"...as interesting as you think" vs "...as interesting as you'd think"?

Question

Speaker A: "You lived in Hawaii? Cool! How was it? Tell me, tell me.

Speaker B: "Haha, it wasn't as interesting as you/you'd think.

What's the correct option in this case? Or should I have written as you might think instead?

Answer 1

There is a difference in sense between the phrases "as you think" and as you'd think." If you say

It wasn't as interesting as you think.

you are (as Robusto points out in a comment above) overtly claiming to know what Speaker A thinks about the topic in question. But even if you do know what Speaker A thinks on the subject, there is something aggressive and potentially rude about asserting that you do. The more polite approach is to make the response conditional, as in

It wasn't as interesting as you'd think.

This expression sets up a hypothetical "you" who doesn't have first-hand experience of the topic being discussed—even though the hypothetical "you" and the actual "you" in all likelihood share this lack of experience. In effect, it is a short form of a much longer that we might express thought along these lines:

It wasn't as interesting as you would think if the only information you had about living there was data from travel brochures, National Geographic TV specials, and beach movies.

From a politeness perspective, the crucial difference between the two options is the framing of the second statement as an open-ended conditional sentence. You can achieve a similar effect by using "might" with its implicit counterpoint "[or might not]":

It wasn't as interesting as you might [or might not] think.

In either case, you give Speaker A leeway not to be one of those people who thinks something that isn't true—namely that living in Hawaii is inherently interesting. Saying

It wasn't as interesting as you think.

flatly accuses Speaker A of being in error.