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2015-04-21 08:53:11
Heidi Grant Halvorson
April 16, 2015
Whatever you may have heard to the contrary, Chip Wilson is not an idiot. The
founder and former CEO and Chairman of Lululemon Atheltica is, in point of
fact, a highly successful entrepreneur, philanthropist, innovator, and
self-made billionaire. Idiots are very rarely any of those things.
But a 2013 Bloomberg TV interview with him and his wife Shannon, Lululemon s
original athletic wear designer, was not one of his finest moments. When he was
asked about reports of customers complaining about pilling in the company s
newest line of high-end yoga pants, he defensively replied that some women s
bodies just actually don t work for yoga pants, and that the problem was
really about the rubbing through the thighs, how much pressure is there.
Translation: If your fat thighs are ruining your pricey Lululemon yoga pants,
that s your problem. Maybe my pants are not for you. (Incidentally, if you
watch the video, you will see Shannon Wilson shoot him a look at that moment
that would have surely turned him to stone had he noticed it, which he did
not.)
It was, of course, horribly offensive but was it Chip Wilson s intention to
be offensive? Did he even think what he said was offensive? In a video apology
he later issued before stepping down as Lululemon s Chairman, Wilson said that
he was sad for the repercussions of my actions and that he accepted
responsibility, that ubiquitous post-disaster PR phrase that everyone repeats
but no one ever seems to mean. But nowhere did he actually acknowledge that
there was anything wrong with what he had said, or that he personally had been
wrong to say it.
I m going to go out on a limb and suggest that Chip Wilson did not intend, with
those poorly chosen words, to insult and alienate his loyal customer base. (Or
to seriously irritate his wife.) It just doesn t make sense to assume
otherwise. So, if that wasn t his intention, and if he s not an idiot
(self-made billionaire, people), then what happened?
The uncomfortable truth is that most of us don t come across the way we intend.
We can t see ourselves truly objectively, and neither can anyone else. Human
beings have a strong tendency to distort other people s feedback to fit their
own views. We know this intellectually, and yet we rarely seem to recognize it
as it s happening.
That can cause you big problems in your personal and professional life. People
may not trust you, may not like you, or may not even notice you, as a result of
these errors in perception. If you have ever felt yourself underestimated or
misjudged, if you have stepped on toes without meaning to and been called to
task for it, if you have wanted to cry out That s not fair! when false and
hurtful assumptions have been made about you, I m here to tell you that you are
right. The way we see one another is far from fair. In fact, much of this
process of perceiving other people isn t even rational. It is biased,
incomplete, and inflexible. It is also largely (but not entirely) automatic.
And yet no one is entirely unknowable either. In fact, some of us are actually
easier to understand than others. These people seem to express themselves in
ways that allow others to perceive them more accurately. Psychologists refer to
this as being more or less judgeable, or as personality expert David Funder
calls it, being a good target. What actually makes someone more judgeable?
Funder has argued that in order for people to be accurate in their assessments
of someone else, four things need to happen. The target must (1) make
information available and (2) make sure that information is relevant. Then, the
perceiver must (3) detect, or pay attention to that information and (4) use it
correctly.
Let s focus for now on the parts that are in the your (i.e., the target s)
control. To be judgeable, you are going to need to make information about
yourself available to others, and it should provide evidence of the particular
qualities you are trying to convey. (In other words, just knowing that you
graduated at the top of your class at Harvard tells me nothing at all about how
personable, trustworthy, creative, or resilient you are). So if you are a very
shy and reserved person, who reveals next to nothing about your thoughts and
feelings to the people around you, then they will know very little about you
aside from the fact that you are shy and reserved, obviously. The danger there
is that people will generally fill in the blanks themselves, imagining a whole
personality profile for you that may or may not probably not be accurate.
