Luigui Bleand: The Sphere

ROME, ITALY — Evening is falling over a large stone square, and the light turns everything gold. In the background, a monumental fountain with statues. In the centre, an enormous armchair, carved and worn, almost a throne. It is empty. People walk past without looking at it: a woman with her shopping bag, two people walking together, a man with a backpack, each carrying their own day. That, at times, is the throne we build for ourselves: we place it at the centre, and almost nobody else looks at it. Whoever sat on it waiting for the square to stop would wait in vain. And if the sun is setting over that square, it is because the Earth turns: a sphere spinning on its axis and around the sun, not around anyone.

I am talking about a tendency we all know: believing that the world should adjust to what we want and that we should always be the priority. It is not about “those people”: it happens to all of us at some point, on a heavy day or when we are in a hurry. That is why I am talking about things we do, not about a type of person, and what we do can be calmly looked at and changed. It happens, for example, when we impose a plan and forget that the other person also has responsibilities, difficulties and dreams. Your friend has an exam; your brother, a double shift; your colleague looks after their mother at night; someone else is saving their few free hours for a dream of many years. Their calendar is not a blank page waiting for us to fill it. Their life deserves space, even if it cannot be seen from the throne.

We all start from ourselves, and not out of bad faith: our own point of view is the one closest at hand. In 2004, in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Nicholas Epley, Boaz Keysar, Leaf Van Boven and Thomas Gilovich asked students who knew whether an ambiguous voice message was sincere or sarcastic to estimate how someone without that information would understand it. When they knew it was sarcastic and had only three seconds to answer, they expected 66% of listeners to catch it; those not hurried, 50%. These were lab tasks with small samples, and those who could take their time showed no significant bias. I would venture to take this outside the lab: when we are in a hurry, it is harder to get out of our own heads, and that is why waiting a moment before reacting makes sense.

Think of “Why aren’t you answering me?” On the other side is someone working, studying, driving or simply resting. In 2021, in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Laura Giurge and Vanessa Bohns published eight pre-registered studies on non-urgent emails. In a survey of 713 workers, those who received such emails outside working hours believed the senders expected a faster reply than the senders said they wanted: 3.64 versus 2.63, on a scale of 1 to 7. These were work emails, almost all recalled or imagined. Knowing how to wait is also respect: it does not mean living on standby for anyone; it means giving others the time their day requires.

Sometimes, behind these scenes, there may be something deeper: expecting special treatment, an inclination each of us has to a greater or lesser degree. In 2016, in Psychological Bulletin, Joshua Grubbs and Julie Exline reviewed the research on this tendency and proposed a cycle: whoever expects more than life usually gives is left exposed, again and again, to unmet expectations, which bring disappointment and anger; to recover, the person bolsters the belief that they deserve more, and the cycle starts again. It is a theoretical model, with still-preliminary support, but it suggests that this expectation also weighs on whoever carries it. In Spanish, the same word, esperar, means both to expect something and to wait for someone. When the first grows too large, the second becomes hard.

And then there is the “no”. It is easy to read a limit or a turned-down plan as a lack of affection, and just as easy to fear that others will read our own “no” that way. In 2024, in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Julian Givi and Colleen Kirk published five experiments, mostly with imagined scenes: a friend invites you to Saturday dinner at a restaurant with a celebrity chef, and you say no to stay home and relax. Those who declined overestimated how angry the inviter would get, how much the inviter would take that “no” as indifference and how much less likely they were to be invited again; the inviters, by contrast, paid more attention to the reasons than to the refusal. So when it is your turn to hear a “no”, it is worth doing the same: looking at the reasons. It seems to me that, often, someone who says no is weighing their day and their tiredness, not measuring how much they care about you.

Here, I believe, lies the most important distinction. Expressing a legitimate need means saying it, explaining it, asking and accepting the answer. “I have too much on my plate this week; can we look at it next week?” is a need. “Answer me now” is an imposition. “I would love it if you came; if you can’t, I understand” leaves room. “If you really cared, you would come” does not. The difference is not in how much you need, but in whether the other person keeps the freedom to say no without it damaging the bond.

And how can we know what someone else thinks or needs? We usually guess. In 2018, in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Tal Eyal, Mary Steffel and Nicholas Epley published 25 experiments. In the last, in 104 pairs of people who had known each other for years, one tried to predict what the other thought about 20 statements. Imagining a day in the other’s life did not help, and on the main measure it even made predictions worse; asking them for five minutes improved them greatly, though only on what was asked. Putting yourself in someone’s place does help you feel empathy and closeness, the authors note; what it cannot do is read minds. To know what someone else thinks, the simplest way is still to ask, and to say what you need too.

Listening is the other half. In 2017, in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Guy Itzchakov, Avraham Kluger and Dotan Castro published four experiments with university students. In one, working in pairs, one student spoke for 12 minutes while the other listened, either attentively or distracted by flickering screens that only the listener could see, something the authors liken to a phone or the television. With an attentive listener, speakers felt less anxious and saw both sides of their own position more clearly. These were short lab conversations, but the scene is instantly recognisable.

In the square, the sun has almost set. The armchair is still empty, and people keep walking past, each with their own things: the shopping, the conversation, the backpack on a shoulder. It is not indifference: each of them is attending to their own life, as you are to yours. So listen before you assume, accept that others will not always see things as you do, and build relationships in which both can ask and both know how to wait. The sphere does not turn around any one of us, and it has room for everyone. Your life matters, and so do the lives of others.