One of the challenges I think that we need to face head on when we think about how we
come across to other people is really understanding that perception is tricky and that for your
perceiver, the person who’s trying to understand you, it’s really kind of an uphill battle.
They’re operating on very little information trying to get the right accurate image of
you.
But the good news is that the kinds of mistakes that perceivers make are very predictable.
It’s not random.
We know a lot about the kinds of signals a person sends and how they tend to be perceived
by other people.
President Obama when he was running for reelection had his first debate with Mitt Romney and
he went into it according to everything that was said afterwards, he had gone into it really
trying to seem presidential and not wanting to rise to debate kind of trying to take advantage
of the fact that he was coming in as an incumbent president.
And it turned out that at the end of it people who were in the audience, even people who
were fans of President Obama thought that he had come across as lethargic, as disengaged,
wondering if he had had enough sleep that night.
And afterwards he was really quite surprised when he spoke to his aides to find out how
poorly he had done because he really thought he was very successfully coming across as
above the fray and presidential when, in fact, he was actually seeming sort of out of it.
And so you can think if someone like President Obama who’s really a gifted orator and has
a lot of experience trying to come across to other people in a particular way, if he
can be so wrong about how he’s coming across then it’s obviously pretty easy for the
rest of us to make the same mistake.
We tend to think that other people are really paying attention, really trying to understand
us.
I mean most of the time they’re happy to just get the gist of you and the gist can
be totally wrong.
The first phase of perception what Kahneman calls system one thinking is really the part
that’s very automatic.
It happens completely below your awareness and that’s where the perceiver is really
trying to figure out, you know, the basics of you.
Are you an anxious person or an honest person or a smart person or a warm person?
And we use – the brain uses sort of basic trait terms to understand you kind of just
the gist of who you are.
When we go into phase two we take a more nuanced view of who you are.
So then that’s the phase where you start to do things like take the context of someone’s
behavior into account, take into account what you know of them outside this one situation.
Really try to get a more nuanced view of what this person is like.
Now the problem is phase one is automatic.
It’s content to just get the gist.
It uses shortcuts and rules of thumb in order to really kind of get a sense of who you are
in that thin slice sort of way.
Phase two is not automatic.
It is labor intensive.
It requires a lot of effort and energy to get a more nuanced view of another person.
So what happens is that much of the time people are never going past phase one.
When they’re trying to understand you they’re just getting the gist and they’re either
not motivated to go into phase two and try to really get a more nuanced view of you or
they’re just unable to go into phase two because they’re so busy with all the other
things we have to pay attention to.
So the point of the book was really to give people that research, that science that shows
look, if you want to come across as trustworthy, if you want to come across as friendly, if
you want to come across as competent or caring these are the signals, right.
This is the body language.
These are the kinds of things you can say in order to really clearly convey that intent
and come across the way you intend to.
So it’s definitely a challenge coming across the way you intend to but it’s definitely
a challenge that with the right tools you can master.