Manipulative people can use this dynamic to their advantage. For instance, I
had an office mate in graduate school who was famous for his reserve in
romantic relationships. He was a completely closed book. I once asked him if
this caused problems for him with the women in his life, and he told me, with
remarkable candor, that he did it intentionally he had found that women would
usually interpret his silences in positive ways. (He s so mysterious. He s a
deep thinker. Maybe he s been hurt before I ll bet he s really sensitive )
The personality they would invent for him, he said, was in fact much better
than his actual personality. As a psychologist, I found this fascinating. As a
single woman, on the other hand, I found it more than a little terrifying.
Ignoring my former office mate for the moment, it is definitely better to be
judgeable to have other people read you easily and accurately. Research
consistently shows that more judgeable people are psychologically better
adjusted they are happier; are more satisfied with their personal and
professional lives; have more lasting, positive relationships; and have a
greater sense of purpose. They feel they are able to live more authentically
and are more confident in their self-knowledge. This makes a lot of sense. If
people are seeing you the way you see yourself, then you aren t getting all the
unsettling, self-doubt-inducing feedback that the chronically misunderstood
have to endure. Life is simply easier and more rewarding when people get you,
and provide you with the opportunities and support that are a good fit for you.
But surely someone who knows you firsthand will see the real you the self
that you see, right? To answer that question, researchers asked nearly 400
college roommates to describe their own personality along with their roommate
s, to see if actually knowing each other, along with time spent living
together, would have an impact on perception. Specifically, they wanted to see
if over time, your roommate was more likely to begin to see you the way you see
yourself. The answer was yes: so long as you have lived together for a minimum
of nine months. It takes that long for perceptions to even begin to get in
sync. And even then, the correlations between how college students saw
themselves and how their roommates saw them were surprisingly low, in the .2-.5
range (remember, 1 would be a perfect correlation).
What about people who really know each other like married couples? They share
a life together, experience the same ups and downs, the same joys and worries,
and (usually) sleep in the same bed. Surely, with all that intimate knowledge
of you, your husband or wife must see you the way you see yourself, right?
Alas. There are, in fact, significant differences in perception among spouses,
too. Interestingly, these differences are also highly predictable. These biases
were nicely illustrated in a study of forty-four married couples, roughly half
of whom were currently in marriage counseling. Those in counseling (or, as the
researchers referred to them, the distressed group) were more likely to have
a negative bias they saw their partner in a far less flattering light than
the partner did and tended to hold the partner more personally responsible for
any bad behaviors they engaged in. So while Larry may see himself as a fairly
conscientious guy who occasionally forgets to take the garbage out (who doesn
t?), his wife, Susan, sees him as irresponsible and inconsiderate, leaving her
(once again) to pick up the slack.
The couples who were not in counseling the nondistressed group tended to
have a positive bias, and were more forgiving. So when Bob forgets to take out
the garbage, Mary sees him as merely a bit absent-minded, but really that s
understandable given how hard Bob has been working, and really, brilliant
people are often a little absent-minded, aren t they?
Now, maybe Susan is right and Mary is being a fool. I m not saying that one of
these biases is right and the other is wrong in fact, any bias is by
definition sometimes wrong. (On the other hand, a negative bias in a marriage
is apparently quite likely to land you in marriage counseling so that s food
for thought.) But taken together, it s easy to see why misunderstandings
between friends and lovers are so common, and why our relationships the keys
to our ultimate success and happiness can be so stressful.
Now you may be asking yourself, if even married couples can t understand each
other or even roommates, or leaders with teams of communications
professionals, don t come across the way they intend to what hope do I have
of ever getting my boss to see my potential, or my colleague to see how hard I
work?
The first step is to understand how little we actually pay attention to each
other, and how much we rely on assumptions.
In the 1980 s, psychologists Susan Fiske and Shelly Taylor were looking for a
way to describe what research was showing to be a ubiquitous tendency among
humans: to think only as much as they feel they need to, and no more. And so
the metaphor of the cognitive miser was born, with each of us an Ebenezer
Scrooge except instead of sitting on piles of money and refusing to pay for
an extra lump of coal to keep the house warm, we sit on reserves of mental
energy and processing capacity, unwilling to spend much of it unless we really
have to. We rely on simple, efficient thought processes to get the job done
not so much out of laziness (though there is some of that, too), but out of
necessity. There is just too much going on, too much to notice, understand, and
act on for us to give every individual and every occurrence our undivided,
unbiased attention.
