aspie? Because you have bad memory? Because you have nonverbal communication deficits? You otherwise didn't respond "ideally"?), and so then ones perception becomes negatively biased to "more accurately predict" intentions in the future?

Here's my hypothesis.

Yes and usually I make negative assumptions, get paranoid about it.....and then of course that sets of my anxiety. For instance say I hang out with my cousin for a night and then she's busy for the next week I might assume because she's not texting me she's pissed off at me and then be too anxious to text her, same with my sister and friends.

In reality its more like they're busy and I'm getting anxious about nothing.

If I want to know someone's intentions, I usually ask.

I can usually identify pretty overt stuff like anger, but I sometimes misinterpret people if they often communicate in a certain way and then shift their communication method to communicate something different - such as with my niece I misread something she said as sarcastic and a bit mean when she was trying to be helpful. But the way she said it was the way she typically says things when she's being sarcastic and a bit mean. I mean phrasing-wise.

Uh... Not at all it appears... Learning that skillset now.