Improve Your Relationships by Thinking Like an Extraterrestrial

A visual way to think like someone else.

Reviewed by Michelle Quirk

Key points

• Relationship problems arise when participants fail to understand each other's point of view.
• A simple way to understand another person better is to visualize five personality traits.
• By comparing your personality traits with those of another person, future conflicts can be avoided.

This post is part two of a two-part series.

My wife, Chris Gilbert, and I wanted to develop a unique extraterrestrial (ET) character for our recent novel, The Shadow of Time.

In a companion PT post, Chris described how she approached the problem based on her experiences as a physician who learned to see the world as her patients did to better understand their ailments.

Here, I describe a completely different approach to getting inside someone else’s head based on my experience as a neuroscientist and psychologist. I aim to apply these ideas to improving relationships.

Becoming your opposite

My first step in envisioning an alien psyche was to imagine human characters who were polar opposites and whose contrasting personalities would lead to tension and conflict (writing teachers say that every scene in a novel should sizzle with conflict). I did this using the “Big-Five” personality traits: agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, and neuroticism.¹

Below are “spider charts” of two human characters whose personalities are distinctly unlike each other in every dimension of personality. On each of the five axes, the degree to which an individual exhibits a personality trait is shown by where the purple lines intersect the axis: The farther from the center of the chart, the stronger that trait.

For the book, I imagined how two such opposite characters would react to stressful situations—such as their first encounter with a scary ET—and to each other during those situations. This approach produced the desired conflict in scenes the characters shared.

In the real world, such personality differences can also lead to conflict. For instance, if a married couple (people are sometimes drawn to their opposites²) differs significantly along the openness dimension, one partner might want to vacation in a very unusual location, while the other may want to go to a familiar vacation spot, producing arguments over where to vacation.

One way to avoid such conflicts is for couples to map out their respective personalities, as shown above, to foresee where problems—such as arguments over where to vacation—are likely to arise before they erupt.

Chris and I, who are quite different along multiple dimensions (she’s much more conscientious than I am, for example), frequently do this to avoid stepping on future “relationship landmines.”

Conflict in novels is good, but in relationships, not so much.

Thinking like an ET

The spider chart approach proved useful for producing conflict between humans throughout our story and even more useful for creating tension between humans and ETs.

However, instead of the “Big-Five” personality traits, I used a few nonpersonality traits that define us as humans:

• Spirituality (belief in a higher being)
• Parallel thinking (thinking about more than one thing at once: humans typically think about one thing at a time)
• Competitiveness (humans routinely compete for scarce resources and mates)
• Long-lived (humans live longer than mayflies but much shorter than Greenland sharks)
• Social (humans are a social species that thrive by cooperating)

On the left is a visual depiction of humans; on the right is the same depiction of an ET, who, for example, lived an extremely long life compared to humans.

Other traits, such as sexuality and curiosity, also define us as human, but I have simplified the spider charts to make a point: One glance at a spider chart can uncover where conflicts are likely to arise. For example, the ET in our novel had nine brains that ran in parallel, simultaneously thinking different thoughts, in contrast to our more single-minded brains. Our ET had virtually no relationship with others of their kind, whereas the emotional bonds among our human characters were all-important to the story.

Needless to say, the ET and humans depicted above could not understand each other because they struggled to see the world through each other’s eyes. Such mutual misunderstandings were at the heart of ET/human conflicts, just as in the real world, misunderstandings between nations can lead to war.³

So, if you find yourself in conflict with a spouse, family member, co-worker, or friend, work up some spider charts for both you and the person you are having trouble with that quickly show where and why conflicts might be arising.

The resulting insights and improvements in your relationship could be…out of this world.