How Well Do You Know Me?

What is "How Well Do You Know Me?"

A guessing game for two people and one phone. One of you answers a two-option question about yourself, and the other guesses which you chose. The questions start light, with weekends and travel, move on to how you react under pressure, and end with the things you really care about.

You answer by dragging with your finger rather than tapping. At the reveal, the game replays both paths: whether the person answering curved toward the other option first, and how sure the guesser was. At the end, it lists the missed and hesitant rounds so you can keep talking.

This is a conversation game, not a relationship assessment. The score doesn't say how good your relationship is or how compatible you are, and it can't tell whether anyone is being truthful.

How to play

1. 1Choose a length (6 or 12 rounds) and enter both names.
2. 2Each round, the person answering holds the dot and drags it to their answer, then passes the phone so the other can guess the same way. You take turns being the one who answers.
3. 3See whether the guess matched and replay the finger paths. The "worth talking about" list at the end makes a good place to pick up the conversation.

The psychology behind it

How well do we read the people close to us?

Psychologist William Ickes and colleagues study empathic accuracy: how accurately one person can infer what another is thinking and feeling in the moment. It varies from person to person and from situation to situation, and even people who are very close don't always read each other correctly.

A separate study (Swann & Gill, 1997, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) found that relationship partners tend to be more confident than accurate about each other. So the questions you're sure you'll get right are worth asking about too.

The path of your hand shows the pull of the other option

Psychologist Jonathan Freeman and colleagues use mouse movements to study how decisions unfold (Freeman & Ambady, 2010, Behavior Research Methods; Freeman, Dale & Farmer, 2011, "Hand in motion reveals mind in motion", Frontiers in Psychology). When two options both attract someone, the movement tends to curve toward the one they didn't choose, a trace of the pull between the two.

This game borrows that idea for a finger on a phone screen. Its "sure", "paused" and "torn" labels are rough hints, not a lab measure. Hesitating means you weighed both options. It doesn't mean you lied.

If the game brings up something you'd like to talk through properly, a counsellor is one option.

References

1. Ickes, W. (Ed.). (1997). Empathic accuracy. Guilford Press.
2. Swann, W. B., Jr., & Gill, M. J. (1997). Confidence and accuracy in person perception: Do we know what we think we know about our relationship partners? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 73(4), 747–757.
3. Freeman, J. B., & Ambady, N. (2010). MouseTracker: Software for studying real-time mental processing using a computer mouse-tracking method. Behavior Research Methods, 42(1), 226–241.
4. Freeman, J. B., Dale, R., & Farmer, T. A. (2011). Hand in motion reveals mind in motion. Frontiers in Psychology, 2, 59.