Human thought, like every other complex process, is subject to the
speed-versus-accuracy trade-off. Go fast, and you make mistakes. Be thorough
and diligent, and you take an eternity. We are, as Fiske later called us,
motivated tacticians strategically choosing ease and speed, or effort and
accuracy, depending on our motivation. Most of the time, just the gist will
do, so we choose the speed.
The cognitive miser s favorite shortcut tools are heuristics and assumptions.
Heuristics are rules of thumb like Things that come to mind easily happen more
frequently. In other words, if I ask you Does your Uncle Phil lose his temper
a lot? and you can remember a lot of times when your Uncle Phil lost his
temper, then you will probably conclude that yes, Phil loses his temper quite
often. But if you have a hard time recalling such an instance, you would
conclude that Phil is gentle like a lamb. Like most rules-of-thumb, this
heuristic will steer you toward the right answer much of the time. But it can
also lead you astray.
Quick which is more common, getting struck by lightening or getting bitten by
a shark? Most people think shark bites are more frequent, when in fact roughly
5,000 people in the U.S. are struck by lightening each year, compared to only
ten to fifteen who are attacked by sharks. (On the National Geographic Shark
Week website, I also learned the fun fact that in 1996, only thirteen people
were injured by sharks, while 43,000 were injured by toilets, and 2,600 by room
fresheners.)
Why do we think sharks are a much bigger source of danger than lightening
strikes and toilets and room fresheners? Because whenever someone is bitten by
a shark, you hear about it on the news. There s something so primally
terrifying about shark attacks (thank you, Steven Spielberg) that it makes for
a great infotainment story. When is the last time you saw a story about a
lightening victim on the news, or a guy who fell and hit his head on the toilet
lid, or I m honestly not sure how you get injured by a room freshener, but
you see my point.
Assumptions, the cognitive miser s other favorite shortcut, come in many
varieties, too. They guide what the perceiver sees, how that information is
interpreted, and how it is remembered forming an integral part of his or her
perception of you. There are some assumptions so universal and automatic that
you can count on other people making them about you (and you can count on
people to have no idea that they are doing it):
You are who they expect you to be, in light of their past experience with you.
The first impression you give is the right one, and it shapes how everything
else about you is perceived.
You are like the other members of groups to which you appear to belong.
If you have a very positive trait if you are smart, beautiful, funny, kind,
and so forth you are likely to have other positive traits.
You share the opinions, feelings, and foibles of the perceiver, but not
necessarily his or her ethical standards and abilities.
So you re never really starting from scratch with another person, even when you
are meeting them for the first time. The perceiver s brain is rapidly filling
in details about you many before you have even spoken a word. Knowing this
gives you a sense of what you ve got going for you and what you might be up
against. And the more you can know in advance about your perceiver s likes,
dislikes, strengths, and weaknesses, the better equipped you will be to
anticipate what s being projected onto you.
You don t have to take all of this passively. For example, you can deliberately
emphasize your group memberships or your good qualities, to benefit from
positive stereotypes and halo effects. You can take pains to make the best
possible impression right out of the gate, to use the primacy effect to your
maximum advantage. You can make your opinions and values explicitly known. When
you have made the wrong impression, or have changed in ways you want the people
who know you to notice, you can use strategies that will get them to update
their beliefs about you. But however you choose to use the information, it s
essential to start by knowing where you probably stand.
This article is excerpted from Heidi Grant Halvorson s new book, No One
Understands You and What to Do About It.
Heidi Grant Halvorson, Ph.D. is associate director for the Motivation Science
Center at the Columbia University Business School and author of Nine Things
Successful People Do Differently and the forthcoming No One Understands You and
What to Do About It. Dr. Halvorson is available for speaking and training. She
s on Twitter @hghalvorson.