Are Eyes Windows to the Soul?

There’s something disarming about eye contact. Two eyes—just a few centimeters wide—can hold an entire emotion, or at least the ghost of one. A narrowing of the brow. A softening at the corner of the eye. We search for meaning in tiny shifts we’ve been reading, often unconsciously, our whole lives.

In this activity, you were asked to do something seemingly simple: look into someone’s eyes and guess what they feel. But the task is trickier than it seems - and more revealing, too. Because what you just did isn’t just about eyes. It’s about how we reach across the invisible space between minds.

The activity you completed is based on a psychological measure, Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET), which is among the most widely used tools for exploring how we interpret emotional states of others (Baron-Cohen et al., 2001). You look at a black-and-white photograph, cropped showing only around a person’s eyes and indicate what the person is feeling.

This process is part of a larger ability psychology calls mentalizing - our ability to imagine what someone else might be thinking, feeling, or intending. It’s a key part of empathy and social awareness, but it’s not magic or mind-reading. It’s a kind of thoughtful guessing, based on patterns we learn.

What’s powerful about this activity is that it makes something usually automatic feel visible. We rarely think about how much effort our minds put into understanding each other. This gives us a brief, focused glimpse into that behind-the-scenes work.

After completing the activity, you received a score - a percentage representing how often your answer matched the “target” expression. I realize it's tempting to see our number as a grade. But this isn’t a test. It’s like a mirror, reflecting a small part of how we interpret others. And mirrors can be shaped by lighting, angle, and mood. Here’s a guide to understanding your score:

The RMET was first developed to explore how people on the autism spectrum perceive emotional cues. Across many studies, a consistent pattern emerges: on average, persons on the autism spectrum tend to score lower than neurotypical peers (Peñuelas‑Calvo et al., 2019).

But these averages hide a huge range of variation.

Some autistic people score well above typical. Others don’t. Among fascinating finding is how intelligence interacts with the spectrum. Among neurotypical individuals, persons with higher IQs tend to score slightly better. But among autistic people, higher IQ sometimes predicts lower scores. Why? It may reflect how someone approaches the activity. Neurotypical people often read emotions through subtle, intuitive pattern-matching - like catching a melody you heard before. But many high-IQ autistic individuals may approach the task analytically: breaking down the angle of a brow or curvature of a eyelid. That logic-based strategy can backfire when emotions are ambiguous or don’t "follow the rules." Their brains may be brilliant - but they’re solving the wrong kind of problem.

This tells us something profound: our strengths are sometimes shaped by the strategies we use. And what works beautifully in one setting might falter in another.

People who read more fiction tend to do slightly better on this activity (Mumper & Gerrig, 2017). Fiction asks us to do what this activity does: step inside someone else's mind. As we follow characters through complex emotional landscapes, our brains get practice making sense of unspoken thoughts and feelings. Another pathway from reading to greater awareness of emotional cues may be how a richer vocabulary helps us find the right feeling to a subtle expression.

Television and movies similarly supports this kind of emotional attunement too (e.g., Tukachinsky Forster & Cohen, 2021). When we watch people navigate relationships, moral dilemmas, or quiet heartbreaks on screen, we’re not just entertained. We’re often feeling with them. Imagining what we might do in their shoes. It's especially true for long-form character-driven narratives, in contrast with action driven media, because we're invited into a kind of emotional rehearsal space. We simulate other minds, try on different lives, and stretch our perspective-taking 'muscles' in the process.

Perhaps among the most unexpected findings is how people from lower social classes tend to score higher on this activity than those from higher social classes (Dietze & Knowles, 2021). While it may seem counterintuitive at first, it makes sense when you think about it. People from less privileged backgrounds often need to pay closer attention to others - especially those with power and authority. Tuning into emotional cues can be a kind of social survival skill. It reminds us emotional skills don’t always come from comfort. Sometimes, they come from necessity.

Whether your score surprises you, frustrates you, affirms something, or leaves you unsure, please realize the real value isn't a number - it's noticing.


You just did something that, in real life, is nearly invisible: trying to read a moment of emotion in someone else's eyes. It's powerful when we notice not just the face in front of us, but our own reactions, hesitations, assumptions, and feelings we read into them.

Maybe you found yourself overthinking. Or trusting your gut. Or realizing how much you rely on context, like: voice, body language, background. You might be someone who reads others easily or someone who never feels quite sure. You might be shaped through neurodivergence, trauma, culture, or years of having to pay close attention to stay safe. However you got here, you’re not broken.

You’re human.

And being human means we don’t always get it right. But we can get better at being curious. Better at slowing down. Better at offering others the same grace we wish someone would offer us.

Uneasy Feelings about Your Results?
Please remember your results with any activity are not who you are. Your results are a 'snapshot' of a moment when you did an activity. It's just one measure, a single thread, of the many strands of who you are. Any result is a guess with statistical error. And it's possible the measure is flawed in a way so it doesn't work for you. Please do not think of your results as definitive dogma. Instead they're a starting point for our self reflection. Please keep in mind too, self-reflection can feel uncomfortable. "Bad" feelings are not actually bad. They're information. So, even if your activity result is inaccurate and flawed, you might ask yourself what your feeling is trying to tell you? Trusted teachers, friends, and therapists can be helpful. I wrote an essay elaborating with concrete examples how we can appreciate uneasy feelings about our activity results.

Scholarly Information?
You're welcome to use Copernican Revolution activities and essays for your thesis and studies. Having information about scholarly aspects like psychometric data, activity design details, and norm calculations may help. The primary focus of my essays is connecting educated laypersons with psychology. To help people like you, with advanced academic interests, I add an appendix with each activity.

Baron-Cohen, S., Wheelwright, S., Hill, J., Raste, Y., & Plumb, I. (2001). The "Reading the Mind in the Eyes" test revised version: A study with normal adults, and adults with Asperger syndrome or high-functioning autism. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 42(2), 241–251.

Dietze, P., & Knowles, E. D. (2021). Social class predicts emotion perception and perspective-taking performance. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 47(5), 781–793.

Mumper, M. L., & Gerrig, R. J. (2017). Leisure reading and social cognition: A meta-analysis. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 11(1), 109–120.

Peñuelas-Calvo, I., Sareen, A., Sevilla-Llewellyn-Jones, J., & Fernández-Berrocal, P. (2019). The "Reading the Mind in the Eyes" test in autism-spectrum disorders: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 49, 1048–1061.

Peterson, E., & Miller, S. F. (2012). The eyes test as a measure of individual differences: How much of the variance reflects verbal IQ? Frontiers in Psychology, 3, 220.

Tukachinsky Forster, R., & Cohen, J. (2021). Understanding others through televised narratives: The role of perceived realism and narrative transportation. Media Psychology, 24(2), 139–165.